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1 Cor 13:13- And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Had a great talk with Gary today. Hearing him share his stories about how just by dreaming big, loving and believing in youths, many of his cell members have risen up to become generals in God’s army! At the day’s end, it is love that is still the greatest treasure we can have above everything else.

Jesus said in Matt 22:40 that all the Law and the Prophets hang upon these two commandments. And we know that these two commandments Jesus referred to was firstly, to love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your mind, and secondly, to love your neighbour as yourself. Everything we do hangs on those two greatest commandments, not the other way round.

Planning is essential and good. If we don’t plan, we plan to fail. There is nothing inherently wrong with planning. So is wanting to win schools and win souls to Jesus. But on the day of judgment, when we stand before God who is supreme justice, all our works that we’ve done on this earth will be tested. But when God’s fire comes and tests what our works have been made of, we want to be able to say to Him: “Lord, i did my works because I love You and love people, because You first loved me.” Anything else that is not built on the foundation of love will be consumed by fire.

Our self-righteous works will not merit us anything when God’s fire comes and tests them. The same goes even when we have sheep under our care. If just giving Bible studies and preaching to people is equivalent to love, then the whole world would already have been saved a long time ago! But it takes people who are willing to love and lay down their lives for others like Jesus did, that the unsaved will indeed experience the love of Father God.

Do we have a love deficit today? Try as we may, but until we have opened our hearts and let the Father’s love flood our entire being, we will always be in a love deficit. It is a a God-shaped vacuum that only He can fill. When we examine the life of Heidi Baker, a woman of God, she is essentially love exemplified, even in the pictures that are taken of her. God’s love just flows so abundantly and naturally to all who are around her. This is the power source of a lady whose ministry work in Mozambique, one of the poorest countries in the world, has planted over 5000 churches in this once war torn country! Once, when asked by our church staff what her resolutions were for the new year, her answer was straight to the point: ‘I want to love God more and love people more this year.’, while we in our love deficit make resolutions to exercise more, lose more weight, top our academics(often w/o any heart commitment to start with in the 1st place!).

I’m convinced that through all these years, no other method, principle, strategy, is as powerful as love. God’s love must be the only foundation on which we do what we say, live what we preach, walk what we model. Making our decisions seasoned and compelled by God’s love will drastically change our very being, and in turn, positively influence our negative circumstances for good.

It has to be the navigator’s compass, the backpacker’s signpost of our lives.Love never fails, and there is nothing in this universe as the power of love, to the extent of loving even your enemies.

Every other effort outside of love will crumble. As Apostle Paul put it:

‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.’-1 Cor 13:1

So abide these three for all eternity: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. I wanna experience the love of loves even more deeper than before.

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