So I’ve been on the race for about four months now and one of the things that’s most talked about is “Love”. To me love is very simple, because it’s an action word not just something you say. It’s easier for me to show someone that I love them than just to say it, because I wasn’t raised in an overly emotional house. Not to say my parents never said they loved me but I was just raised to know that love is 90% action and the rest words.
So on the race I’ve been struggling with this thing called love because so many people have their own Idea of how love should look, talk, walk, and so on. Some people say, “well I wasn’t loved by my parents so I don’t know what love should look like.” For me I don’t understand that, because as Christians we all have a parent that has shown more love than any of us ever can. John 3:16 says, “For God so LOVED the world that he gave his only begotten son….. Jesus died for all of us that we might have life and have it more abundantly. And not only that but there is a book that called “The BIBLE” and in John 1:1 it says “In the beginning was the word, and word was with God, and the word was God. Now that tells me that everything I need to know as a Christian or as person God is, and his word is there for me to know him, and his love.
We turn to so many books to tell us what love is, and what’s our love language is. For example there is this one book call “The 5 Love Languages”. The Five Love Languages is an ideology developed by Dr. Gary Chapman that discusses relationships between couples. He stresses to his audience in his book that all people express their love for one another in various ways and it is essential for couples to identify how they communicate their love to one another so that they are able to improve upon their relationship. Dr. Chapman identifies five different types of love in his book: Words of Affirmation, quality time, acts of service, physical touch, and receiving gifts.
Now I’m not saying that Dr. Chapman is wrong, but what I want to convey to my audience is that we don’t have to look to man to define what love is and what it looks like. The Bible in 1 Corinthians 13 spells out what love is, what it should look like and what it shouldn’t be. (See Below)
1 Corinthians 13:
1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. 8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 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. 12 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. 13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
The three great pursuits of the Christian life are not “miracles, power, and gifts.” They are faith, hope, and love. Though the gifts are precious, and given by the Holy Spirit today, they were never meant to be the focus or goal of our Christian lives. Instead, we pursue faith, hope, and love. What is your Christian life focused on? What do you really want more of? It should all come back to faith, hope, and love. If it doesn’t, we need to receive God’s sense of priorities, and put our focus where it belongs. Love is greatest because it will continue and even grow. When we are in heaven, faith and hope will have fulfilled their purpose. We won’t need faith when we see God face to face. We won’t need to hope in the coming of Jesus once He comes. But we will always love the Lord and each other, and grow in that love through eternity.
Love is also the greatest because it is an attribute of God (1 John 4:8), and faith and hope are not part of God’s character and personality. God does not have faith in the way we have faith, because He never has to “trust” outside of Himself. God does not have hope the way we have hope, because He knows all things and is in complete control. But God is love, and will always be love. Fortunately, we don’t need to choose between faith, hope, and love. Paul isn’t trying to make us choose. But he wants to emphasize the point to the Corinthian Christians: without love as the motive and goal, the gifts are meaningless distractions. If you lose love, you lose everything.
