The ‘energy of life’ will go.
Eternal life means to know Love. God is Love. John says: ‘This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.’
Whatever your belief or faith, first seek out Love. Everything else will follow.
Love is eternal, because God is eternal.
* * *
Love is life.
Love never ends and life will not end while there is Love.
That is what Paul is showing us, that, in all created things, Love is present as the Supreme Gift, because Love remains when all other things pass away.
Love is here, it exists in us here and now. It is not something that will be given to us after we die. On the contrary, we will have very few chances to learn Love when we are old if we do not seek it out and practise it now.
No worse fate can befall a man than to live and die alone, unloving and unloved.
To love is to be saved.
Not to love or be loved is to be damned.
And he who takes joy in love already takes joy in God, because God is Love.
I have all but finished this very long sermon, but, first, I want to propose something: how many of you would like to join me in reading this part of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians at least once a week for the next three months. A man did that once and it changed his life completely.
Or you could start by reading the letter every day, especially the verses that describe the kind of behaviour that goes with Love:
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy.
Put those ingredients into your life. From then on, everything you do will be eternal. It’s worth spending a little time learning the art of Love.
No man becomes a saint in his sleep; he must pray and meditate.
In the same way, any improvement, in any direction, requires preparation and care.
Address yourselves to living a life that is a full and proper one. If you look back, you will see that the best and most important moments of your life were those in which the spirit of Love was present.
When we look at our past – and ignore the transitory pleasures of life – we will see that the important moments of our existence were those in which we experienced Love, unnoticed acts of kindness that we did for those around us, unimportant things sometimes, but which, for a fraction of a second, made us feel as if we had already entered eternal life.
I have seen almost all the beautiful things that God created. I have enjoyed almost all the pleasures a man can experience. However, when I look back at my past, there are only four or five brief moments when I did something that was a poor imitation of God’s Love.
Those are the moments that justify my existence. Everything else is transitory. Any other good or virtue is mere illusion. Those small acts of Love that no one noticed, that no one knows about, justify my life.
Because Love endures.
* * *
Matthew gives us a classic description of the Final Judgment: the Son of Man is seated upon a throne and, like a shepherd, is dividing the sheep from the goats.
At that moment, the most important question for a human being to ask will not be: ‘How did I live?’ but ‘How did I love?’
The final test of every search for salvation will be Love. What we did or believed or achieved will be of no account.
None of that will count. What will count is how we loved our fellow men and women.
The mistakes we made will not even be remembered. We will be judged by the good we neglected to do, because to keep Love locked up inside us is to go against the spirit of God, it is proof that we never knew Him, that He loved us in vain, and that His Son died in vain.