I DO! – The Greatest of These – June29th

I DO
June 29, 2021

The Greatest of These

1 Corinthians 13:1-3, ‘If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all His mysteries and making everything as plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t have love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.’ (MSG)

‘Love is a many splendored thing’. It is often ‘blind’. We hear it said. Love sees every facet that it needs to see and can overlook everything else. Love can dream; it can visualize hope and joy and triumph when reality stares tragedy in the face. Love blankets a myriad of wrongs; it carries someone else’s burden when that someone can no longer carry it alone. Love will get you in many binds and it will get you out of equally as many. Love can color anything bright and beautiful; it has its own language and writes its own music. Love is an oxymoron. It is also magnificent and true, and it can turn a person from the inside out. It feels like a cocoon of butterflies hatched in your insides and you will lose yourself over love and later find yourself in love and often you cannot stand up under the effects of love. It is one of the most powerful and motivating factors ever given to humanity.

And, in fact, love was so powerful, that it caused God Almighty to do something so awesomely crazy as to send His one and only true Son to this world, to fall in love with messy mankind, to compassionately live for us, to then passionately die in our place, to essentially cover our multitude of sins. Love shouts ‘I Do’ from the mountaintops and snuggles up close on barren nights and it fights harder for you than you will ever fight for yourself. Love will pursue you; it will track you down. It will give you something to strive for. Love will keep you going when your fuel tank is on empty and you have no ability to go anymore, and when you have nowhere to go, it will give you a place to call home. Love is our greatest commodity; it is a necessity but it is also a luxury; that’s why it is an oxymoron. You will die without love; you cannot live without it no matter how hard you try. Your vessel will continue to seek for something to fill it even long after you have avidly stopped searching, because the Lover of your soul made you with a love-shaped hole inside of you that will not be still until it is filled. Brace yourself. Love is a wild but worthwhile ride.

What a promise ‘I Do’ is! Whether we are committing to a person or simply being intentional in life, our word should be a cherished commodity. This month, journey with me in ‘I Do’ moments which are an oath, a vow, a pact, a pledge, an honorarium.