Ligonier Ministries Blog

1. Love Beyond Performance: Why Virtue Without Love Is Worthless

   Our culture is much obsessed with performance. We take people who are extraordinary in their ability to perform certain feats and turn them into heroes—great actors or actresses, musicians, military heroes, professional athletes, and so forth. We are drawn, as if by a magnet, to people who are high-performance individuals. We surround these people with attention and adulation and, many times, with enormous financial rewards. We tend to measure the worth of people by what they can do, by how well they perform. Paul turns his attention to this issue in 1 Corinthians 13:3: “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” He’s talking about performance, about behavioral patterns that themselves are considered extremely virtuous. He speaks of giving away everything, making the ultimate financial sacrifice. “I am the great benefactor,” he says in effect, “and if I build museums or residential shelters for the homeless, if I give money to feed the hungry or to clothe the naked, if I do all these things, but have not love, what is it worth?” “And if I deliver up my body to be burned . . .” Paul is not despising the martyrs who had shed their blood on behalf of the gospel for the sake of Christ. He is not criticizing the spirit of charity that has been manifest in the liberal generosity of many people in the church who give of their goods and their time sacrificially. He doesn’t say that these things are bad. He is stressing again that these things can be done without love. It is theoretically possible to give all your money away, to be the greatest donor in the world, to be the greatest benefactor in the world, and still not possess love. A person can even be a martyr for the wrong reasons. That may sound almost impossible until we remember the ongoing dispute that Jesus had with the Pharisees. The Pharisees came under the judgment of Christ chiefly for one sin: hypocrisy. It wasn’t that something was wrong with their outward performance, but something was wrong inside. Something was wrong with their hearts. They were scrupulous in their giving, they tithed their mint and dill and cumin and made all kinds of sacrifices for the church of their day, all the while hating the Lord’s Messiah. All the while, they were enemies of God. The best book ever written on 1 Corinthians 13 is Charity and Its Fruits by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards’ treatment of this chapter is fantastic. His understanding of the depths of Christian grace is itself extraordinary. But one of the things that he probes is this question: What would motivate a person to be sacrificial in his giving or even to lay down his life as a martyr in a particular cause if he didn’t have the love of God in his heart? Edwards explores two ideas that are common in the history of theology. One is the concept called civic virtue. The Bible acknowledges, for example, that one does not have to be a regenerate Christian to exhibit outward conformity to the laws of God. We can’t go out to a highway and determine who is a Christian and who isn’t by noting who’s keeping the speed limit. We will find many Christians who are breaking the speed limit and many non-Christians who are obeying it. We can find all kinds of humane works performed by non-Christians, and at the same time, we will see all kinds of dreadful acts performed by Christians. People who are not yet reconciled to God through Christ can display outward conformity to the law of God. That’s called civic virtue or civic righteousness. The second thing that Edwards explores is the cause of civic righteousness, which he attributes chiefly to what he calls enlightened self-interest. Going back to the idea of obeying the speed limit, someone may obey the speed limit at a given time not because he wants to give glory to God by demonstrating submission to the civil magistrate, not because he wants to be kind and considerate of the safety of other people whose lives he might endanger if he drives at high speed, but because he is concerned for his own personal safety, or he fears getting a ticket. People fear getting into trouble. That is enlightened self-interest—the desire to look out for oneself or to act for one’s own good. How would that explain giving away all of one’s goods? What is enlightened about that? The answer is that some people would rather have the applause of men than silver and gold. If they live in a certain culture where sacrificial giving or getting rid of all possessions and living as a hermit or a monk provokes the exaltation of people, a person may be inclined to do that without any real love for God or for people. What about martyrdom, the ultimate sacrifice, giving oneself up to be burned? Even in that extreme case, some people can seek their own interest. They see martyrdom as a quick ticket to immortality in history. They’d rather die and be famous than live and be nobody. Or they’d rather be dead and be looked at by their family and friends as people of courage than live and be deemed cowardly. When soldiers are asked what motivates them to take the risks in combat that they do, they answer that it’s sometimes because they’re terrified of not obeying orders and they’d rather get shot in the stomach than in the back. Ultimately, we don’t know what’s going on in people’s hearts. Only God can read the heart and know whether the performance is motivated by love. The point that we’re making, and that Paul is making, is that it’s possible to do these things and not have love. If that happens, these extraordinary acts of performance have no value whatsoever. They’re nothing. They’re worthless without love because love is the sine qua non of all virtue. Obviously, Paul is speaking illustratively here, not exhaustively. He could continue the list forever—though I write fifty books, though I have perfect attendance in church, though I have taken care of five hundred sick people. He could give an endless list and declare that none of those things matter apart from love because the absence of love vitiates the virtue of any action or performance. Edwards makes this comment: “Men are ready to make much of what they do but more of what they suffer.” Have you ever been in a conversation and somebody said to you, “Look at all I have done for you”? Then begins the list of sacrifices made and all the benefits provided. We want to say, “Look at the accomplishments that I have achieved in my lifetime.” We want to be recognized for our performance, for our achievements, but even more so for what we endure on behalf of others. Often, when we feel that we have suffered unjustly at the hands of another person, we want to make an ordeal out of it. Before Paul begins to give us his exposition of what love is, he has shown us how important love is and the premium that God places on love. It’s higher than the gifts and more important than performance. Edwards makes an important point here: “The ordinary influence of the Spirit of God working the grace of charity in the heart is a more excellent blessing than any of the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit.” There is a distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Love is a gift of the Spirit, and everyone who is genuinely regenerate and indwelt by the Holy Spirit is given the gift of love. In that sense, it is an ordinary gift, as distinguished from those special powers that not everybody is given. Paul enumerates the extraordinary gifts: the gifts that not every Christian has. Edwards says that though the extraordinary gifts get all the attention, the one that counts the most and is most prized by God is love.

