Footsteps #138

I remember in the midst of performing a wedding, while reading 1Cor.13:4-7, being convicted of my shortcomings in regard to what I was reading. While vs.1-3 challenge us to examine motivations that drive our actions and our exercise of spiritual gifts, vs.4-7 challenge us in a different way.  Every human heart cringes before the standard sketched in these short verses.  “Love does not insist on its own way.”  But sometimes we do!  “Love hopes all things.”  But hope so often fades from our hearts.  We thrill at the heights of pure love and yet despair of ever providing an adequate reflection of it. In sharing his exalted picture of love Paul does not mean to discourage us but encourage us. 

Just as gifts and ministries are given by God’s Spirit, so is love?  It is impossible for us to generate so sublime a thing in our own lives.  As with spiritual gifts, we find ourselves recipients, not manufacturers.  Paul does not mean to entice the Corinthian Christians with a love that they cannot experience.  Rather, he pleads for their actions to be prompted by the greatest of God’s gifts, the “more excellent way” of love.  The appropriate response to Paul’s high-powered words on love is not despair.  It is, first, to confess how consistently we have failed to express such love.  And, second, to pray for open hearts to receive God’s gift of love that we might truly bless those around us. Ask yourself, which of these statements on love do you most need to be expressed in your life now?  

With regard to Paul’s phrase, “Love is not resentful,” the power of agape love drives us to a new beginning.  Love lets the past die!  It moves people to a new beginning without settling the past, because Christ has settled the accounts of the past at the cross. This is called reconciliation, and reconciliation is loves ultimate goal. 

In the final section of this great chapter (Vs8-13), Paul contrasts the permanence of love with the comparative impermanence of spiritual gifts.  What a superb tactic for people so focused on the exercise of spiritual gifts that they have missed the surpassing importance of love!