Good morning and happy Aloha Friday! Margie has been in California all week and she returned last night, what a joy to get my Margie back! Her new job has much less travel than her last position with Brighton so it’s been a joy she can be home so much more. We see jobs much differently now, less overnights and less commute time are both very good things, even if it means less money. What good is money if your miserable.
Tonight, we plan to head down to Crandall to watch the Pirates play Midlothian Heritage. My nephew Preston is on the Varsity at Crandall and my niece Hannah, is a trainer for Midlothian. How cool, we can go to the game and watch both of them! It’s also a little funny to think back that I played on this same field in Crandall from 1983-89. Wow has it really been 30 years?
Today we have the joy of looking at one of the most beautiful, poetic, promising chapters in God’s Word, 1 Corinthians 13, The ways of Love. This is one of those iconic, well-known chapters in God’s Word that has become so mainstream that even most non-church goers know some or most of it. It’s probably the most used passage at marriges of any other in the Bible. The world primarily uses it to picture the love between two people that are pledging their lives each other.
But I want us to view it in a different manner today. We read of this love in chapter 13 and think we can somehow possess this type of love and therefore be capable of loving in this way. You cannot give away what you cannot possess. You see, the love that Paul tells us of here I don’t think we can comprehend. We as sinners, as a people in rebellion towards God, are only capable of a certain degree of love. The ability to comprehend and fully understand and give love is a gift from God. God and God alone offers us love and therefore the ability to give it away. We are a conduit for God’s Love. We can only give away a level of love that God first gives to us.
The chapter needs to be read in its entirety so I strongly encourage you to do that. In fact, how about you do that right now. Go ahead, go find your bible or pull up the Bible app on your phone or tablet and go to 1 Corinthians chapter 13 and read it real quick. Its only 4 paragraphs so you can read it in 3 minutes. Go ahead, I’ll wait while you read it……………………………………………………………………….
I’m still waiting, have you finished it all?....................................................................................
Did you really read it or are you just skipping ahead?................................................................
Wow, right? What a unbelievable passage of scripture. So, when we read this we usually think of love between people. But what you’re really reading is a biography of Jesus Christ. What your reading about is PERFECT love. Only a perfect person can possess and extend perfect love and Jesus is that only perfect person that has ever lived. The love that Christ has extended to us is the singe greatest love that has ever existed. It is the love that we are reading about here.
We’re told what love is here. Love is patient, love is kind, etc. But I’d like to tell you more about this love.
Love is a King that comes to Earth a peasant. Love is the Son of God born in a lowly cattle barn. Love is a perfect man sent to an imperfect people. Love is a sinless life lived amongst sinful lives. Love is being in perfect obedience to the Father. Love is being perfectly innocent but being convicted as guilty. Love is being tortured, beaten, spit on and mocked. Love is having a crown of thorns driven onto your head. Love is carrying your own cross on a bleeding lacerated back. Love is hanging on a cross for the sins of an arrogant people. Love is having your side pierced and dying on that cross. Love is being placed in a borrowed tomb for 3 days. Love is being raised from the dead to once and for all conquer the death of sin. Love is a God that sends His only son that He loves so much to die for all sinners. Love is a God that makes a way. Love is eternity with God in His Heaven.
My friends, that is Love.
May you be blessed with the understanding of the love that God has for you today and be so full of it that you share that love with another. You can share the greatest love ever known, that Jesus came and died for us, to save us from our sins. That Love, my friends, is the gift of true and abundant life.
Share the Love.
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