Praise the Lord for the way He loves us. It is written in Romans: "But God shows His love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." It is written again in 1 John 4: “We love, because He first loved us"
A pastor tells of a wife who came into his office full of hatred toward her husband. "I do not only want to get rid of him; I want to get even. Before I divorce him, I want to hurt him as much as he has me," the woman fumed. Crane suggested an ingenious plan. "Go home and act as if you really loved your husband. Tell him how much he means to you. Praise him for every decent trait. Go out of your way to be as kind, considerate, and generous as possible. Spare no efforts to please him, to enjoy him. Make him believe you love him. After you’ve convinced him of your undying love and that you cannot live without him, then drop the bomb. Tell him that you’re getting a divorce. That will really hurt him." With revenge in her eyes, she smiled and exclaimed, "Beautiful, beautiful. Will he ever be surprised!" And she did it with enthusiasm—acting as if. For two months she showed love, kindness, listening, giving, reinforcing, forgiveness, patience, sharing. When she didn’t return, Crane called. "Are you ready now to go through with the divorce?" "Divorce?!" she exclaimed. "Never! I discovered I really do love him."The Catholic Saint Francis de Sales said, “You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love God and man by loving.”The Apostle Paul penned his Corinthian letter to a church in complete disarray and on the verge of imploding upon itself. The church was rife with public immorality, doctrinal confusion, divisions, party politics, petty bickering, believers suing other believers in secular courts, syncretism, divorce, and abuses of spiritual gifts and the sacraments. And the root causes all of those ills Paul subscribes to one deficiency: The Corinthians were not manifesting and exercising sacrificial love to each other in their common life. Following this diagnosis the Apostle then proceeds to prescribe the cure for the Corinthian troubles: Manifest and exercise sacrificial love to each other in your common life.The remedy is found in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, the familiar, much beloved, and popularly named “love chapter.” Yet I submit to you that our familiarity with 1 Corinthians 13 has not resulted in our incorporating its truths into our hearts and manifesting its principles in our lives—just the opposite. Perhaps our over-familiarity has desensitized us, and numbed us, to the scandal of the priority and power of sacrificial love in action. And it’s time for us to wake up. Paul begins his appeal to the addled Corinthians and us in the first 3 verses of chapter 13 by a declaration of the priority and primacy of sacrificial love for the every born again believer. His point is a simple one: Love is the premier virtue of the Christian life. It towers above all others in importance, and it must be the ground, the foundation, the first principle, of everything we as believers do and are. And notice how Paul uses hyperbole—exaggeration—to make his point so that we won’t miss it.The Apostle states rather matter-of-factly: “No matter how spiritual other Christians perceive me to be, or how much I accomplish for the kingdom, if it is not motivated by and accompanied with love, I am nothing and I accomplish absolutely nothing. If I exhibit supernatural, ecstatic utterances without love—worthless. If I memorize the Bible cover to cover, and know everything there is to know about God, and have supernatural faith, without love it is all meaningless. If I give everything I have for the poor, and even my own dearest possession, my life, as a martyr, and if either is loveless, it is also in God’s reckoning useless.”Paul’s point? Sacrificial love is the premier virtue of the Christian faith; and with that point implicitly comes this imperative: Do what you have to do to begin manifesting this love in your life. Genuine love does not envy. It does not parade itself—boast about what it is doing to receive recognition and acclaim. Love is not rude—that is, it is concerned with the feelings of others and doesn’t manifest itself in fits of meanness. It is not self-serving; it motivates us to forego our needs and concentrates rather on the needs of others. Love is not easily provoked; in trying situations it causes us to stop and seek a response that better serves our brother or sister than our own need to be right. It is difficult to incite a row with love. Love keeps no accounts of wrongs done to it. Husbands and wives, do you know when we play the “trump card” of our spouse’s past wrongs in a marital spat? When our case is weak and we are losing the argument. Love has a short memory of past injuries and refuses to bring them up again to hurt someone. And love doesn’t rejoice in evil, but finds its joy and contentment in what is good, and true, and righteous. Conversely, love suffers long; it holds off anger and is able to withstand wrongs. It is kind—tender, pleasant, and sweet-natured. Love bears all things. When we think of a “bearing” love our thoughts go immediately to Calvary; there our Lord, motivated by