Imitators of Love - Part 15: God's Love Never Fails

REVIEW
 
Well, I believe today we will be concluding our series entitled “Imitators of Love” where we have learned more about Love Himself.
 
We started off talking about how the high call of every believer in a nutshell is to imitate our Heavenly Father as His dear children. This is what the Bible calls “godliness.”
 
So, in order to be godly by imitating God in our everyday life, we first have to know who and what we are imitating. So it is imperative that if you and I are going to replicate the Lord’s nature in our lives, then we need to learn what His nature is. And I can assure you, church, He is love. So everything we learn about love in the Bible is what we are learning about the Lord. The Lord is love!
 
And there is a lot to learn about love, amen? In fact, this is part 15 of this series, which I know is a lot, but it’s important that we build this new image of God’s nature not just in our heads but in our hearts. So what we are doing is taking these “legos of love” and building something amazing!
 
We’ve specifically been using the pieces found in First Corinthians 13:4-8, which gives us one of the most concise descriptions of love and, therefore, since God is love, it can be read like so – “GOD suffers long, and GOD is kind. GOD does not envy; GOD does not parade HIMSELF, HE is not puffed up; HE does not behave rudely, HE does not seek HIS own, HE is not provoked, HE thinks no evil; HE does not rejoice in iniquity, but HE rejoices in the truth; HE bears all things, HE believes all things, HE hopes all things, HE endures all things. GOD never fails …”
 
Most recently, we have looked at verse 7, with what seems to be Paul just quickly giving us a few more characteristics of love on his way to wrapping up his point. In it, he says, “(Love) bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
 
We learned that love “bearing” all things literally describes love as covering, concealing, or hiding something—thus protecting them. In fact, we learned how the root word for this that Paul used here in First Corinthians 13:7, was the word for the roof of a house. Therefore, love covers all!
 
We then looked at what Paul says at the end of verse 7 of how love “endures all things” which describes how love has staying under power – meaning love will put up with and tolerate a lot more in others than our flesh would like to. So love endures all!
 
Last week, we looked at the other two characteristics of love in this verse that says, “love believes all things, hopes all things.”
 
The phrase “love believes all things” describes believing the best in everyone. In other words, love is not cynical by nature. No, it’s not pessimistic, but it trusts by default. Therefore, love tends towards giving people the benefit of the doubt. However, this does not mean that love is gullible and will accept just anything as the truth. What it does mean, however, is that while love might certainly be aware of the truth, it chooses to magnify something else instead. In other words, while love is not blind (contrary to what the world likes to say), it does focus on the positives in the other person more than their negatives. 
 
But I like the Living Bible’s translation because it says that love “will always believe in him (the person they are loving).” The New Living Translation puts it this way – Love “never loses faith (in others)” This obviously describes how love will believe in people, and never quit on them. To me, this is more of the idea that is being expressed here – believing in another person, not simply believing everything they tell you. 
 
Then we looked at what it means that love “hopes all things” and found that the New Testament term hope describes a confident expectation of something good in the future. So when it comes to this description of love, we can see that love has more of an expectation of something good tied to it. Therefore, if I am loving someone else, then I will have a similar hope for them – that is, I will hope, wish, desire, and expect blessings to befall them. I will hope these good things will happen to them like I would that they happen to me.
 
Yes, if I love someone, I will desire that they are blessed, I’ll wish God’s best for them, and I’ll be optimistic that they will receive what He wants for them. But if I “hope all” for them, then that means that I will have a confident expectation of those good things happening in their life.  
 
And we learned that God certainly does believe in us and hope for us!
 
You see, sometimes we think God is done with us because of the mistakes that we’ve made. We think we’ve nullified His plan for our lives because we’ve turned from His plan too many times. But when we consider Israel, we must conclude that God will never quit on us—especially when our covenant is written not in the blood of bulls and goats, but in the precious blood of Jesus Christ! Amen!    
 
Praise God, church, God will never, ever, quit on us! If He began a good work, He will see it through! He is faithful even when we are faithless, and He was, is, and evermore shall be the God of hope! Amen!
 
