Friday, September 5, 2008
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The Thing that Counts
"The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love" (Galatians 5:6).
One of the main goals of the faith-forward website is to encourage you in your faith. We want to encourage you to search out and discover more of the promises of scripture and believe for them in your own walk. We want you to boldly believe that God can and wants to do amazing and wonderful things in and through your life. We want you to believe big and see God come through so that he can receive all the glory for the great things that he has done. If we all do that, more of what God wants to accomplish in the earth will get done!
We could say the same things about love. We want to encourage you in your love. We want you to know the love of God in your own life. We want you to love others in a more powerful way. I want to do the same in my life. They'll know we are Christians by our love. According to this scripture, the only thing that counts for anything is faith expressing itself through love. So, without love, faith, no matter how much I have, will amount to nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:2 says exactly that: "and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." Without love, everything that we can think of doing, and this holds true for anything we do in the arena of faith, amounts to nothing. We need love. We need to express our faith in loving ways.
That being true, what we can say about love, we can also say about faith (or hope for that matter). And it would not be stretching the truth to far to conclude of faith expressing itself through love, that,
"Faith is patient, faith is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Faith does not delight in evil by rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perserveres. Faith never fails" (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).
If you and I are going to grow in our faith, we are going to need to grow in our love. Am I all of the things mentioned in 1 Corinthians 13? How about you? Am I patient and kind? Do I envy or boast or am I proud, sometimes even proud about the amount of faith that I have? How about rude or self-seeking? Do I use my faith to get things that I want and that will benefit me, or am I more concerned with the needs of others or with what God wants? Faith expressing itself through love is unselfish. I have no right to get angry when I have to wait patiently for my faith to manifest. I don't get to keep track of how I think I may have been wronged by God when I believed for something and didn't see it or didn't see it soon enough. "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love."
If I am going to grow in my faith, I cannot neglect to grow in my love. "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:13). If my hope is going to increase, and faith is always tied to hope, my love must grow as well. It is true that without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrew 11:6). And faith grows in the soil of hope (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is important and hope is essential but the greatest is love, and without love, hope or faith is nothing.
So focus on your love today and let it grow. Your faith and your hope will benefit and become much more than they could be on their own. Faith expressing itself through love is the only thing that really counts in this world. Why? Because they have so little of any of these three. And they long to see real hope and real faith and most of all, real love! That's why it counts for so much!
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