Sunday Go To Meeting Bun!

Sunday Bun 
by
L. A. Marzulli

1 Corinthians 13

The Way of Love

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

I recently sat down with a man who was having problems liking or even tolerating people he was working with.  He is a very brilliant man, and has a quick mind.  I listened as he spoke about the faults of his co-workers, his impatience with his wife, his aloofness in regard to fellowship with other people, his distancing of himself from his family, his brothers and sisters, and his overwhelming desire to be the best in his field.

I began to quote Corinthians 13 to him.   I said, it’s not about the end results, although they are important, it’s about the people we meet along the way, the people we share our time with, the folks we come in contact with.  The above scripture makes it very plain, love is our goal, our highest goal. However, this love is not something we can manufacture, it is a gift from the spirit of The Living God.

It is He who fills us with agape love and joy and this is how we can love those we are with.  It is not a love born from our flesh.  In abiding in this love we can pray earnestly and sincerely for those who spitefully use us!

Our goals are important and we should never lose site of them, however, if we are obsessed with them so that we will ignore those around us, we miss the mark, as it were.

In closing todays Bun.  At some point most of us will lie on our death beds.  I can assure you, we will not be thinking about our achievements at that point.  In fact one man whom I knew, who was a multi-millionaire, lamented the fact he hadn’t spent more time with his family, as all he thought about was amassing a fortune.  He died full of remorse.

The chapter above should be the goal of every Christian on the planet.  As Paul says, without love it doesn’t matter what we achieve, how much we know about a subject, or how much of a fortune we amass, without love we are nothing….