LOVE NEVER DIES
 
But like I said, I believe we are rounding up our look at God’s amazing love this week. And we are doing this by looking at the last characteristic of love given to us in First Corinthians chapter 13 when the apostle Paul begins verse 8 by saying, “love never fails.”
 
Now this is yet another time when understanding the original language and looking at other translations becomes important. The reason is because when see the word “fails” here, our mind might go towards “failing” in the sense of failing to succeed at something like we fail a test. But that could lead one to believe that Paul was saying that “love never loses” or “love always succeeds.” And while it is certainly true that love is the way to victory and is how to be successful in this life and in the kingdom of God, that’s not exactly what “fails” means here.
 
When we study this word “fails,” we can clearly see how it more describes something ending, ceasing, dying, etc.—kind of like when the Bible refers to a flower failing. Therefore, when we are told here that love never fails, the idea is more of love never dying or love never ending.
 
And you don’t even need to know how to look up words to understand this because his point is even more clear as you go on to read what Paul said in the rest of this verse, where he says, “But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.” So it’s like the translators wanted to use various synonyms for “fail” by saying that these other things like prophecies, tongues, and knowledge will “cease” and “vanish away.”
 
So we can conclude that love will NEVER fail, cease, or vanish away. In other words, it will never end. It’s for this reason that I like the following translations: The New Living Translation says, “But love will last forever” and the Message Bible says, “Love never dies.”
 
So this description of love never ending shows us some important things about how love works in our lives – some of which are contrary to the way folks refer to love.
 
In fact, the Greek word that is used to define “fails” literally means to “fall out”—which is interesting because what is something that the world likes to say about love? It likes to describe one “falling in” and “falling out” of love. But what did we just learn? It’s that the literal translation of this phrase is that “love never falls out.” Therefore, according to the Scriptures, love is never something that we fall in & out of.
 
This is important to understand because how many times have we heard of someone who started off falling head over heels in love with someone and then, after some time, they say those “feelings” that they had for them have changed and that they have “fallen out” of love with them. This is not the love of God, church.
 
No, if we are being honest, what is happening is that person who says this, is falling in and out of “feelings.” But the truth is love is not a feeling. For example, what do people like to say when they “fall out of love?” They say, “I just don’t feel for you the same way I used to feel about you.” This, again, indicates that to them, love is a feeling or an emotion. No! The truth is that when someone says they have fallen out of love with someone, really what they are saying is that they have “fallen out of feelings.”
 
It is actually impossible to “fall out of” the true love of God. Why? Because love is an act of your will and is not an emotion or a feeling! No, real love never ENDS because it’s a spiritual virtue and while the way we feel can certainly change, spiritual realities never change! Therefore, because God never changes, His love is the same yesterday, today, and forevermore!
 
GOD’S LOVE NEVER FAILS
 
Now as we’ve been doing throughout this series, let’s delve into His love as we round up our study. So if love never fails, then that means God never fails – which teaches us that God never ends and, therefore, His love never ends. 
 
In fact, this is what that very popular “praise phrase” that we see throughout the Old Testament is saying – You know, the one that says, “For the Lord is good and His mercy endures forever.”
 
You see, the phrase “His mercy endures forever” describes that hesed kind of covenant love (which we will get into here in a moment). But the word “endures” was added by the translators. Therefore, this phrase literally reads as so – His steadfast, covenant love is forever – which is essentially saying the same thing as First Corinthians 13:8 – that His love never ends.
 
So what does this mean that God’s love never ends, ceases, or dies? It simply means that we can never see the end of His love. He doesn’t quit on His people. He keeps on loving us no matter how far out there we get or how long we are out there. His love is forever, and it knows no end. 
 
Church, this is evidently an important truth for us to understand about God’s love because of how much we see it highlighted throughout the Scriptures. Let me give you a couple more places where we see it mentioned in different ways …  
 
One is found in Jeremiah 31:3, where the Lord said to His people through the Prophet Jeremiah –“The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying: ‘Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love;
Therefore, with lovingkindness I have drawn you.’”
 
This was again another time where God’s people had been disciplined for forsaking God’s living waters. Yet, even in their failure, the Lord said, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” And everlasting love sounds to me like a love that never fails, amen?
 
