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In Christ, Mark
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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.
Love never fails.
1 Corinthians 13:8a
This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.
As we come to the penultimate message in this seven message series, we have spent a majority of time learning what true love, the kind of love God expects from us, looks like. We have read the scriptures about what love is and what it isn’t in regard to practical every day application.
Today and tomorrow, we reach truths about love itself, about the power that results when we love the way God’s word tells us to. And as we see in the first part of 1 Corinthians 13, verse 8, true love never fails and never means never.
Need an illustration. Let me share a personal testimony about how this verse came alive and revealed itself to me in a very special way.
We start back in 1992 when I was trying to piece my life together after a divorce ended a nearly ten year marriage. I had been a victim of infidelity and was afraid I might never be able to trust again but the Lord had plans for me, plans to show me what real love looked like.
I was serving in the United States Navy and had been volunteering at a local elementary school, assisting with two third grade classes. After doing this faithfully for months when my ship was in port, I ran into the school’s assistant principal one day, Ms. White. She was a beautiful woman, well educated and sophisticated, a woman I thought was way out of my league.
Ms. White and I had spoken before but the conversations were always about professional matters, specifically about the work the ship and its volunteers were doing at the school. That changed on this particular day as we were heading into a weekend. Ms. White mentioned she was going to see a movie and, using every ounce of courage I could muster, I asked if she was going alone. Of little surprise, she said she had a date but then added, “I am going with someone but they don’t know what direction they are going”. And with that, she was summoned over the announcing system and had to go, leaving me to wonder what she meant by the statement.
Well, I thought about how things transpired and decided to see if she would go out with me. I sent her flowers, carefully wording the card so she knew it was from me, even though no one else would know. I was going to be in the school one last day before our ship went to sea for six weeks and so I know I had one shot at success.
When that day came, I entered the school and went to the third grade classrooms where I usually worked. I didn’t see Ms. White the whole time and so I figured that it wasn’t going to work out. I walked out of the classroom and started down the hall to leave the building when around the corner came none other than Ms. White herself. She cautiously looked left and right to make sure we were alone before telling me she loved the flowers and accepted my invitation to dinner. We would do that the next evening and it was clear to us both that the Lord had special plans for us, plans for us to marry and become one flesh.
While I was at sea, I wanted to tell my parents but was a bit hesitant at first. You see, Ms. White, was Black and I am White, and back in those days, interracial relationships were still trying to get accepted in society. In fact, in Virginia, the state where we both loved and worked, interracial relationships were forbidden before the landmark Loving case changed the law.
I grew up in a very small town in Pennsylvania and the culture there is a lot different than in the big city. People were more set in their ways and less prone to change. My father was very much like this but as I considered calling him and my mother, I remembered that I wasn’t brought up in a prejudicial environment. I was taught to love and respect others, and ultimately, this led me to make the call and tell my parents about my engagement.
Well, the call went pretty well at first as I told them I had met a wonderful lady I had decided to marry. I felt it was important to let them know everything and so I informed them that Grace, Ms. White’s first name, was Black. Things got very quiet on the other end of the phone and then the call was abruptly ended. Both of my parents cut off communication at first but then my mother came around, apologizing for her reaction. She offered her support to our pending marriage and said she wanted to attend. My father on the other hand, excommunicated me.
Grace and I were married in December of 1992 with my mother and sister present at the wedding. My father stayed home. After getting married, Grace and I would make several trips to Pennsylvania and when we went by my parent’s home, my mother would be the only one there. My father would always conveniently be absent. This behavior would go on for a year and a half and during that time, Grace and I committed ourselves to not exchange an eye for an eye. And so we sent my father cards and gifts, always letting him know we loved and missed him.
One day in the summer of 1994, my sister called me to say that she was arranging a family reunion. We were all going to assemble in my hometown and have a cookout at a state park nearby. She added that all my other siblings were going to be there and she wondered if Grace and I would come. I automatically asked about my father and my sister told me he wanted to reconcile.
And so Grace and I made the eight hour drive north to western Pennsylvania and arrived at my parent’s home. My father was inside and Grace asked me to go in first and so I did. As soon as I walked through the door, my father started weeping. He was in such deep sorrow and inconsolable. I went and sat beside him, putting my arm around him and telling him it was okay, adding that I loved and forgave him. He couldn’t understand how I could feel that way and so I shared the Gospel with him, telling of how God forgave me despite my sinfulness out of love by giving up His only Son to die so I might live. I let him know that Jesus loved him and wanted to bring him salvation.
After I had shared this, the time had come for my father to meet Grace for the first time. Yes, he had passed judgment on her simply because of her skin color, not who she was as a person. He began to weep harder than the first time and Grace went to him, hugged him, and told him he was forgiven and loved.
Friends, that day the sinful bondage of racism was broken and love was the instrument used to break it. My father’s experience of love and forgiveness changed him from the inside out. He started to attend church every single Sunday, becoming a faithful member of a small church congregation before he passed away in 2011. And for Grace, my father treated her as if she was his daughter from that point forward.
So what happened? What led to the sudden softening of a hardened heart?
It was all about unfailing love. Plain and simple.
You see, as we looked back on what happened, Grace and I saw where we could have easily messed up the Lord’s plan for my father. All we had to do is adopt the same attitude he showed, allowing hatred to rule the day instead of love. In the end translation, God wasn’t up to reconciling my father to Grace and me. Rather, He was trying to reconcile my father to Himself. We were just instruments by which the Lord worked to bring my dad to Him, to bring my dad to find his salvation.
Friends, the moral of this story is that when you don’t know what else to do, love, even if the other person decides to not love you back. Never stop loving because God’s word tells us that it never fails.
Amen.
In Christ,
Mark
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