Superior Love

 

    Without love in your heart your Spiritual Gifts are useless.  It takes agape love for them to be fully charged or have meaning.  The way God loves empowers everything.  It is not easy.  People are not easy.  Situations can be heart breaking, but we have to push through and find a way to love those around use honestly.

    Love is patient and kind.  It knows how to hold it's tongue and not be too sensitive.  Love is not envious, proud, boastful, rude, selfish, or hold grudges.  Love is slow to anger.  This is the type of love that Jesus lived out.  He had the power to wipe out anyone who annoyed him or were unrepentant of their sins.  However, he allowed those very people to kill him instead.  We do not need to stay in abusive relationships, but we can use the situation to reveal Jesus to other people.

    Superior love is agape love.  It hates all evil.  It rejoices in the truth.  It is protective of the truth.  Superior love trust in it's salvation without doubt.  It holds onto the hope of what is to come after this life.  This hope helps superior love to persevere all types of persecution because it knows that love always wins.  

    Love endures even when the one you love dies.  It never ends.  Even when everything else ends, love never ends.  It is what keeps the world going.  Love makes the imperfect disappear.   It matures in it's relationships: Friendship, work, marriage, and family.  Love matures in a way that it is able to remove the childish things of the past, so that it can flourish.  

      Faith, hope, and love work together to endure and become strong.  Together it is powerful, but the source of all the power is love.  Love is the strongest thing in your life.  That is why you should pray that God shows you love in the way it needs to be seen, lived, and accepted.  Look in the mirror.  Do you fully know the face looking back at you?  Do you understand yourself?  The answer will reveal how you need to pray about love in your heart, mind, and life.

1 Corinthians 13