Quest: Perfect Love
1 Corinthians 13
Two of my recent blogs were about my Quest to "Know Him Who is From the Beginning":
One of the things I discussed in the Prophecy post was serving God as a prophet. As I spent more time talking with God about it and studying scripture I was reminded of 1 Corinthians 13 verse 2:
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
I think the reason I am on this quest is because the "gift of prophecy" is getting awakened in me giving me an unquenchable desire to “fathom all mysteries and all knowledge."
However, it is always important to read scripture in context. So I re-read the whole chapter and reviewed how it fit in the rest of the book. Verses 8-10 jumped out at me:
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be restrained; where there is knowledge, it will be dismissed. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial passes away.
The desire to prophesy is Biblical. However, so are the warnings in verses 2c and 8b:
If I don’t have love, I am nothing
Prophecies will cease
So, as I mentioned in the last post, I started a deep dive into the Great Commandment which can be summarized as loving God and loving others. But the Bible uses a lot of other words to describe what that love looks like. In particular, it says we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, understanding and strength. What do those words really mean? It will take at least one post for each of those topics to even scratch the surface.
I'll close this post with a summary of what Paul said about love in 1 Corinthians 13:
Love IS: patient, kind
Love DOES: rejoice in the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things
Love is NOT: proud, rude, self-seeking, easily angered
Love DOES NOT: fail, envy, boast, keep an account of wrongs, take pleasure in evil