1 Corinthians 13
How many of you have been at a wedding
in which this text was read as part of the ceremony? This text is very popular
among fiancées and wedding planners. As
a definition or description of love, it’s a classic. And it’s classy. It is one of the best-written, most poetic
and beautifully written pieces of literature on the topic. Bur Paul didn’t write it for a wedding! It is
very appropriately included right here, smack dab in the middle of talking
about the unity of the Body of Christ, the variety of spiritual gifts, and how
that all works together. It’s not really about marital love. It is about how
all of us in the community of Christ should be able to get along in spite of
our wide degree of differences.
He wrote it for the church. Just to collect up the last couple of weeks again, before chapter 13 we have chapter 12 in which Paul wrote about one body many parts, one Spirit, many gifts. He was helping the Corinthians understand how the community called the church ought to exist, how we ought to treat each other, and how does the Holy Spirit operate in our lives in this great variety of ways that all works together harmoniously if we love one another. There’s different abilities, but there’s one overarching attitude that makes it all work together. We are all different parts but we have to figure out how to get along.
That’s what love is for. That’s why we have 1 Cor. 13 where it is. In the next chapter, 14, Paul will show how love has its impact on the ways the members of the church worship together. There is to be no competition, no showiness, no lack of consideration for each other’s needs.
So what is it about love that is so important to this discussion of spiritual gifts and the nature of Christian community? Paul’s chapter 13 breaks into three sections; the absence of love, the nature of love, the greatness of love. The first section, verses 1-3 depicts love as the proper motivation for everything we do as Christians by saying that any good we might think we are doing is actually worthless if love is not the motivator. The next section, 4-8 is Paul’s actual definition or description of love itself, what it is and what it is not. And the last section, 9-13 is actually Paul’s loving way of addressing the boastful ones in the Corinthian Church who thought they were so mature in the faith even though they had not love. Their boasting proves the absence of love. He was letting them know that in reality they were the immature Christians who caused the problems. He was telling them to grow up!
Last of all he emphasizes that love is the best, most important and most enduring quality of Christian living.
That’s a great summary of this teaching, but let’s go back to the beginning and look at what happens without love. One of the things that Paul is really trying to do in the first section is prove that love makes all the difference. There were other religious cults around the Corinthians. These new believers themselves used to be pagans and idol worshipers so they were very familiar with the religious practices of the other religions around them. Do you know that speaking in tongues happened in other religions before Christianity? It was all around the citizens of Corinth.
As idolaters they were in contact with demons and evil spirits that unbelievers thought were legitimate Gods worthy of worship. And these demons encouraged such deception by causing their followers to speak in tongues. Yes it would be quite an experience to feel taken over by a spirit that made you speak in a language you didn’t know and made you feel that spiritual godlike beings really do exist and might help you live a better life if you treat them right. But Paul is saying the experience itself is not enough to assure one that he or she is really in touch with the one true God. Without the distinctly Christian characteristic of Love as defined by God, all that ecstatic utterance called speaking in tongues is just noise, like a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
By the way, Corinth was also filled with the noise of clanging gongs and cymbals. The commentaries I read mentioned that the pagan religious culture of Corinth included this practice of marching to their worship services, or even announcing their own religious rites, in processions that included gongs and cymbals being sounded repeatedly as they moved through the city streets. There were many such groups, so there were many such instruments, all playing at the same time. But they were not together, not in tune, not in harmony, and not making any sense at all, just a great noise, such as you might hear at the humane society when all the dogs are barking. It’s not exactly a symphony.
That’s how Paul brings his readers attention away from the surface behaviors and gets us down to the foundational heart of the matter. We must be moved by love, and nothing that we do matters at all if we do not have love. It is the same principle in the next verse. All around the Corinthians were all kinds of soothsayers, astrologers and fortunetellers. Paul lumped them all under the Christian terms saying, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge.” It was really just like today. We still have astrologers and fortunetellers and palm readers in some places. Do you think they love their clients? Or just want to earn money from folks who believe in that stuff? That’s Paul’s point. Without love, even if you do it in church and call it the gift of prophesy, you are no better than all the rest of the charlatans in the world around you, drawing attention to yourself for your own reasons.
