How often we seem to fail to be God-lights for the God whose is love; we are admonished to know the truth, to strive for the truth, to speak truth to one another... but we are also admonished to love one another fervently, in our reproof and rebukes to edify, to uplift, to seek peace, to live love. Hard words for those who are Spirit-filled and breathe out so many un-spirit like words and thoughts and actions. Paul concludes with the statement "Be Ye Men" - real men strive to love, speak love, and know love. May God help us all to be truer lights for him and relect all of his holy Personage.
1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
ps - for those who are on the battlelines of faith, remember that you are not alone, and that your brethren are your friends, not your enemy. It is Satan who would have us be divided among ourselves and to minimalize our witness as God-lights. And by God's Spirit do we not only fight the devil, but this wicked world and the wickedness of our sin within. So be at peace with the house of God whose family you are a part of for we have enough enemies about us in this half-life twilight of our eternal existence.