TRUE LOVE BY TU FACE – An Ultra-dimensional Remix

It is interesting to realise how much human love reveals and shades light on the unsoundable mystery of God’s love. The other day I was listening to TuFace Idibia’s ‘True Love’… I don’t know how it happened: my ear was hearing one thing and my mind was hearing a different thing. These two parts of me were operating on different frequencies. One was in the realm of rhythm and rhymes, the other was busy trying to decipher spiritual truths. In the meanwhile, there was this constant interaction between human love and divine love, and I will like to share the result with you. But first let’s listen to the rhymes and wordings of the original.

LINE 1: You see true love she used to live here before, but I got messed up and threw her out the door. Now I don’t feel airy like I used to before, all the things we used to say, all the way we used to dey, how we used to play. Now there’s an emptiness inside of my soul, and it seems my unmanliness is start to show. And God knows I cannot take it no more that’s why I am asking you how do I come up with you.

REFRAIN: See, I’m looking for someone that satisfies me, looking for someone that loves me completely, looking for someone that shows me true love. And I’m searching for a kind of possibility, someone that truly loves me for me, someone that come and be my true love...

LINE 2: Now loneliness is the order of my day. Since she’s gone I feel like fading away. Lord, na die I dey, Oh God. See, na she bin dey mek my head bin dey swell; now that she’s gone I feel like jumping in a well. Oh! I cannot take it no more, that why I am asking you how do I come up with you.

True love, True love, True love, where’s my true love? True love, True love, True love, where’s my true love?

The first observation we would like to make is that the “True Love” of the song is unidentified, that is to say, she is not named. We are only told that “she used to live here before”. The song-writer goes ahead to give us a picture of what life is without his True Love (see line 1 and 2). In the refrain, he tries a qualitative description of True Love. Then he concludes by asking an inviting riddle-like question: “where is my true love?” It was as if TuFace was asking: “From the information and description I have given above, can any of you guess who and where my true love is?” The answer we propose to this riddle is, GOD IS OUR TRUE LOVE.

To justify this position, let us go back to our song, to the description of True Love that we have in the refrain. Four main definitions of True Love can be deduced: True love is (a) Someone that satisfies me (b) Someone that loves me completely (c) Someone that shows me true love (d) Someone the truly loves me for me. Now, in the first place, we ask the question: who is that person that really satisfies me? My parents? My girlfriend? My boyfriend? My wife? My best friend? My child? No, nobody can truly satisfy me. My parents may satisfy my material needs by providing me with all the money and provision I need but they may not be able to satisfy my need for independence or for knowledge. My girlfriend may be able to give me all the emotional comfort and physical pleasure I need but would that really satisfy me? No! Experience shows that this kind of satisfaction is momentary and ephemeral. The tensions experienced even in the most rosy relationships attest to the fact that they are not satisfactory. My best friend can be as caring as he or she can be disobliging. So in the final analysis, the truth remains that only God can truly satisfy me. “How do you mean?”, you may ask. Well, the truth that it is only in God that we find true satisfaction is a certitude of faith and only with an attitude of faith can it be fully appreciated and experienced. But it is not an assertion that is unreasonable. If it is true that it is God who made us, who made us the way we are with our insatiable heart, then it follows that He has got the resources to fill in that space of all our longings for love. People normally make budgets according to the size of their revenue. You never see a Coca Cola bottle that is filled to the brim; there is always this empty space between the neck of the bottle and the cork. The producer intentionally leaves the space though he always has enough of the Coke drink to fill it. Of course anyone can fill the space perhaps with water or any other drink whatsoever, but if you want to get the unique and authentic Coca Cola taste, you would have to go to the Coca Cola producer. Human beings are like Coke bottles, we are never full, never satisfied, and never really satisfiable except in and by God, our Creator. Any attempt to satisfy us outside God is only superficial. This is what the venerable and well-informed St Augustine meant when he asserted: Lord, our hearts were made for you and they are restless until they rest in You. God is that Someone that satisfies me.

