Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant.  When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.  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! 1 Corinthians 13:11-12, The Message

“Why don’t you grow up?  You aren’t a child anymore!”  Scores of adults never cut the apron strings, never emotionally grow up.  They lean on mother, on their wife or husband, or buy expensive toys which become security blankets.  The difference between some men and their boys is merely the price of their toys, so observed one critic.

“When I was a child,” wrote Paul to the Corinthians, “I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me” (1 Corinthians 13:11).  Only by doing that can a person ever grow to emotional maturity.  And failure to do that cripples you forever, so much so that often you become impossible to live with—selfish, irresponsible, and a pain.

Have you observed two children playing who just couldn’t get along?  The first thing you know, one threatens, “OK, I’ll just take my toys and go home!”  As adults we do that when we threaten to walk out on a marriage rather than face issues, learn to communicate, and resolve conflict.  Quitting is always easier than facing our childishness.  Needed:  the courage to allow the persistence of love to win out.

Having talked about love’s persistence and strength, Paul says that love is a mystery which we will never fully understand until we cross the threshold separating us from the very face of Him who is love—God.  He says, “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known.”

There are many things in life that are a complete mystery to me.  The older I grow, the less I try to understand them but become more willing to put them in the hands of a loving God who sees life from a much different perspective from mine and trust Him with what I can’t comprehend.  I cannot understand the suffering of an innocent child—say, a baby whose tender body is racked with fever, or a child whose tiny limbs are twisted by disease and suffering.  It is hard for me to understand the loss of a loved one, especially when death cuts short the life of a young man or woman who is just beginning to taste the elixir of living.  It is hard to understand, at times, why the godless prosper and the person who strives to live by God’s Book can barely eke out a living, but the greatest mystery of all is why a person will choose to remain selfish, alone and loveless when he can reach out for God and find His love, which can fill their hearts.

No one is born with love in his heart.  It is learned, and the longer we wait to let God’s love fill our hearts the more difficult it becomes for us to be willing to let Him love through us.

Your capacity really to love may have been damaged by something that happened, perhaps many years ago; but the Great Physician can perform plastic surgery of the heart and erase the scar tissue of unpleasant memories and bring the touch of love into your loveless life.  The eminent psychiatrist Erich Fromm said, “The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.  The full answer to the problem of existence lies in truth and mature love.”

“And now,” concludes Paul, “these three remain:  faith, hope and love.  But the greatest of these is love.”  On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your ability to love?  Has the fire of love in your heart gone out?  Let God’s love touch your heart, and the overflow will touch those around you.  It still works just that way.

Resource reading: 1 Corinthians 13: 8-13 (Memorize v. 13)