If God is, inherently and essentially, Love - the eternal community of self-giving love that is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - and the essential, defining nature of humanity is that we have been created and called as image-bearers of this God, then it would seem to follow that the ability and longing to give and receive love is perhaps the most fundamental, defining element of what it means to be genuinely human. Which is perhaps what so emboldened the Apostle Paul to declare:
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, 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 love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. ”
Altogether, as a disciple of Christ in pursuit of Christ-likeness, it is possible that we might achieve a life of MIRACLES: of prophetic, powerful words and world-shaping faith; a life of radical self-emptying generosity and Kingdom witness. (Could it be imagined that any of US might live to know such heights!) But, if these be LOVELESS pursuits, in the end they cannot but become forces and vehicles of our own condemnation.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.”
“...people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.”
Suddenly, it is brought into sharp relief: for the follower of Jesus it is Love, or nothing!