The 'verse of the day' over the past couple of days have been taking a leaf from 1 Cor 13... I figured I might take a read of it (Message version) although I've already read it before.
Some gems from it - "If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, 'Jump,' and it jumps, but I don't love,I'm nothing.". There's a few like this - If I do XXXX but don't love, I'm nothing, I've gotten nowhere, I'm bankrupt.
I was wondering...why? If (for some weird reason) I help an old lady across the road, but without love, does she not still get helped across the road? Is it not the same either way, with or without love, to her? Then I thought... no, that's not right. If I help someone across the road, or pack groceries in the car, or I dunno, do some sort of charitable event with the purpose of furthering oneself - for example, expecting payment or increase in status in other people's eyes - then there really was no point doing it in the first place. The ends do not justify the means, the means justifies the ends. It's a good act if we do it for love, it's a bad act if we do it for ourself.
I guess the point of it is, with love, all these things will happen as a result, which is what makes love the most important of all. Of the three it mentions there - Trust, Hope, Love - Love is the most important. Why? The list before said Love "Trusts God always" and "Always looks for the best" - LOVE is a prerequisite for those 2, how can you trust without love? How can you even hope without love? Hope is fairly synonymous to faith (oblig quote: "fear expects the worst, faith expects the best"), so how can we be faithful if we do not love? I believe THAT is why love is the most important.
Before I became Christian, some things didn't make sense to me (indeed, lots of things still don't :p heh). Hmm having trouble articulating it here though... maybe a question... "If there was no heaven, would you still love God? And live your life by /for Him?". It's a tough question, the thing that gets most people into Christianity (or really, any religion) is the reward. Personally, I think that if the only reason for worshipping and loving God is to "get into heaven", then we're not gonna get there. We have to live our lives as Christians because it's a better way to live, to love, because it's the way Jesus lived His life, for others, out of love, not because of the rewards we get out of the end. If God dropped us a message tomorrow saying "I've given up on this Heaven thing," I don't think he'd want us to stop loving. Jesus wouldn't have, and He's a guy that knows what He's doing! :D
(sidenote: I quite like analysing these things, I should do it more often :D)