Love Endures

About a year ago my friend Matt Vaughn said something profound. It’s stuck with me, and God brought it to mind this week.

I’ve been meditating on those words lately. I looked up what it means to endure- some of the definitions are:

endure:
– to last
– to carry on through, despite hardships;
– to bear with patience
– to suffer patiently without yielding.

What does it mean to have a love that endures all? A love that endures pain? I know there are some people in my life who’ve loved me like that- even when I’ve hurt them. I’m thankful for that love. Even more, I’m thankful for the love of Jesus Christ, my Savior, who loved me so much that He endured the pain and shame of the cross, just so that He could have a relationship with me!

And now, the tables are turned. I am now learning what it means to love sacrificially. To choose love over selfishness — to choose another’s needs and heart over my own. It’s painful and beautiful all at once. It helps me understand the love of God more every day, and how often we take that love for granted.

1 Corinthians 13 (The Message)

The Way of Love

1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If
I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making
everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain,
“Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. 3-7If
I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be
burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no
matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without
love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

8-10Love
never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues
will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of
the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the
Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

11When
I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any
infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

12We
don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through
a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun
shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees
us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

13But
for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to
lead us toward that consummation:

Trust steadily in God, hope
unswervingly, love extravagantly.

And the best of the three is love.