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The Greatest of These

book pages folded into heart shape while sitting beside another book on table

I love how God speaks to us through the Bible and the preaching of His Word. I recently heard a sermon at church and was reminded of the importance of 1 Corinthians 13:13 which says, "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

There were three lessons that came to mind the more I dwelt on this topic:
  1. I am very quick to forget that God is love (1 John 4:16b).
  2. I misplace love by focusing on what I love rather than who I love.
  3. Nothing I do is of value if there is no love.
As a fallen human being, I am incredibly guilty of all of these things. In forgetting that God is love, I tend to do this most by reducing love to an abstraction or a concept. Translating that God is love from head knowledge to an actual practice in my life is a challenge when I don't always feel that love or reflect on what the immensity of it means. While I know it as intrinsic truth, I have a harder time seeing this extend to my behaviour and actions. Love is often secondary in how I approach life, and thus, I make the mistake of taking my task-oriented personality and placing it on God, when that should not be the case at all.

Furthermore, I recognize how easily I misplace or misattribute love to the wrong things. There's the saying about how we should love people and use things, but I think our proclivity is to use people and love things. This has been so evident to me the more time I spend online because I can see how much I fall into this trap. At the same time, this is also very true of me in real life where I take people for granted because I'm so fixated on things. It's awful and I do feel badly about it; however, it can also be a difficult habit to break.

Finally, at the end of the day, I can keep on doing everything that I'm doing, but it could all be in vain if my heart is not right with God and if I'm not loving Him while I do it. Even if my brain tends to veer toward logic over emotion, I can't dismiss the reality that other people have feelings and that I need to be considerate of them. I like to think that I can bring great passion to the things I'm doing, but more than likely, a lot of it might be rote exercise without much meaning or regard. It takes more effort to think about love as the driving force rather than just checking things off a list, like when it comes to prayer or Bible reading.

In recognizing these struggles within me, I can also identify how this affects and skews my perspective as a reader. It's sad, but I can see the following things pop up:
  • Focusing more on the books than the authors.
  • Searching for typos and grammatical mistakes over the heart of the story.
  • Taking for granted that there will always be new books to read.
  • Assuming that authors are always available to write more and at the speed I want.
  • Nitpicking the minutest details in a book that in the overall scheme of things, don't mean much.
  • Not praying for authors and the struggles they're going through.
  • Not being loving enough in my online presence (and in real life, obviously!).
  • Spending more time and resources on books than people.
  • Judging other readers by the books they read.
  • Being more concerned about posting content than in being a friend.
I don't necessarily want to dwell on all the ways I can and have sinned, especially as a book reviewer; however, I feel it's necessary to bring everything back to what matters. Am I reflecting God's love in who I am, what I do, and how I go about life? Can others sense that God's love is what motivates me?

These are questions I know will take a lifetime to answer, but they're a powerful reminder for me that my lifetime could be much shorter than anticipated. My prayer is that even if I have made mistakes in my content, conduct, or something else in my time on these platforms that I can repent and do better going forward. I don't want Christian Shelves to be synonymous with being "correct" but unloving. It's more important that I'm pointing everything toward Jesus and His great love for us, so please pray for me to be able to do that. I can't do this alone and certainly not without God's strength, so thank you.

In case I haven't shared it before, I do love the people I've had the opportunity to interact with. I love hearing about people's lives, both authors and readers. And I love that we have the same heart for sharing books that speak of Jesus. I might not always have the time to do everything I want with these platforms, but I hope there is enough love emanating from the words I write. What a blessing to get to be a part of this work for God's kingdom purposes.
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