TuFace also presented True Love as “Someone that loves me completely”. The key word here is ‘completely’. It means perfectly, absolutely, totally, utterly and thoroughly. Who on earth can boast of loving someone completely? Who can boast of being loved completely? As a matter of fact, human love is by its very nature fractioned and rationed. We usually have many objects of our love; nobody loves just one thing or one person. We normally ration out our love to various persons and interests. For example, I love my mother, I love my sister and brothers, I love my dad, I love my friends, I love football, I love philosophy, I love plantain chips, and of course I love myself. You see how I shared out my love to various people, interests and things? I can’t therefore love anyone completely simply because I don’t have a complete love. This is true for every human being. The case is simple: (1) Only someone who is perfect can love perfectly, absolutely and completely, for you can not give what you don’t have. (2) No human being is perfect. (3) Therefore no human being can love completely. If like TuFace you are looking for “someone to love you completely”, I have a suggestion: God. Who is God? God is Love (1John 4:8) God=love. God is love, love is God. He is perfect and complete love, the only One capable of loving completely. He loves each individual uniquely and completely as if that individual soul is the only person in the world. Interestingly, His complete love does not get exhausted because it is eternal and infinite as He Himself is eternal and infinite. God is that Someone that loves me completely.

We go to point 3: Someone that shows me true love. The logic is the same – only someone who has true love can show true love. So I will leave you to reason it out yourselves. First and foremost, you need to find out what true love really means, and then see if that can be applied to any human being in the strict sense of the word. I bet you will discover that though human love can be sincere and true to a certain extent, only God can really show true love. The erudite apostle, Paul tried to express this point when he wrote: “For Christ, while we were still helpless, yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6-8). So just sit and count your blessings, beginning from the gift of life and you will immediately realise that God is that Someone that shows me true love.

The fourth definition is as follows: True Love is Someone that truly loves me for me. Here again the stakes are really high; let’s see who can attain it! Can any human being reach it? Well, it has been observed that we human beings usually place conditions and give reasons for loving another. Listen to this everyday (voiced or unvoiced) expressions of love and you will understand what I mean: I love you because you are so beautiful; the reason why I love mom is that she hardly gets angry; (I love you because) you make me feel good about myself; (I love you because) I guess my life will be incomplete without you; (I love you and like staying around you because) you have a very good sense of humour; (I love you because) it feels good to love and to be loved; I love hardworking people like you; I love you because we are brothers; I love you just because of God; I just love children (i.e. I love you just because you’re a child); I love you just the way you are (in other words, I love you because though you are hot tempered, you can control you anger, though you are not so pretty, you are caring, though you can be very annoying, you are so unpretentious and sincere; in short, I love you because you have a mixture of good and bad qualities that is OK with me) and we can go on and on. You see, we always place conditions to our love for others. For this reason, no one can say he truly loves another person solely for that person’s sake. In other to find that Someone that truly loves me for me, we have to look somewhere else, we have to look up, up to heaven. God is that only Someone. He loves without condition; He gives no reason for loving. Remember we said He is love, i.e. it is in His very nature to love, He cannot but love, He cannot be without loving because He is love. So He loves naturally, spontaneously, freely, without distinction or discrimination, without condition or consideration. It is He who “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45). And even as His murders were hammering nails into His hands and feet, he still loved them with all His heart, and He said this sincere, heart-felt prayer for them: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” The conclusion is that God is that Someone who truly loves me for me because He is the only one really capable of loving unconditionally.

Friends! You may now agree with me that the cause of many frustrations and depressions in our today’s world and time is due to the fact that many people do not really know who their True Love is and where to find her. Guys generally think that True Love is found in the ideal lady: beautiful, shapely, sexy, tender, understanding, intelligent. Girls presume that True Love is Mr Right: Tall, brawny, rich, caring, generous, handsome and cool. The result of this kind of extrapolation is often disappointment. I am even persuaded to think that many of the failures in relationship may be God’s way of telling the couples involved that there is a higher and more perfect love than what they experience and to which they should also aspire. The truth is that human love is noble and ennobling, worthy to be sort after and enjoyable when attained. There is hardly anything as beautiful as the feeling of being in love. But, but, I will save you a lot of trouble by telling you that despite its merits, human love is always imperfect, incomplete and compromised by inherent tensions. God is our only true love and human love is true only to the extent that it corresponds and reflects the true love of God.

