While it is important to discover one's spiritual gift through serving the body, there is one more aspect to the gift and the service we have not yet discussed: how it is to be exercised. Our gift, exercised as a service, is to be done out of love. As we grow in love for one another, we never miss an opportunity to serve each other. By serving we learn what gifts God has already given us, and we leave ourselves open to God's enabling us with another gift. Why does God give good gifts to his children? Because he loves us. Why do we exercise our gifts in service to each other? Because we love God and each other. And what is the greatest gift ever given to mankind? Love. Immediately following Paul's lengthiest discussion of gifts, he concludes, “Let me show you a more excellent way.” That most excellent way, far more excellent than any gift he discussed before, is the way of love. God has modeled his love for us in the following ways.

• He created man even though in His foreknowledge he knew we would fail Him. Ephesians 1.3-.11
• The incarnation proves God's love to us. Why would a supreme being bother becoming like a limited race? Why would He consider us worthy of this kind of communication? Would an angry God, out to punish us, have cared enough to come to us as Jesus of Nazareth, as a human, vulnerable baby? "Or was it anger and not love at all that was behind the incarnation?" 
• The death and resurrection of Christ proves His love for us. Did Jesus have to come and get crucified, because only if He died in agony could His bad-tempered Father forgive His other children? Obviously, no. “For God demonstrates His love for us in this: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5.8

God has demonstrated His love to us repeatedly, and from his demonstration we can learn of the essence of love: self-sacrifice.

How ought we to respond to such a great love? The Bible commands “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The implication for the church is we are to be an example - a light unto the world. The pastors are not the laborers, we are, and the church is not a place for unbelievers to be swayed, but an example to them as we are encouraged and built up each week (Matthew 22.37-.40).

The struggle: our two natures. For our new nature, love is natural, but for the old nature, unnatural. Every time we exercise love, the old nature dies a little more, and we give strength to the new. But the opposite is true as well. For every time we do not respond in a loving fashion, the old nature gains ground in our lives, and we begin to kill the work which God is doing in us. Matthew 26.41; Romans 8.1-.17

We are in a love triangle with God and the world. As the diagram below illustrates, God loves us and others equally. We love God (though others may or may not) and we are commanded to love others. Notice that as we grow to love God more and more, the gap between Us and Others narrows; it is easier to love others as we grow closer to God and see them as He does.

What does all this require? What does it take to obey the command to love, to feed the new nature and starve the old, to grow in Christ and in a love for others? The same thing it required of Jesus: self-sacrifice (Matthew 17.24-.26).