Living in Love
I was thinking today that Kim and I have experienced 30 Valentine’s Days together. WOW! What an amazing blessing God has given us in enduring romance and love! Our marriage has endured many difficulties, but God has been faithful through it all, and has held our love steadfast through the storms. So when we talk about the kind of love God has blessed us with, we’re not talking about mere sentimentality. As a fellow named Smiley Blanton put it in his book many years ago, life really does boil down to Love or Perish:
Without love, hopes perish.
Without love, dreams and creativity perish.
Without love, families and churches perish.
Without love, friendships perish.
Without love, the intimacies of romance perish.
Without love, the desire to go on living can perish.
To love and to be loved is the bedrock of our existence. But love must also flex and adapt. Rigid love is not true love. It is veiled manipulation, a conditional time bomb that explodes when frustrated. Genuine love willingly waits! It isn’t pushy or demanding. It neither clutches nor clings. Real love is not shortsighted, selfish, or insensitive. It detects needs and does what is best for the other person without being told.
Those are the lessons we read from the greatest treatise ever written on the subject:
“Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears . . believes . . . hopes . . . endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:47).
This is the love Christ has for us, and the kind of love we are blessed to live in. How will you express your love today?
Loving you in the Lord,
Bill
Tags: 1 Corinthians 13, love, marriage, Valentine's Day
Filed under: From Our Pastor
