The Always God

When Nicky and I do marriage prep with couples, one of the passages we read is 1 Corinthians 13. It’s a classic wedding passage and while it's not really about marriage, you want to see love thrive in marriage, so in that sense it's a great passage to read and think about together. It's also surprisingly challenging. It's easy to feel love. But 1 Corinthians 13 invites you to do love?

Grab your Bible some time and read through the whole chapter. For today I want to pause at verses 6-7. This is what they say.

"Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

Always.

That's challenging, right?

We don't “always”, do we? We fail each other. We fail ourselves. We say we'll always be there and then we're not. We say we'll always trust and then suspicion creeps in. We say we'll always persevere and then we give up at the first hard conversation. If "always" is the expectation for love, most of us are failing most days.

But the purpose of this chapter is not to get you to sit there dwelling on your failure. In no small part, Paul wants us to lift our eyes and look at Jesus. Because these verses are not only a call to you and me. They're describing him. Jesus is the one who always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. He's the one who embraces the "always" always. And as good as we can be at loving, our love will always be just a faint echo of his.

And so here's the wonderful news that flows out of all this: the always God wants to draw near to us who don't always. We don't always love each other well and we don't always love him well either - and yet, he still comes.

That's the heart of Christianity, really. The God who always loves wants to make his home in us, and he wants to invite us into his home. In Christ, we're not merely tolerated, we're welcomed in, fully, permanently, always. We can belong to Jesus because he loves us always, even to death on a cross. His “always” love removes the mistakes we’ve made by not being “always”. His “always” love forgives the mistakes we make when we fail to be “always”. His “always” love removes the punishment we deserve for not being “always”. His “always” love sets the example for us and empowers us so we can be more “always” than ever before.

Church at its best, demonstrates and shares this “always” love. It's a place where forever friendship with God and with each other is known and lived out. Not that we always get it right, but we know the one who always does and always seek to point the world to him.

So this Sunday, who could you invite in to see this “always” love? In a world full of maybes, who needs to hear that they are, were and can be always loved?