2. Stream All Messages from the 2026 National Conference

   You can now freely stream all the messages from our 2026 National Conference online, in the Ligonier app, and on our YouTube channel. Watch your favorite moments again and share this Bible teaching with your friends and family. CONFERENCE SESSIONS: What Is Truth? by Derek Thomas Does God Control Everything? by H.B. Charles Jr. What Is My Purpose? by Ken Jones How Should I Endure Suffering? by Sinclair Ferguson How Can I Know God’s Will? by David Strain How Can I Overcome Anxiety? by Eric Bancroft Does Prayer Change Things? by W. Robert Godfrey Can I Be Sure I’m Saved? by Derek Thomas Who Is God? by Joel Kim What Is My Identity? by Michael Reeves Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? by David Garner How Do I Grow in Holiness? by Sinclair Ferguson Q&A SESSIONS: Questions & Answers with Bancroft, Charles, Godfrey, and Jones Questions & Answers with Garner, Reeves, Strain, and Thomas Questions & Answers with Ferguson, Godfrey, Kim, and Thomas SEMINARS: Lights in a Dark World with Eric Bancroft and H.B. Charles Jr. Training Leaders in the Church with Sinclair Ferguson, David Garner, and Joel Kim Register today and save for our 2027 National Conference, The Glorious Attributes of God.

