Last Sunday evening I heard a sermon on love. It was on the classic love passage of 1 Corinthians 13 (love is patient, kind etc…) as ever, very challenging as I reflect on the place of love in my own life.
Often we grow too accustomed as Christians to the well rehearsed passages of Scripture, so I wanted to open myself up to receiving what ever God had to show me ‘this time’ in this new reading of a familiar passage.
What struck me this time around was that verse 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.
That stopped me in my path fairly abruptly…
I had a thought - ‘what do I seek?’
When I read the Bible, when I pray, when I come into the presence of God, what do I seek?
To be honest, I seek answers. I seek knowledge. I seek measurable progress in my faith that demonstrates itself in ‘having the answers’ or even 'being productive' (especially as my job is so caught up in my faith).
Perhaps I secretly knew this already, or at least suspected it. But often it’s God’s word, read afresh that hits these things home.
I had a revelation, simple yet profound. 'Where there is knowledge, it will pass away.'
In verse 13, Paul hits on a mystery, only three things remain. Faith, hope, love.
Of course, we learn the definition of love in 1 John 4:8 - ‘God is love’.
When we seek after love, we seek after who God is.
It doesn’t sit well in my results driven mindset, how can I measure this? what will I have achieved?
What can I say I’ve ticked off the list?
It grates against my need to be ‘productive’.
Learning to let go of all of that and dwelling in the love of God for the sake of the love of God may not feel like I’m achieving anything and certainly won’t look that way from the outside looking in, but wow is it freeing, it releases us from the self imposed bonds we place on our identities as either consumers or producers (or both). We are much more than that.
God has blessed us with being both and yet when we make that the seat of our existence and the measure of our ‘success’ in life we run the risk of losing this fundamental dynamic of living freely in God’s love.
So try it. Try not trying to find the answers or getting it ‘right’ - try stopping and soaking in the love of God, just be with him. Allow your mind to rebel and demand a more productive use of time, watch it struggle for a bit with what you’re doing and allow it to fade away gently.
It isn’t about the answers or feeling like we know more. Faith, hope and love are not a means to some other end. They are the end, God is love.
‘and the greatest of these is love’. (1 Cor 13:13)
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