Since tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, I want to share a well-known Scripture passage on love.

Each of us can benefit from reading and contemplating Saint Paul’s famous words below.

The Gift of Love

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:1-13).

Even though we can’t love perfectly as God does, we can strive to love authentically as St. Paul describes. 

Let us pray that we may give the gift of love to each person in our lives. 

And let us allow the Lord to fill us with His perfect love each and every day.

For more on Christian love and St. Valentine’s Day, visit last year’s re-blog.