3. How Did We Get the Canons of Dort?

   On May 6, 1619, delegated pastors and professors from across Europe processed through the streets of Dordrecht to the Grote Kerk, the “Great Church.” There the Canons of Dort were read publicly in Dutch for the town and its guests to hear. As each delegate’s name was called, he tipped his hat in assent. Ever since, the Canons have belonged to the confessional heritage of the Dutch Reformed churches. But how did everyone get there in the first place? To answer that, we need to go back to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when the Netherlands became the scene of a fierce struggle politically and theologically over the grace of God. The Reformation did not necessarily start on October 31, 1517, with Martin Luther, nor did it arrive in the Netherlands on untilled soil. For generations, reforming movements had been calling the church back to the Word in a series of medieval debates. Groups such as the Waldensians and Lollards had fled there, and movements within the Netherlands, such as the Brethren of the Common Life, encouraged a simple, Scripture-shaped piety. It’s said that on the eve of what we call “the Reformation,” Frisian fishermen living in huts could read, write, and discuss Scripture. Upon this latest reformation movement in the Netherlands came the weight of empire. The seventeen provinces of the Netherlands were ruled by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Under his son and successor, Philip II of Spain, persecution intensified. While Charles enacted laws outlawing Protestantism, he never strictly applied them. Philip, however, did. He forbade reading and possessing forbidden books, worshipping outside the Roman Church, talking openly or secretly about the Scriptures, and teaching the Scriptures unless one was a graduate of a university. The penalties were severe: the sword for males, being buried alive for females, and fire for those who wouldn’t confess. If you failed to inform the authorities of someone later found to be a heretic, you’d be guilty. Tensions boiled over in 1566 in the beeldenstorm, the wave of public iconoclasm. In the years that followed, resistance to Spanish rule grew under William of Orange, the Netherlands’ leading noble, and the northern provinces eventually united in open revolt. In 1583, the new United Provinces rejected Philip’s rule. That political upheaval formed the backdrop for the theological controversy that would later produce the Canons of Dort. At the eye of that storm stood Jakob Harmenszoon, Latinized as Jacobus Arminius. Educated at Leiden and then abroad, Arminius had strong Reformed credentials and even a glowing letter of recommendation from his professor at Geneva, Theodore Beza. In 1588, he became a pastor in Amsterdam. Yet as he preached through Romans, concerns began to grow. While in Romans 2, he said his hearers would have been better off if they had remained in the Roman Church because at least, they would be doing good works in the hope of eternal reward, while now they did none at all. In Romans 5, he said death was inevitable even if Adam had obeyed the Lord’s command. In Romans 7, he moved away from the Augustinian tradition, suggesting that Paul was speaking of the unregenerate man. Especially in Romans 9, he interpreted “Jacob I loved and Esau I hated,” as classes of people rather than individuals. Arminius’ senior colleague, Petrus Plancius (1552–1622) protested to the consistory (the ruling church council), which investigated Arminius, but nothing came of it. These concerns only intensified after Arminius became professor at Leiden in 1603. His colleague, Franciscus Gomarus, came to believe that Arminius’ theology endangered the church’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. If election was grounded in foreseen faith, then faith itself seemed to become a kind of work. The issue was no mere academic quarrel. It touched the very question of whether salvation is wholly of grace. Many ministers called for a national synod to settle the matter. But in the Dutch Republic, theology and politics were tightly bound together. Some sided with the church’s right to govern its own doctrine and discipline; others insisted that the civil authorities had the decisive voice. Conferences were held in 1607 and 1609 between Arminius and Gomarus, but nothing was resolved. Arminius died in 1609, remembered even by opponents as a humble and godly man, but the controversy did not die with him. His death didn’t end the fight. In January 1610, forty-three ministers sympathetic to Arminius met in Gouda and issued a five-point document called The Remonstrance, meaning “public protest.” From that point on, they were known as the Remonstrants. Their opponents replied in 1611 with a Counter-Remonstrance. The conflict spread from lecture halls and consistories into the pews and the streets. Congregations divided. Worshipers moved from church to church to avoid certain preachers. Riots broke out. By 1617 and 1618, the Dutch Republic itself was nearing civil conflict, just as the threat of renewed war with Spain loomed. Under that pressure, the States General finally called a national synod. At the urging of King James I of England, it became an international synod. Reformed churches from across Europe were invited to send delegates so that the Dutch churches would not settle this matter in isolation. This was no small provincial meeting. It was, as one observer put it, a muster of the forces of Calvinism. The Synod of Dort met from November 1618–May 1619. Dutch delegates were joined by representatives from England, the Palatinate, Hesse, the Swiss Republics, Bremen, and Nassau-Wetteravia. Due to political pressures and distance, the French and Brandenburgers were not able to attend. The Remonstrants were summoned to appear and defend their views. But the proceedings quickly bogged down as their leading spokesman, Simon Episcopius, challenged the synod’s right to judge them and sought to redirect the debate. After weeks of delay and frustration, President Johannes Bogerman finally dismissed them with the famous order: “You are dismissed! Get out!” After that, the synod examined the Remonstrant teachings from their published writings and set to work. A drafting committee, made up of Dutch and foreign delegates, labored intensely to produce what became the Canons of Dort. The Canons were not written as a detached theological treatise. They were a pastoral and polemical response to a real crisis in the church. They addressed five disputed heads of doctrine, each one tied to the Remonstrant challenge. At every point, they defended the same great truth: Salvation from beginning to end is of the Lord. God’s election is gracious, Christ’s atonement is powerful, the Spirit’s calling is effectual, and God preserves His people to the end. That is how we got the Canons of Dort: through persecution, political upheaval, ecclesiastical controversy, and a major international synod. The Canons were born in a fight over grace. That is why they still matter. They are the church’s confession that sinners are saved not by the uncertainty of their own will, but by the free, sovereign, and steadfast mercy of God.