And yes even the last verse of the section in which Paul brings up the greatest sacrifice of one’s own life, he reminds his readers that even that can be done for the wrong reasons. In summary, God is love, and if we are not motivated by the love that comes from God we are actually no use to God at all. So rather than looking at any particular behavior as evidence of being filled with the Spirit, Paul says look for the love. The absence of God’s love means the service is not Christian, even if it happens in church. God’s love makes all the difference.
I could paraphrase these verses for our community to use in this way. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of us attend worship. It doesn’t matter how much of our money goes into fancy video and other productions and equipment to make a great worship service. It doesn’t matter how much we give to charity and how many ministries we have to feed the hungry and serve the poor. What it all boils down to is, when we get together for worship, do we really enjoy each other’s company, do we really respect and care for each other in the most otherish way we can? And are we filled with compassionate love for the lost so that we eagerly desire to do all that we can to reach them? Because if we don’t really love each other, and the lost around us, then anything else that we do that looks like success to us, will appear to all the world around us as vain hypocrisy.
Now I’ve used my favorite new word there. It’s a word I made up: otherish. Otherish is the true opposite of selfish. The world thinks that the opposite of selfish is selfless. But I am not satisfied with that, because selfless still has some “self” left in it, just a little less. To completely get myself out of being even the least bit selfish, to deny myself, to completely get myself out of the picture, I would have to be otherish. God’s love is a self-denying, otherish love. So to repeat, when we get together for worship, do we really enjoy each other’s company, do we really respect and care for each other in the most otherish way we can? And are we filed with compassionate otherish love for the lost so that we eagerly desire to do all that we can to reach them? Because if we don’t really love each other, and the lost around us, then anything else that we do that looks like success to us, will appear to all the world around us as vain hypocrisy. God’s love is otherish. And the only way we can display it, is if we have received the Holy Spirit because truly otherish love is a supernatural gift from God. It is his love put into us.
Paul speaks of doing things, but of having love. It is a love that is not naturally in us, but we can have it in us by the power of Christ in us. The kind of otherish love that needs to be at work in our lives to create genuine Christian community is not natural love. By nature we are selfish, not otherish. The supernatural otherish love that comes from God can only be active in the life of a Spirit-filled believer. It is the kind of love that makes it possible for us to love people we would not naturally be inclined to care about. God’s otherish love is supernatural.
In the next section, Paul tells us exactly what love is and what it is not. It is interesting and perhaps it should also sadden us to have to admit that the best way Paul has of defining proper Christian love is to put it all in contrast with the way we humans normally behave. I am not going to expound on this very much. I am just going to get the point across through a simple exercise. But before we do that I want to point out what we usually mean when we humans say we love something. This is actually a misuse of the word love but it is so common in our language that we simply must talk about it a bit.
For example, what do I really mean when I say that I love chocolate? Doesn’t that mean that when I think about chocolate and when I go and get some, all I am really interested in is the pleasure that I receive from chocolate? Isn’t love like that really very self-centered? As I said before, we are naturally born selfish. Properly speaking, I should not say I love chocolate. Not if we want to speak of love the way the Bible does. I could say I am drawn to chocolate. I am attracted to chocolate. It gives me great pleasure to eat chocolate. But every time I eat chocolate, I am not doing anything for the chocolate. Even if you say, “But Pastor, I would do anything for chocolate!” All you mean is that you would do anything to get some. You don’t want to bless chocolate. You want chocolate to bless you! My desire for chocolate is very self-serving and self-seeking. My relationship with chocolate is entirely one-sided, it is all about what I get out of it.
Similarly then, what do I really mean when I say I love my wife? According to the world’s use of the word, and according to my own natural human tendencies, to be honest, without the Holy Spirit giving me God’s otherish love, I would have to admit that a lot of the time I mean the self-serving, self-centered, “what am I getting out of it” kind of love. In re-learning about the kind of Christian, otherish love that Paul is talking about here I have begun to place a greater emphasis on what I have always really felt as part of my love for Kathy but needs to be more and more the focus of how I love her.
Now I have started expressing my love for her by saying things like, “I want to help you have a really great day.” I want to bless you. It’s easy to love someone who blesses me, but that’s chocolate love, being grateful and appreciative of what I am getting out of the relationship. Jesus often talked about otherish love; give to those who can’t pay you back, bless those that curse you and pray for your enemies. To really love someone is to be a blessing to them, even if they don’t bless you back.
