Yesterday was quite eventful, wasn’t it? Valentine’s Day is about love
and it’s so real. It’s hard to ignore love, you know. That’s how we are wired.
We are created not of clay but of love. And that’s why a day like this really
leaves no one indifferent. For some of us, it was quite memorable sharing
quality time with that special one. For some others it was rather nostalgic.
With all the red colour everywhere, they could not but recall to mind those
good days when valentine was valentine. Some just had fun observing others do
their thing. And to some others, like my old friend Bassey, it was a bitter cup
of disappointment. Mine was kind of an anticlimax. God has his way of reminding
us that every love here below is but a shadow of True Love. Anyway, valentine
has come and gone and we are not even sure of marking the next one since we
will all be before polling booths voting for the next president of Nigeria.
You sure know the story of St Valentine, the guy behind this tradition.
He is as old as Santa Claus, I guess albeit more real. It was during the reign
of the great Roman Emperor Claudius II, in a time when war was the primary
means of conquest. The Emperor needed a strong army to pursue his course but
men were not readily joining the military. He thought they were being ‘distracted’
from the gallant adventure of war by their wives and so decided to forbid
marriage in the Empire. He reasoned that if men couldn’t get married, they will
be more disposed and available to fight wars. But Valentinus, a middle-aged Priest,
had a different opinion. He thought and taught that marriage was a higher good
than war and loving was nobler than fighting. So he went about secretly and
illegally wedding couples. It wasn’t long that Claudius discovered this and
Valentine was caught and imprisoned. Few hours before his execution, he sent a
short note to all the couples he had wedded: “Let your love for each other be
genuine and remember your Valentine”. He died on 14th February 270.
What a strong testimony of life! He believed in love and died for love’s
sake. In his honour, we have a day we can rightly call, World lovers’ day. But
love is not a matter of a day. Love is an attitude. Love is life. So let love
flow, show love. It is better than showing off. Simply let love flow... That’s all.
You remember the two thieves who died with Jesus on that Good Friday
afternoon? They had a number of things in common: they were guilty of the same
crime, suffered the same sentence and had exactly the same opportunity of
grace, one at His left the other at His right. But one simple detail separates
these two men: One asked to be saved from the cross, the other preferred to be
saved on it; one wanted to be taken down from the cross, the other wished to be
taken up to heaven.
Many Christians of today are pretty much like that thief on the left. We
often pray the same way he prayed. We want a Christ without the cross and a Christianity
of roses and glory only. We like to lay claim to our position as sons and
daughters of God with the reasoning that the Son of God cannot be on the cross.
“If you are the Son of God”, we often say to Him, “save yourself and save us”. “If
You know You are God enough bring me down from this cross of pain and sickness,
misunderstanding and embarrassment, loneliness and lowliness”.
Of course He has the power to bring us down just as He had the power to
come down from the cross Himself. But if He decided to hang on there and die,
it is because there must be certain situations where coming down from the cross
is directly opposed to going up to heaven, where our material comfort and temporal
satisfaction is detrimental to our spiritual good. In such cases, it is infinitely
more profitable to be saved on and by that cross than to be saved from it.
This truth may sound strange to some people because it supposes that
there are instances where suffering and unpleasant situations are more
beneficial than their removal. Well, it may be better to look at it this way.
Our Lord Jesus saved us by His life and love which incidentally involved
suffering and death. And since that day when He died on the cross, suffering, disappointment
and even death have gained an additional meaning. By dying on the cross, the
Son of God gave a new status to the crosses of men. That which was formerly and
purely an instrument of suffering and shame and death, can become in Christ a
means of salvation and exaltation.
Now don’t think I am proposing that one must do nothing to alleviate
suffering and inconveniences in oneself and in others, or worse still that one
should go in search of sufferings. No! What I’m saying is that if there are certain
troubles you must bear, then bear them profitably by bearing them in union with
Christ just as the Good Thief did. We often speak of offering them up to
Christ. It’s all part of carrying our crosses after Him.
Lord, if my being taken down from this cross will cost me my being taken
up to you, I prefer to stay and die on it. Amen.
Going through the readings of today, I was
going to share with you a reflection I had titled “Touching the Untouchables”.
I was going to accentuate the really moving gesture of Jesus touching the
leper. Then I would have presented it as a model for all Christians and indeed
all people of God will. May be we’ll have another opportunity to exploit that;
but for now, in continuing with the subject of yesterday’s reflection, let’s
stay on with the boundless love of God.
If yesterday we saw how His love moved Him to
cure Peter’s mother-in-law, today we witness that love stretched even further. This
time around it was a leper. Now many of us have never encountered a leper. So it
may help our reflection if I describe it a bit to you. It’s an ugly and chronic
disease that disfigures the skin, weakens the muscles and snaps the nerves. In the time of Jesus, it was even more grievous
because leprosy had a social and religious downside: not only was the leper ostracised
from the community but also he was made to feel alienated from God.
When the leper of today’s gospel met Jesus
there was more than one thing at stake. Jesus risked contracting the deadly
disease but even more so, He risked becoming religiously unclean. Yet when the
leper approached Him, He didn’t mind to stretch out His hand to touch the leper
and heal Him. He shared the pain of the man and was even ready to take his
place. And that was indeed the case, for at the end of the story we saw the
restored man leaving his isolation and running into the town to the priest; but
as for Jesus, “it was impossible for Him to enter the town openly {but} He
remained outside in deserted places” (Mark 1:45). They swapped positions, so
much His love for us.
