"Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love."
Out of every gift God has placed within us, Love is the greatest. Now I really thought about this yesterday before writing this post. I really wanted to understand what He meant.
The more I thought on it, the more I understood it better. Every human being, whether they believe in God or not are all born with certain characteristics innate within them, and two of these are hope and faith.
We all use our faith on a daily basis, that is our natural faith. When we go to sleep at night, we already plan our tomorrow because we believe we will wake up, infact it doesn't even occur to us that we might not wake up. When we sit on a chair, we believe it is capable to hold us up.....there are many ways in which we use our natural faith, I don't want to go too much into it.
We all have hope. Even in the most difficult of circumstances, deep within us, deep deep down, we believe things can get better. EVERY human being has this. Deep deep down, even the one who is really depressed believes things can get better, even if it is the smallest of hope, it is still there.
But Love......now this is a choice. To love someone or something, we have to want to. We have to open ourselves, our heart, our mind to the person or the thing.
So now bringing this to our relationship with God. The reason He says that out of faith, hope and love, Love is the greatest, is because to love Him we have to choose to, we have to want to. And when we truly, but truly love Him.....nothing keeps us apart from Him.
True love never fails. Look at the case of Jesus, His entire being did NOT want to go through with the sacrifice on the cross, so much so, He sweated blood (check Luke 22:44). BUT because His love for us is so great and unimaginable and amazing, He did it. Three times, He prayed to the Father and asked if the cup could pass, but nonetheless for the Father's will to be done. He did it, He accomplished His mission, He didn't give up, why? Not because of faith or hope alone....but the greatest of all, because of His love for every single one of us.
This is what will keep us till the very end, our love for Him, our true love for Him. This is what makes it impossible for us to give up on our faith and our hope in the return of our saviour. I have seen people giving up on their faith and when I understood whatI have just explained above, I finally understood how and why it happened.
They had faith and hope amongst other things such as knowledge, excellent speech etc.....but their love for God was not true. If it were, they would find it impossible to enjoy life out of His presence.....impossible.
I will be reading over this again and truly fighting to apply all I have learnt over the past few weeks about what true Love really means. This is the love God has towards me, far higher than I can imagine, and this is the love I should also have towards Him.
Be blessed.
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