SCANDALOUS
June 27th, 2022
LOVE…Never Stops Loving (v.13:8)
1 Corinthians 13:8, 13, ‘Love never stops loving. It extends beyond the gift of prophecy, which eventually fades away. It is more enduring than tongues, which one day will fall silent. Love remains long after words of knowledge are forgotten…Until then, there are three things that remain: faith, hope and love—yet love surpasses them all. So, above all else, let love be the beautiful prize for which you run.’ (TPT)
Love never dies.
‘I don’t know what happened; we just fell out of love.’
‘One day I woke up and realized I didn’t love her anymore.’
‘We just grew apart.’
‘We outgrew each other.’
‘It wasn’t anything either one of us did. Our love just died.’
These are common statements we hear all the time. Maybe you or I have even mumbled them, or at least thought them quite loudly within the silence of our cortex. But the truth is, then you never truly loved one another, because love, true love, doesn’t die. It grows old with you, but it never dies.
What’s more, it never stops loving. We don’t fall out of love. In fact, we actually don’t fall in love either. Not in the manner suggested, like walking along and falling into a pothole, or manhole to those that express falling in love like a crescendo of flashing lights and loud noises. We may fall but it’s not in love, because love becomes. Love develops. Like a picture, a negative, developed in a dark room, and over a long period of time, it evolves into a positive, into something beyond an actual emotion you not only feel, but you also hold. You can look back over the years and see how it has become what it is today, while it took its time to develop, to not only mature but also mellow with age.
Like a seed that is planted. In the depth of dark dankness. Obscurity is where it germinates, cultivates; where it is nurtured with tender loving care that is not seen by the outside world. Where it flourishes in the dark, takes root, holds on, survives, grows vibrant and then perfected, ripening to what it is someday, when everyone stops watching any longer because they almost forgot you were two since you’ve been one for so long.
That’s the love that God loves us by, with, what He pours over us. The love that sings over us and never fades, never stops loving, never dies. Eternal love. The kind that lasts forever.
Zephaniah 3:17, ‘The Lord your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.’ (NKJV)
So many weddings happen every year during the month of June; so many ‘I do’s’ are spoken that eventually become ‘I don’t’s’, because we understand so little about love, God’s love, and the longevity of it, the immortality it owns. What would happen if we too loved like that and never stopped loving, never allowed love to expire or die or cease to exist?