Think of putting that kind of emphasis on your motivation for everything you do. Those of you who are married, what would happen in your house if you turned to your spouse and genuinely meant it when you say, “I want to help you have a really great day.” And how would you spend your time to make that happen? For those of you not married, you could still employ the same principle, in your workplace for example. Are you on the job just because it happens to be where you ended up in the process of looking for a paycheck? Or can you genuinely say, “I want to be a blessing here. I am giving myself away to this task and to the people with whom I work because it is where God can use me to do the most good in the world.”
Let’s even ask what we mean when we say we love God. In John 4:18 we read, “We love [God] because he first loved us.” God reached down from Heaven to save us from sin. We receive tremendous benefit and blessing from God because he loved us first. That’s where it starts. That same self-seeking, self-serving nature realizes that it is a good thing to believe in God so that we don’t have to suffer in hell, we can be forgiven of sin, we can be guided and blessed by the Holy Spirit. We can be filled with Holy Spirit joy and experience a sense of belonging and purpose. But if that is all that we mean when we say we love God, then we are still talking about the worldly kind of love. That’s loving God the way we love chocolate, for what we get out of it. That describes people who go to church for what they get out of it, to be blessed. But what about being a blessing by giving and participating in the giving end of ministry?
Now the exercise. One commentary suggested that the way we should read 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 to see the perfect character of Jesus and how he loves us. Jesus is patient, Jesus is kind. He does not envy, he does not boast, he is not proud. He does not dishonor others, he is not self-seeking, he is not easily angered, he keeps no record of wrongs. Jesus does not delight in evil but rejoices whit the truth. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Isn’t that all true?
Now think, if Christ lives in us because we are Christians, then we should also be able to say the same is true for each of us. So I’ll just ask you to think about it. Are you patient? Are you kind. Or are you envious, boastful or proud? Do you always honor others or are you self-seeking? Are you easily angered? Are you keeping records of wrongs? Do you delight in evil or rejoices with the truth? Do you always protect, always trust, always hope, always persevere?
When I look at it that way, I find that I have to admit I haven’t perfected the kind of love that God wants to see in me. And now, when I say I love God, I want it to be that otherish kind of love that he has shown me. I want to grow up into meaning that I want to be as completely otherish as God himself is. Real Christian love is all about what others get out of us. I believe we have been blessed to be a blessing, and I want to work at that with all my heart and mind and strength and soul. I hope you do too.
Now, I realize that in this life I will never quite manage it. My sinful nature will tend to get in the way. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t even bother to try. Oh, no. As Paul said, “I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.” That keeps me humble before the Lord. I can’t get conceited and think I am a pretty mature Christian. I must always go back to God again, every day in fact, and acknowledge a continuing dependence upon Him to put his Spirit into me so that I act more like Him the next time. That’s what prayer, Bible Study and Christian fellowship are all about, the discipline of depending upon God so that I grow in grace and show more Christian love.
That’s why Paul was led in the final section to talk about the difference between childish ways and grown up ways. We all start out in life needing to be completely cared for by others. And to use the easy to understand worldly way with this word, we all do love to be held, to be fed, to be played with, to be washed and warmed and comforted. But what we have to learn as we grow is how to give it back. We have to learn to love comforting others. We have to learn to love serving others. It has to be shown to us first. And we see it in the cross of Christ. That’s where we first get a glimpse of the amazing grace of God and how completely otherish is His love for us.
God certainly didn’t love any of us for what He could get out of us. We were all dead, completely worthless and unresponsive to His Spirit. But He loved us because love is His nature. He loved us for what we could get out of Him, life itself, eternal life as His best gift to give us, the very best possible life we could possibly live.
But we barely understand that. We see it as if we are looking in a mirror, and in Paul’s day the mirrors were only made of a flat piece of polished bronze that gave a poor reflection. The Truth is, this God, the God of the universe, the God who breathed stars into existence became sin for you. He looked down at tiny little you and loved you enough to say, “I want you to have a great day. Yes and I want you to have a wonderful eternal life.” Let’s believe that God really does want to be our Heavenly Father. Let’s trust Jesus to come and dwell in our hearts so that we begin to have the same otherish kind of love for others that he has shown he has for us.
And let’s try to put that into practice, not in our own strength, but continually looking to Jesus and depending upon the Holy Spirit to fill us and refill us with His Holy Spirit so that the world sees us fulfilling Jesus’ command to love one another. When we are loving each other and the people of this world with the supernatural otherish love that comes from God, that’s when people who need to know God loves them will sit up and take notice. They’ll see it and say, I want what you got! And all the while God’s love will be growing in us as we walk with Him. As a result, we will be very useful to God in his work of saving other souls. Faith in Jesus gives us hope for a great future. But best of all the lord of God gives us something to give to the needy world today. Amen.
