Love

READ: 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a
THINK: Which of the qualities of love describes you? Which does not?
PRAY: For our team’s success to judged on how well we love.

At the pinnacle of Peter’s maturity flow chart of a verse is love. Honestly, it is the pinnacle of many things in Christianity, perhaps culminating in John’s famous statement that God is love. How can it get clearer than that?

Yet, love is often very misunderstood in our culture. We use it to describe a feeling that we have toward a girlfriend, parent or pet. We use it how much we like something. But really love is about motivation and action, what you say and what you do. Ultimately, love is about service.

The characteristics of love in 1 Corinthians should look very familiar after studying 2 Peter this week. Look at the 1 Corinthians verse again. Love isn’t self-seeking? You mean it seeks the good of all? Right, just like the goodness that we talked about on day one. Love always perseveres? Check. We covered that on day three. Love is kind? Perhaps like the brotherly kindness and family atmosphere that we thought about just this morning. Love is really a culmination of many characteristics and the actions that flow from those. If you are practicing the things that we have contemplated this week, then you are practicing love.

Notice that I say practicing there. Not “if you are thinking about how to persevere.” Love requires the action. Without the action, it is nothing.

So how will we put it into practice? We will sacrifice. “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends,” Jesus says. And so we will put others ahead of ourselves and go out of our way to serve them.

We will volunteer to go fetch balls that we didn’t hit over the fence.
We will lay off the people who annoy us and refuse to make things worse.
We will begin to recognize when we are being annoying and learn the service of silence.
We will offer encouragement when needed, even taking our attention off of our own games for a moment.
We will be patient with our beginners, those who can’t keep the rally going.
We will be kind to those who have an obvious flaw in their swing, or in their personality.
We won’t boast or brag when we win a challenge match over a teammate.
We will delight in the success of each other.
We can learn to be a team that is aware of one another, and willing to go out of our normal pattern to love.

Perhaps we’ll love tennis as well. Make a sacrifice of our time to get better at a game we enjoy. Maybe it will be sacrificing our effort, our attitude, our energy to focus better in a practice or match.

We’ll probably love our opponents as well, our “enemies.” We will call the game fairly, sacrificing any advantage we could give ourselves. We will compete with great attitude and effort, no matter the score or situation. We’ll be respectful despite any way that they treat us.

And the season will be a success. I know for sure that if love is the goal, we will succeed.

We will be a team of love, of sacrificing self for others. We will be men of patience, humility, hope and trust. We will persevere. We will mature throughout this season into men of love.