Love never fails
“It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”[1]
The words are familiar, so familiar that they risk becoming background music in our souls. Love never fails. It sounds like the kind of phrase that belongs on a wedding card or a coffee mug, a soft sentiment meant to comfort. This is the most important aspect of love, love never fails.
When Paul says, “Love never fails,” he sets it against the temporary nature of everything else we hold sacred, prophecies, tongues, knowledge, even our spiritual maturity itself. All of it is partial, all of it will be swallowed up in the coming completeness. Love, and love alone, is eternal.
Prophecies will cease because they are only signposts, tongues will be stilled because they are only scaffolding, knowledge will pass away because it is only a flicker of a far greater light. The church often clings fiercely to these gifts, as if they are the pinnacle of spiritual life. But Paul reminds us that they are, at best, temporary tools for a world still in shadow.
Love, however, does not belong to this world of shadows. Love is not merely a tool for ministry; it is the very life of God flowing through us. To borrow Paul’s image, love is not a reflection in a mirror, it is the face-to-face encounter itself. Prophecy points to God’s heart, but love is God’s heart. Knowledge describes the truth, but love embodies the Truth. When everything else falls silent in the presence of divine completion, love will continue singing, unbroken.
Paul uses an arresting image: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”
This is not a dismissal of innocence, but a call to grow into the deeper realities of God. Our clinging to spiritual gifts, to partial understanding, to clever arguments and theological certainties, this is spiritual childhood. Necessary for a time, yes, but not the final goal.
Maturity in Christ is not measured by how much we know or how powerfully we minister, but by how deeply we love. To put away childish things is to release the need to be right, the need to be impressive, the need to control the narrative of our own holiness. The grown-up life of faith is not built on acquiring more knowledge but on becoming more love.
“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.”
Paul names the tension we all feel, we live in the now of partial vision, yet we ache for the then of full knowing. Every act of love in this life feels imperfect, flawed, and incomplete. We protect but sometimes fail, we trust but sometimes doubt, we hope but sometimes despair, we persevere but sometimes grow weary.
And yet, Paul dares to say, “Love never fails.” How can that be, when our love feels so fragile?
The answer is hidden in the final line: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” Our love may falter, but God’s love in us does not. What we cannot see clearly now, God already sees perfectly. Our imperfect love is being drawn up into His perfect love, which cannot fail. Even our stumbling attempts are swept into the eternal current of God’s unfailing love. One day, we will see that nothing given in love, no matter how small, was ever wasted.
Paul closes with a triad that has echoed across centuries: “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Faith trusts God’s promises; hope longs for God’s future; but love participates in God’s very nature. Faith and hope will give way to sight and fulfilment when completeness comes, but love is not replaced, it is the very atmosphere of eternity.
To love now, in this incomplete world, is to live a foretaste of heaven. Every act of love is a protest against the brokenness of the world, a defiant declaration that God’s life is already breaking in. When all else fails, love does not. When all else ends, love remains.
To say “love never fails” is not sentimental optimism, it is a declaration of reality as God sees it. We may not always feel it, we may not always understand it, but love is the only thing we can do now that will still matter when we stand face to face with Christ.
So, protect, trust, hope, persevere, even when you stumble, keep loving, because every act of love is eternal.
Think on these things…
Shalom – Shalom,
Jim Varsos
[1] 1 Corinthians 13:7–8a, NIV