You just won a million dollars!
You get it right now. You can do whatever you want to do with it. Do you take the money? How do you feel? How do you treat the person who awards you the money?
Think about that.
Now read, this:
Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe; and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. Acts 2:43
Everyone.
Kept feeling.
A sense of awe.
Do you think that sense of awe sort of felt like winning a million dollars? I do, but only better!
Awe: a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.
When was the last time your church felt a continuous sense of awe? When was the last time that your church felt awe for one service? Or part of the church felt an inkling of awe for just a few minutes?
God wanted us to know that when the church started there was awe. Awe is important to God.
Why was there a sense of awe? Because many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles, right? Right! So that means that the “awe” is gone because the apostles are gone and the wonders and signs went with them, right? Well, not really.
The Bible does say that some of the signs were going to end. Paul told the church in Corinth that prophesy and tongues and knowledge are actually the lesser gifts and they will end.
But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 1 Cor. 13:8-10
What is “in part” or partial is going to disappear when the completeness comes. So what is the completeness?
This verse begins with the sentence, “Love never ends.” Miracles are the incomplete. Love is the complete. Miracles end. Love doesn’t.
The same chapter of the bible ends with this: Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. Love trumps miracles and faith and hope.
Love is the greatest.
Love is so powerful that Jesus said, “Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” John 13:35
Love is proof.
Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. 1 John 4:11-12
Love is God.
That love, that God is in us and is made complete in us. That’s what that verse says right?
Does that mean that God’s love is somehow incomplete? No! Not in its essence, but in that he is a spirit in the spiritual world and he chose humanity in the physical world to be his manifestation of love.
Do you get how colossal that is?
He picked us to be him. Whoa.
So, if love is the greatest, most enduring of all the gifts and it proves disciples and it allows us to see, taste and touch God, shouldn’t there be more awe among God’s people?
If miracles, which were the incomplete, produced awe, shouldn’t love, the complete produce more awe?
If miracles healed the physically blind, shouldn’t we be seeing what love can do for the spiritually blind?
If miracles resurrected the physically dead, shouldn’t we be seeing what love can do to the spiritually dead?
Yes, we should.
That is what church is all about. That is Jesus’ church. That is too important to get wrong.
So show them your love, and prove to all the churches that our boasting about you is justified. 2 Cor. 8:24
This post is dedicated to my home church, THE CHURCH IN CHILLICOTHE. You prove my boasting!
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