NOTES for Co1 13:8-13
It is very difficult to speak about such “abstract” concepts, let alone compare them. With a certain degree of approximation, we might put it this way: in ordinary usage, faith and hope describe our relationship to facts. Faith concerns facts that “already are” (I believe that God exists, that He is good, that He created the world, that He ordered the world in such-and-such a way, that He gave His only-begotten Son...), while hope concerns facts that are “still ahead” (I hope for salvation, resurrection from the dead, eternal life...). But sometimes these words are used to express our relationship with another person: faith as trust in God, hope as reliance upon Him. The word “love” belongs to this same series: it speaks of our relationship with someone else. Yet this word truly is “greater” than faith and hope, because love means the fullness of relationship and, of course, includes both trust and hope.