1 Corinthians 13:3 "Love is patient and kind."

Whenever I read the whole of 1 Corinthians 13, I get excited about God's love for us. I know that I am not able to line up with this definition of love, but I know God is. In fact, God IS love, as we can find in 1 John 4:7-8, "Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love."

Once we've established that God IS love, I want us to look at 1 Corinthians 13 in that light. When we see that GOD is patient and kind and so on, we begin to get a fuller picture of who God is. What's greater than finding out more about our awesome God?

Just to make sure that there's no confusion in this, I want to mention that saying God is patient and kind doesn't mean that God isn't vengeful, fierce and full of righteous anger as he has been described in the Bible. He is certainly those things. He is not limited to only one perspective of him that we can have by reading only part of the Bible. He is God. He is both the loving father and the righteous warrior. He is more than we can fathom.

I could talk about all the different characteristics of God for... well forever. Remember that verse in the Bible that says that if all the sky was a canvas and all the ocean ink that we wouldn't have enough ink and paper to describe how great he is? Well, that's the truth! But I want to come back and focus on what this particular verse has to say about God. After all, we can't understand everything about God, but we can take it one mental bite at a time.

God is patient: It's sometimes hard to see God as a patient God, especially when we read the Old Testament. It seems like he's always having someone come in and kill someone else and throwing his Chosen People out of their land on a moment's notice. However, if we look closer, we can see that God really gave them years or even decades to fix their act most of the time. Even when he did something immediately, it was in response to blatant disrespect of his righteousness and sovereignty.

But again, he usually gave them a significant amount of time and even sent prophets and judges to give them warnings of what would happen if they didn't change what they were doing. After all, if God is truly a righteous and good God, he cannot be able to put up with evil forever. It must eventually we dealt with. Why would we want a God that just put up with evil? He wouldn't be a truly good God and there would be no sense in asking him to save us.

God's patience is what gave me a second chance (and so many other chances after that!) and I love him for that!

God is kind: We see evidence of this wonderful characteristic in the sacrifice of God's only son Jesus here on earth. It could only be kindness and compassion within the very being of God that would lead God to allow his son to be born as a human, to live in a world of turmoil and be constantly attacked verbally and physically, and to die at the hands of men.

However, Jesus' death was not the end of it. God didn't send Jesus to die just to die. He sent him to die for all people so that their debt would be paid off before God when they choose to accept him into their lives. That kindness is what we should thank God for every day! What an amazing love God has for us!

There really aren't enough words to explain even these two characteristics. There aren't even words, period. God's ways are not our ways. All we can do is try our best and ask God to reveal them to us.

As you can probably guess, I'm going to go through the rest of this section in scripture with you guys. Stay tuned for the next one!

Everett