Apr 28, 2024
Scripture Reading: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
We live in a day of imitations. We have plastic flowers, artificial grass, wax fruit … false joy, false humility. But perhaps the saddest imitation offered by our culture is that of love. Our society has shown us an idea of love that looks something like real love, but is not.
Love, at its foundation, is much more than a romantic emotion. It is not something that someone simply 'falls into' or 'falls out of'. In fact, love is not basically something we feel. It is something that we do.
In the middle of his exhortations about spiritual gifts, which had been misused in the Corinthian church, Paul writes about love. 1 Corinthians 13 is a description of love, showing us what love looks like, how it behaves. This passage is not so much a description of what love is, but what love does. Love is patient and kind. It is not proud and does not keep accounts of wrong. It bears all things … does not seek its own … is not easily provoked.
Of course, the way we learn to love more deeply is to be satisfied with and saturated with the love that God has for us. When we consider the love of God and we learn of the glory of it and the depth of it, and God begins to occupy our deepest affections, one of the great things that happens is that we truly begin loving each other better.
Let us pray that God will help us to love the way we ought to love. We need His help because we do not have this love within us and cannot manufacture it by the strength of our will.