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The more excellent way!



A lot of Christians often desire to have spiritual gifts which isn’t bad, God has distributed them to us freely. Paul mentioned them in 1 Corinthians 12: 8-10. The word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, working of miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, different kinds of tongues, interpretation of tongues, gifts of helping and gifts of administration.
Paul wanted us as Christians to desire the best gift but he knew that having these spiritual gifts wasn’t a sure way to make heaven, please God or even fulfil God’s will and purpose for our lives. There was a more excellent way.
1 Corinthians 13. Love is the more excellent way. Anytime we are doing the work of God without love we are simply wasting our time and just making a lot of noise, so when we preach or pray in tongues, we are just making noise if the underlying foundation is not love. This kind of people are like the people Jesus was referring to in Matthew 7:22 who did many wonders for Jesus, they prophesied in his name, cast out demons in his name and even raised the dead in his name but Jesus said to them ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practise lawlessness!’.
The gifts of God are without repentance so even though God gives us gifts such as the word of wisdom, word of knowledge, faith, etc or all the spiritual gifts and we don’t have love, he might not take the gifts away, so because we still have the gifts we may think we are doing just fine this is why it is important to examine ourselves ever so often to know if perhaps we have lost our way.
If the gifts that God has freely given to us is not propelled by love then it will be propelled by something else and this can be dangerous not only to ourselves but to others because we will be motivated by the wrong thing, envy and jealousy can even be our motivation or even pride just to show off the gifts we have.
My sisters and brothers if all that you have is sincere love for your fellow brothers and sisters and for humanity as a whole and you are not a Pastor, Teacher, Evangelist, Apostle etc then you have found the more excellent way. It is good to desire spiritual gifts because it is God’s gift to us, but if you want to express the kind of spiritual gifts that will count in eternity then let it be mixed with love.
1 Corinthians 13:3 If we feed the poor and do all manner of charitable deeds and even give our bodies to be burnt and we don’t have love we will have no reward in heaven and our reward will end here on earth. Without love then the spiritual gifts that God has given to us will be useless to us and to humanity.
We must sincerely love others and even those who hate us. If God loves only those who love him it means that only believers will be alive today, but he also loves those who hate him and causes the sun to shine and rain to fall on both the evil and the good. Matthew 6;45 so we must be like our father and show love to those that don’t like us, hate us and that despitefully use us because this is what differentiates us as children of God.
May we reorder our priorities today and begin to seek the more excellent way.

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