God’s Love

God’s love is amazing. Read the words below and then try to put it into your own words and you’ll get a sense of God’s love.

“Love never gives up”. It doesn’t matter how wrong you think you are, how much a mess you might assume yourself to be….. God will come chasing after you, he loves you. In the story of the Prodigal Son we get a picture of a spoilt brat, who’s statement to his father is more or less, I wish you were dead (that’s when you get an inheritance). He followed it up with wandering off to a foreign land and wasting his fortune on sex, gambling and fun. He found himself destitute, feeding pigs and his thoughts returned to his father.
He must have been in a real quandary at this point. Standing there wondering whether to starve or return to his father. At this point I believe his father’s love must have started to shine through. He must have remembered how good his dad had always been and he decides to return not expecting anything other than to be treated as a servant.
And his dad seeing him far off, runs to his son and throws his arms around him and says, I love you, you’ve returned.

God is waiting to say to us today, “You’ve returned, I love you.”

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

1 Corinthians 13:4-7 & 13 The Message (MSG)

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in the mouth of friend and stranger.

St Patrick