A World of Love

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." - C.S.Lewis

Greg talked today about LOVE. This wasn't a big surprise, since the sermon series right now is on 1 Corinthians 13. It was a really good sermon. He talked a lot about unconditional love, and how it's odd that we desire, crave, long for, and need it since we've never experienced it here on earth. Why, then, do we want so badly to find it? Because, he said, God hard-wired our DNA to crave unconditional love. We're like beached whales, he explained, because we were made to be surrounded constantly with unconditional love, like whales are made to swim in water. But, when whales are beached, and as we often find ourselves here on earth, we continue to make the same motions we do when we're in "water," but it just looks awkward and it ends up leading to our demise instead. That's the way I feel a lot, like there is something I will never fully attain here on earth and I'm just waiting for the day that it is fully realized, like Paul talks about.
Greg talked about how we often look for other things-- be they relationships, work, success, money, looks, etc-- to fill the void we feel because we long for unconditional love. He said it's like being in an airplane and seeing the pretty, fluffy clouds and jumping out of the airplane to see if the clouds are heavenly trampolines. They're not. They're just water vapor and we'll fall right through. That's the way it is when we try to fulfill the needs we have with earthly things, with "false infinites." They're unsatisfying, in the end. But there is hope in the promise of Heaven, and the goodness of God.

I also really liked (and this is a sidenote), Greg's explanation for the verse that says, "And these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." I've always wondered what about love made it greater than the other two, and Greg explained that faith and hope are things that we only need for our temporary time here on earth. We won't need faith when we're face to face with Jesus and we won't need hope because all of the perfection of God and the beauty of eternity will be laid out before us. But love, we will be drowning in love. A perfect love. Jonathan Edwards, Great Awakening author of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," wrote that "Heaven is a world of love." Simply put. Wow.

"All the suffering in the world is as one bad night in a hotel from the perspective of heaven."