If you see TuBaba, tell him I have found his True Love, the True Love of the world, our True Love. You might have ‘messed up (by sinning) and threw Her out of the door’ of your lives. And now, you don’t feel peaceful like you used to. Perhaps you are now feeling this emptiness inside of your soul and your insecurity has become so blatant. May be you’re currently experiencing this deep loneliness that no-one or no-thing seems to be able to fill, and you feel like fading away, like jumping in a well. I’ve got a suggestion: Repent, go back to God, your True Love. He will welcome you it a big bear embrace and your life will once more be animated with peace and joy.

Life in short

People, Life! Life is a web. You won't understand it until you find the thread that keeps it hanging. I mean that without God life makes no sense.

SEX HAS A PRIZE TAG: A WORD TO TEENAGE GIRLS

Many young people today believe that the emotion love should automatically lead to making love. This belief can be costly because outside of marriage, sex has a price tag.

Most young people get information about sex from TV, movies and the internet. These media usually tell a false story about sex or at most a story that is not completely true. They present sex as fun, good and as almost without consequences. Two out of these three are correct. Sex is good and fun but there are consequences. God created sex; it is a beautiful thing. He created it for a purpose and for a specific context and that context is marriage. Outside of that context, it will cost you. The question is: what does it cost and does it worth it?

What is most regrettable is that many young people go into sexual relationship without a good knowledge of what they are going into and the consequences that follow it. It is painful to hear, just after the damage has been done, that ‘Nobody told me’. Life is not a drama rehearsal. You are not here for a practice; you are living life. You haven’t been promised tomorrow, and the choices that you make today will determine what your future will look like. And for many of you, there will be no going back, no second chance. You will have to do it right the first time.

What is the price? If you have sex outside of marriage, you will pay Physically, Emotionally and Spiritually. Perhaps you may escape the physical cost, you can’t escape all, and for each of these, the stakes are very high. There is a price we all pay as individuals when we make wrong choices.

PHYSICALLY

The number one thing teenagers are afraid of when they have sex is pregnancy. But why the fear? Pregnancy is not a disease. It is meant to happen at some point in your life. If it happens prematurely as in teenagers, it becomes a problem, and then the choices are terrible. There is no easy way out. The good choice was before the sexual intercourse and the pregnancy but with the pregnancy, you have no good alternative. Abortion is painful. 80% of all women who have had an abortion said if they could go back, they would choose something different. It is not like going to the dentist to have a tooth-pull. There is the awful possibility of death and accidental damage of the reproduction tissues and organs. There are also permanent and emotional consequences to that choice that you don’t just get over it.

Parenting is not easy either. Imagine a fifteen year old girl who has to parent a child. She should be thinking about playing, having fun with others and studying, but she has to think about feeding a baby. Do you realize that 87% of young teenagers who parent, both they and their child will live below the poverty line for at least 10 years, most of them for the rest of their lives? It is a positive option but it is not an easy one.

Before you go to bed tonight, 12,000 teenagers like you will get a sexually transmitted disease. That amounts to 3,000,000 every year. In the 60s, there were 5 known sexually transmitted disease. Today, there 50, and 30% of these are absolutely incurable. That means that once you’ve got it, it’s there for life.

You know, sex don’t just happen; there is a time one decides to have sex or when one decides not to look at her options. I know a 13 year old who had to do a complete hysterectomy because she had sex and contracted gonorrhea that so badly affected her fallopian tubes and uterus. She will never have children. One night, one choice and she is permanently scarred for life. One day she will meet a man she loves and wants to marry, but she has to say to him: "You know what? I will never have children." If she can go back to make a different choice, would she? Yes! Can she? No! Her choice was made. There are other diseases as bad as gonorrhea or even worse. There are many people who find out that they are dying at 35 because of the choices they made when they were 17. And there is AIDS. AIDS doubles among teenagers every 14 months. It is now the 6^th leading cause of death between 16 and 24 years old.

