Fred Craddock is the Pastor and Preacher at Cherry Log, Georgia USA.  He is one of this world’s storytellers.  His stories are always poignant, telling, full of insight from the everyday.

Fred Craddock tells this story:[1]

“I preached four nights in a church in Atlanta, a nice, big church with a good crowd, more than I’m used to.  There was a moment in the service in which the Pastor said, “We’ll now have our moments of fellowship.  Greet each other in Christian love,” and you never saw such hugging and kissing and carrying on in your life – people going across the room, and up and down the aisles, and grabbing and hugging.  Somebody came up to me – I was down behind the pulpit – and gave me a great big hug.  It was just really something.  Finally the Pastor had to say, “All right, hold it, hold it. We have to get on with the worship!”  Four nights it was like that!

The last night, he and his wife took me and my wife out to coffee.  He said, “Did you ever see such a family church? Did you ever see such love in your life in a church?”

My wife said, “Yeah, well, yeah, I have.”

He said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “I was there for all four services, and nobody ever spoke to me.”

And do you know what he said? He said, “Well, that was because they didn’t know who you were.”

Do you think the Apostle Paul could be right?  Without love we are no more than a noisy gong or a clanging bell; our words and actions are meaningless without love to guide and motivate them. 

Of all the emotions that the human heart is gifted with Love must be the most complex.  Love will lift us up in tears of joy and cast us down in tears of pain.  Love will heal our heart and break it just as swiftly.  We are often powerless in the face of Love as it drives us onward to greater things consuming us in the heat of its passion.  It is Love which allows the human heart to give of its all in self sacrifice and self-denial.

It is my folly to describe Love as a human emotion.  Love is in some way indefinable.  The gift of love is mysterious in its workings.  Love is spiritual.  We cannot reason why we love, what makes us love or even want to love.  For when we love another we dare to give them our all; we become vulnerable, open to the possibility of hurt and failure and disappointment, equally we run the risk of disappointing those whom we love.  So many for fear of hurt and rejection never venture their all in love and so never find the fullness of life promised to them in Christ.  Like the servant in the parable of the Talents, who hides the gold coin his Master has given him deep within the ground.  Out of sight and safe from harm he keeps the gift his Master has given him but it produces nothing.  Love is of the essence of who and what we are, it is Love, which makes us truly human and truly spiritual beings.

Even the Apostle Paul for all his intelligence and insight and awareness of the things of God finds himself struggling to describe the nature of love.  Paul, in the 13^th Chapter of his letter to the Corinthians, oscillates constantly from the positive to the negative, “ Love is patient and kind, Love is not jealous or conceited or proud.” “Love is happy with the truth, Love is not happy with evil.”  But more than anything Paul recognises that without love we are nothing and all our actions are vain and pointless if love is not at the heart of them.

You may have all the faith needed to move mountains but unless love is there to guide and direct that faith what point would it have? You may sacrifice your very life and give away all you have but what would be the point if no one knew the sacrifice was made out of love for them.  Your actions of sacrifice would be seen as the actions of a fool.  Without Love says Paul, Without Love we are nothing.  We amount to no more than the dry dust from which God formed us.  Without Love we have no life, no spirit, no sense of God’s presence within us, around us.

Maybe Fred Craddock’s story, which I began with, is one you might expect to hear from an American church where sometimes we assume religion is just so much “froth and bubble” – nothing of any real substance. Maybe you are thankful that we don’t indulge in such fripperies as hugging and kissing each other during our time in church.  But perhaps the point of his story is that words and actions cannot cover up for the absence of love.  When love is conspicuous by its absence there is no substitute you shall find that will make everything look and feel all right again.

And so we spend our lives wanting to be loved by others and endeavouring to love others as fully as we can.  “To love and be loved” seems to capture the essence and purpose of our daily living.  It cannot be a coincidence then, that the greatest of the Commandments are based upon Love; to Love the Lord your God and to Love your neighbour as yourself.  And the greatest example of love in all its fullness is the life of our Lord Jesus who did give up everything, sacrificing all, in love, for us.

Our part in this is to find out what it might be like to love as He Loves, to know and experience for ourselves the truest deepest love that has ever been expressed.

Without Love, I am nothing.