love, bore the cross, the shame, the abuse, the rejection of friends, and the sins of the world. Love believes all things. It hopes all things, continuing to look beyond the immediate circumstances to the future fulfillment of God’s promised blessings to the righteous. Love endures all things—. St. John says in 1 John 4:7-8: “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”Paul concludes his appeal to the Corinthians and us with the revelation of the permanence of love in verses 8-13.The sign gifts, like tongues, interpretation of tongues, special revelations, and the like, the Apostle says, will fade away in the life of the church. But love he says will never fade away. The obvious implications are that love is more important than these gifts, because that which is important endures. Paul says that there are 3 cardinal virtues in the Christian life—3 things we must possess and manifest if we are authentic heirs of everlasting life: Faith—a complete reliance upon the redemptive work of Christ; hope—the expectation of realizing the promises of God in the future which we only anticipate now; and love—the decision of our wills to put the needs and concerns of others before our own. And of these 3 essentials Paul says, the greatest is love. This harkens us back to Jesus’ teaching, doesn't it? “Rabbi,” the lawyer asked, “which is the greatest of all the commandments?” “Love God with all that you have and all that you are, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. On these 2 commandments hang God’s entire revelation and ethical imperative in the Old Covenant. There is no commandment greater than these.”What does love look like? It looks like this. In his book Loving God, Chuck Colson writes:It was a quiet December evening on Ward C43, the oncology unit at Georgetown University Hospital. Many of the rooms around the central nurse’s station were dark and empty, but in Room 11 a man lay critically ill.The patient was Jack Swigert, the man who had piloted the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 and was now Congressman-elect from Colorado’s 6th Congressional district. Cancer, the great lever, now waged its deadly assault on his body.With the dying man was a tall, quiet visitor, sitting in the spot he had occupied almost every night since Swigert had been admitted. Though Bill Armstrong, U.S. Senator from Colorado and chairman of the Senate subcommittee handling Washington’s hottest issue, social security, was one of the busiest and most powerful men in Washington, he was not visiting this room night after night as a powerful politician. He was here as a deeply committed Christian and as Jack Swigert’s friend, fulfilling a responsibility he would not delegate or shirk, much as he disliked hospitals.This night Bill leaned over the bed and spoke quietly to his friend. “Jack, you’re going to be all right. God loves you. I love you. You’re surrounded by friends who are praying for you. You’re going to be all right.” The only response was Jack’s tortured and uneven breathing.Bill pulled his chair closer to the bed and opened his Bible. “Psalm 23,” he began to read in a steady voice. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want….”Time passed. “Psalm 150,” Bill began, then his skin prickled. Jack’s ragged breathing had stopped. He leaned down over the bed, then called for help. As he watched the nurse examining Jack, Bill knew there was nothing more he could do. His friend was dead.Politicians are busy people, Colson concludes, especially Senate committee chairmen. Yet it never occurred to Bill Armstrong that he was too busy to be at the hospital. Nothing dramatic or heroic about his decision—just a friend doing what he could.What more can be said except, “Go, and do thou likewise?”St. Augustine rightly opined that as a consequence of the Fall we are all born with natures, as he called them, incurvatis in se: “twisted in on themselves.” We are by nature selfish, self-absorbed, and blind to accurate self-analysis about just those realities.What then are we to do?Francis de Sales rightly said: We learn to love by loving. Period.I have spent long hours in the intensive care waiting room…watching with anguished people…listening to urgent questions: Will my husband make it? Will my child walk again? How do you live without your companion of thirty years?The intensive care waiting room is different from any other place in the world. And the people who wait are different. They can’t do enough for each other. No one is rude. The distinctions of race and class melt away. A person is a father first, a black man second. The garbage man loves his wife as much as the university professor loves his, and everyone understands this. Each person pulls for everyone else.In the intensive care waiting room, the world changes. Vanity and pretense vanish. The universe is focused on the doctor’s next report. If only it will show improvement. Everyone knows that loving someone else is what life is all about.Can you imagine how very different our homes and our church would be if we realized that our everyday life is in fact the crucible of the intensive care waiting room?In Jesus our Saviour
Brown
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