He wrote it for the church. Just to collect up the last couple of weeks again, before chapter 13 we have chapter 12 in which Paul wrote about one body many parts, one Spirit, many gifts. He was helping the Corinthians understand how the community called the church ought to exist, how we ought to treat each other, and how does the Holy Spirit operate in our lives in this great variety of ways that all works together harmoniously if we love one another. There’s different abilities, but there’s one overarching attitude that makes it all work together. We are all different parts but we have to figure out how to get along.
That’s what love is for. That’s why we have 1 Cor. 13 where it is. In the next chapter, 14, Paul will show how love has its impact on the ways the members of the church worship together. There is to be no competition, no showiness, no lack of consideration for each other’s needs.
So what is it about love that is so important to this discussion of spiritual gifts and the nature of Christian community? Paul’s chapter 13 breaks into three sections; the absence of love, the nature of love, the greatness of love. The first section, verses 1-3 depicts love as the proper motivation for everything we do as Christians by saying that any good we might think we are doing is actually worthless if love is not the motivator. The next section, 4-8 is Paul’s actual definition or description of love itself, what it is and what it is not. And the last section, 9-13 is actually Paul’s loving way of addressing the boastful ones in the Corinthian Church who thought they were so mature in the faith even though they had not love. Their boasting proves the absence of love. He was letting them know that in reality they were the immature Christians who caused the problems. He was telling them to grow up!
Last of all he emphasizes that love is the best, most important and most enduring quality of Christian living.
That’s a great summary of this teaching, but let’s go back to the beginning and look at what happens without love. One of the things that Paul is really trying to do in the first section is prove that love makes all the difference. There were other religious cults around the Corinthians. These new believers themselves used to be pagans and idol worshipers so they were very familiar with the religious practices of the other religions around them. Do you know that speaking in tongues happened in other religions before Christianity? It was all around the citizens of Corinth.
As idolaters they were in contact with demons and evil spirits that unbelievers thought were legitimate Gods worthy of worship. And these demons encouraged such deception by causing their followers to speak in tongues. Yes it would be quite an experience to feel taken over by a spirit that made you speak in a language you didn’t know and made you feel that spiritual godlike beings really do exist and might help you live a better life if you treat them right. But Paul is saying the experience itself is not enough to assure one that he or she is really in touch with the one true God. Without the distinctly Christian characteristic of Love as defined by God, all that ecstatic utterance called speaking in tongues is just noise, like a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
By the way, Corinth was also filled with the noise of clanging gongs and cymbals. The commentaries I read mentioned that the pagan religious culture of Corinth included this practice of marching to their worship services, or even announcing their own religious rites, in processions that included gongs and cymbals being sounded repeatedly as they moved through the city streets. There were many such groups, so there were many such instruments, all playing at the same time. But they were not together, not in tune, not in harmony, and not making any sense at all, just a great noise, such as you might hear at the humane society when all the dogs are barking. It’s not exactly a symphony.
That’s how Paul brings his readers attention away from the surface behaviors and gets us down to the foundational heart of the matter. We must be moved by love, and nothing that we do matters at all if we do not have love. It is the same principle in the next verse. All around the Corinthians were all kinds of soothsayers, astrologers and fortunetellers. Paul lumped them all under the Christian terms saying, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge.” It was really just like today. We still have astrologers and fortunetellers and palm readers in some places. Do you think they love their clients? Or just want to earn money from folks who believe in that stuff? That’s Paul’s point. Without love, even if you do it in church and call it the gift of prophesy, you are no better than all the rest of the charlatans in the world around you, drawing attention to yourself for your own reasons.
And yes even the last verse of the section in which Paul brings up the greatest sacrifice of one’s own life, he reminds his readers that even that can be done for the wrong reasons. In summary, God is love, and if we are not motivated by the love that comes from God we are actually no use to God at all. So rather than looking at any particular behavior as evidence of being filled with the Spirit, Paul says look for the love. The absence of God’s love means the service is not Christian, even if it happens in church. God’s love makes all the difference.
