I’ve been meaning to try and do one passage from 1 Corinthians 13 each day, but I have fallen a bit behind working 2 jobs to try to pay for this mission trek. I will continue to do this passage, but it may take me a little bit longer than the 2 weeks I had originally planned. Continued support would be greatly appreciated; I need to be up to $3000 in a little less than 30 days to make the first support deadline.
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.
1 Corinthians 13:2 ESV
I continue to look at this passage because it is so personally convicting. There are times that I find myself reading through systematic theologies & doctrinal dissertations and forget what it is really about. If I ever came to the point in my life where I could write a multivolume systematic theology but didn’t have love or know what the love of Christ is then it would all be worthless dribble strewn out on a waste of trees.
These passages remind me that everything starts with the heart, as it says in Proverbs 4:23 that the heart is the well spring of life; to guard the heart, because everything that you do is an outpouring of the heart. This point is hit upon multiple times, how Jesus told the Pharisees that despite them trying to diligently adhere to the law they were dead inside, because their heart wasn’t in it.
So how then are we to change our hearts? How can we turn this around to where our heart is flowing pure water of everlasting life as opposed to water that brings death? (James 3:11-12)
The unfortunate news is that we cannot do this, we cannot change our hearts. From our father Adam, to Cain, to Noah, to David, and the list goes on to you and me; we cannot change our hearts, we want to rebel from God out of our own pride. It is only through the Father’s love, Christ’s work on the cross and the Holy Spirit’s conviction that our heart of stone can be removed and replaced with a heart of flesh that longs for God (Ezekiel 36:26). Salvation is a miracle; an act that goes against nature that can only be accomplished through divine intervention.
It is only through an act of God that we can even remotely be able to turn to Him. It is only by His power that we can even have hope of salvation. Once this good news, that God would choose to save some, with hopes for all, in a damned & dyeing world and one day create it a new glorious creation where all sings to His glory. Once we have this in our changed hearts, permeating through every aspect of our life, can we flow forth with love, not our but the love that is from God.
Do you have a flesh heart that beats for God alone or has your heart been hardened? Are you alive in this world, but dead to God or are you dead to things of this life and raised in Christ? I pray the Holy Spirit would convict us all to take refuge in God’s divine and saving love; for fear that if we are not then we will be destroyed by His perfect justice & wrath.
