“Let love be your highest goal…” (1 Corinthians 14:1)
What are your priorities? Paul challenges us to let love be our highest priority at the end of his inspired love chapter. We should follow after love, make love our greatest pursuit, and love should be our highest goal, depending on how the verse is translated in your Bible.
A practical way to make love our greatest goal is to take the 15 virtues in the middle of the love chapter (I Corinthians 13) and apply them in our relationships. It will not take long to realize we cannot love in these ways on our own. These are the ways God loves. The miracle is God can love in these 15 ways through us!
The love virtues are all others-centered, unselfish ways of showing unconditional love. They are not natural, but unnatural for us, because they are supernatural. They are the fruit and evidence that God lives in us and is expressing the essence of God’s character through us. The dynamic effect of God’s love upon those we love in these ways will convince us this love is God and deserves to be our highest goal.
I have been loved in these ways and by the grace of God I have loved in these ways. I am committed to making this love my first priority. I resonate with Joyce Kilmer who summarized the essence of the lives of the fallen who lie beneath poppies in French WWI military graveyards when he wrote: “Loved and were loved, but now they lie in Flanders Fields.”
Paul prescribed these love virtues believing they could solve the problems in the worst relationships in his worst church. I believe they can solve the problems in all our relationships if we will graciously apply them, through Christ.
Dick Woodward, 12 November 2013
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