Do you do what you do in sacrificial love? 1 Corinthians 15-16

1 Corinthians 16:14 (NASBStr)

Let all that you do be done in love.

At the end of a long letter in which you covered a long lists of topics, it might be difficult to know how to summarize it.  How do you make a summary statement when you covered conduct in the church, spiritual gifts, giving, the Lord's Table, Salvation, sanctification and an assorted other great church topics?   Yet, Paul does so in the above statement.   You can sum it all up with one axiom:  Let all that you do be done in love.   You will recall that when Jesus was confronted by the lawyer who was sent to entrap Him and was asked which was the greatest commandment, Jesus summarized the entire Torah in two statements: Love God and Love your neighbor.   So, Paul follows that example and tells the Corinthian believers to do the same.   Paul had told them earlier that in the Christian faith their were three great truths centered around Hope, Faith and Love.   And, without explanation he simply stated that the greatest of those three was Love.   Therefore isn't out of the ordinary that he would summarize  everything he had just written to them in this exhaustive statement.  In his word choices for love, Paul uses the most powerful of Greek terms, agape.   The word means to love in sacrificial ways; laying your life down if necessary.   So, his admonition, in summary, of everything just read in the letter is to do whatever you do in sacrificial love.   Most of what we do in life is for ourselves.   Even acts of kindness and good works are often done in selfish motives; we tend to give to get!   Yet, true living for God is to live for Him and others and not for what we get out of it.   If we truly are followers of Christ we will do what we do like He did.  In love He lived and died for us.