Love is all you give in Jesus
Love is all you give in Jesus - love which gives and builds in Jesus.
Romance love has songs like "Ain't no mountain high enough -- to keep me away from you...", for warm, fuzzy feeling. Super-spirituality offers use of communicative gifts, noisily. Super-insight offers gifts of discernment for present and future, in vanity. Super-faith offers miracles in nature, super-generosity offers millions to welfare giving, and super-fanaticism offers even suicide blasts or self-immolation fires, which do no good. Love in Jesus gives new life to save.
John 3.16, "God so loved the world..." Matt 5.44, "Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you...", John 15.12-13, "Love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no person than this, that someone lay down their life for their friends..." John 19.30, "It is finished" - these are the image behind 1 Cor 13.1-8. Jesus in love for us died for our forgiveness, Jesus crucified, resurrected and giving the Holy Spirit to save, is the fullness of love.
Verse 12b "then we shall see face-to-face', means only the image of the resurrected Jesus is behind 1 Cor 13. Paul didn't write it to win a religious or philosophical contest, or as 'spirit of common humanity' wisdom literature. Hippy 'love is all you need' for self-centred harmony, tranquility, serendipity and withdrawal is not it. Only the love that saves is the love beyond ourselves which "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things", love that "never ends". Love is all you give in Jesus, the King of love.
| 1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. (1Corinthians13:1-8) |
[Rod Adamson is married to Colleen 20 years, they have one daughter. They minister at George Presby, within the APTsec 'Apostolic Protestant Theology Sector' Go to resurrectlife co za]
