L-O-V-E.

11Nov08

You know what, this is something I still don’t understand:

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end

Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

- 1 Corinthians 13, The Message.

(The concept of) Love still baffles me.  I guess that’s a good thing, haha.

The intro of the chapter started with this:

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

I’m always convicted whenever I read this chapter.    It always puts me in perspective…

To put things simply, it says that if we think that we got it made as Christians when we have supernatural mega wowowow faith, immense spiritual wisdom and knowledge, receive dreams and visions, destroy the strongholds of th enemy…  Well, we’re not even close.  That’s not the point of “Christianity”.

Yeah, they’re not the point.  I read 1 Corinthians 13 again and again and is one of my favorite verses, and yes, those are not the things that will make the headlines in heaven.

Of course, charity is good.  Learning to do things in a spiritual warfare is equally beneficial…  But it’s not really the #1 thing that will make God smile.

It’s love.

I’ve always wondered why love (those stated above) is the utmost thing. 

And I just realized now.  It’s because it’s love that made Jesus come for us.  Nothing more, nothing less.  So I guess the saying is true, “Love conquers the world.”    And we ought to do the same to others.  With the same measure we have received that we do.

Love even when they don’t act that they deserve it.  Because we didn’t too, but Jesus loved anyway.

Love even when they talk about you behind your back, because Jesus gave love even to those who spitted on Him.

Love even when you don’t understand, because Jesus went through it as well but took the stand for us.

We can think of reasons why not to love, sometimes they outweigh more than the reasons why we should love but Jesus gave us the encouragements to be selfless:  The Cross.  The empty grave.  The new life.

If He wasn’t selfless, where would you and I be now? 

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