If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. (1 Corinthians 13:1)
In 1 Corinthians, chapter 13 is a new chapter, but it does not introduce a new subject. In 1 Corinthians 13, the Apostle Paul is still talking about unity in the body of Christ, as he does in the rest of 1 Corinthians. This means that when Paul tells us what “love” is in this passage, he is not speaking about love in general. Neither is he speaking about married love. He is not even directing us to have a certain attitude or emotion toward other people. There are no commands for us in 1 Corinthians 13!
Paul is doing the same thing in 1 Corinthians 13 that he usually does when he responds to the problems of the Church in his letters. Paul is preaching Christ. Paul is speaking of a perfect love which never fails, always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. This is not our human love. What is love? Love is a who. Who is love? God is love.
In 1 Corinthians 14:1, Paul commands us to “pursue love”. This means that our focus should not be on trying to become better at loving other people. Our focus should be on looking toward the love of God which comes to us through Christ on the cross. As 1 John 4:10 says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
For Paul, being spiritual is not about having extraordinary human talents such as linguistic skill, knowledge, foresight, or any of these things. Being spiritual is not even about having a loving attitude toward other people. It is about knowing nothing “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).
We tend to like it when celebrities become Christians because they have the power, finances, and exposure to influence many other people to become Christians. We assume that celebrities and powerful people would be the people whom God would be most likely to use to build the church. But because the way of love is the way of cross, the people who pursue love tend not to be people who have superpowers, but people who are weak, fearful, and foolish.
Among the attributes of love, at the very center of 1 Corinthians 13, we see that love “does not insist on its own way.” We see this aspect of love in the prayers of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and in the Lord’s Prayer. This means that love is not what happens when we do what we want to do with a loving attitude. Love is not even us giving up what we want to do and doing what other people want to do. Love is what happens when God’s will is what is done instead of our will.
But how do we know what God’s will is? God spreads the answer to what His will is throughout the whole congregation so that, in order to know what His will is, we need to seek God’s will together. Paul never put his faith and trust in talented leaders with loving attitudes to run churches under his oversight. Instead, Paul put his faith and trust in the whole congregation being brought together at the foot of the cross.
At the foot of the cross, everyone is available to be used by the Lord on any particular day for any particular purpose. There, everyone is responsible together for discerning the will of the Lord in unity. Church should not be set up as a hierarchy. Church has to be set up so that everyone is prepared to preach, pray, or die at a moment’s notice.
So, having one person or even a small group of people set up to lead the church and make the decisions is dangerous, deadly, and unbiblical. Paul never writes his letters to the pastor or to the elder board, but to the whole congregation. Paul believed that God is the one who leads throughout the whole congregation jointly gathered, and submitted to the Lord’s will. The job of pastors and elders is to point to the Lord and ensure that the congregational leadership is his alone, not usurped by…pastors and elders.
In the Church, the Lord Himself is present among us to lead.
In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul is addressing the issue of what it means to be “spiritual people” (lit. “spirituals” in the original Greek text). For modern Christians, we may think that the most “spiritual” people are people who fast, pray, and lead worship particularly well, hear God’s voice, or have other characteristics that make them seem like they are closer to God than other people. The Corinthian Christians also thought about “spiritual” people in this way. They thought that the most spiritual people were the kind of people who speak in tongues and prophesy.
But it turns out that this thinking is wrong.
When Christians think this way, it is no different from Gentile idol worship. For Gentiles, the things that are “spiritual” are idols carved from wood and stone that they prepare and raise up as special channels for encountering the divine.
In fact, it is idolatry when we claim that certain pastors, parents, places, events, or buildings are specially designated by God as the ones he has chosen to consistently provide us with divine insight and direction. Similarly, it is idolatry to believe that God simply and directly gives each individual Christian all the personal direction they need, when they prepare themselves to be spiritual vessels.
These ideas of ours die hard, as they did for the Corinthians as well! But Paul helped the Corinthians to avoid wrong perceptions of what is “spiritual” by giving them a proper understanding of Christ’s body.
Ever since Pentecost, all who are baptized into Christ’s body receive the fullness of God through the Holy Spirit; all have become prophets, just as Moses had wished back in Numbers 11. All those who confess “Jesus is Lord” in the Holy Spirit are “spiritual” (see 1 Corinthians 12:3). That is, in fact, what it means to be a spiritual person.
What it means that “the body is one and has many members” (1 Corinthians 12:12) is that all—not some—of the believers whom God has placed around us are spirit-filled gifts from God to aid in our growth in Christ—including the very ordinary Christians and even the Christians we do not like. This is why Paul says, “there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.” (1 Corinthians 12:4-6).
Some preachers reduce this to meaning little more than God has equipped people in a local church with all the individual skills necessary to help run the church. They preach this scripture right before they hand out “spiritual gifts tests” to discover whether God has given them a gift for cooking, accounting, tithing, or ushering so that they can know where they should volunteer at the church. Such preachers say that exercising these gifts makes us the “hands and feet of Jesus” as we represent Christ to the world.