4. Who Is Jesus?

   Who is Jesus? Conflicting answers to this question have echoed through history. Ancient Gnostics taught that Jesus was a spirit who only appeared to be human. The Arian heresy said that He was a creation of God. Islam reduced Him to a mere human prophet. Much of medieval Roman Catholicism represented Him as an austere king, only approachable through mediators. If we fast forward to today, heresy and error have multiplied. Theological liberals claim that He is mainly a myth, while neo-pagans seek an affirming spirit guide, or now even an interdimensional alien. Popular songs seem to present Him as an imaginary friend who always guides us away from trials. Sadly, many others seem to know His name only as a curse word. To sweep these falsehoods away, we must to go back to the Bible. To know Jesus’ true identity, we must understand His name as it is revealed in the Word of God. Who is Jesus? In ancient times, the names given to children had to do with the testimony their parents wanted them to have. In our culture, many think of baby names first being associated with the way they sound. But in Jewish antiquity, it was customary to give children meaningful names that testified to God’s character. In Matthew 1, an angel of the Lord brought a message to Joseph, who was Jesus’ earthly father: > An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” > (which means, God with us). (Matt. 1:20–23) The Greek name Jesus is a combination of the divine name Jehovah and the verb to save. He is “Jehovah saves.” In the Old Testament, Joshua is the Hebrew name with the same meaning. Joshua saved by conquering the promised land and providing rest. But notice what Jesus Christ saves from. The very foundation of His identity is to “save his people from their sins.” He saves not just from the symptoms of our problems, but He deals with the very root cause. Many do not think that they need to be saved from sin. They want help with self-improvement or desire a shortcut to better spiritual experiences. They are looking for saviors that will prop up their own prideful identity. Some pick and choose from a mix of heresies and half-truths, developing their own “personal Jesus.” This is idolatry. We should not be surprised that false teachers would promote these ideas. The church has been warned again and again that they would arrive (Matt. 7:15; Acts 20:30; 2 Peter 2:1; 1 John 2:18). Since Jesus saves His people from their sin, we must know ourselves if we are to truly know Jesus. In historical Reformed churches, they would say, “You must become a sinner.” They did not mean that we need to start sinning more, but that we need to recognize our identity as a sinner (Luke 18:13). The gritty history of the Bible lines up with our own experience: God’s people had to learn through stumbling, wandering, backsliding, slavery, exile, and denials that they could not save themselves from their sins. We are by nature rebels and enemies of God. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8). If we truly know that we are sinners, we know that we need the Savior who alone can rescue us from sin. Only Jesus can save us because He is truly God and truly man. We are mere creatures. He is Creator (John 1:1–3). We are flawed and fallen images of God. He is the “express image of God” (Heb. 1:3). His title is Christ, which means “the anointed one.” He is the Spirit-anointed Prophet, Priest, and King. He perfectly declared the truth, paid the price for sin at the cross, and accomplished victory over sin and death in His resurrection. His glorious identity as “God with us” makes Him the only Savior who gives eternal life to those who trust in Him. Matthew’s gospel refers to Isaiah 7:14 when it says, “‘They shall call his name Immanuel’ (which means, God with us)” (Matt. 1:20–23). Why this second name? Who calls Him Immanuel? We do. The redeemed church of all ages and places continues to fulfill this prophecy. Knowing ourselves to be sinners saved by grace and having the Word, we insist that He is “God-with-us.” The true identity of Jesus has been at the very heart of church history. It was heresy and error about Him that led to the councils, creeds, reformations, and confessions that restated this truth. When false teachings denied Him, sinners who had been saved by grace proclaimed: “Immanuel!” Though we may live in an age of errors, we live in an age of the same opportunity. Let us continue to boldly confess Jesus Christ as “God with us.” : Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on September 22, 2023.

