Paulson Post

We have never experienced love that is comparable to God's. Human love is conditional.  Unattractive people are hard to love. Even though it was my first visit, the lady at the post office counter greeted me with a very friendly smile. I visited that town after 30 long years. She acted as if she is meeting a friend, but her appearance scared me so that I did not greet her or smile back. The left side of her face was charred, and she had lost the left eye. Her gums and teeth were visible since the left portion of her lips were burnt too. Her smile was frightening.  A young man, envious of her relationship with another person, threw sulfuric acid at her face, disfiguring her. As a result, her real lover abandoned her since she was no longer as beautiful as she was before the accident. It turned out that we were friends at school thirty years ago, which explains her friendly smile. At school, I remember her as a vibrant and winsome girl. One of the conditions we set for pe...

'Love is a verb, not a noun.' That was on a T-Shirt. What it stressed probably is to really love than talking about love. However, in the Bible, just two verses apart from each other the word 'love' is used both as noun and verb. That is in 1 John 3:16-18. In the first case (in 1 John 3:16) it is a noun. ' By this we know love , that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. ' The second occurrence is in 3:18, ' Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. ' Love cannot be just a verb. At the same time, unless love is quantified and displayed it cannot be a verb or an action. In fact, the act of loving comes from love. The reason for the exhortation in verse 18 is the direct result of the experience of love that verse 16 talks about. Love is quantified as 'laying down our lives for others.' That is the breadth and depth of love. It can reach a point where a person lov...

I stared at that bouquet of flowers handed over to me feeling little uneasy. It was Fathers’ Day and I was reminded of it early in the morning by my two children who had wished me already before I went to church. In my church I have made it a policy that we will pray for fathers on Fathers’ Day and mothers on Mothers’ day in the church but will not have any celebration of such days on Sundays. My reason is simple. Nowadays, almost every day is ‘some day’ and it distracts our attention from the real business that we are supposed to do on Sunday: the Lord’s Day. I don’t encourage celebration of such days to make sure these celebrations do not eclipse the day that is of paramount importance: the Lord’s Day. However, one of the youth took the initiative to buy a bouquet of flowers and when I had said the benediction at the end of the service, shot in front of the pulpit with the flowers saying, ‘today is Fathers’ Day. And we would like to honor our pastor who is our spiritual f...

The Bible teaches us that love is a fruit of the Spirit and it has supremacy over the gifts of the Spirit. In fact Saint Paul argues that the exercise of the gifts of the Spirit is useless if devoid of love. Being devoid of love is a state of existence which can be very well described as "being nothing” (1 Cor 13:2) and such lives "gain nothing” (1 Cor 13:3). The love mentioned in this passage is a entirely different type of love, very different from what we usually mean by it. The Greek word AGAPE is consistently used throughout the entire chapter of 1 Corinthians 13, the greatest poem on love. It was a common word for love which found a new meaning in the New Testament because of the experience of love that the writers had. Their experience was different from those who lived before their era, before Christ came in to this world to put up a magnifcient show of this special love. The translators of the Old Testament into Greek who lived about 200 years before Christ had ma...