What Difference Does It Make?
If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:2 NASB
All knowledge – Day 28. We are coming close. But lest we imagine that these last days are about gaining knowledge in order to get a grip on the elusive “spiritual” life, we need to consider Paul’s declaration (lament?). “If I understand all knowledge.” The Greek text is eido pantan gnosin, implying not merely sensory perception but a deep penetration into the essence of things. In other words, the same kind of knowledge that God Himself has. Paul uses the strongest possible case, what we would call omniscience. Even if I know everything that can be known but I am without love, I am nothing! This is powerful. Even a “god” without love (and we have yet to determine what “love” is) is nothing!
So here we are. Rational, discursive, analytic, predictive, cognitive, controlling beings gathering information in order to govern our unruly emotional lives. And Paul says, “Collect as much as you can. Stuff yourselves with knowing. Then recognize that it means nothing at all unless it is employed in the service of love.” Twenty-eight days into analysis we come to the brick wall of arrogance. We thought we could figure all of this out. We thought we could somehow lasso our emotions and get them under control. We thought we were capable of redirecting the yetzer ha’ra, that slippery and conning force, through the strength of our understanding. We thought we could save ourselves (with a little help from on high, of course). But Paul sets us straight. All mysteries, all knowledge, all prophecy—none of it makes any difference, not even to YHVH Himself, unless we encounter love. And that cannot be accomplished at all—unless the love of YHVH first encounters us.
In the end it isn’t intellectual prowess that leads me out of the pit. In fact, intellectual prowess is more than likely my enemy. It convinces me that what I lack is the magic formula of spiritual awareness when the truth is that what I lack is the fear of the Lord. In the end I must come to terms with my created status, my utter dependence on mercy and grace, my emptiness, the depths that I fear to see. In the end, knowing brings me to nothing.
The whisper. That’s what I need. The whisper that makes it all make sense. The whisper that tells me I am His concern. No more analysis. No more word studies of amazing insights. No more explanations and explications. No, now I must listen for the whisper. I must compel the ear of the universe to hear the faintest praise of the Creator in order to know that He sees something in my blind eyes. What is this love that Paul prioritizes? It is agape, the spontaneous passive experience of being cared for, of being someone’s concern. It is not knowing the truth of a statement of care. It is feeling it as a visceral reality in my life. I need the whisper of the lover of my soul in order to be whole. Nothing less will do.
Topical Index: all knowledge, pantan gnoskin, love, agape, 1 Corinthians 13:2
If you are interested in the exegetical analysis of the “love” chapter of 1 Corinthians, you might read this.
Something Beautiful
Friends, God is Love.
And because God SO LOVED the world, He gave..
What did He give? The best Gift ever.
Looking for love? Look no further than this! — THIS IS LOVE: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning Sacrifice for our sins ~ 1 John 4.10
Remember our previous “definition” of love? “Benevolence towards another at cost to myself?” Now, look again to Calvary and to Calvary’s cross, and view in full the “price,” the cost of God’s benevolence towards us.
Friend, “Christ died for sinners, of whom I am chief” is a faithful saying and worthy of full (and universal) acceptance.
[Therefore] ~ conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth; knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, *but with precious blood*, as of a Lamb unblemished and spotless, *the blood of Christ*… (1 Peter 1.18,19)
Thank You for the cross, LORD. Thank you for the Price You paid.
Calvary was not the end. No sir. No ma’am. It was the beginning of something beautiful.
~ For He [the One] who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all —how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things? ~ (Romans 8.32)
~ For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him! ~ (John 3.17)
O to grace, how great a debtor
Daily, I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter
bind my wandering heart to Thee!
Something beautiful, something good
All my confusion He understood
All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife
But He made something beautiful of my life
BINGO!!!!! FATHER – You ARE AWESOME in Your LOVE! Blessings cover you Skip!
And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.
“and the sheep follow Him, for they know His voice.”
That voice, that whisper of Himself revealing His
very presence within. Nothing in all this world is
remotely like it. “He uttered his voice, the earth melted.”
When you know He is within, and lovingly in control,
then, and only then, can you truly head toward the
exit called self. But we’ll need His help.
“If you love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray
the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He
may abide with you forever — the Spirit of truth, whom the
world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows
Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in
you.”