What are teenagers told to do to prevent them from the disease that will kill them? Condom, Safe-sex. Statistics are not constant about the failure rate of condom for AIDS but we can work it out. We know with some surety that the failure rate of condom for pregnancy is 17-30%, and there are 3-5 days a month when you can get pregnant, that it about 100 hours. But AIDS can be gotten every single second of sexual intercourse. Only women can get pregnant but everybody can get AIDS. What is that doing to our statistics? It is heightening the failure rate of condoms for AIDS. The sperm cell is 150 times larger than an HIV cell. Imagine it: 300 million HIV cells will fit into the space of the ‘full stop’ at the end of this sentence. How many of these cells will it take to infect you with a disease that will kill you? Just one! Two venereal diseases – human papilloma virus (the main cause of cervical cancer) and Chlamydia (the leading cause of infertility) – are carried by at least one of every three teenage girls who have sex. Venereal diseases and AIDS don’t always show symptoms, so many people don’t even know they have them. And you are being told to use a condom to prevent them. At the pack of a condom, it is written: “Don’t expose this material to extreme cold or extreme heat.” This condition can hardly be met as the condom travels from the manufacturers’ factory to the shop where it is sold. Very likely before the condom gets to the users, it is already damaged.

EMOTIONALLY

What if there were no physically prices to pay? What if we didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant? There will still be emotional side-effects. There is no condom for the heart.

God created sex to have a bonding effect on our lives. It is meant to take one special relationship and bond it together for life, but many have started using sex for fun, as a game and it does not mean anything any more. The average length of a relationship for people under nineteen once sex becomes involved is 3 weeks. So young people come together because they think they are in love and after 3 weeks someone who was special before isn’t that special anymore and they move on to the next relationship, most of the time leaving one another emotionally torn apart. You know, Sex can make you feel like you’re experiencing true love. That makes a breakup very painful, which can lead to deep depression, hopelessness, and even suicide. In addition, this deep pain makes it hard to trust again. Once a person’s heart is broken, they fear another broken commitment in the future. Many, once they’ve been burned, just give up hope.

Many people experience deep remorse after having sex before marriage. There is often the feeling of being used, a feeling that you’ve given up something precious, and all for nothing. Premarital sex often produces regret and remorse which lasts for years. One young wife says, “I would do anything, ANYTHING, to forget the sexual experiences I had before I met my husband . . . the pictures of the past and the other men go through my head, and it’s killing any intimacy. The truth is, I’ve been married to this wonderful man for eight years and I have never been ‘alone’ in the bedroom with him.”

Apart from the guilt feeling of doing something morally wrong that comes after sexual intercourse, young people also have a sense of lose of the self-respect. People are not things. Uncommitted sex treats them as things for pleasure satisfaction and that hurts and wrecks their self-esteem. They as a result often seek any kind of attention, even if it’s in other demeaning sexual relationships. Girls are more vulnerable in this respect because girls are more likely to think of sex as a way to "show you care." They're more likely to see sex as a sign of commitment in the relationship. If a girl expects a sexual interlude to be loving, she may very well feel cheated and used when the boy doesn't show a greater romantic interest after the event. As one 15-year-old girl describes her experience: "I didn't expect the guy to marry me, but I never expected him to avoid me in school." Moreover there is a sense of unworthiness that comes from doing what one knows she is not supposed to do.

My dear friends, premarital sex will corrupt your character. Good character includes honesty, fairness, decency, caring, self-control, etc. If you start messing with sex before marriage, your self-control will suffer, and sex can almost take over your whole life. Sexual addictions are out of control today and it expresses itself in promiscuity, incest, pornography, masturbation and sexual harassment, just to mention some of them.

Sex before marriage can also turn a good relationship bad. It can easily take over your relationship and stop other very important dimensions of the relationship from developing – leaving a one-track relationship with no solid foundation.

Why take risks that can cause you grief the rest of your life? Your future marriage will be much happier if you don’t have to worry about – or recover from – the negative emotional consequences of sex before marriage. Without sex, your relationship can still be great fun as you grow together, develop your own identities, chart your exciting future, hone your skills, pursue your interests, make more friends and nurture your spirit. Waiting will help each of you develop discipline and great respect for each other. It also makes for an awesome honeymoon!

Sex certainly can be a source of great pleasure and joy. But as should be amply clear sex also can be the source of deep wounds and suffering. What makes the difference is the relationship within which it occurs. Sex is most joyful and fulfilling - most emotionally safe as well as physically safe - when it occurs with a loving, total, and binding commitment. Historically, we have called that marriage. Sexual union is then part of something bigger - the union of two persons' lives.

