Friends: Understanding God’s love is perhaps life’s greatest mystery and humanity’s greatest gift. The Bible tells us so.  See the column below.  Have a great week!  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #909

April 16, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Love is the Greatest

By Bob Walters

“And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” – 1 Corinthians 13:13

This verse, 1 Cointhians 13:13, is the one that hooked me my first day in church.

Russ Blowers was preaching – September 2, 2001 – on his 50^th anniversary of tending the flock at East 91^st Street Christian Church in Indianapolis. I was an unbeliever somehow in church (sitting in the back row), and Russ said, approximately:

“We learn faith from the past, we have hope in the future, but we have love in the present.”  Learning later that C.S. Lewis wrote, “… the present is where eternity touches time” (The Screwtape Letters), the idea, well, the reality, that God is Love, God is eternal, and God stepped into the present in the form of his Son Jesus Christ, solved Russ’s words and put my esteem of love’s stature in theology at the head of the line.

There are dozens of personal, corollary stories (rabbit trails, my wife calls them) that could stretch the above three paragraphs into days of self-reflection, but I recently learned something new – a brilliant perspective – on all that 1 Corinthians 13 says about love with a nearly perfect blending of Paul’s “fruits of the Spirit” in Galatians 5:22-23.

First Corinthians 13:4-8 says “Love is patient, kind, does not envy, does not boast, is not proud, does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking, not easily angered, keeps no records of wrong, does not delight in evil, rejoices in truth, and always protects, trusts, hopes, and perseveres.”

Galatians 5:22-23 says, “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

My friend Craig Streett, at a recent E91 Mustard Seed Bible class, shared the following handwritten card stuffed in his Bible from a lesson long ago.  Its precis was this: Love is the chief and true fruit of the Spirit, and all other fruits flow from love.

Note: this doesn’t divide the fruits, but we must never divide love, because God is love and we mustn’t divide God.  But what about Father, Son, Spirit?”  My advice is to consider the math problem of the Holy Trinity – 3 in 1, 1 in 3 – as multiplication, i.e., 1x1x1=1, that gives us a loving community of one, not a divided crowd of three. 

So, without division, notice how these two “truth” and “fruit” passages of Paul’s sync up pretty well when love takes the lead over all fruits of the Spirit. Here’s the note:

         “The fruit of the Spirit is love …

1.    Joy is love’s strength.

2.    Peace is love’s security.

3.    Longsuffering is love’s patience.

4.    Kindness is love’s conduct.

5.    Goodness is love’s character.

6.    Faithfulness is love’s confidence.

7.    Gentleness is love’s humility.

8.    Self-control is love’s victory.

Against such as these there is no law.”

When we see love’s fruits in our lives, we have love’s gifts in our hearts.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes this list originated with BibleProject.com. And ... next week we'll review Dave Faust's new book "Not Too Old, Turning your Later Years into Greater Years." Available at Amazon and CollegePress. E91 has planned a book signing session with Dave Sunday, April 28, where books will also be available.