“The greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13
Love is so big and so important that Love is both a gift and a fruit. I believe love may be the most visible fruit. All the fruits have to be visible. There’s something about them that allows them to be seen.
Today, let’s pray specifically for the fruit of love. Let’s pray that people would be able to see love in me.
Come, Holy Spirit, may I produce the fruit of love.
I think Jesus’ greatest attribute was that He loved well. Actually, He loved perfectly. As He was perfectly led by the Spirit, it produced a fruit a hundredfold, and that fruit was love. And Jesus loved. Jesus IS Love (1 John 4:8).
I think that’s what made Him so attractive, is that people saw in Him something different. He was somebody that they could approach. He was somebody that they knew they could be honest with. I love the encounter with the woman at the well—this woman who was such a profound sinner, and she was hiding from everybody. She encounters Jesus, and the way He loved her changed her. Have you ever met someone who had such a love? With these people, a soul finds himself opening up and telling things meant to be hidden.
I believe this perfect love was visible to all who looked at Jesus. This explains why people in the Gospels and since could have a momentary encounter with Jesus and instantly drop what they were doing, how they were living to follow Him.
I think Mother Teresa loved well. You just watch the way people flocked to her and the way she cared for them—that, yeah, love can be seen. You could see love when you looked at her.
They see the love ‘in the eyes’.
But what does it look like for us to love? I mean, to really love.
It seems to me that when we love, we see the other person. We really see them. We see their goodness and their beauty. We see their fear, their brokenness, at times their sinfulness, and we love them in the midst of that.
It’s an appropriate image that love lets us be vulnerable and lets us be broken and allows us to be weak. It’s love that often moves us to the confessional, that realizes that even in the soul’s sinfulness the Lord isn’t going to turn away from me. He’s not going to walk away from me, but He’s going to ultimately love me.
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” 1 John 4:7-13