I could paraphrase these verses for our community to use in this way. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of us attend worship. It doesn’t matter how much of our money goes into fancy video and other productions and equipment to make a great worship service. It doesn’t matter how much we give to charity and how many ministries we have to feed the hungry and serve the poor. What it all boils down to is, when we get together for worship, do we really enjoy each other’s company, do we really respect and care for each other in the most otherish way we can? And are we filled with compassionate love for the lost so that we eagerly desire to do all that we can to reach them? Because if we don’t really love each other, and the lost around us, then anything else that we do that looks like success to us, will appear to all the world around us as vain hypocrisy.
Now I’ve used my favorite new word there. It’s a word I made up: otherish. Otherish is the true opposite of selfish. The world thinks that the opposite of selfish is selfless. But I am not satisfied with that, because selfless still has some “self” left in it, just a little less. To completely get myself out of being even the least bit selfish, to deny myself, to completely get myself out of the picture, I would have to be otherish. God’s love is a self-denying, otherish love. So to repeat, when we get together for worship, do we really enjoy each other’s company, do we really respect and care for each other in the most otherish way we can? And are we filed with compassionate otherish love for the lost so that we eagerly desire to do all that we can to reach them? Because if we don’t really love each other, and the lost around us, then anything else that we do that looks like success to us, will appear to all the world around us as vain hypocrisy. God’s love is otherish. And the only way we can display it, is if we have received the Holy Spirit because truly otherish love is a supernatural gift from God. It is his love put into us.
Paul speaks of doing things, but of having love. It is a love that is not naturally in us, but we can have it in us by the power of Christ in us. The kind of otherish love that needs to be at work in our lives to create genuine Christian community is not natural love. By nature we are selfish, not otherish. The supernatural otherish love that comes from God can only be active in the life of a Spirit-filled believer. It is the kind of love that makes it possible for us to love people we would not naturally be inclined to care about. God’s otherish love is supernatural.
In the next section, Paul tells us exactly what love is and what it is not. It is interesting and perhaps it should also sadden us to have to admit that the best way Paul has of defining proper Christian love is to put it all in contrast with the way we humans normally behave. I am not going to expound on this very much. I am just going to get the point across through a simple exercise. But before we do that I want to point out what we usually mean when we humans say we love something. This is actually a misuse of the word love but it is so common in our language that we simply must talk about it a bit.
For example, what do I really mean when I say that I love chocolate? Doesn’t that mean that when I think about chocolate and when I go and get some, all I am really interested in is the pleasure that I receive from chocolate? Isn’t love like that really very self-centered? As I said before, we are naturally born selfish. Properly speaking, I should not say I love chocolate. Not if we want to speak of love the way the Bible does. I could say I am drawn to chocolate. I am attracted to chocolate. It gives me great pleasure to eat chocolate. But every time I eat chocolate, I am not doing anything for the chocolate. Even if you say, “But Pastor, I would do anything for chocolate!” All you mean is that you would do anything to get some. You don’t want to bless chocolate. You want chocolate to bless you! My desire for chocolate is very self-serving and self-seeking. My relationship with chocolate is entirely one-sided, it is all about what I get out of it.
Similarly then, what do I really mean when I say I love my wife? According to the world’s use of the word, and according to my own natural human tendencies, to be honest, without the Holy Spirit giving me God’s otherish love, I would have to admit that a lot of the time I mean the self-serving, self-centered, “what am I getting out of it” kind of love. In re-learning about the kind of Christian, otherish love that Paul is talking about here I have begun to place a greater emphasis on what I have always really felt as part of my love for Kathy but needs to be more and more the focus of how I love her.
Now I have started expressing my love for her by saying things like, “I want to help you have a really great day.” I want to bless you. It’s easy to love someone who blesses me, but that’s chocolate love, being grateful and appreciative of what I am getting out of the relationship. Jesus often talked about otherish love; give to those who can’t pay you back, bless those that curse you and pray for your enemies. To really love someone is to be a blessing to them, even if they don’t bless you back.
Think of putting that kind of emphasis on your motivation for everything you do. Those of you who are married, what would happen in your house if you turned to your spouse and genuinely meant it when you say, “I want to help you have a really great day.” And how would you spend your time to make that happen? For those of you not married, you could still employ the same principle, in your workplace for example. Are you on the job just because it happens to be where you ended up in the process of looking for a paycheck? Or can you genuinely say, “I want to be a blessing here. I am giving myself away to this task and to the people with whom I work because it is where God can use me to do the most good in the world.”
