Today my heart is stirred. The commandment of God to love one another has been resonating in my spirit for some time now. It seems so very hard to carry this out. Not always because I do not possess the desire but I seem to lack opportunity. How do we begin to truly love one another? I was reading today in 1 Cor and was struck by verse 14:1 where it says to pursue love and desire spiritual gifts. To pursue is to literally run after while desire is to burn passionately for and can entail a pursuit. I got the sense that we must really go after love with all we have but never stop desiring the spiritual gifts, but only as they can aid us in loving. Basically I think we should focus all our energy upon the love part but at the same time keep our eye open and ready for the gift part. If we look back to chapter 13 we see plainly that Paul instructed that gifts without love are totally and utterly worthless. Yet we clamor around for opportunity to exercise gifts instead of exercising love. We spend hours in devotion and prayer to God many times with the sole intent of seeing His power manifested; healing, deliverance, resurrection, overcoming etc. The power of God is good, but the love of God is better. We could say that power will always follow love but love never follows power. Think about this in the natural, someone who loves will always exert more power than someone who does not. This is why you do more for your own children than for the children of other people, because you love your own children more. We must learn how to pursue love!! Jesus said it is by our love for one another that the world will know we are His disciples. Let us begin to go out of our way for one another, to seek out and pursue opportunities to love.
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