B-log

Humanity has had a “love problem” from nearly the beginning of time. It didn’t start out that way, but sometime after their original creation, the first people bought in to a lie and distrusted the love of God. That distrust led to separation, and that separation led to an endless, endemic plight that accounts for every lie since the first, every murder since the first, every betrayal since the first, every….

Well, you get the picture.

By the time the Apostle Paul wrote his first letter to the struggling church in Corinth, they were neck deep in their own “love problem.” They were jacked up, to use a deeply spiritual term. He realized there was no “Control-Z” undo to their problems. So he attempted to re-orient their thinking and, accordingly, change their dysfunctional ways.

This congregation considered themselves be quite a spiritual group of elite people. The members of the church had acquired great knowledge, they possessed the ability to speak in a variety of languages, they had been graced with gifts of prophecy. God had blessed them in mighty ways, yet they were a congregation that was struggling, suffocated by division, infighting, and confusion. Interestingly, Paul wrote (what we call) chapter 13 to show that this church, in many ways, was clueless when it came to love. 

Fortunately, we have the text to help us understand what they weren’t comprehending. Read the first three verses for context.

The Corinthian church didn’t lack for any spiritual gift, but they were not daily living in the source or power of those gifts, Jesus Christ. Spiritual gifts are bestowed differently upon every believer. What a blessing to have and know which spiritual gift you have been given. That said, spiritual gifts are not the evidence of the health of your spiritual life. That health is evidenced instead by your spiritual fruits. 

Galatians 5:22 says, “But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness…”

And the list goes on. What is important here? The first (in rank) fruit of the spirit listed is LOVE. Returning to the original Corinthian passage, notice:

Without Love, your gifts are immaterial (verse 1). Here, Paul writes using the greatest form of exaggeration or hyperbole. He’s saying, even if a person had the greatest ability to speak with eloquence, he may as well be babbling gibberish if he doesn’t operate out of a love motive.

Without Love, our gains are insubstantial (verse 2). Paul’s extremism is continued for the purpose of proving his point. He is saying that if you have the ability to know and understand all life’s mysteries, even being so gifted that you might know the motives of God, that if you operate without love, you are nothing.

Without Love, our giving is insignificant (verse 3). Paul concludes the exaggeration by saying that the ultimate giving, giving up all possessions or the burning up of one’s life, would be meaningless if not driven by a love motive. 

This passage has a simple message for you right now, today. Love gives your life meaning. Your days can be full…full of accomplishment, full of accumulation, and full of accolades. But if you don’t have love, you ain’t got diddly squat.

 ”I may not be a smart man, Jenny, but I know what love is.”

  -Forrest Gump

We all might know what love is, but none of us knows on our own how to really make love.

You might be saying, “Speak for yourself, McAnally.” I’m not talking about that kind of “making love.” After all, this is pastor’s blog, not a screenplay based on a Nicolas Sparks novel.

I’m talking about the kind of “making love” that is reflected in the old Kentucky Headhunters song Always Making Love to You, which recounts how the singer’s love for his lady is “made” in the time while they are apart from one another, or when they simply think of one another, rather than in times of cuddlin’ and smoochin’.

Using this as the shore from which to wade into the shallow end of potentially deep theological waters, this type of “making love” is not the romance, eros, the physical manifestation of love that is commonly expressed between two people. Rather, the “making of love” or the creation of love is only possible because God makes or creates his agape love and expresses it to his creation (at least according to 1 John 4:9).

Ultimately, God expresses the love he makes not in creating us, but in redeeming us, through the death and atonement of Jesus.  The love that God creates is selfless. It’s sacrificial. It’s timeless. It’s epic.

This is the standard. This is the model. This is the ideal. We can’t “manufacture love” the way God does. However, because he loves us, we have been commanded to access the love that he has manufactured, and with it love others sacrificially and selflessly. 

We don’t have too look far to realize that far too often, we fail miserably when we attempt to create love and nurture loving relationships in our own lives.  These failures befall us in so many places:

• More than half of all marriages fail.
• Millions of pre-born children around the world are aborted.
• The euphemism named euthanasia (meaning, literally, easy death) is growing in social acceptance and frequency each passing year.
• Children are growing up in an epidemic of fatherlessness.
• War rages on around the world, replete with genocide, rape, torture, and forced starvation. 

This is the indictment against humanity. It falls upon your shoulders and it rests heavily upon mine. Our total inability to make, manufacture, manifest, build or create love from our own motivations or mechanisms illustrates the vast disparity between God and humanity.

In the posts to follow, we’ll dive into 1 Corinthians 13, perhaps the most famous passage on love. I hope it will help you love God, love others, and love yourself more fully and appropriately. I hope it will help you “make love” better.