But this is wrong thinking. It is not that God manifests 10% of Himself through one Christian’s cleaning ability and 20% of Himself through another Christian’s preaching ability. God is not more or less present in certain Christians. And it is not the job of the church to do His work for Him, but our job is to witness to Christ who is always working through all things in the world to accomplish His purposes—even the things that we do not like or cannot intuit.
This means that we can receive anything from another Christian as a gift from God, however imperfectly it is given. We may not like it, and it may not make us feel good. But the gift is designed to turn us away from our preferences and preferred communication styles and toward God’s preferences and communication styles. And God’s preference is to work through many different types of people with a variety of characteristics so that we are always dependent upon him, not one or two “spiritual” people with whom we feel compatible.
For this reason, Paul claims even at the beginning of 1 Corinthians that the Corinthian believers are “not lacking in any gift” and subsequently appeals to them that “there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:7-10).
This is the theme of the entire letter to the Corinthians: God insists on spreading all of the gifts we need for our salvation throughout all the believers he has placed around us. We should not look for special individuals within that group to be the means that God always communicates with us. God’s purpose is to draw the whole body together in mutual interdependence such that all the members must rely on each other at all times.
We may bristle at the idea that our salvation depends on us receiving each believer around us as God’s gift for us. We think, “My salvation is between me and God!” But salvation is not only a one-time event, but an event with past, present, and future dimensions that extends throughout our whole Christian life, bringing us from where we are now to the second coming of Christ and the New Jerusalem.
The writer of Hebrews likens our salvation journey to the Israelites’ 40-year trek through the desert. On the journey we do not get to choose who we journey with or how we get help; God does. Paul said, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Corinthians 12:21). It is God’s character that, sometimes, He will speak to us through the believers we do not like and in the places we view to be very unspiritual.
So as we gather around the Lord’s table, say this to yourself: “Those with whom I break bread today are those into whose hands the Lord has entrusted my salvation and my spiritual growth.”
God gave the Apostle Paul the responsibility of spreading the gospel to the Gentiles. But then in God’s wisdom, God decided that Paul would spend his most important years of that ministry in prison. If we were Paul, we might cry out to God, “Why would you give me this task but not give me the freedom to complete it?”
North Korean women listening to the North Korean Bible on MP3 devices.
But the New Testament never records Paul complaining about the time he spent in prison. In fact, when Paul writes the church in Philippi, he says his imprisonment is actually advancing the spread of the gospel!
God put Paul in chains so that the gospel would go to all the world. That is a very difficult thing for us modern believers in Korea and the West to understand.
Since the time of Christ, governments around the world have banned or restricted the practice of the Christian faith. Even today, in more than 70 countries around the world, governments restrict Christianity. They control when and where and under what circumstances Christians can practice their faith.
They put Christianity in chains.
There are some countries like North Korea where the government declares that there are no circumstances under which Christianity can be practiced in their country. We think of such countries as “closed”. That is why often when I come to a church or conference in South Korea to preach, Christians will come to me with tears in their eyes and tell me that they are praying night and day for North Korea to open to the gospel.
Until that day comes, they say, they will do all they can to “sow the seed”. They will pray. They will plan and set aside money for missions for when North Korea opens. They will support Christian medical or humanitarian or educational projects to North Korea. They hope that this will give North Koreans a good impression of Christianity which may cause them to be more “open” to Christianity, or maybe the missionary might somehow get the opportunity to secretly share the gospel with a North Korean.
These are well-meaning thoughts and prayers. But in reply to all of these thoughts and prayers, the Apostle Paul gently corrects us in 2 Timothy 2:9 by saying, “But God’s word is not chained.”
Scripture shows us that God is not limited to working through his servants. It is of course true that God invites his servants to carry out his work. But when they don’t, this does not stop him; he simply works through his enemies. That is because God’s enemies are his servants too, whether they want to be or not. Even when they seek to destroy his work, they can only end up completing it.
This is why Joseph says to his brothers who tried to kill him and then sold him into slavery, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”
In the book of Esther, Haman sets up a plan to kill all the Jews. Esther has miraculously become the queen of Persia. Mordecai, Esther’s cousin and guardian, sends her this message: “Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?”
In other words, Mordecai has no doubt that God will rescue the Jews. But Mordecai doesn’t beg Esther to be the one to rescue them, even though she is in the most obvious position to help. Mordecai knows that God will always be faithful to his promises, even when his own people are not.
The message of Scripture is clear: The enemy can put God’s people (like Paul) in chains. God’s own people, in their ignorance, can even reject him and his work. But no one can stop his plan.
Always, God’s plan is carried out by his word. In the beginning, when God creates the heavens and the earth, he does so through his word. In Isaiah 55, God says, “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”
In Acts 16:6, the Holy Spirit stops Paul from preaching the gospel in the province of Asia. But Acts does not say that Paul came to this conclusion because the authorities stopped him from preaching. In fact, throughout the book of Acts, many different authorities try to stop the Apostles from preaching the gospel. But unless the Holy Spirit directs the Apostles to stop, they keep preaching.
