this girl will never be the same: Essential

I stumbled upon a neat blog the other day. It's called Sunday Scribblings. The author posts on Saturdays (usually) a prompt for you to write about, and then you link your blog in with the others there. It gives something neat to write about, and a chance to share you blog with others who may have never come your way otherwise.

So, the prompt from last weekend was 'Essential'.

#236 - Essential

The prompt this week comes from the book, Walking on Alligators by Susan Shaughnessy. In it she quotes Voltaire: "The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything."

In writing and in life, the secret is sometimes in what you leave out.

"Start now to separate out what is essential for what you will write today. What you set aside is not lost. It remains, a part of your growing capital of ideas." - Susan Shaughnessy

Tell us what is essential for you today - but only tell us the essential bits.

What is essential to me, or for me, is outliving this life. I want each day to be an expression of my faith in Jesus, my love for Matt, our children and my family.

Every day I am coming to understand that verse from the Bible, 1 Cor. 13:13, "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." The essentials in my life are faith in Jesus, hope of a future with babies to raise up (and so much more), and love for Matt, our babies gone too soon, myself and our family.

Here is an excerpt from Coffman Commentaries on the Bible:

But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

But now ...
This means "in this present state." "If we give it any other sense, as though Paul said, 'now to sum all things up,' then we have him saying that faith, hope and love are eternal." ^F30 As Barclay said, the stress in this verse regards "the supremacy of love," ^F31 not its permanence which was treated in 1 Cor. 13:8 in this paragraph. "Now" in this verse meant that Paul had returned to the present situation after the digression to speak of eternal things in 1 Cor. 13:12, which should be treated, actually, as a parenthesis. Shore and many others insist that "NOW is not here temporal, but logical"; ^F32 but this viewpoint should be rejected, as James Macknight declared:

The clause "now abideth" implies that these graces (faith, hope and love) are not always to abide; at least the graces of faith and hope shall not abide; for seeing that faith is the persuasion of things hoped for (Hebrews 11:1), and hope that is seen is not hope (Romans 8:24); in heaven, where all the objects of our faith and hope are put in our possession, there can be no place for either. ^F33

By the above comment, Macknight clearly construed the "now" of this verse as temporal, that is, a reference to the time present. All of the clever arguments adduced to show how we shall still have faith and hope in heaven fall to the ground in the light of the truth that both faith and hope deal with uncertainties, and there shall be no uncertainties in the eternal world.
Abideth ...
here has the force of saying that the miraculous spiritual gifts shall not abide; and, of course, they did not; nor do they exist now. It is in this dispensation that faith, hope and love abide; but what is especially stressed, "Love is the greatest" of the trio.
And the greatest of these is love ...
It is an unqualified disaster for advocates of the "faith only" theory that love should here be ranked ahead of faith; and, consequently, it is usually interpreted as meaning "God's love of men," not men's love of God and of each other. Thus, Guthrie commented on this verse, "greater than these is the love (of God)." ^F34 Throughout the chapter, it has been made clear that love as a virtue of men, not as an attribute of God, is meant. It is true, of course, that the love in Christian hearts has been shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Spirit; but by the virtue of that very fact it becomes a Christian virtue.

WHY LOVE IS THE GREATEST THING

Love is the fulfillment of the law, which was never true of faith (Romans 13:10).

Love outranks faith in the power to motivate people.

Love includes obedience (John 14:15), which is not true of faith or hope.

Love is the heart of the Great Commandment to love God and one's neighbor (Mark 12:28-31).

Love shall abide eternally, whereas both faith and hope shall not, except in some exceptional sense.

Love, if lacking in the heart, would be a sufficient deficiency to prevent one's salvation, even if he possessed "all faith" (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Love works the greatest miracle of transformation in human hearts, distinguishing it from faith, which exists in some pretty cold fish!

There is no wonder, then, that Paul extolled the virtue of love in his wonderful efforts to correct the puffed-up Corinthians. This chapter may be viewed as one of the most important in Scripture, not merely for the truly marvelous things said of love, but also for the firm word therein regarding the cessation of the miraculous age. For further comments on "miracles" and why they ceased, see my Commentary on Hebrews, pp. 42-44.
Concerning the subject of love, there is none other that so fascinates and inspires the hearts of people; for this gift ranks first among the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22ff). There is even a sense in which it is a continuing "miracle" throughout the church age, not any less than the "confirming miracles" of the apostolic period, merely different. It is the signature of God himself in the hearts of all the redeemed.