Filled With Love

FILLED WITH LOVE

a prayer to open

Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

May your Kingdom come, may your will be done

on earth as it is in heaven.

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Love has become one of the most ubiquitous words in the English language. Most often we associate love with a feeling, an emotion we experience. It’s something we fall into—we can’t control it! The love we see in the Bible is something quite different. As theologian Scot McKnight says, “Love is about the rugged commitment” to be with, for, and unto another person.^a This is what we see in Jesus: a covenant love that is inconvenient and disruptive and calls us to be in proximity and seek the best for the other. We are largely incapable of this love—that is, unless we allow the Holy Spirit to fill, lead, and guide us.

• Where do you see the love described in today’s passage reflected in your life? In what areas are you struggling to demonstrate this kind of love?
• What is your life saying about your commitment and desire to love, whether to those who know you or to those who simply observe you?
• Take a few minutes in prayer, asking God to show you where you need to grow when it comes to the love that pours out of you to others. What did he illuminate for you?

Father, I want to love like you. I want to go out of my way, be inconvenienced, be disrupted, and love with abandon. Help me to release my grip on my own agenda, allow space to love, and slow down and see when and how to love those whose paths I cross. Transform my self-centeredness and grow my heart’s capacity to love. Amen.