I would like to engrave in our hearts and subconsciousnesses
a firm, unshakable and undaunted conviction concerning the love that God has
for you. As a matter of fact, it is God’s earnest desire that you understand
and appreciate the depth of His love for you. Many of us know John 3:16 by
heart and have somehow gotten used to the saying that God loves us perhaps even
to the extent that it no longer makes much import. So it will be well if you
use the opportunity that the first reading of today gives us to remind
ourselves of the extent of that love.
The Scripture says that in time past, God spoke to our
fathers in various and many ways through the prophets but that in our days, He
has spoken to us by His Son. You see clearly how much God desires to
communicate to us and to establish a relationship with us. He has attempted
various means in the past to achieve this. If it wasn’t through dreams and
visions as in the case of Abraham and Jacob, He would communicate through
oracles. But these means still seemed so inadequate to Him, that He thought to
Himself, “What if I went personally to communicate with these my lovely
creatures one-on-one as a father would chat with his son?” It was thus decided
and so did God come in the person of His divine Son to speak with us not
through intermediaries but personally. That way, at least, He hopes to convince
us of His love for us and win our love too.
If we ever love God, it is because He loved us first and if
we love God, we must express it in the love we show to every person even the
most undeserving of our love.
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.
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 6th 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 youread 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.
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.
At Mass today, the Gospel reading was on the parable of the Talents. I am sure you know the story. One guy was given 5 talents, another 2 and the third was given 1. The master who gave them the talents left everything to their initiative. The first two guys invested their talent profitable but the last guy buried his.
Why on earth did he do that? Well he said it was because he was afraid of the master. He considered the master as a mean gentleman that "reaps where he did not sow and gathers where he did not scatter. How honest that was! How admirable and audacious! He said his mind. And if that is truly the case with his master, we can really lay blames on the poor guy.
Well the guy was wrong in his perception of the master. The story reveals the master as a generous, wise and considerate man. Remember he did not even ask the other two servants to refund him his capital; he gave them but the capital and the profit. This act alone does not potrait someone who reaps where he did not sow.
In reality, friend, man of us are like this third servant in the sense that we have a misguided notion about God. There are not a few people who think God kind of a kill-fun entity out there who places laws against does things that makes us feel good. Some see God as one big mean fellow that punishes us with a guilty conscience when we do some of the things we like to do.
No, that is not God. God is love and whatever he tells us to do, he tells us because he cares about us and because He knows that at the end that won't make us happy. He is calling you and me to us our three Ts: time, treasure and talent . we must not bury them as the third servant erroneously did. We should use them for the betterment of the world, to put a smile in the face of the needy person next door, we should use them to promote justice and right morals wherever we find ourselves. In short, we should us our 3 'T's to build the kingdom of God here on earth. Be sure of this: there is an abundant reward in store for anyone who does this. God will faithfully multiply his or her lot until he or she becomes more or less intoxicated with blessing. I mean it. it's true; I have tried it. May be you can do the same. Try and see. PEACE
I look at the world outside and at the other person Then I look at myself Sometimes I get sober on the inside I ask questions Questions that have always been asked And which resonate every now and then in my heart How did it all come about? Where is it leading us to?
I want life, abundant life But I can get only just my life span And I burn inwardly for love untainted But what comes comes with prizes and reserves Then I ask where to find the truth in all these Alas, only this and that opinion before me
I am discouraged and suspicious Perhaps there is no need to worry Just eat and drink whatever is present at present And I say in my anxiety, 'Be free be free my heart Cut the strings that holds from above'
But from time to time comes the knock on the door That gets me uneasy with its calls Afraid to open the door and sit a while in my depression Somehow I find a way to dull the sound and continue How long will it be, the subtle longing of my heart
Wake up, sleeping soul Answer the phone that's been ringing God is calling you because He love you Come, He says, to the Spring of Life And to the Love-Well that never dries Come to the truth you are searching for You are tired, come and rest in me.
If you could take out your heart and hold it in your hand to examine, what would you notice as its most foundamental yearings? Perhaps the yearning to live, we yearn for life. Without it no other yearning can be achieved. Perhaps you will also see the yearning to know, we yearn for truth that is why we dont like secrets kept from us. Perhaps you will see also the yearning to be loved, we yearn for love, all of us. how can you satisfy these yearning or better stil, can we really satisfy our yearning so completely. No, because we all die and lose life, we can know as much as we desire, and we are often disappionted in love. Since these yearning can't be met here, and given that they must be met afterall, how do we go about fulfiling our basic heart desires? What it is the answer to our yearnings?
Well, if you need energy, you need to eat food which is the source of energy for all animals. And so, if you need life, you need to go to the source of life, the "I am the Life" and He will give you life everlasting. If you need truth go to the source, the "I am the Truth". If you need need Love, go to the source, to God who is Love. For no one has ever claimed or can ever claim the he is the Way, the Truth, the Life and Love personified but God. God is the answer to all our yearnings.