Can you hear it today? Can you hear the Lord saying to you this same thing, church? “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” This is what the Spirit is saying to His church right now!
 
In another example from the ministry of Jeremiah, we’ve seen what the Lord told His people in Lamentations 3:22. This was a verse we looked at last week, but I want you to notice something about this passage of Scripture: “Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not.”
 
Now the Lord’s “mercies” is describing that covenant, faithful love of God. So it is through that love that God’s people are not consumed – meaning that it was because of God’s unending love that they had not been totally destroyed. In other words, even though they had messed up and gotten themselves into this situation, through the Lord’s faithful love, He had not let them be utterly destroyed. And why was that? Well, he went on to say exactly why – “because His compassions fail not.”
 
Now compassion is certainly a fruit of love and here we see how this love of God “fails not”—meaning, it never ends like First Corinthians 13:8 declares. So through the countless times that we see His steadfast love & mercy being described as being forever, it is crystal clear that God’s amazing love never fails.
 
COVENANT LOVE
 
But as promised, I want us now to look at this Old Testament word that was used to describe God’s love in many of these verses, because I believe it will teach us a lot about this aspect of love never dying.
 
The Hebrew word that is used in these verses to describe God’s lovingkindness, mercy, & faithfulness is the word hesed.
 
In Exodus 34:6-7, this is how God revealed Himself to Moses when He gave him the Ten Commandments on the two tablets of stone. In this story, we are told – “Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”
 
Now when it says in verse 5 that he proclaimed to Moses the name of the Lord, it is important to understand that he was not just declaring a term or title. To us, proclaiming a name might mean simply saying, “Bill, Joe, or Mary,” but in their day, the name of a person was their character, nature, and personality. So what God was proclaiming here was who He was. That’s important when considering what He said next as He passed before Moses …
 
In verse 6, the Lord said concerning Himself – “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth …”
 
So this is who God chose to reveal Himself as to His servant, Moses – As merciful, gracious, longsuffering, and then notice this … as “abounding in goodness and truth.” The word that is used for “goodness” here is the word hesed. So God described Himself as being filled with and overflowing in this virtue. So let’s look at what hesed is …
 
This word is oftentimes translated as “lovingkindness and mercy” and it describes “unfailing, faithful, and steadfast love.” One translation calls it “loyal love” because the core idea of this term communicates loyalty & faithfulness within a relationship. It is for this reason that hesed is closely related to God’s covenant with His people, Israel. Therefore, as it relates to the concept of love, hesed expresses God’s faithfulness to His people.
 
Now while we are not as in tune with the concept of covenant in our society today, I believe that something that we are certainly familiar with can help us understand this concept of hesed – the marriage covenant.
 
You see, while marriages do not mean nearly as much to our modern-day society as they used to, the Scriptures teach us that a marriage is a covenant, not simply a contract. In other words, a marriage means much more to the Lord than it does to most people. Contracts can have a time limit on them, but marriages are meant to be permanent. Therefore, the concepts of loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness are, in the eyes of the Lord, a big part of a marriage. Now this is oh so important when it comes to this part of God’s nature – hesed.
 
You see, I see hesed being perfectly illustrated by a marriage where both partners see their union as a covenant, and because of this, they place a premium on being faithful & loyal towards each other while also being steadfast in their love for one another. And this is certainly consistent with what we see in the Scriptures, because how many times do we see our relationship with the Lord being compared to a marriage?
 
In the Old Testament, we see how God saw Himself as Israel’s husband. Let me show you a couple of examples of this:
 
Isaiah 54:5 says, “For your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is His name;”
 
Jeremiah 31:31-32 also says, "Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah— not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the LORD.”
 
And while we have these verses that clearly say God was Israel’s husband, there are a ton of verses that come from that same perspective. However, they emphasize more of Israel’s failure to be a good wife to Him.
 
Yes, there are countless verses throughout the Prophets in particular, that describe the “harlotry” of Israel even though they were married to the Lord. In other words, these verses describe how they were unfaithful to Him by turning to other gods and simply not loving Him with all their hearts. He often called this “playing the harlot.”
 
