-Having taken off the nasty ratty old coat of anger and lying, etc, and having put on these new clothes of kindness and humility and forbearance and mercy, finally we put on love, God’s agape love, which is the ‘greatest of these’. Paul here calls it a bond of completion. It is the glue which holds us all together. It is the yeast without which the recipe ultimately falls flat. It is the coat which completes the ensemble. Love bears and endures ALL things and never fails (1Corinthians 13.7-8). When we love our neighbor, we fulfill all the rest of God’s law (Romans 13.8-13). And love within the Body of Christ not only carries out the new great command Jesus gave His disciples but it also demonstrates to the world that we are really following Him (John 13.34-35).
-Love moves toward my neighbor, in this case towards a fellow believer to give to them, to build them up, to meet their need. Love is the absence of self. I am not in it for me or for what i get out of it but rather to serve and bless and do what’s best for my brothers and sisters in Christ. What if we all rolled this way?
-About the closest we can get to Paradise in this life is to find love. Not the fleeting failing kind that is permeated with self, but rather the love which comes only from Above. Patient, kind, self-sacrificing, forgiving, rejoicing with the truth, bearing and enduring all things. This love truly never fails. But you can’t manufacture it - gotta get it from the Source...!
-Yes love here puts the finishing touch on that which maintains the oneness which the Holy Spirit is naturally forging between believers (Ephesians 4.3) and is the ultimate demonstration of the reality of His presence and work. If i do not have love my faith is worthless. Love is the ligament, the vital link that God designed to hold a body together when internal forces would otherwise normally pull it apart. Muscles and bones normally pull against each other in ways that would force them apart were it not for the ligaments. There were similar forces in Colossae and still are within every local body of Christ-followers that also conspire to pull believers apart from one another, oh so many of them (these pull apart other unions as well, marriages, teams, rock groups, etc). Some of these things aren’t bad in and of themselves, but they can be catastrophic if not clothed with love and grace. Busy-ness. Selfishness. Personality quirks and differences. Disagreements. Wounds and slights and offenses which go unforgiven. Grumbling and complaining and rebellion against leadership (at which God’s people have always been way too good). American Christians actually carry a double-whammy legacy - we are descended from rebels (doubly so in the south!), and we come from a long line of schismatics going back to the ‘Great Schism’ itself (Google it). Paul pleads repeatedly with God’s people in their assemblies to pursue and guard oneness and avoid schisms of any kind (1Corinthians 1.10, Philippians 1.27, 2.2, Ephesians 4.2-3). Look at how Jesus closes His upper room prayer - He prays for us - for us to be one, perfected in unity and manifesting God’s love towards one another (John 17.20-26), love that bears all things and never fails. But again it’s not any kind of love that I can force or fake. It’s supernatural, out-of-this-world. But that’s why the world takes notice when and if it gets a glimpse of it.
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