Sex without commitment is very risky for the heart

SPIRITUALLY

Spiritually, sin cuts us off from God, and this is the most serious consequence of premarital sex. The loss of God’s friendship and the endangering of your soul is the greatest price you can pay for having sex now. We know that God forbids sex outside of marriage because it is not in line with His purpose of creating it, and He feels really bad about it. This is understandable. If you purchased a gift for a friend and before you can give it to that friend, he or she steals it! Wouldn’t you be upset? Imagine, then, how God feels when a person engages in premarital sex, abusing the gift that God has provided.

It is true that throughout the Bible, there is no place where it is written: ”thou shall not have sex before marriage”, but the Bible is clear that that is what God demands of us in line with his purpose, which is for our own good. In the Scripture, God also warns us of the deadly spiritual consequences of sexual sins. The apostle Paul, who wrote much of the New Testament, placed particular emphasis on the benefits of sexual purity and the disruptive impact of sexual immorality. If you read the sixth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, you will understand that casual sex is definitely not as trivial as satisfying a physical hunger. Bodies are important because God has bought them into being and will raise them. Notice also how St. Paul makes it abundantly clear that pre-marital sex is not a mini-marriage, but it is encroaching upon the holy ground of marriage in an unacceptable way. Physical union should not take place outside of a “one flesh” (i.e. marriage) union. The point is that to be united with someone other than one’s spouse is to tear oneself away from Christ with whom we are spiritually united as Christians.

Dear younger ones, God loves you and does not want you to dishonour your body by premarital sex or fornication. His recommendation is that you “Flee from sexual immorality. Every sin that a person does is outside the body; but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body” (I Corinthians 6:18). The implications of this statement are fairly clear. It can be read as “All sins are bad, but premarital sex is really bad.”

But why should you risk losing God’s favour, condemning yourself to hell and suffering other physical and emotional pain because of a momentary pleasure that you can actually save for the right time? The cost is really high and it doesn’t worth the trouble.

Our bodies, our hearts, our relationships, and our souls are not made for premarital sex. We're made for enduring love.

BALAK, BALAAM AND THE SPIRITUAL LESSONS

I want to tell you a story. Long, long time ago, about 1250 years before Jesus was born, far away in the desert of Zin which is not far from the Suez Canal that separated Africa from the Middle East, there was a group of people who was fleeing from slavery and looking for a promised land. These people were called Israelites or The Sons of Israel. They needed to pass through Kri-Hareseth and Dibon which were districts in Moab, a then powerful country. But Balak king of Moab would not allow the Israelites pass through his country because he was both suspicious and afraid of the Israelites. Knowing that the Israelites would insist on passing through his country by force, he sent words to one soothsayer-prophet called Balaam, asking him to come and curse the Israelites for him. This is how he put it: “Look, a people coming from Egypt has overrun the whole countryside; they have halted at my doorstep. I beg you come and curse this people for me, for they are stronger than I am. We may then be able to defeat them and drive them out of the country. For this I know: anyone you bless is blessed, anyone you curse is accursed.”

Well, Balaam agreed to go with Balak’s envoy but he insisted that it was on the condition that he will do only what Yahweh commands him to do. He told the messengers Balak sent: “Even if Balak gives me the sun and the moon, I can not go against the orders of Yahweh my God… How can I curse someone whom God has not cursed, how denounce someone whom God has not denounced?” Three times Balak urged Balaam to curse the Israelites, offering at each occasion, a burnt-offering of seven bulls and seven rams. But all these came to nothing: Balaam continued to bless rather than curse.

Balak was frustrated, the people of Israelites were stronger than him and the soothsayer would not curse them. God has blessed them, no enemy can hurt them; they were chosen, they were favoured, no weapon fashioned against them would prosper.

But Balak did not give up. He rather changed his tactics. “If I can get them to anger this their God”, he said to himself, “if I can get them to sin against this God that protects them and gives them strength and victory, then they will not be as powerful and I can fight and defeat them.” So he called a secret meeting of all the women of Moab. He advised them to go to the camp of the Israelites and seduce their men to sin with them and lure them into worshipping Baal. The plan worked well. God was very angry with the Israelites that he allowed a disastrous plague to come on them and 24,000 of them died as a result. And that is the end of my story. See Numbers 21-24; 31:6 for more details.

The moral of the story is that our enemy, the devil has no power to harm us as far as God is with us and as far as we remain faithful to God. Now the Devil knows this very well so he uses tactics 2, which is to get us sin against God, to create enmity between us and God, to alienate us from God. So he sends us temptations just as Balak did to the Israelites, we who like the Israelites are on our journey to the Promised Land (heaven). He knows that if he succeeds in making us fall out of grace with God, he will be able to deal with us almost as he wills.

