I have often had the experience of working with a couple preparing for a wedding when I asked the couple if there were any scriptures that are significant to them that could be read during the ceremony.

Blank stares.

But sometimes, after a moment or two of awkward silence, a dim and distant light will flicker behind the eyes of one or the other – usually the bride-to-be – and she will pull up something from her memory and say, “What about that thingy about love?”

Now, after you’ve done a few weddings, you learn how to interpret such phrases as “that thingy about love.” She is talking about First Corinthians 13 – the love chapter – one of the most famous and popular passages in all the Bible. Many of us know it, at least in part. Can you help me recite the beginning and the end?

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of (angels), but have not (love), I am a noisy gong or a clanging (cymbal).

See? You know the beginning. How about the end?

“So faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the (greatest of these is love).”

Awesome! Just about everybody knows that thingy about love.

Trouble is, we really don’t know it as well as we think we do.

Far from being a glowing essay about the beauty, power and preeminence of love, the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the little Christian church in Corinth has another more important purpose. If you grew up thinking this passage is just a description of love, you need to come deeper and see something much more profound. The true message of this chapter, in fact, can be summed up in two words. They are two words that need to be spoken to every church, to every Christian and to every person who professes to be a man or woman of faith – two words that are well-described in a little story involving Carlyle Marney, the brilliant Southern Baptist preacher and church historian of a generation ago.

Marney, the story goes, was strutting across the campus of a certain Baptist seminary, puffing away on his ever-present pipe and trailing a stream of blue smoke behind him. A young man, one of Marney’s students, approached him and, with great righteous indignation said, “Dr. Marney, I want you to know that your smoking offends me!”

Marney stopped walking, removed the pipe from his mouth, exhaled one last stream of blue smoke and said, “Son….GROW UP!”

St. Paul could not have said it better himself! Here’s how the apostle put it in verse 11 of the 13th chapter of First Corinthians:

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

That’s the simple message of 1st Corinthians 13. Paul is saying to the Corinthians the very same thing Carlyle Marney said to the young student. Two simple but very profound words:

“Grow up!”