Daily Manna · Day 24 · January 24
The Greatest
“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
Picture a house church in Corinth. A letter from Paul is being read aloud to a room full of people who have been arguing about whose spiritual gift is the most impressive. Some are proud of speaking in tongues, others of their knowledge. When the reader reaches chapter thirteen, the room goes quiet, because the letter has stopped describing their gifts and has started weighing them.
Paul piles up the whole list: tongues "of men and of angels," prophecy, "all mysteries, and all knowledge," and faith strong enough to "remove mountains." He adds giving away everything to feed the poor, and even giving your body to be burned. Then he says that without love all of it is worth nothing. ("Charity" is the old KJV word for love.) He also tells them why, and the reason has to do with time: "whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away." These gifts are good, but they are temporary, like scaffolding on a building. Verse 13 is what remains when the scaffolding comes down: "faith, hope, charity, these three." And love is the greatest, because it is the only one of the three that God Himself has. God does not need faith, and He has nothing left to hope for.
Take this as the warning Paul meant it to be. You can be gifted, generous, brave and even correct about God, and without love still be nothing. Paul says "nothing," and he means it. He wrote this to a church that came "behind in no gift" (1:7). Yet the same chapter holds out the hope: "Charity never faileth." When everything else comes down, God's love is what will still be standing.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 24 is Thirty and Eight Years (John 5:6).