The sole aim of the devil, the worst that the devil can do is to see the righteous fall out of favour with God. It is for us therefore to take care so that we don’t fall into the trickery of the devil. It is for us to stand up to him strong in faith. I tell you this story not only because I want you to be holy but also because I want you to persevere in holiness and to realize that that is the best state to be in. and may the Holy Spirit help you to understand what these words mean.

(This is an extract from my letter written JSS 2 Students of Ss Simon and Jude Seminary, Kuje, Abuja)

I WANT TO SPEAK IN THE TONGUE

According to Mark 16:17, speaking in tongues is one of the signs that are associated with believers. Paul names it in his letter to the Corinthians as one of the gifts of the Holy Sprit. In the fourteenth chapter where he valorises spiritual gifts as regards their relevance to the Christian community, he gives less importance to speaking in tongues saying that it would be much better for one to prophesy than for one to speak in tongues. Above all these, the apostle advises that we should make love our aim and aspiration for “if there are prophesies, they will be done away with; if tongues, they will fall silent” (1 Cor. 13:8) but love will last unto eternity. It is the perfection of all spiritual gift, and “once perfection comes all imperfect things will be done away with” (1Cor 13:9). So I would prefer to speak in the tongue of love than to speak in tongues. And what does it mean to speak in the tongue of love?

To answer this question, we first try to define what we mean by the tongue of love. The tongue of love is the language of God and the language of God is the Word of God and God has only one Word and that is love. The Word of God (which is identical with God – cf. John 1:1) that became flesh in Jesus is nothing but a personification of love. We can actually say that this love is the Spirit of God, His essence, and when He speaks, it is this Holy Spirit of His that communicates. We call the Sacred Scripture the Word of God and rightly so because though written by men, each word was written under the breath of the Holy Spirit. It was God who was speaking and the Holy Spirit inspired the human authors to put down in intelligible words the one Word of God. That is why, I think the Bible is that voluminous. Poor human beings with their limited faculties were trying to put down in human language the one-worded language of God. If God Himself were to write the Bible, the Bible would have been one little sheet with just one word on it – love.

How then does one speak in this tongue of God? We happen to have an example in the Scripture. It is narrated in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. On the day of Pentecost, we are told, after spending 9 days in prayer and expectation in the Upper Room, the apostles received the Holy Spirit. First there was a sudden violent wind that filled the room in which they were. Then there was a big fire which separated into flames and rested on the head of each of them. The fire got into them and became the ‘gift of tongues’. I don’t think they were speaking in tongues in the normal understanding of the expression. There were not speaking intelligible or mysterious words. They were speaking in their everyday language, perhaps Aramaic or Greek. What made the difference was that their words were backed up with the Spirit of God which transformed those words into the tongue of love, for they were saying nothing other than the good news of love, the love of a God who became man and died a shameful death just to save us from sin and death by His raising to life. It is not therefore surprising that everyone there, regardless of region and language was able to understand what they were saying. The language of love is a universal language which everyone understands.

The illustration above was a miracle. It doesn’t happen ordinarily. But there is an ordinary and everyday way of speaking in the tongue of love. The tongue of love is spoken more in act than in words. It consists in loving the other as Jesus loves us. Self-denial is one of the principle character for that is exactly how Jesus showed His love for us – “He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming human as we are; and being in every way like a human being, He was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.”(Phil. 2:6-8) “No one can have greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.”(John 15:13). So speaking in the tongue involves a kind of dying to oneself God’s sake, and no one can claim to love the God he does not see if he does not love the brother he sees. (cf. 1 John 4:20). In practical terms, it means being patient with the other, not being jealous or boastful, not being rude, always ready to sacrifice rather than seek one’s advantage or even one’s legitimate rights, not taking offence or storing grievances, never rejoicing in wrong doing, being zealous for the cause of justice and truth, and ready to make allowances, to excuse the other (cf. 1 Cor. 13: 4-7). As I said, this is the language everyone can understand, it is the language that God speaks, it is the noblest of all aspiration and that is why I want to speak in this tongue. I invite you to aspire towards the same perfection for that is the ultimate purpose of our being.