Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. 1 Cor 13:13 (NLT)
Clearly Seeing Faith – Part 1
Clearly, Paul believes that love is at the end of it all. In 1st Corinthians, he is passionately explaining, almost ranting, about how love is the absolute and divine nature of God. The Greek term used for love in this passage is Agape, which is the purest and most selfless form of love… It’s unconditional, otherworldly, irrational and unexplainable. It’s a love that exists in a time and space that transcends our situations, circumstances, actions and justice. Impacting everything and being changed by nothing. Steadfast and eternal, it is the bedrock of existence.
1 Cor 13:12 says,
“We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us.”
There’s a sense around our living that there is something out there that we cannot see or touch or explain or pin down. It is like looking out to sea in a thick fog and seeing a shape of something on the water, but not really being able to define it. But, as heaven invades earth, as the divine collision of dust and glory continues between the natural and the supernatural, the Creator and his creations, Jesus and our hearts, this fog will continue to clear. And when it clears we will see that behind it all, holding the vastness of the universe and the intricacies of our hearts and lives together was not money, or fame, or even good behavior and polite manners… but love. Love and her children, hope and faith
Faith is the chasm between what we see and cannot see; the realm in which everything was created; it's the substance and the whisper, a hint and a memory of things we cannot see clearly or put our hands on. It’s the transcendent substance that fills in the porous nature of our humanity and lifts us into the heavenly realm despite the pull of our earthly coils, trying to weigh us down.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”
Sin nature, like gravity, tries with all it might to anchor us to what is temporal and secondary. But like enough hydrogen has the ability to supersede the law of gravity and lift what is naturally heavy, faith intervenes and fills in the eternal gap. And God is full of it. It's threaded through him and emanates from him… he has more than enough of it to last humanity an eternity and back. And if faced with unfaithfulness, the divine remains faithful. It's not just what he does, but who he is.
When life reaches its limits, when we can’t see through it’s fog, faith is the rope we pull ourselves up with, that we hold onto for dear life. It comes into its own in mystery and takes us to higher levels. It’s in these places of faith that we see God for who he really is and ourselves for who we really are.
Faith is that uneasy, exquisite, adrenalin, patient, one-step-at-a-time realm that connects our dust bucket natural lives to the infinite and divine God of love. He is love and love is him. And when you love, whether it be in the receiving or the giving, faith is born. And it changes everything.
Go to Part 2 – What Hope Does
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