Garden Ministries

Encounter the living God

General

What difference does it make if we don’t have LOVE?

To have LOVE, I must know LOVE. And God IS LOVE (I John 4:8). Therefore, I must KNOW God to LOVE like Him. I thought I KNEW all of this! It seems that my spiritual Drawing Board just got erased and I am on Ground Zero and need a super-charged revelation about God’s LOVE—again.

Super-talented, amazingly gifted, dazzle-your-socks-off performances, without first investing our hearts into God’s heart and caring about what He says to care about, counts for nothing. What a waste of time, energy, and personal resources. From God’s perspective, performance-based giving has no return on our investment because it was not given out of a First Love relationship with Him.

The “Align-Abide-Agree” strategy helps us discover the vital link between knowing and acting in the kind of love that I Corinthians 13 describes.

  • Align with God–who is Love–through reverent submission to and passion for Jesus, his beloved Son. Not my will but Yours be done God.
  • Abide with Jesus who intimately loves us. Get to know His heart for you and for others.
  • Agree with God who requires us to know his love more than any other eternal attribute. Above even our faith and our hope, the greatest of these is LOVE.

I Corinthians 13:1-3 (NLT): If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. 3 If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

Character Qualities that Tell Me if I Know Him and Have His Love (or Not)
4 Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. 7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.