1 Corinthians 13 (again) Jesus is Love

What if you took the word “love” in this chapter and instead of thinking of the emotion or verb “love” and took it as the pronoun for Jesus? Play with me for a moment. Jesus is, in essence, LOVE. He is pure and without sin. He is the embodiment of LOVE. He gave up everything to give us everything and therefore is the perfect example of LOVE. So, for this morning, let’s rewrite this and let’s allow 1 Corinthians 13 to be a sort of focus, if you will, on Jesus for the day; ready? “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not Jesus, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not Jesus, I am nothing. If I give away all I haven and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not Jesus, I gain nothing. Jesus is patient and kind; Jesus does not envy or boast; he is not arrogant or rude. He does not insist on his own way; He is not irritable or resentful; He does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Jesus bears all things, believes all thing, hopes all things, endures all things. Jesus never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now fatih, hope, and Jesus abide, these three; but the greatest of these is Jesus.