The Priority of Love, Part 2

This is the second of a 2-part discussion on the importance of love as the foundation of all we do in our efforts to promote the Gospel. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Part 1 first.

As previously explained from 1 Corinthians 13, love must go before my speech (verse 1), my smarts (verse 2) and my spirituality (verse 2). But there’s a fourth quality, my sacrifice. Curiously, 1 Corinthians 13:3 seems to imply that one could offer sacrifice for another apart from the presence of love. How can this be? Why would anyone be willing to give up everything he owns, even offer up his “body to be burned” for someone he does not love? Does it not go without saying that such a sacrifice would “profiteth me nothing”? Unfortunately, it does not.

Sadly, many of those deeds we see which the world calls “selfless acts” are nothing of the kind. While they appear on the surface to be motivated by a profound attitude of sacrifice, they are in fact the very opposite. They stem, not from a pure heart of genuine, born again faith in Jesus Christ, but from a deceived heart that is blinded by the fraudulent vale of religion. While the heart of biblical Christianity is love “out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned” (or genuine), the heart of religion is sacrifice that is more about reward and self-image than it is about love.

At the core of false religion is the convincing and destructive lie that my sacrifice has the power to earn me favor with God. How many devoted and sincere religious men and women down through the ages have bestowed all their goods to feed the poor, and even given their lives, believing to the grave, with all their hearts that their sacrifice would see them to great rewards on the other side.

The truth is that I cannot sacrifice to bring the blessings of God. On the contrary, I sacrifice because I am blessed of God and because I am loved of God, and because I love like God loves. Love is “above all things”. It even covers “the multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). EVERYTHING should be done with love (1 Corinthians 16:14), because love “is the bond of perfectness” (Colossians 3:14).