5. Love and Maturity: What the Corinthians Got Wrong

   Paul had to speak harshly to the Corinthian community because the church there was not known for its maturity. The Corinthian church was racked by divisions; some followed Apollos and some followed Peter and some followed Paul. Problems confronted the Corinthian community—immorality, heresy, denying the resurrection. It was hardly a model congregation. In fact, if you go beyond the New Testament and you read the writings of Clement, the bishop of Rome at the end of the first century, you find a letter to the Corinthian congregation that was written decades after Paul's letters. Clement pleaded with the Corinthian Christians to go back, to read Paul's letters, and to begin to implement what the Apostle had taught them in the first place because the same problems were continuing in this community. Paul uses two sharp words of criticism for the Corinthian community. He calls them “carnal,” which is to say that they claimed to be spiritual but were actually more in the flesh than they were in the Spirit. Then Paul chastises them for being infantile in their understanding of the things of God and in their behavior. In a word, they were not behaving as mature Christians; they were being childish. The Bible calls us to be childlike in our faith. To be child-like means to have an almost naive, innocent dependence on our heavenly Father. It's to have the kind of implicit trust in our heavenly Father that infants have toward their parents. At a very early age, infants and children tend to have a simple trust in their earthly parents, and so by analogy, we are told in the New Testament to be childlike in our faith, having the same kind of trusting attitude toward God that children do toward their parents in this world. That's also spelled out in greater detail by the Apostle Paul when he instructs the Corinthians, “Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Cor. 14:20). The author of Hebrews frequently called the Christians to grow up into maturity in terms of their understanding of the things of God. Believers were chastened for being satisfied with the milk of the gospel and not digging deeply into the Word of God to come to an in-depth understanding of all that God has revealed. To be infants in evil means that we're not supposed to be sophisticated, mature, adult practitioners of wickedness. Children sin, but infants are not locked up in maximum-security prisons in America because the sins of babies and of little children tend to be relatively harmless in comparison to the sins of adults. When we're told to be infants, it's in this respect: We as Christian adults should be naive in our practice of evil even as we are called to be fully mature in our understanding. Paul chides the Corinthians for their childishness, which had at its root a preoccupation with the spectacular and an ignorance of the deep things of God, specifically the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Isn't it more interesting and more exciting to focus our attention on the gifts of the Spirit than to focus our attention on the fruit of the Spirit? Yet that which has the enduring value to the church and to the individual Christian is the fruit of the Spirit. The congregation in Corinth was filled with diverse manifestations of the spectacular gifts of the Spirit, but there was no love there. Paul is saying that it's time to put things in perspective. It is time to grow up in the Christian faith. He doesn't directly tell the Corinthians that they've been childish. This is a typical type of rebuke for the Apostle. He's gentle, he's sensitive, and in this case, he's somewhat indirect. He points to himself as an example: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (1 Cor. 13:11). It's important to see that this doesn't just drop into 1 Corinthians 13 with no bearing on the rest of what the Apostle is teaching. He is obviously making an admonition. The thinly veiled criticism is that just as Paul stopped pursuing childish ways when he became a man, it was time for the Corinthians to stop pursuing childish ways in their Christian lives. What created so much of the strife in the Corinthian church was the attitude of those engaged in the extraordinary gifts who were convinced that they were on a higher spiritual plane than the rest of the members of the church. Paul is saying that they were on a lower spiritual plane because they were behaving in an infantile way. They misunderstood the meaning of true spirituality. The purpose of being spiritual in biblical terms is that we be sanctified. The purpose of the Holy Spirit's activity in our lives is to instruct us and move us toward righteousness. Spirituality is the means to the end; it is not the end. We must never confuse the two. That's why the accent in the New Testament is not on the gifts of the Spirit; it's on the fruit of the Spirit. When the fruit of the Spirit is made manifest, righteousness is there. Every day, we are surrounded by a numerous variety of things that attack Christian virtue and put pressure on the development of the fruit of the Spirit. It is the work of Satan to sow tares among the good fruit. If he can choke out the fruit of the Spirit in our lives or deceive us into thinking that the gifts of the Spirit are a substitute for the fruit of the Spirit, he has succeeded. He has kept us at a childish level of understanding of what Christianity is trying to make us. Paul says that we all go through different stages of development throughout life. Every adult was once a child. When we were children, we acted like children; we spoke like children, we thought like children, and we understood like children. We still have certain childish qualities that endure in our lives, but Paul insists, “When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” In putting away the childish ways, he focused his attention on the mature ways. The mature Christian seeks to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Spiritual maturity looks like godliness that has been learned over time through making diligent use of the means of grace so that grace has had time to mature and ripen in our souls and our lives as our minds have been renewed by learning to look at life from the perspective of the biblical Word. The child plays with ABCs. He doesn't have a large vocabulary. He's at a simplified level of things. That's why we don't make children presidents of corporations; their understanding is limited. They haven't delved into the complex issues of life. There's a reason that the leaders of the early church were called elders. Yet in Corinth, there were young believers—full of exuberance, full of excitement, and full of themselves—who were like rebellious teenagers and who began to despise the authority of those who were mature and those whom the Apostle had commissioned as the ruling elders of the community. That's what the problem was all about. This problem was addressed in 1 Corinthians, in 2 Corinthians, and in Clement's letter at the end of the first century. In saying that he put away childish ways after becoming a man, Paul states: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:12–13). Paul spoke even of his own heightened understanding of knowledge, and he was the most mature Christian alive in the world in his day. He was a man who had the equivalent of two doctorates in theology by the time he was twenty-one years old, who spent years in the desert being instructed by Christ Himself, and who was made an Apostle to the gentiles. It's that man who was saying, “Now I know in part.” He understood that even his understanding was limited and not worthy to be compared with what he would enjoy when he entered into heaven. In those days, mirrors were not quite as brilliant in their reflection as they are today. There was a certain dimness to them, a certain internal distortion, and Paul was saying that this is the way that our knowledge is now. It's partial; we see in the glass darkly or in the mirror dimly. But all dimness and darkness will be removed when we enter into glory and look at things as they are bathed in the overwhelming light that comes from the presence of God. At that point, we will truly and fully know and experience love.