Love….hopes all things ~
1 Corinthinans 13:7
Amongst faith, hope and love, love is the greatest. All things flow from the fountain of love. There is no faith apart from love and there can be no hope without the same abiding work of love.
1 Corinthians doesn’t simply tell us what love is and how we are to love, it tells us who and how God is.
God is Love.
But lets talk about hope for a minute. It’s a wonder to me how we can all be so familiar with certain scriptures and their application, yet at different times in our lives fail so fully in their promises. It always brings me back to the foundation of our lives and the inability we have to live, apart from Jesus Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Our life demands union with our life source, an abiding, not a visit.
Character is best seen in the outworkings of our connections with others. It is displayed and tested as we mingle with others. You’d think the remedy would be isolation, but since we have never been created to be alone this can’t be good or right. Character is tested in the calm and the chaos.
We’ve talked about how every family in heaven and on earth derives its name and nature from God as Father. Do you ever wonder what kind of family connections you will be a part of in heaven? Please note Ephesians three says’ every family’, so this seems to me, there has to be more than one family, or one kind of family in heaven, just as there are here on earth.
So family is an eternal reality and, like marriage, we are to learn eternal truths from. We learn how to love in and through the relationships we have been set in. We are tested and pruned through the connections we hold. This is the way of God.
Working recently with a young father and his family who are beginning their pastoral ministry, we have encouraged them to live church just as they live family. If a man can’t rule his own house, how can he oversee the house of God. The family is God’s school.
And God is the God of hope, who fills us with all joy and peace in believing that we may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
This very God of hope is the one who fills us with our sense of future and hope that we may continually rise up and move forward, unified in His love with all joy and peace in believing, we are too abound in hope!
William Barclay’s Daily Study Bible Series on this verse renders this ~
“ love never ceases to hope”.
We may have times and seasons where our circumstances and conditions seem hopeless but the one who is the author and creator of all things, who knows the beginning from the end, is never hopeless.
As our love is found rooted and grounded in Him, increasing though our vital connection with Him and tested through our connections with each other; may that Hope be found as endless and abounding as His love.
Selah.