Nothingness

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 KJV

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

The word charity is very often mistranslated (it might be more fair to say casually translated) as love. It is immediately applied then to the love between the husband and wife and is confined like a prisoner to something far less profound than it is intended to be. We certainly do not mean to teach that if a husband does not love his wife properly then all else in his life is nothingness. Too many men have been used as kings and prophets but have had poor marriages for this to be true. Even John Wesley, who is admited by so many, had a very unhappy - even hateful marriage. David's trouble with wives, Jacob, Moses' wife calling him a bloody husband. These men were certainly not "nothing."

The charity of the Bible is much more than love. It is even much more than "giving without expectation of return". The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says of this word:

"In the King James Version in 26 places from 1Corinthians 8:1 onward. The same Greek word, which appears in the New Testament 115 times, is elsewhere translated by “love.”

1. A New Word

The substantive agapē is mainly, if not exclusively, a Biblical and ecclesiastical word (see Deissmann, Bible Studies, 198ff), not found in profane writings, although the verb agapā́n, from which it is derived, is used in classical Greek in the sense of “love, founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Latin diligere” (Grimm-Thayer), rather than natural emotion (Latin, amare).

2. A New Ideal

It is a significant evidence of the sense of a new ideal and principle of life that permeated the Christian consciousness of the earliest communities, that they should have made current a new word to express it, and that they should derive that word, not from the current or philosophical language of Greek morality, but from the Septuagint.

3. An Apostolic Term

In the New Testament the word is apostolic, and appears first and predominantly in the Pauline writings. It is found only twice in the Synoptics (Matthew 24:12; Luke 11:42), and although it is in both places put in the mouth of the Saviour, it can easily be understood how the language of a later time may have been used by the narrator... JesusChrist gave the thing and the spirit in the church, and the apostles (probably Paul) invented the term to express it."

I suggest that this new ideal is that of the love that binds Christians together within the local church. It is that thing that unites us as members of the body of Christ, which is a local church, with all of its peculiarities and various personalities, which then transforms us into something. We go from isolated individualists to members in particular with purpose, direction and a head, which is Jesus Christ.