Call It Love
Many of us fight the same battle against the fear of sharing our hearts with people, and as I’ve prayed for guidance in this area, I’ve seen that, for me, it is often the result of a lack of faith and my incapability to see the bigger picture. Everyone whom I have seen give their all to the mission of Christ, has had a faith that cancels out fear, but I think a lot of it has to do with love as well. We can see in many ways throughout our lives that when faith and love combine, they have the power to cancel out fear. Highly acclaimed preacher, author, and Christian apologist, Tim Keller, says in one of his sermons on the subject: “Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws.” It looks like a part of the reason that it is confusing to us is because we don't know what love truly is; we mistake it for sentimentality. Most of us were taught that it was sentimentality. Starting when we are old enough to comprehend, the world teaches us what love is. Movies, music, and books show us that love is a feeling that has no boundaries, and most of the time in this stereotypical love story, many people get hurt because of one person’s selfish desire or quest for it. So we have to do some studying of the word itself. Love is technically a noun and a verb, so by definition, that makes it a solid possession as well as an action. Something we feel, and something we do. It is something that we feel so deeply that we have to act upon it. I Corinthians 13:4-8 is a verse most of us know (Love is patient, love is kind). It describes all the different characteristics embodied by love. But, so often when we learn this verse, we don’t go all the way to verse 8.
Verse 8 says this:
“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.”
So what does this mean? Temporary. These things are temporary. Even knowledge, tongues, prophecies—things we try to justify as permanent; things that we slave away to acquire over time. We like to think the knowledge we store up will be with us forever, but we often skip the one thing that is implicitly stated to be worth it in the end: love. It clearly says that it never fails.
We live in a world where everything fails. We look at the world and we see nothing permanent and nothing eternal, and that’s because nothing that the world offers us is. Many times over the years, I’ve found myself wanting something eternal, just something that I don’t have to worry about losing. Many times while trying to figure out what that was, I did not go to the Bible for answers, and because of that, I didn’t find anything. It drove me crazy trying to find a constant because it’s all I was looking for.
The word love is used about 551 times in the bible, and that’s just the word itself. The concept of it being practiced is used many more. If we step back and look at the creation of the Bible and of us, all we can see is one enormous act of love itself: Christ being sent and what he did on earth.
Tim Keller said in another one of his sermons that, “all life-changing love is inconvenient.” When we consider this, we should have no doubt what we should do with our lives. And when we truly believe that loving others while sharing this message is our purpose, the Lord will stand with us, driving out our fear with our faith. As 1 John 4:18 says, “perfect love casts out fear.”
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