“⁸Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away.”

Love never fails! It never, never, never, never fails. The underlying Greek construction is terse, pointed. Punctuated by its abrupt lack of usual literary connectors like “but”, “now,” this signals to the student of God’s Word to sit up and take notice. The statement stands on its own. Yet it concludes—no, summarizes, or possibly encapsulates—the fifteen descriptors of love in a grand finale.

Certainly love endures any difficulty or roadblock that stands in the way of one person’s loving reach into another person’s life. Certainly the time element of endurance permeates love (the NIV and ESV emphasize this aspect when they translate “Love never ends”). However, the quality of indestructibility equally adheres (as in the NASB and NKJV translations). The underlying Greek word for “fails” has a semantic range that includes “be destroyed, cease, fall down, collapse.” Love will never come up short; nothing can stop it from the effect God has designed it for.

This does not mean that love is an inanimate thing, but rather that the person who loves will never go wrong. If there is one thing we can be absolutely sure of in this Christian life of faith, it is the supremacy, endurance, efficacy (in short, the success) of love. This sounds flowery to some people, as though it doesn’t really “work” in the real world. However, the apostle Paul very much speaks out of the hardships of life’s greatest knocks when we read of his deprivations, sufferings, and persecutions (coming up in his second letter to the Corinthians). He knows whereof he writes. No, this is not just fluffy stuff for the spiritual mystics, but rugged self-sacrifice, a hard-core belief that God’s love for the world really is the power of the gospel that saved us, changed us, and enables us to love others.

How ironic, then, the focus—both in Corinth and in present-day Christianity—on the sensational spiritual gifts, the exaltation of the celebrity preachers, the fanciful, embellished testimonies. Compare being a prophet versus being a person who loves in the pattern of Christ and Him crucified. No contest! Compare the person who speaks either in tongues or with eloquent oratorical skills, or a person who has great knowledge, with the person who loves as described here. No comparison. Those things have extremely limited shelf life. They are all of limited value; they can fail. Love never fails. Absolutely! Because Jesus Christ and Him crucified never fails. So love is proved.

Lord, I desire to love like You love; therefore, teach me more about Your love.