As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:
3…remembering
unceasingly your work of faith, and labor of love, and endurance of hope of our
Lord Jesus Christ before God and our Father, …
Faith, hope, and love. “And now these three remain – faith,
hope, and love – but the greatest of these is love” (I Cor 13:13). As I have
studied, it was interesting to find that apparently there was a day when it was
generally understood that faith, hope, and love are the three principal graces
of Christianity. Matthew Henry, for instance, commenting on I Cor 13:13, wrote,
“True grace is much more excellent than any spiritual gifts whatever. And
faith, hope, and love are the three principal graces, of which love is the
chief, being the end to which the other two are but means.”
One writer called them “the three cardinal virtues.” One
even went so far as to maintain that these three graces inhere in the
fundamental Trinitary structure of reality. He compared it to, of course, God
who exists as a Trinity, and also to light which, in the visible spectrum, is
actually made up of the three colors – red, yellow, and blue – that all other
colors derive from these three (and in fact white light is the summation of
them all). Particularly since I believe the entire universe is logically
fractal, I find these suggestions fascinating. I’ve been pondering over the
Bible to see if in fact, the case can be made that faith, hope, and love are “the
three principal graces.” I Cor 13:13 certainly points toward that conclusion. I
think right now I would have to say I’m not 100% convinced, but I am intrigued
enough to wander down the path. I think I will consider such a paradigm in this
post and then, beyond that, I will start trying to be aware of the proposition
as I’m reading and studying through the entire Bible, to see if I think in fact
that position is defensible.
Faith, hope, and love.
Another interesting (to me) observation is that the Greek
structure at this point is odd. It is literally, “…remembering of you the work
of the faith and the labor of the love and the endurance of the hope …” The
article “the” is used six times. If anything, Greek tends to drop the article
where we, in English, would want to add it. Instead, in English, here in I Thess
1:3,we drop them all – just the opposite of what one usually sees. I wonder why
they are multiplied in the Greek? I want to say Paul is making some kind of
point, but frankly I don’t know what it is. I don’t remember ever seeing this construction
before. Guess I’ll just have to note it and then hope I stumble across
something that explains it. None of the commentators I read offered any
technical suggestions in this regard.
I also think it interesting to note that the three concepts,
faith, hope, and love, are abstract nouns. It is somewhat difficult to define them. One has to do lots of explaining
just to pin down exactly what we mean by each of the words “faith, hope, and
love.” But Paul turns them very practical by referring not to the concepts
themselves, but to their evidences.
He remembers their “work of faith,
and labor of love, and endurance of hope …”
Real faith works.
James, of course, drives this point hard. You cannot truly “believe” something
and not have it change who you are and what you do. And that change doesn’t necessarily
occur because you’ve decided to change. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the
Word of God – and when you have seen and understood Biblical truth, it changes
how you see the world. It changes what you value. It changes your paradigm of
life and reality and, even if it is in some small way, still it will change who
you are and what you do. John Eadie
noted, “No principle of action is so powerful as genuine faith …” Real faith works.
Interestingly, Paul notes of the Thessalonians their labor of love. Faith works. Love labors. The word translated “labor”
means wearisome work. It refers to a
work that goes on to exhaustion. Like faith, love works, but love takes the work
of faith and carries it on even to death. Jesus is of course the ultimate
example, “Having loved His own, He loved them to the end.” He not only came to “do
the work of His Father” but it was love that drove Him all the way to the
Cross. I would suggest the clearest and most common human example of this is a
mother. It is a lot of work to carry and bear and care for children. It’s a lot
of work to change all the diapers and prepare the bottles and make the meals
and sew the clothes. But a mother isn’t doing it “dutifully.” It is love that drives her heart. It is love
that keeps her doing it when she only gets three hours of sleep a night and when
she herself is sick. It is love that makes her not just work but toil to
exhaustion for her babies. Like Jacob, even seven years of hard labor mean
nothing when love drives us: “So Jacob served seven years to get Rachel, but
they seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her.”
And so it is in hearts captured by real faith. “I am
crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I but Christ liveth in me;
and the life that I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved
me and gave His life for me.” Faith changes how we think. Love lives out what
we value. And what real Christianity causes
us to value is God and others, to love
God and others. Someone wrote, “The labor of love is kindness.” Paul could see
clearly that the Thessalonians have truly been captured by Christ because he
saw in them “the labor of love.”
I’d like to inject here that it might be worthwhile to
consider the opposite of love. What is it? Our most natural response, I think,
would be to say it is hate. And that certainly is true, but I wonder if it
wouldn’t be more immediately practical to think that the opposite of love is fear. “There is no fear in love. Perfect
love casts out fear.” As long as Peter was looking at Jesus, he could walk on
water. But what went wrong? He saw the wind and the waves and feared and down
he went. As long as his eyes and his heart were filled with Jesus he could do
amazing things. But, in that moment, fear conquered his love. I would suggest,
if we would love well, we must pray and guard constantly against fear. To be
born again is to carry in our very souls the love of Jesus. That love will
express itself – unless we give way to fear and let it stop the flow of grace
from our hearts. Love labors.
But there is one more grace which must prevail in our
hearts: hope. It is hope that gives us endurance.
For the Christian, it is particularly the “hope of our Lord Jesus Christ,” as
Paul includes here. Faith works and love will even toil to exhaustion, but in
this world we face many, many discouragements. Faith sometimes has to work with
no apparent success. We all know what it is to pray and strive, only to wonder
if it will ever do any good. We all know that love is to a large extent unrequited.
In this world, we stick out our heart in love, and all too often those we would
love simply step on it. Why should we go on? What keeps us believing and loving
in spite of the disappointments? Hope. Hope endures.
We Christians have the ultimate hope because we believe we will beyond this
life see Jesus, that He sees our work of faith and our labor of love, and that
He will say to us, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” Every moment of
our lives matter because of Him. “Even a cup of cold water” matters to Him. All
day every day, I can work and love and keep on working and loving – in spite of
the discouragements – because I know it matters to Him. Hope endures.
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