This weekend we helped the children recognize the power of love over all things and that love is God’s greatest gift to us.

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” This quotation is an ideal one sentence summary of 1 Corinthians 13. This passage emphasizes how knowledge and intelligence, spiritual gifts, and faith are completely useless without love. According to Paul, it doesn’t matter how much you know even if you have all the knowledge and can solve all of the world’s mysteries such knowledge is empty and vain without love. What good is it if a person has such profound knowledge, but does not show care or concern for others?

Love is such an exhausted word in our society. It is used to describe our affections for people, objects, animals, places, and almost everything. In some ways, the power of the word love has lost its meaning. To say you love something or someone doesn’t quite have the impact that it used to. But love is an incredible thing. And God’s love is beyond comprehension. According to Paul’s letter, some characteristics of love are being patient, kind, and rejoicing in truth. These are big words! To always be patient, to always be kind these are goals that we would all like to meet, but seldom do. Some descriptions that are not characteristic of love include being envious, boastful, arrogant, rude, irritable, and resentful. How many of these actions come so easily to us much easier than kindness and patience!

The part of Paul’s letter found in 1 Corinthians 13, like the word love itself, is very common in our culture. We encounter it so often that we respond with a complacent affirmation to its truth if we even respond at all. But the message of this chapter is radical, life changing, earth shattering no matter how hard it is, God’s call to us is to love and to love unconditionally. And it requires an active response. As your children encounter Paul’s letter maybe again, maybe for the first time help them see how this letter is a personal calling for them individually. As you teach your children, point out ways they are showing characteristics of love. When you give the children affirmations, point out that their action is what this weekend lesson was about.

Affirm yourself, also, as a parent. You can show your children how to be kind and patient, not envious and boastful. Ask for God’s help. Allow God to use you as an example of what love truly is. Remember, the children don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God.” 1 John 4:7