What will remain of you when your children and grandchildren look back on their family home? This sermon reads the hymn of love (1 Corinthians 13) alongside a very personal memory, a childhood cut short by a mother’s sudden death, decades of marriage, and the prayers of earlier generations still at work today. It keeps returning to forgiveness, which costs something, though refusing to forgive costs far more. Listen if you want the next generation to have something worth remembering about you.
Discussion questions
For your small group or for personal reflection after the sermon.
- Why do you think Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 places love above speaking in tongues, prophecy, all knowledge, and even faith that can move mountains?
- Which description of love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 moves you the most, and which do you find hardest to live out? Why?
- After washing His disciples' feet, Jesus says they are blessed not just for knowing but for doing (John 13). What makes it so hard to move from knowing about love to actually practicing it?
- The speaker says true love begins when we put the other person's good above our own and expect nothing in return. How does this change the way you understand love in marriage and family?
- Love keeps no record of wrongs, and forgiveness, like love, is a choice and not just a feeling. How can a lack of forgiveness waste our present and our future in relationships?
- The speaker notes that we take love for granted, like air and water, and that children learn love by watching us. What specific thing can you do this week so that the people closest to you see your love or forgiveness?
