1 Corinthians 13: love in Christian community
This chapter describes love that changes relationships; its setting reaches far beyond a wedding ceremony.
Understand the context
Paul places this passage between chapters 12 and 14, which discuss gifts and the gathered community. Talent, knowledge and impressive actions alone cannot build that community. Chapter 13 asks what way of living gives them meaning.
A Christian reading
Love is recognised in patience, kindness and refusing to make oneself the centre. Paul contrasts it with envy and pursuing only personal advantage. The ending acknowledges the limits of knowledge. Loving requires humility that makes room for another person rather than claiming complete understanding.
For reading and daily life
Choose one relationship and behaviour to practise: listening without interruption, refusing humiliation or speaking truth respectfully. Patience does not require accepting violence or remaining in danger. Love can involve setting a fair boundary and protecting someone vulnerable.
A question to consider
What observable action, rather than a feeling alone, could express love this week?
The biblical text — 1 Corinthians 13:1–13
English — World English Bible
1 If I speak with the languages of men and of angels, but don’t have love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.
2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but don’t have love, I am nothing.
3 If I give away all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but don’t have love, it profits me nothing.
4 Love is patient and is kind. Love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud,
5 doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil;
6 doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;
7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will be done away with. Where there are various languages, they will cease. Where there is knowledge, it will be done away with.
9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part;
10 but when that which is complete has come, then that which is partial will be done away with.
11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things.
12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, even as I was also fully known.
13 But now faith, hope, and love remain—these three. The greatest of these is love.
Read the passages in context
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BibleMio editorial notes, prepared with AI assistance. These notes are not part of the biblical text.