This does not mean that Christians are free to break the law. Romans 13:1 says, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities”. But God does not permit us to submit to authorities’ efforts to put his word in chains. We must instead preach the whole gospel of Christ, in whatever place Christ commands us to preach it, to whomever Christ commands us to preach it, and we must do so whether or authorities grant us a “right” to preach.
At the same time, we must always remain subject to the penalties and punishments the authorities lay upon us for refusing their chaining of the word. We must always preach boldly but then go to prison willingly, even joyfully. As the global founder of Voice of the Martyrs, the Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, explained with regard to the Romanian Communists who imprisoned him, “We reached an understanding. We would preach, and then they would beat us. In this way we were both happy.”
In many ways, the situation in North Korea today is no different than when Christianity first came to Chosun 140 years ago: There was a complete and total ban on all foreign religion. Anyone found possessing a Bible or having made contact with a missionary would be killed.
Even the first Western missionaries to Chosun—Allen, Appenzeller, and Underwood—worried about the ban on foreign religions. It was not possible for missionaries to plant a church or to preach in public. They were not permitted to come to Chosun as religious workers. They could only come as men who could bring from the West the skills necessary for Chosun to modernize. Chosun was completely “closed” to Christianity.
But it’s important to remember that the first Chosun Christians did not become Christian through contact with Appenzeller, Underwood, or Allen. Instead, the first Chosun Christians came from the northern part of Chosun. They became Christian through reading the Bible on their own—a Bible they had to acquire secretly from a smuggler. They could not meet together with missionaries or other Chosun Christians for worship or discipleship. They had access to no Christian materials other than the Bible. They had access to no Christian teachers to help them understand that book other than the Holy Spirit.
So before Appenzeller, Underwood, and Allen had even come to Chosun, there were already Christians there. It was the result of the Holy Spirit working through the ministry of Missionary John Ross. By the time the first Western missionaries arrived, somewhere between 15,000 and 50,000 copies of Ross’ translation of books of the New Testament had already been smuggled into Chosun—even though Chosun was at that time regarded as the most closed country on earth—a “hermit kingdom”.
Missionary John Ross
“That’s because the word of God is not chained,” the Apostle Paul would say.
Ross was the first translator of the Bible into the Chosun language. Ross had never been trained in Bible translation. And his fellow translators from Chosun were not even Christian. They were merchants from Chosun whose businesses had all gone bad. Some were ill or struggling with alcohol or other addictions. They got involved with Ross for one reason: they were desperate for some way—any way—to make money.
How did they become Christian? Through the process of translating the Bible.
This was the core of John Ross’s missionary strategy: introduce people to Christ by giving them only the word of God, since Christ is fully present in his word. Nothing else was needed.
In 1882, these new Chosun Christians risked their lives to smuggle the first ever copies of the Chosun language version of the scriptures from China inside of what is today North Korea. Imagine the surprise of the first Western missionaries to Chosun when shortly after their arrival, hundreds of Chosun Christians appeared at their door asking to be baptized. When the missionaries asked these Chosun people how they would even know about baptism, they showed their copies of the Gospel of Luke. The missionaries were certain that the Chosun people could not possibly understand Christian doctrine enough to be baptized, so they gave them a doctrinal examination. Most of them passed easily.
The missionaries agreed to baptize the Chosun believers, but they were so concerned about violating the ban on religion that they insisted that the baptisms had to be done in secret, far away from the city.
Chosun was the place where the word of God came before missionaries arrived.
And what about today? There is a common misconception among Korean Christians that gospel ministry to North Korea is still a future event, that North Korea is “closed” to the gospel. But God is not waiting for a future date for North Korea to open. God is continuing to bring his word inside North Korea today. And despite the life-threatening consequences of being caught, more North Koreans are reading the Bible and being transformed by it today than any other time in history.
North Korean defectors in South Korea updating the original John Ross Bible.
Voice of the Martyrs Korea delivers more than 40,000 Bibles into North Korea annually via land, sea, and air. In addition, we broadcast four daily shortwave radio programs into North Korea.
But is it working? Is the word of God truly “unchained” inside North Korea?
Database Center for North Korean Human Rights is an independent data-gathering NGO. They have been conducting an ongoing study about various aspects of life inside North Korea. One of the questions they ask is, “Have you ever seen a Bible with your own eyes inside of North Korea?” In the first year of their study, in the year 2000, they found that effectively 0% of people inside North Korea had ever seen a Bible with their own eyes. However, they have continued to update that study. At the end of 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, they determined that nearly 8% of people inside of North Korea have now seen a Bible with their own eyes.
To all those who have been praying night and day for North Korea to open to the gospel, give thanks to the Lord! He is already answering your prayer! By every objective measurement, North Koreans are hearing the word of God today in greater numbers than ever before, despite every effort that is still being made to restrain it.
“That is because the word of God cannot be chained.”
And that is why today is the day for gospel ministry to North Korea.
Do the Word 