Love in control

Happy are those whom you choose and bring near

To live in your courts. Psalm 65:4

 

Read 1 Corinthians 12:27—13:3

Here I am urged to two things, and the one is to superintend the other. There’s what I am to strive for and what I am to have. I am to strive for the gifts, the graces, the form that the grace of God takes in my life or works through my life: the energising of God, the ministries of the Lord, or the ways the Spirit shows up in my life.[1] Strive for the things? Evidently, yes, I am to seek earnestly that God may do his most excellent work in me and through me. I am not to shy away from the Spirit of God prompting, filling, moving or using me to touch another life. Not in the least. And if I am scared by that, then I had better remember the thing I am to have. I am in the hands of a loving God who wants only our good. And that is what I am to have, love, the controlling motive.

 

Dear Lord, I thank you that you have placed me together with others, in a together life. I do not actually have love in the abstract. Rather, you have given me this brother, this particular sister. I have them and they have me and we are not disconnected. They fill out who I am and I fill out who they are. There are things you have given me to treasure in them as much as in myself. To contribute, to feed into their lives as much as they into mine. And as we seek one another’s upbuilding, I pray — I strive for this — that I may supply by your Spirit what my brother and sister need, that they may be to the full the people you made them to be.

[1] 1 Corinthians 12:4—7