Love Never Ends

Two of my favourite things at this time of year are hearing banns read in church and meeting with wedding couples ahead of their ‘big day’. We spend time preparing for two things simultaneously; their wedding day and the marriage itself. We work through what to expect out of the service, their vows, and married life ahead. Often they choose to include a well known passage from 1 Corinthians 13 as their Scripture reading and we spend a little time together thinking about what model that gives us for marriage. Verse 8 of that passage aptly begins ‘Love never ends’. St Paul isn’t speaking here about fallible human love. He is speaking about the nature of the love God has for us and all creation.

 

If we believe that God is love, and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them, then God is the natural source of all love and gives us the best foundation for healthy human relationship. We can love others only because God ‘first loved us’. Tragically not everyone has grown up knowing how much they are loved from a young age. And even if we do grow up knowing we are loved, that doesn’t, by any stretch, make human relationships perfect, whether we are married or not. People change, relationships shift, life happens, even good things can come to end. But God’s love never ends. It remains constant, irrespective of whatever else is going on in the world. God’s love rejoices in the truth, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and never fails. In a world of challenge, uncertainty, and our own frequent struggle to accept how deeply we are loved, we can rest in the knowledge that it is God’s love (not our comprehension of it) which provides a sure foundation for all of our human relationships and the love we share with those around us.