What Is Love...Love Is the Greatest

Faith...Hope...and Love!

Faith is one of my favorite words…I learned an acrostic of it many years ago … Faith = Forsaking All I Trust Him.  This means that I do not depend on what I see…it means I forsake those things and put total trust in what I can’t see.  Right now as I look around me, I can only see what’s directly around me…I have no way to look into the future and see what is there.  It’s like looking through a tiny hole in a fence and only seeing what is directly in front of me.  I don't know what else is to the right and to the left because I am only seeing what is in front of me.  I do know God in his infinite wisdom can see the big picture of my life...that is why my faith is in Him...I trust Him. 

 It is faith that moves those mountains in my life and it is faith that produces miracles that I could only dream of without Him…but…Faith is not the greatest.

Hope is putting my confidence in what I can’t see…Hope is not just for what is out there in the future, but for the here and now.  Hope gives us joy in our lives right now because we know what we have been promised.  Hope is what helps us when we have others against us.  We can only have hope because God is the anchor that keeps us stable.  But…Hope is not the greatest.

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What about Ali?  Is he the greatest?  He sure told everyone he was!  I sorta pulled that one outta left field didn’t I?  LOL    Actually in boxing, in his day, he was the best.  Now that you think about it…he said things that were not as though they were and then…he got in the ring and proved he was right.  Kinda reminds me of faith….now back to the lesson at hand…

Faith Hope and Love and the greatest of these is love.  What makes love the greatest?  The answer lies in God.  God is not faith…God is not hope…Love is the greatest because God is love.  Love is the reason for God sending his son into the world to make life better and give us a hope for our future.  We are to live out that love in our lives…if love is so important to God, and he is the very essence of love, then it is very important that we implement it in our lives every day. 

Are you living out love in your day to day life, or just when you go to church?  You need to have faith … the "forsaking all" kind of faith.  You need to have hope…the kind that has your confidence in God…but more than any of these…You need to have a genuine…true…honest Love.

Below is the Love Chapter that we have been studying…

1 Corinthians 13

New International Version (NIV)

1 Corinthians 13

 1 If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.

 4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

 8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

 13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

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