Dear Friends,
Unbelievers sometimes seek to taunt Christians by saying something like,
“Your faith has been around a long time and look at the mess the world
is in!! Now that makes as much sense as a man calling his doctor a quack
because the medicine the doctor prescribed which the man did not take
did not cure him! Today’s attached devotional makes a similar point! God
bless you!

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• I Corinthians 13:1-7 (ESV)

  1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 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. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

  4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

“It is were not so tragic it would be funny that modern man dismisses Christianity and the Christian way of love on the ground that it does not work. Will anyone in his right mind claim that any of the modern alternatives do work? Certainly the stress on the self-centered life does not lead to blissful happiness; only fierce competition results when self-absorbed people confront each other…. Selfishness leads ultimately to suffering ⎯ for everyone. Where is there a system that works better than the way of Christian love?” [Leon Morris, Testaments of Love: A Study of Love in the Bible, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981), p. 278-279]