Love never fails.
1 Corinthians 13:4
There are few things in this world that we can assert with any real certainty are without possibility of failure. Death and taxes perhaps? Realistically, not even they. But here Paul asserts with a confident economy of language that love never fails.
But I am nonetheless certain that all of you before drawing your next breath can bring to mind a moment or moments where it has felt like love has failed you. That moment when you laid yourself bare (metaphorically speaking please) and entrusted your heart to another and they dealt with it carelessly (or worse). That time when you anticipated that you would be carried by another’s love across a desert of brokenness and instead you found yourself abandoned on the road, the burden too heavy, the journey too long.
Broken hearts, broken lives, a seeming testament to love’s capacity to come up short. So how then can we reconcile the writers perfect words with our imperfect experience? Firstly and most painfully, let us acknowledge that for as many times as love has failed us, we have in likelihood failed it. Sometimes with intent and others inadvertently.
Which tells us what? Much of our understanding of love is received as water poured out through fractured vessels. The water is pure, it comes direct from the source but the brokenness of our carriage contaminates, and dilutes its perfection. To be sure, when it is good, it is amazing. But when it is tainted or in short supply it is made more horrible in the knowledge of what it is at its best.
So what is to be done with this knowledge? First we should be encouraged to rely more heavily on love at its source. God is the bringer of perfect love, as witnessed by the laying down of the life of His beloved son Jesus Christ for us while we were yet still sinners. His love is borne with no shortcoming, no lack of expression, no want in delivery. It is all there, entirely for the receiving.
Secondly, and this is almost entirely the point of this series, we must work toward being better vessels, better carriers of this precious love. Better in its receipt, better in its transmission. We must strive for less leaks and less contamination of this perfect gift. And above all we must deliver it with a generosity that befits its limitless supply.
Love never fails, church. It will do what nothing else can do, for you, in you, and through you. I pray that we all begin to let it, in ever increasing measure.
All my love
Stephen Hickson