Teaching Pastor Ben Stuart opens 1 Corinthians 13 not as a wedding poem, but as a survival manual for the church. He starts with a hollow tree: massive, impressive-looking, brought down not by lightning but by tiny bugs that slowly ate it from the inside out. Churches die the same way—not through outside persecution, but through envy, ego, and pettiness quietly hollowing them out. Paul’s remedy is love, and Ben walks through the chapter in three beats: a loveless life is a wasted life, no matter how gifted or generous you are; love is both patient (it absorbs difficulty) and kind (it actively pursues the good of others); and love is the only thing that races into eternity—because one day gifts will fade, faith will become sight, and hope will be realized, but love goes on forever. The call is simple: stop lamenting how cold the world is getting, and pick up a shovel.
