The Greatest of These

Education, training, life experience, knowledge, personality, skill sets…we all have these in some form or fashion. We use them to live, work, and play, for good (most of the time) and for evil (sometimes if we’re being honest). All of our “personal resources” that we use to live life, do these make us something? If we don’t have love, they don’t. Paul tells the people of Corinth, “If  have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all knowledge, and if I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:2)

These words, written almost 2000 years ago, still apply to us today! 1 John 4:15 tells us that “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” Jesus laid the groundwork for this in John 15:17 when He said, “These things I command you, that you love one another.” So when we live a life of love for one another because of how God loves us, the emptiness we have inside disappears, because God is in us, and we are in Him!

We end with Paul’s encouragement to the people of Ephesus when he writes, “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:17-19)