Daily Worship

Hope

October 10, 2015 0 0

1Corinthians 13

The Way of Love

13 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, 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. 11 When 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.

Father, I’ve just realised that the greatest poem ever written 
was written by a religious lawyer who once hated Christians!
This is hope in every possible sense.
This is life in the land of the dead.
This is Gospel light in the heart of darkness.
This is the reason every person on earth cannot be written off.
And so I pray in hope for the radicalised people in the world who burn with wrongness,
I pray for the powerful too drunk with delusion to care,
I pray for marginalised who live on hair-line cracks of life,
I pray for the prisoner who lives with the guilt of life shaping choices,
I pray for the lonely who long for friendship and I pray that hope will be our message to world. Amen