Love is…
Scripture:
Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
—1 Corinthians 13:4–13 (NLT)
This is a passage many of us know well. It is read at weddings, taught in Sunday school, and held up as the gold standard of Christian love. And rightly so. Paul makes his emphasis unmistakably clear — love matters more than any spiritual gift, any sacrifice, any act of devotion. Without love, everything else falls apart. But today, rather than reading these verses as a command about how we are supposed to love, try reading them as a description of how God loves you. Because if God is love, as John tells us in his first letter, then this passage is His very nature on display.
Read it again from that angle. God is patient with you. He is kind toward you. He is not irritable with you. He does not keep a record of your wrongs. He rejoices in truth over your life. And He never gives up on you. Never. His love is enduring, faithful, and full of hope for what He is doing in you. That is not a distant theological claim. That is the personal, pursuing love of a Father who knows you completely and has chosen you anyway.
“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”¹ — Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child
Manning understood what Paul is describing. The kind of love your soul aches for, the kind of love we all spend our lives searching for, is already yours in Christ. You do not have to earn it. You do not have to fear it slipping away. This love is secure because it does not depend on your performance but on God’s character. He has already chosen you, He delights in you, and He extends mercy over your failures and hope into your future.
And as we receive that love more deeply, something begins to shift. We start to extend to others what we have been given. We listen with more grace. We forgive more freely. We become, slowly and imperfectly, a living reflection of the love that found us first. Three things will last forever, Paul says, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. That is where God begins with us, and it is where He calls us to begin with one another.
Reflection:
- Which part of God’s love in this passage do you struggle most to believe is true for you?
- How might your life look different if you truly believed God is not keeping a record of your wrongs?
- Who in your life needs to experience the kind of love described in this passage, through you?
Prayer:
Thank God that His love never gives up on you. Ask Him to help you receive that love more deeply today, and pray that it flows through you to everyone He brings across your path.
Footnote:
¹ Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2015), 42.