Devotional Thought of the Day

⁸  Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! 1 Corinthians 13:8 (NLT)

¹⁷ Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. ¹⁸ And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. ¹⁹ May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully.

Almost all men are infected with the disease of wanting to acquire useless knowledge, but one thing alone is sufficient: the knowledge of the love of Christ.^57[i]

You are standing at the shoreline at the ocean.  The waves occasionally wash over your feet, the salt water foaming around them.  But you can’t stand in one place all too long.  For the water and sand, and your own weight work against you standing in place. The sand shifts, your heels and toes sink in, and soon you find yourself off balance.

There is an old hymn about that, On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand, and a contemporary version of it called Cornerstone.

Despite the warning in 1 Corinthians 8, I wonder if the church treasures knowledge above love at times.  Do we treasure the theologians and their systems that amaze us than the simplicity of hearing the words of Scripture testifying to God’s unending love?   Do we treasure those that reveal the deep theological knowledge of theologians like Augustine and Chemnitz, or those who reveal the secrets of the end times, or the errors of all other theologies and the superiority of their own?

When we minimize our faith to knowledge, when that is what we treasure, then we have to be careful as the sands shift under our feet.  For the Kingdom of God is beyond any man’s ability to understand, never mind explain. We are all struggling, and we can have the right knowledge, and do all the right things, and still be worthless, spending our days trying to find the next moment of illumination, the next winning argument, the next solid theological fact that makes us that much more…

Vain.

Not because the fact is wrong, but because we put our roots, our trust, into the wrong thing.

We need something permanent, more stable; that doesn’t swing like a pendulum, or ebb and flow like the tide that erodes where we stand.

We need our roots to go deep into the love of God.  For it never fails.  It is our constant, our basis.

For when we talk of love not failing, we aren’t talking about a grade for a semester,  We are talking about failing as in fading, as in weakening, as in failing to support and be stable.  It doesn’t fail like the sand underneath our feet at the beach.  It is far greater in every dimension than we can ever understand.

But it is something we experience, that we can know with our hearts far more than our tongues can explain. It is the constant in our life, as the God who is defined as love takes up resident within us. Never will His love abandon or forsake us.  Never will it weaken or fade, never will we be separated from it. His love will always support us and it can and will flow through us to others.

Love simply is..

Because God is love.. and that love is revealed to us daily…

May we remember that His love is where our roots take hold, our foundation, our basis of life and may remember that because it will never fail.

⁵⁷ Quoted by A. Mitchell Hunter, The Teaching of Calvin: A Modern Interpretation, 2d ed. (London: James Clarke, 1950), p. 82. But Hunter adds that Calvin “did not burn his classics; nor did he cease to peruse them” (pp. 82–83). Hunter’s quotation is from Comm. Eph. 3:19 (C.O. 51:188).

^[i] Gerrish, B. A. (2004). The old Protestantism and the new: essays on the Reformation heritage (p. 61). London; New York: T&T Clark.