Love is…
With Valentine’s Day coming, I want to revisit 1Corinthians 13 and godly LOVE. We all first think of 1Cor.13 as being about marital love, however its place in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians shows that this was not his intent at that time. The Corinthians were prideful and arguing, so Paul used 1Cor.13 to describe how to disagree. We must lead with LOVE, and Paul beautifully describes biblical perfect love (see the ESV below). LOVE gives us a platform for relationship (and we must remember that no one is changed by anger).
Nothing really matters except LOVE, as Jesus told us in Mathew 22:37-40 “Love the Lord you God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it – Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Jake Barker at my church, Traders Point Christian Church (www.tpcc.org), preached this month on 1Cor.13. He challenges us to examine ourselves and how we are doing with Jesus’ greatest commandment – LOVE. Jake related that Christians often lead with – “You’re wrong and I am right and let me save you.” And no one in their baptism testimony states that they decided to become baptized because of someone chastising or confronting them… Rather all baptism testimonies center around someone LOVING.
Jake asks these questions for us to ponder:
Who is the person who I dislike or disagree most with?
When I face disagreement, what is my first reaction – anger or love? … No one is changed by anger.
What is too important that distracts me from my first and most important mission – to LOVE?
Phillip Yancy writes in “What’s so Amazing About Grace” something we all must consider daily in our dying to self… “You only love Jesus as much as you love the person who you like the least.”
I praise God that we can all grow in our LOVE daily by being in close daily relationship with Him, and by allowing His Spirit to direct and guide us in His awesome LOVE!
My prayers for your LOVE (and study of 1Cor. below), and for your every AM devotional, prayer, & Bible reading time, and just calling upon Jesus anytime and all times throughout your day!
Hugs & love, Dr. Lisa (I love to read every AM to myself and my children from the daily devotional “Jesus Calling” – it is written as if Jesus is talking to me Himself.)
1 Corinthians 13 (ESV)
“If I speak in tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy clang or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all the mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 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. 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.”
