Ohio/ Kentucky Trip

Yesterday I booked our flight to Ohio we will be visiting Southern Seminary in Kentucky as well as Camp Presmont in Ohio hopefully(if I get the position). I got a GREAT deal only $194 per person with tax from Ft. Myers. I found even cheaper tickets ($156) from Ft. Lauderdale but decided on Ft. Myers from a convience standpoint. We will be arriving in Pittsburgh on Wed. 4/1. I will spend 2 days at the camp on Thurs. and Fri. looking at facilities as well as hopefully meeting a few people while I am there. Amanda will hopefully be visiting camp with me on Friday to get the lay of the land as well as visit the neighboring towns as we will hopefully be living there for a few months this summer.
We will then leave Saturday early morning (like 4 or 5 AM) to drive to Louisville arriving around 9AM (I hope). We will spend Sat. through Mon. afternoon in Louisville and then head back to OH then fly out of Pitt. on Tues. morning. I am really excited for the trip and I am really looking forward to visiting Southern Seminary over the weekend. We plan on visiting Highview Baptist Church on Sunday morning for worship. This is the church in which Eric Yeldell leads worship (Eric is the son-in-law of our pastor in Naples) and Russell Moore preaches. We will not have much time to see friends but there will hopefully be time for that when we move there in about 6 weeks. Yikes!

The Greatest Gift

1 Corinthians 12-14 is well known to most Christians as the place in Scripture where Paul writes extensively about the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is also a place of great disagreement between believers. No matter what you think about prophecy, tongues, or the office of apostles today there is one thing we should all be able to agree on: the greatest of God's gifts is love. Paul tells us what love is in the passage and gives us specific examples of what love IS. If you look at the way love is described here love is always described as an action. It is not something passive or something done in the past. Love is a present action--not a past experience--and we must chose to love every moment.

We can never match up to what Paul has laid out to us in 1 Cor. 13. If we put our name in the place of love in the passage we see how much we fail to love biblically. When we examine ourselves we will see that we fail in all these areas. We only succeed because God gives us the ability to succeed. 1 Cor. 12:4-6 tells us that it is God who works to bring about our love for others. As I wrote in the last post, it is the Holy Spirit who brings about this love.

Lastly we need to see love as a necessity, above all other gifts, for all believers believe through the Holy Spirit. It is a prerequisite to all other gifts and ministries, and without it everything we do is empty. We must do all things out of an attitude of love for others and a desire to glorify God by displaying His love for them through us. When we do this we are also fulfilling the two greatest commandments of love for God and for neighbor.