1 Corinthians 13:1-3
Imagine with me that you have awakened in a world without love. It is a world where people don’t care—and they don’t care that they don’t care. It is a world where offenses began fights and wars, because no one loved enough to forgive.
It’s a world where people were selfishly ambitious, stepping on others in climbing to the top, abusing others merely to survive. It’s a world where the lives of old people and the unborn were cheap.
It is a world where other people’s lives are cheap as long as you get what you want. It is a world where people hardly marry, and those that did rarely stayed that way. It is a world where children had to fend for themselves.
It is a world where people sat silent when evil took place, where protecting the weak was a waste of time. A world without love would be a world without hope and filled with all the ugly substitutions people find to take love’s place. Part of what makes hell so terrible is that you can’t find any love there.
The world is certainly an unloving place at times. At any time there are no less than ten wars going on somewhere in the world. Crime, abortion, prejudice, and pride still plague us. The world is sometimes very ugly, and trying to find love is not easy.
It is not so much that people are hateful as it is they are apathetic. The opposite of love is not hate; it is apathy or indifference. Apathy occurs when a person cannot feel and doesn’t care. He may not even want to care; he may not want to feel. That’s a terrible condition. Someone has well said, “Love will find a way, but indifference will find an excuse.”
Matt. 22:35-39
And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him, ³⁶“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” ³⁷And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ⁴⁰On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
- I have often wondered why love, which some think of as a feeling, is a command. Love is not a mere feeling, though it may include feeling.
- Love is the determination to sacrifice one’s self or one’s desire for the best interests of an other.
I John 4:7-11
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. ¹⁰In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
God is love! God sacrificed His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our best interests.
The Preeminence of Love (1 Cor. 13:1-3)
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ²And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
1 Cor. 13:1-3
love is the most important spiritual quality
more than speaking in tongues, more than prophecy,
more than miraculous knowledge, more than faith to work miracles
more than giving all your possessions to feed the poor
more than giving your body to be burned,
Without love I am a noisy gong, I am nothing, what I do profits nothing.
Love is the difference between existing and living. It is the difference between religion and Christianity.
Henry Drummond years ago wrote a book entitled, “The Greatest Thing in the World,” in which he pointed out that love is the “the highest good.”
Many people want to be loved, but they do not understand the higher calling of loving others. Man reaches his noblest place by loving, not in being loved.
Many people confuse infatuation or lust with love. Love is not so much a feeling as it is a mindset, a choice. We love because we choose to love. We can love others even when we don’t like them.
The word agape or love (primarily of Christian love) means such concern or interest in another that one is willing to sacrifice what is his own to do what is best for another.
People are not “born lovers” any more than people are born chefs. They have to learn how to cook, and they have to learn how to love. You may have the deepest of feelings, but love is a verb, an act of heart and soul.
Loving someone means that you have paid enough attention to the needs and desires of another that their needs and desires become more important than your own.
What we need more of, more than anything else, is that we show the world around us just how much we love Jesus, how much we love one another, and how much we love them. When we do that, people are going to want to be a part of what we have in Christ.
-Josh Romo