Bearfruit

If I spoke every language but did not love others, my words would be like noisy clanging. If I saw the future, memorized all of wikipedia and had an inner resolve strong enough to move mountains but did not love others my gains would be worthless. If I gave everything I had to the poor and even died for a good cause I might have something to boast about, but without love I would be nothing.

What is love? It is patient and kind, never bragging or jealous or rude. It never demands its own way nor keeps track of the times it has been let down. It does not enjoy getting away with what is wrong - it celebrates when justice prevails. Love never gives up, always has hope and can last through every circumstance.

Everything else known to mankind will become useless in time except love - it is precious forever. As an adult, we remember the actions of our youth and understand that we saw life as if we were looking through a foggy mirror. Right now our understanding of the universe is similarly incomplete, but when we achieve full understanding we’ll look back and be ashamed of how we’ve behaved.

Three things will last forever - faith, hope and love. The greatest of these is love.

- a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13

Let’s see, God made the universe, the earth, the plants, animals, sun, moon… then he made a man, whom he assigned the task of naming the animals, then he made a woman and created the institution of marriage. All of this in six days. Then he invented the “day of rest.” What did God do on this day?

The answer is simple. Don’t start by preaching, don’t start with morality. Don’t start by trying to be angelic. Start by caring for others. Jesus said,

34 “So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. 35 Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” John 13:34-35

The language of the Bible. Paul spoke Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. Possibly other languages too, but these three we can be certain of. When he traveled around on his missionary journeys, he invariably came to visit people who did not speak one of those three languages. In these cases, one of two things happened - either God enabled the people to understand him (aka speaking in tongues - and by the way, this is the true meaning of tongues, not spouting gibberish as you roll around on the floor) or He provided an interpreter.

I was wrong… I thought this would be about calvinism, but instead it’s about Isaiah 32:1a,3 (NLT). Actually, it may be related to calvinism… The verse is, “Look, a righteous king is coming!… Then, everyone who can see will be looking for God, and those who can hear will listen to his voice.” This is another one of those verses that seems to be both for and against predestination. Look carefully at the wording: For predestination - “everyone who can see.” For free will - “will be looking.”

Futility of Describing Non-temporal Things with Temporal Words:

It’s all [NOT] good: It’s worse to murder than to lie, right? Wrong. Romans 1:18-32 clearly says that murder, homosexuality, lieing/deceit, gossip, envy/jealously and God-hating are all on the same level, and all who do these things deserve death.

“Throw out the mocker, and fighting, quarrels, and insults will disappear” Proverbs 22:10.

Several of today’s proverbs struck a chord with me; here are a few more that elicited comments/thoughts:

“Just as the rich rule the poor, so the borrower is servant to the lender” vs 7. Yes, slavery does exist today, it just has a different name, “Revolving Credit.”

Who is Eliakim son of Hilkiah?

Confession vs. Repentence - To many, the terms are used interchangably, but there is actually a remarkable difference between the meanings of these two words. Confession is admitting you’ve done something wrong, repentence is turning away from wrong doing (aka U-Turn).