Blessed are those who pursue

“Pursue love” 1 Corinthians 14:1

Pursue – It’s all connected.  Start anywhere in the Bible and pretty soon you will find that you have traveled over all the themes.  Like a magnificently complex kaleidoscope, the words of Scripture are all connected.  Each one leads us to another, often reminding us of other nuances and other directions.  This word (dioko) is a good example.

Dioko means “to press hard after, to go after with a fervent desire to obtain”.  That’s what Paul wants us to do about love.  We know that Paul’s Hebrew background fills in the context.  Love means pressing through with the action steps that provide gracious benevolence to others.  Without action, love is an empty word.  Actually, without gracious benevolence toward others, love is changed into something far worse than an empty concept.  Love without action becomes the other side of dioko for dioko has a dark meaning as well.  It is the word we encounter in the Beatitude “Blessed are those who are persecuted.”  When love refuses to show itself in gracious benevolence, it is not apathy.  It is persecution!

God intends us to pursue love.  He wants us to constantly take the action steps of grace.  When we don’t, something else transpires.  We become the persecutors, the ones who make a mockery of God’s grace.  If love does not show itself, it turns inward and becomes the source of unspeakable terror.

There is a good reason Paul pushes us out the door into a world that is in desperate need of grace.  Paul knows that if we coddle God’s love, if we hold it for ourselves, if we use it for self-protection, we will subvert it into the other meaning of dioko.  The dark side.

There is no such thing as Christian theology without compassion for others.  When beliefs do not become traction on the ground of life, something has gone terribly wrong.  The real test of following the Lord is not all the information I can recite about Jesus.  The real test is my life.  That is the gospel that matters, the one most often read by others.  Wherever your behavior does not match the words of Scripture, you become the persecutor rather than the pursuing.

No wonder we need a fearless moral inventory.