SCANDALOUS
June 29th, 2022
LOVE…Surpasses Them All (v.13:13a)
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)
Trust steadily, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.
There is a story in God’s Word about a woman who was so profoundly struck by the extravagance of God’s love toward her, Jesus’ forgiveness freely given her, that she excessively lavished upon the feet of Jesus an expensive vial of perfume that was rumored to have cost a year’s wages. As if that wasn’t enough, her tears drenched his feet, and she mopped them up with her long hair. Snidely, the men in the room, because they knew her as a lady of the night, or bluntly, a prostitute, looked down their long-upturned noses and sniffed in disgust, loudly voicing their dehumanizing opinions not only about the woman, but also about Jesus and His inability to see her sinfulness.
It is epic how Jesus responds. Unlike us, Jesus sees her, not her sinfulness. He sees her, not her condition. While man looks at her outward failures, Jesus sees her heart. So, comparatively, Jesus asks the self-righteous in the room, “Who is more grateful for the forgiveness of a debt he could not pay: one who owes a great deal or one who owes a small amount?” Begrudgingly, I imagine, Simon, the homeowner where this party takes places, whispers, ‘I suppose the one who owes the greater debt.’
What a powerful lesson that is about God’s love! When I really grasped what God had done for me, when the scales fell from my eyes and my heart, and I was able to see all that God had forgiven me, it was earth-shattering. My worship of Him comes from an endless well of gratitude, a burbling brook that bubbles over with so much awe because I simply cannot fathom the excessiveness of His grace toward me. What Jesus did for me on the cross is an absurdity, an exorbitant costly choice He made on my behalf, to rescue me from all my stupidity and waywardness, to set me free from me. See, I, like that woman in Luke, (chapter 7), have been forgiven so, so much, that if it takes all I own to thank Him, to lavish upon Him, it still isn’t even close to my gratefulness. I am wrecked often by my gratuity toward God. And like those spiteful and scorn-filled people who witnessed her worship of Jesus that day, I have those in my life who gave up on me and walked away, who scorned me and likely will never speak to me again, who do not understand that God’s redemption and grace changes people, like Mary, like me. But it does. Like Mary, I am someone who has been forgiven much, loved extravagantly, and therefore, my worship is the only thing I have which I can pour over Him in an attempt to say thank you.
1 Corinthians 13:13b, ‘So above all else, let love be the beautiful prize for which you run.’ (TPT)
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 hugeness of it, the intensity of it, the extravagance. What would happen if we too loved like that, absurdly, costly, excessively, exorbitantly, recklessly, lavishly?