“The whisper. That’s what I need.” Yes, but to hear a whisper one must become quiet, still, silent and that is my dilemma. Through the years I have been become almost deaf, if not from the bellowing clamor, then from the incessant chatter of the yetzer ha’ra. As a result I thought both God and I would have to shout louder and speak more in order to hear or be heard above the din of the yetzer ha’ra, but I was wrong. I became hoarse in my baying to God to garner His attention and affection, and I interpreted His quietude as displeasure, or worse, abandonment. Thus, I became more anxious, more afraid and I railed louder and heard less. What a quandary I created. I am now discovering that to hear (and to be heard) is only possible when you subdue your yetzer ha’ra to be quieted, stilled and silenced by awe in the presence of YHWH. Thank you Skip. You do offer more than information and intellectual discourse…. much more.
Michael Stanley, I miss you in all the places you have not written something! You just sliced sideways into the tumor of my previous life. And made me laugh, and remember, when you did. Thank you!
I have hesitated to respond to this day’s discourse, because it lays open the deepest wound of my life. In fact, the rest of my little tragedies perhaps were self-imposed flights into the unknown wilderness that I chose to participate in in an unknowing attempt to avoid that deepest cut, which is the call of the Damascus Road that I think comes to everyone in some form or another.
“For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” Romans 11:29. I was born with the instinct to hide my deepest self from myself, as well as all others, including G-d. I can never remember a time when I did not ache with the pain of that shame. The pretense of pride goes all the way back. At no time did I truly believe that it would be ok if I revealed who I truly was. At no time did I not suffer viscerally from not being able to. Hiding is excruciating!
As I hit my teen years, I held out a hope that it was at least external circumstances that prevented me from being able to walk freely in the land of the living in my own skin, strong and unafraid. I longed to reveal who I really was, and to operate from that platform. By then, I was starting to sense the difficulty that exposure entailed, and that it was going to cost something. I was hurting badly enough by then to start to be willing to endure the pain of disclosure as an alternative; I still believed, wanted to believe, in my relative innocence, anyway – I wanted to believe that it was only because I had not gotten a “real chance” to “express myself”!
So I embarked on a journey of self-discovery, aching from the pain of shame the whole way, and I actually managed to get quite a ways along; far enough to decide that I needed a medium of expression; a way to communicate to others who I ‘really was’. I would go to that hurting place where I could hear the throbbing of all my sorrow and all my desire for joy, and lay my hand on that wall that was constructed to keep who I was from myself, and then try. I systematically attempted to pick up the mediums that I saw (and appreciated) others using. I tried all the art forms I could get my hands on the tools for, as I saw art as a way I wanted to ‘see myself’ through. In each one, one by one, I would get to a point of proficiency, whether it was visual arts; drawing and painting, or music, or even poetry, and then, I would hit a wall. It wasn’t that I particularly lacked any skill, it was that I didn’t have ENOUGH skill to unlock the door in that wall of me. I got more and more upset.
It was finally, in response to an insightful teacher who assigned an open-ended writing essay, that I stumbled upon that elusive flash: I had actually found a wave to ride, and I happily rode it, hurting all the way, sure that what I had to say was so offensive it would not even get graded; but, it got a favorable response – actual encouragement – on the other end! I was ecstatic. However, just as quickly, my joy turned to, well, incredulous rage. I couldn’t believe it. The modicum of expression I had the single biggest love-hate relationship with, which was the words of prose, no less, was the only thing I had found a voice in. I protested. I didn’t WANT words! By that time, I didn’t trust words any more. In fact, I had the deepest suspicion that words CONCEALED truth; that words only showed up in the place Thoreau described as a “lull in the wind”: and prose, no less! Not even the mystical, magical rivers of Syria, but the muddy, floody Jordan: that river that connected the Land of Promise to the wilderness of my disasters, which I was seeking asylum from! I got very angry. I protested: I denied: I pouted. I despised words and all they represented, because they had let me down the most. So I turned my back, and when life intervened in my education, I was glad to run from the pain that the path of self-disclosure represented. I didn’t write again for over 20 years
Here I am again. I still believe that words can conceal the truth; that we depend on them in fact, in so many ways, to do just that. I think we turn to knowledge that words represent as a weapon against ourselves; as insulation from the truth – the truth of who we really are. In fact, my suspicion has deepened into conviction that the truth, the real Truth, is wordless. As such, words, and their underlying knowledge, are my bane, in the fullest sense of the word. They represent blessing, and curse, and destiny for me. I sweat every time I have to use them, fully aware that if I were to truly use them effectively, I would need none of them. I am sweating now.
I have a son of few words. We can be together, traveling or working or just hanging out, and hours can pass, where we interact with each other, just hanging out on each others’ wave length, and no words are necessary. In that place, the truth shows up. When I was young, I heard a song about a boy who struck a note “that sounded like a great Amen”, and he spent the rest of his life searching for it again. I think love resonates fully only in the place beyond all knowledge, and we ache until we rest in Him.