The Excellent Way #3

At the foot of Golgotha you will notice a tour bus that has been completely destroyed. Actually there were two of them with big holes in the tops of them. What a contradictory statement that is. Right at the foot of the place where a loving Savior was crucified and said "Father forgive them..." is evidence of hate and contempt.
That is real. Golgotha was a real place. Hate is real as evidenced by the destruction it causes in the lives of men. Love is just as real as is evidenced by the death of One who died for our sins.
The Corinthian church was real. It was comprised of real people. It was not a figment of Paul's imagination. It was no mystical body without flesh and blood.
Paul wrote to them as real people with real problems, real sins that caused disfellowship, disunity and division among the people of God.
What caused this? The real culprit was a lack of love, the same thing that destroyed those buses. The culprit was not that they were sinners. All men are sinners.(Ro. 3:23) All Christians sin.(I Jn. 1:8,10) Unity can be had among sinful Christians, but unity cannot be had without love. That may seem a little confusing. But that is a fact. Christians sin, but those sins should not separate them from one another, and the reason for that is simple--love.
The paradox of it all is that some are brash enough to set himself or themselves up as models for good human behavior rather than using Jesus as the model. And they compare themselves with one another and therefore think some fall short on the basis of comparison with themselves. Jesus is the model for all that and He is the model for that thing called Love. He is the author and finisher. He is the alpha and omega. He is the great I Am.
The pentitent sinner is a restored, reconciled sinner according to a loving Savior. And after one studies the positives and negatives Paul shows us with respect to love one notes that Jesus is the model of all these good qualities. For example He keeps no records. He forgets as far as the east is from the west. Unloving people keep records and hold grudges. And the converse viewpoint of all the qualities of love is the very thing that causes disunity.
If Jesus looked at men as men look at men then we would all be hopelessly lost. The difference is that Jesus looks at us from a loving heart. Men do not look at men that way in so many places and cases.
The word Paul uses for love in I Cor. 13 is agape. William Barclay describes this love as deliberate love of the will. He calls this love: a product of the Spirit(Gal. 5:22 "But the fruit of the Spirit if love...") an attribute of God(Jn. 3:16); our duty to God(Mt. 22:37 "...Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind."); the mark of the Christian life(I Cor. 16:14 "...Do everything in love..."); the way the church is built up(Eph. 4:16 "From Him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does it works."
This love is not self-seeking. It seeks the welfare of others.
Paul begins in I Cor. 13 by saying some surprising statements to some then and now. The orthodox and "right" would tend to take Paul to task on this if he were not an apostle. Paul said that if love were absent then activity and display mean nothing. One might speak with tongues of men and angels but the absence of love would tend to cause one to be something like a Mardi Gras noise maker. One might be a great teacher in the eyes of a number of folks and perceive very deep thoughts and be a virtual walking enclopedia of knowledge but in crunch time when it really counts for the welfare of another if love were absent all that means nothing. One might be an eleemosynary giant of a person and become some kind of seeming matyr but if love is absent nothing is gained from that.
Seems to me that I can gain the accolades of a number of people of my ilk, but if love is absent from me and them then we have our reward. I might pray long prayers and give eloquent speeches, do good works of all sorts and look great on the outside, but if a loving heart does not beat within my chest God knows.
I should know. But I may have confused myself with my correctness and greatness to the point that I have completely missed the whole point of love and what it means to love and the results of love. God forbid!
Paul does not leave me in doubt. I can know. For not only does he give the results of a life lived without love, but he defines it. He does not leave me in the dark about this attribute that if it is absent in my spiritual make-up I can be a divider, a spoiler of unity and destructive of concilatory relationships.
We need not wonder if we have this attribute or not. Paul specifically describes it and the Greek language defines it.
The apostle of love made a sobering statement: "...he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"(I John 4:20)