Common sense says choose the reliable car with a full service record over the flashy one with 300,000 kilometres on the clock. That same common sense applies to Paul’s argument for why love outlasts even the most impressive spiritual gifts.

We all hope to achieve something great in life, something that outlasts us. Consider 1 Corinthians 15 and the confession’s teaching on Christ’s resurrection as the Mediator, the achievement that actually secures everything for his people.

Omnia vincit amor, love conquers all, a phrase traced back to Virgil in 37 BC and forward through centuries of songs, tattoos, and paintings. Consider Paul’s claim that real love bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things, a love far sturdier than the sentimental version the world has borrowed the phrase for.

There’s so much we could say about our Savior, but none of it means anything if we don’t speak about his cross, the central thing Jesus came to do. Consider all seven of Christ’s sayings from the cross as a window into the heart of the atonement.

The word love has become nearly meaningless in our post-Christian age, stripped of any objective standard to define it. Continue through 1 Corinthians 13 to recover what love actually means when it’s anchored in truth rather than sentiment.

How big a deal is obeying God: just beneficial, or a matter of life and death, heaven and hell? Consider the confession’s distinction between Christ’s active obedience, keeping the law for us, and his passive obedience, bearing its penalty for us.

One of love’s greatest enemies is anger, and our world runs on it, road rage and online tribalism everyday examples. Consider Paul’s claim that love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing but in the truth.

Peter has gone back to fishing, and caught nothing all night, when a familiar figure calls out from the shore on this Easter Sunday. Consider John 21’s account of a failed fisherman restored, and what Jesus’s threefold question to Peter actually accomplishes.

Jesus appeared to people at least eleven separate times during the forty days between his resurrection and ascension, from Mary Magdalene onward. Consider the doubting apostle Thomas, and what it took to move him from skepticism to worship.

Imagine what a condemned man faces the night before his execution, alone in his cell, waiting for the sun to rise on his last day. Consider Jesus’s own agony in Gethsemane on this Good Friday service, facing a death infinitely worse than any human execution.