Love

"So now faith, hope, and love abide,

these three; but the greatest of these is love."

1 Corinthians 13:13

     This week we celebrated 39 years of marriage. Wow!  Some days it seems that long, but other days it seems only yesterday we were that young, excited couple starting our life together. As a young couple, and by today's standards 20 and 24 is young, we were excited to be moving to another state 500 miles from our hometown to begin a new job and our new life.  It never occurred to us that we should be scared.  We had each other and we had God to lead the way.  It was an adventure.  We didn't have a lot of money but we didn't care.  We put away what we needed to pay the bills and the rest was for groceries and gas.  There wasn't any extra.  So for us to have recreational entertainment, it was long walks, drives in the country, visiting historical sights around the area, and board games.  There was no internet or smartphones to distract us.  There wasn't much on TV even with a limited cable.  Looking back, I wish it was still that way.  The distractions of life that get in the way of living.

     Those distractions take us from the loving God that is there for us.  I John 4 tells us that God is love. The word love is mentioned in the Bible many times and depending on the version which you are reading.  The Kings James Bible mentions love 310 times, in the New American Standard Bible, it's mentioned 348 times. In the New International Version, love is mentioned 551 times.  We use the word love a lot too.  We love this pizza, we love that TV show, we love our families and friends.  

      The word love is tossed around and used flippantly without people realizing the depths of the word.  "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast, it is not arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful, it does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends...". (I Corthinians 13: 4-8)  Love is the greatest of all things.  

       The love of God is so great that it is unfathomable to us mere humans. I John 4:10 states, "in 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.".  He gave us His only Son to die for us.  To take the sins of every man and woman and crush them forever.  We owe God everything but we give Him very little.  We give him Sunday mornings and some don't even give Him that day.   We don't spend the time with Him that He deserves for what He has done for us.  We spend our days looking at our smartphones and cruising the internet mindlessly even though we know there is nothing new or different there than the five minutes before when we looked.  We should be spending that time in prayer and reading of the Word so that we know the love of God.  So we know that God is there for us when things get tough.  So we know that when we do not have much we still have everything we need.  God is love and all we need to do is reach out to Him and give Him the time He deserves.   Will you do that?  

"We love because He first loved us."

I John 4:19