Love is...

1 Corinthians 13:4-8 

“Love endures all things…”  God endures all things.

He persists in the face of adversity.  God doesn’t give up.  He continues to advance His kingdom in the heavens and earth.  He advances it in us against all of our stubbornness and rebellion, in the midst of our sadness and grief, in spite of our scattered and often unreliable affections. We are not always the most desirable vessels to move through, yet, God persists to save in and through us!  Bless God for His mercies!  He suffers violence against Himself, scorning the shame of its open wounding, remaining quiet concerning the personal blows and establishes His kingdom in and through us.  He knows that the very work that He persists to do has eternal ramifications. We depend on His persistence. 

He loves us so He persists.  This causes us to be humble.  We see His bruising and recognize that it is our own rebellion that bruises Him.  We see His patience and realize, thankfully, that He is waiting with our grief.  We see His consistency and know that He is faithful to us even when we are flighty in our faithfullness.  So we bow our hearts and prefer not to be a source of His pain but to be a source of His healing by reconciling His own creation to Himself.  We join His sufferings and take on His grief.  We marvel at His affections and cover ourselves with them as though they were our own.  We endure with Him.  We persist with Him.  We share His bruising, the public shame, that comes from being identified with Him.  We are thankful that He identifies with us even when we make Him look less than He is.  We persist for others.  We know that they bruise us because they do not understand God’s goodness.  We remember our own rebellion and therefore endure their rebellion.  We remember our losses and therefore endure their grief.  We remember the nature of our affections and therefore receive with joy that which is less than we hoped for.  We endure with and for others because God has endured all things with and for us.