“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 1 John 4:7-8
Those three words, “God is love”, should mean so much to this fallen world that we live in, but the people who shove newsy information into our daily lives never remind us of that statement amid their gloom and doom; perhaps because they don’t recognize them. Those three words could bring so much comfort to a bad headline.
A devotion last week from Charles Swindoll told of folded letter that was written by a veteran missionary and found years later. With her husband, she was on her way to another tour of duty in Khartoum, Sudan. No one seems to know who authored it, but whoever it was, she captured the essence of the greatest essay on love ever written. Here are her words.
“If I have the language ever so perfectly and speak like a pundit, and have not the love that grips the heart, I am nothing. If I have decorations and diplomas and am proficient in up-to-date methods and have not the touch of understanding love, I am nothing. If I am able to worst my opponents in argument so as to make fools of them, and have not the wooing note, I am nothing. If I have all faith and great ideals and magnificent plans and wonderful visions, and have not the love that sweats and bleeds and weeps and prays and pleads, I am nothing. If I surrender all prospects, and leaving home and friends and comforts, give myself to the showy sacrifice of a missionary career, and turn sour and selfish amid the daily annoyances and personal slights of a missionary life, and though I give my body to be consumed in the heat and sweat and mildew of India, and have not the love that yields its rights, its coveted leisure, its pet plans, I am nothing, nothing. Virtue has ceased to go out of me. If I can heal all manner of sickness and disease, but wound hearts and hurt feelings for want of love that is kind, I am nothing. If I write books and publish articles that set the world agape and fail to transcribe the word of the cross in the language of love, I am nothing. Worse, I may be competent, busy, fussy, punctilious, and well-equipped, but like the church at Laodicea; nauseating to Christ.”
Please read this twice today and then pray about her words. How about you and me committing ourselves to a life like this, a life that really amounts to something, rather than nothing. God is love. That should be the headline tomorrow in our fallen world; wherever we may happen to be. Each new day God brings our way is a fresh opportunity to start sharing the Truth.
Heavenly Father, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Amen.
May God be with you…Jay