Let’s even ask what we mean when we say we love God. In John 4:18 we read, “We love [God] because he first loved us.” God reached down from Heaven to save us from sin. We receive tremendous benefit and blessing from God because he loved us first. That’s where it starts. That same self-seeking, self-serving nature realizes that it is a good thing to believe in God so that we don’t have to suffer in hell, we can be forgiven of sin, we can be guided and blessed by the Holy Spirit. We can be filled with Holy Spirit joy and experience a sense of belonging and purpose. But if that is all that we mean when we say we love God, then we are still talking about the worldly kind of love. That’s loving God the way we love chocolate, for what we get out of it. That describes people who go to church for what they get out of it, to be blessed. But what about being a blessing by giving and participating in the giving end of ministry?
Now the exercise. One commentary suggested that the way we should read 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 to see the perfect character of Jesus and how he loves us. Jesus is patient, Jesus is kind. He does not envy, he does not boast, he is not proud. He does not dishonor others, he is not self-seeking, he is not easily angered, he keeps no record of wrongs. Jesus does not delight in evil but rejoices whit the truth. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Isn’t that all true?
Now think, if Christ lives in us because we are Christians, then we should also be able to say the same is true for each of us. So I’ll just ask you to think about it. Are you patient? Are you kind. Or are you envious, boastful or proud? Do you always honor others or are you self-seeking? Are you easily angered? Are you keeping records of wrongs? Do you delight in evil or rejoices with the truth? Do you always protect, always trust, always hope, always persevere?
When I look at it that way, I find that I have to admit I haven’t perfected the kind of love that God wants to see in me. And now, when I say I love God, I want it to be that otherish kind of love that he has shown me. I want to grow up into meaning that I want to be as completely otherish as God himself is. Real Christian love is all about what others get out of us. I believe we have been blessed to be a blessing, and I want to work at that with all my heart and mind and strength and soul. I hope you do too.
Now, I realize that in this life I will never quite manage it. My sinful nature will tend to get in the way. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t even bother to try. Oh, no. As Paul said, “I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.” That keeps me humble before the Lord. I can’t get conceited and think I am a pretty mature Christian. I must always go back to God again, every day in fact, and acknowledge a continuing dependence upon Him to put his Spirit into me so that I act more like Him the next time. That’s what prayer, Bible Study and Christian fellowship are all about, the discipline of depending upon God so that I grow in grace and show more Christian love.
That’s why Paul was led in the final section to talk about the difference between childish ways and grown up ways. We all start out in life needing to be completely cared for by others. And to use the easy to understand worldly way with this word, we all do love to be held, to be fed, to be played with, to be washed and warmed and comforted. But what we have to learn as we grow is how to give it back. We have to learn to love comforting others. We have to learn to love serving others. It has to be shown to us first. And we see it in the cross of Christ. That’s where we first get a glimpse of the amazing grace of God and how completely otherish is His love for us.
God certainly didn’t love any of us for what He could get out of us. We were all dead, completely worthless and unresponsive to His Spirit. But He loved us because love is His nature. He loved us for what we could get out of Him, life itself, eternal life as His best gift to give us, the very best possible life we could possibly live.
But we barely understand that. We see it as if we are looking in a mirror, and in Paul’s day the mirrors were only made of a flat piece of polished bronze that gave a poor reflection. The Truth is, this God, the God of the universe, the God who breathed stars into existence became sin for you. He looked down at tiny little you and loved you enough to say, “I want you to have a great day. Yes and I want you to have a wonderful eternal life.” Let’s believe that God really does want to be our Heavenly Father. Let’s trust Jesus to come and dwell in our hearts so that we begin to have the same otherish kind of love for others that he has shown he has for us.
And let’s try to put that into practice, not in our own strength, but continually looking to Jesus and depending upon the Holy Spirit to fill us and refill us with His Holy Spirit so that the world sees us fulfilling Jesus’ command to love one another. When we are loving each other and the people of this world with the supernatural otherish love that comes from God, that’s when people who need to know God loves them will sit up and take notice. They’ll see it and say, I want what you got! And all the while God’s love will be growing in us as we walk with Him. As a result, we will be very useful to God in his work of saving other souls. Faith in Jesus gives us hope for a great future. But best of all the lord of God gives us something to give to the needy world today. Amen.
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