HOSEA & GOMER
 
One of our greatest examples of this is found in the Book of Hosea where the Lord sought to illustrate to His chosen people both their unfaithfulness and His heart to pursue them through His hesed.
 
Now the story of Hosea is a unique one, but one with profound truths about God’s faithfulness.
 
In short, the nation of Israel was in the middle of one of those times where their unfaithfulness to God was on full display. Yes, they were turning to other natural means of defending themselves which included other nations & their gods. To the Lord, this was the same as adultery.  
 
So what the Lord told His prophet to do was to go take for himself a prostitute named Gomer to be his wife – for (as Hosea 1:2 says) “the land has committed great harlotry by departing from the Lord.”
 
So this marriage to the harlot was meant to illustrate to God’s people how they were like the harlot in His covenant with them. Like we’ve seen, God’s covenant with His people on Sinai was like a marriage covenant. The Lord wanted His people’s heart – for them to love Him with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength and to certainly remain faithful to Him and Him alone. So whenever His people would turn to other gods, He saw it as them committing spiritual adultery against Him.
 
So during this marriage with Gomer, she and Hosea had three children – all of which were meant to illustrate the fruit of His bride’s unfaithfulness. Yet after even this, Gomer left Hosea to be with another man. However, the Lord told Hosea to take back Gomer who, by the laws of the times, should have been stoned to death. And not only was he to take her back, but he was also to buy her back – showing us the power of redemption. 
 
You see, the man whom she ran to, as she embraced her adultery whole heartedly, required payment to release her back to her husband. The law allowed for Hosea to punish Gomer harshly, but instead, he received her back into his home and paid the man she went with to “redeem” her (See Hosea 3:2).
 
Hosea 2:19-20 puts it beautifully: In it, the Lord says, “I will betroth you to Me forever; Yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and justice, in lovingkindness and mercy; I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord.”
 
This pursuit of Israel by the Lord amidst her unfaithfulness is such a beautiful picture of the Lord’s faithfulness to His church today. It is so easy to see how the Lord might be quick to judge us or terminate our relationship with Him because of how far we can fall from His glory, but the lesson of God’s undying love for us is what is on full display in the Book of Hosea.
 
THE SUBJECT OF MARRIAGE & DIVORCE
 
Have you ever wondered why the Lord dealt so strongly with the subject of marriage and divorce? Why does He put such an importance on the sanctity of marriage? I believe it is for the same reason as we are looking at today – that in the Lord’s love for us, He will never divorce us! This is His attitude towards His covenant with us!
 
Now in describing this, let me say this lest anyone receives any condemnation that is not intended: I (and the Lord) understand that a lot of us have had some difficult prior marriages. In some of these, we had abusive spouses. In others, we had unfaithful spouses. In even others, we ourselves were not walking with the Lord the way we might be today and simply didn’t know what we know now. No matter the situation, DO NOT let the enemy or your own heart condemn you over the past. Just allow the revelation of God’s love to impact your heart and see how this relates to your covenant with Him.
 
We see Scripture after Scripture declaring how great is the faithfulness of our God, how He will never leave us nor forsake us, how He is the friend that sticks closer than a brother, and how even when our mother and father forsake us, He will stand by us. Time and time again, the Scriptures reinforce how the Lord is faithful, even when we are faithless. And faithfulness is best illustrated in the marriage covenant. If a husband is faithful, then that means that He will never leave His bride’s side for another. If he is faithful, then he will never lie to her. If he is faithful, he will never violate her trust by being joined to another.
 
And this is the core reason why God is opposed to divorce. It is because it is completely opposite to how He treats us. He never stops loving us! He will never put us away! Nothing can pluck us out of His hand, and nothing can separate us from His love! Nothing!
 
Just like the song we love to sing… Great is His faithfulness! This declaration was made in the Book of Lamentations where the nation of Israel was in a bad place, having forsaken their Lord and His ways. But, again, He is faithful even when we are faithless.
 
So when it comes to the covenant relationship between Hosea & Gomer, their marriage is a love story, but not the fairy tale kind. Love will always end with “a happily ever after” because it never ends. Amen!