We’ve been looking at the famous “love chapter” in First Corinthians. oYou’ve likely heard the words spoken at wedding ceremonies or written on invitations or decorative wall hangings. This excerpt from God’s Word offers practical truth that inspires us to a better life, a life of love.
But these words also might ring hollow or worse, bring pain, if you have ever been hurt by someone who should have loved you instead. Or having been abandoned physically, emotionally, or spiritually, you can’t even ponder the phrase, “love never fails.” Loving someone doesn’t mean they will always love you back or that they will express their love in a way that speaks love to you. And when this is your experience, there are no words to remove the pain you feel.
The old ‘sticks and stones’ nursery rhyme is dead wrong. Words DO hurt. Sometimes they create a lifetime of hurt. But love…love is a choice. You can’t make me stop loving you. Others don’t have the power to make you stop loving life or others, even if they don’t return that love.
It’s called loving unconditionally. It’s the way God loves us. His word says “while we were still sinners, he loved us.” God doesn’t wait until we get our act together. (Let’s give Him thanks for THAT!) He loves us and pursues us even when we don’t pursue Him, even when we have been running FROM Him for a very long time. Even when we feel that even He has abandoned us, His love never fails.
Don’t give up on love. Don’t give up on God. Don’t give up on others. Build new relationships. In the end all our lives are about faith, hope, and love. Pursue great love. Make it your life’s greatest ambition.
First Corinthians 13:8-13
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. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.