God’s Love for Us Expects the Best
David W Palmer
Paul’s description of love in 1 Corinthians 13 is the perfect portrayal of the love with which God loves us. Today, we are looking at the second last point: “If you love someone, you will … always expect the best of him.”
(1 Corinthians 13:4–7 TLB) “… {7} If you love someone, you will … always expect the best of him, and always stand your ground in defending him.”
Love “Always Expects the Best of Others”
For us, this is a very challenging aspect of love. We feel we are judicious and clever— “street-wise” if you like—to be aware of just how dark and deceitful human behavior, and indeed the human heart, can be. We feel justified to be on the watch for deceptive and wicked motivations held secretly in the hearts of others. After all, the Old Testament prophet said:
(Jeremiah 17:9 NLT) “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?”
If this is the case—and the prophet said it is—why then would God expect the best of us; and indeed, why would he tell us to expect the best of others? After all, for every born again person, there is an old nature. We buried it at baptism, but it’s amazing how often it tries to resurrect itself through us so it can live again. And doesn’t John say, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us”? (1 John 1:8 NKJV).
Why then would God risk being viewed as naïve to “expect the best” of us? And what’s more, why would he ask us to expect the best of others? Surely this will leave us completely unprepared for what we all know they may get up to? Won’t that leave us naively vulnerable to being ripped off and hurt?
I will let the apostle Paul explain:
(2 Corinthians 5:16–17 NLT) “So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! {17} This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!”
Through Paul, the Holy Spirit is saying that in the new birth, God has brilliantly come up with a completely new creation. Now “anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person.” What’s more, their “old life is gone” and “a new life has begun.” This is the truth and reality of the new creation in Christ. The Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit have all pinned their hope for us in this miraculous new creation; they believe that the “new man” is now our true identity, and not the old sinful one.
God is a faith God. He believes he changed us to the new man at our new birth; and he will never speak against his faith, or hold onto any other image than what he believes the new birth has done for us. He views us now as new; he no longer views us “merely from a human view point.” I believe he does this—keeps believing the best of us—because grace acting through faith is the only, and I repeat “only,” power capable of changing us to be like him. If God begins to hold a different image, and to verbalize that we really haven’t changed, then we are doomed.
The Holy Spirit urges us to be like God in this process. Yes, people sin; yes, at times they allow their old nature to live through them again; and yes, their flesh sometimes dominates their spirit. But we will not help God’s objective if we drop our faith in their transformation any more than if God was to drop his. He exhorts us to expect the best of other born again believers, he tells us to only think on good things, and he warns us to only speak that which imparts grace—or we will be grieving the Holy Spirit:
(Philippians 4:8 NKJV) “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.”
(Ephesians 4:27, 29–30 NKJV) “
