I Corinthians 13:13, "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." I recently sat through a sermon on the idea of a past blog on I Corinthians 13. The preacher replaced "love" for "God" and took it further and asked us to place our name in replace for the word "love." So the passage would read like this: "Suzanne is patient. Suzanne is kind. Suzanne isn't envious. Suzanne doesn't boast..." You get the picture. Makes me pretty humble to really examine whether my name belongs in there or not and in most cases... it did not.
Lately I have thought about the concept of "hope." We have a close friend of the family whose step daughter has recently been diagnosed with leukemia. I spoke with our friend briefly and the one thing that stood out to me in our conversation was when she talked about the other families they have met at the hospital. The families who do not have Jesus. That they seem hopeless and don't seem to have any place to turn. Imagine going through a situation where you didn't have God to rely on.
Imagine a world without hope. What is hope... Webster defines it "to cherish a desire with anticipation;" "to desire with expectation or obtainment;" "to expect with confidence/trust." It is used as both a noun and a verb.
At some point in our being, we will no longer need Hope or Faith. Colossians 1:27 reads, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." Hope is given to us to keep us focused on things to come... to keep us focused on seeing our Savior. Faith is believing, but both faith and hope are for us only here on earth, however, love is forever.
We need to live for love... for faith will be fulfilled ...and hope... hope will be a reality when we are reunited with our Savior. Today's focus is on love. Once we are in His presence, we no longer need to hope. Our hope is fulfilled and we are left with only love... which is the greatest of these three. And since "God is love" ~ oh, the heavenly bliss!
