He tells us to ‘enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise give thanks to him and praise his name’ (v.4) ‘Enter with the password: “Thank you!”’ (v.4, MSG) ‘Be thankful and say so to Him’ (v.4, AMP). The psalmist exhorts us to ‘Shout for joy to the Lord… Worship the Lord with gladness come before him with joyful songs’ (vv.1–2). His faithfulness continues through all generations. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture.ĥ For the Lord is good and his love endures forever For giving grateful praise.ġ Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. It is, in the words of St Paul, ‘the most excellent way’ (1 Corinthians 12:31). It should be the main thing in your life. Love should be number one on your spiritual priority list. We deceive ourselves if we think we can love God and hate other people (1 John 4:20). What is the noblest object of desire, the supreme gift to covet?’ In 1 Corinthians 13 ‘Paul takes us to Christianity at its source and there we see, “The greatest of these is love.”’ the supreme good? You have life before you. We get an idea of what Drummond must have said that evening in his book, The Greatest Thing in the World. Would that we could all move into that love chapter and live there.’ The one great need in our Christian life is love, more love to God and to each other. ‘It seemed to me that I had never heard anything so beautiful. After some urging, Henry drew a small New Testament from his pocket, opened it at 1 Corinthians 13 and began to speak on the subject of love. One evening they asked Henry Drummond to expound on a portion of Scripture. Moody was once staying with friends in England. I do not think it will come as any surprise to those who know me well that I had to stop there! So I substituted my own name and started with ‘Nicky is patient’.
The four verses (1 Corinthians 13:4–7) start with ‘love is patient’. Her aim was, one day, to get through the whole list. When she reached a characteristic that she knew was not true of her, she had to stop. For the word ‘love’ she would substitute her own name. I tried following the example of a missionary I once heard about who, each day, would read the four verses from today’s New Testament passage, which lists sixteen characteristics of love.
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