"If I speak with the tongue of men and angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal" --- 1 Corinthians 13:1

It is better, to botch Tennyson, to have love for the lost than never to have love at all.

Without this love, as Paul says, our words of evangelism --- though brilliant and persuasive --- become like meaningless noise.

The reason for this is that we follow an order of love. For God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God so loved the world, (as we've often heard), that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

Without this love, there would be no eternal sacrifice to repay the unpayable debt and fulfill the impossible standard of perfection.

What is meant by "this love?" What sort of love are we to show? Love itself is certainly an overloaded word in our language --- it has no less than four Greek equivalents.

The sort of love we show to the lost world is certainly not the sort that stems from any sense of charity, for charity itself extends from condescension. Though we be forgiven, we are no less criminal than the lost world itself.

Nor again should our essential love flow out of any great admiration of humanity, though this love be necessarily towards all humankind; man is a fallen low creature, having been designed perfectly and afterward continually rejecting our original form --- the clay rebelling against the potter with regards to its final shape.

Instead, this mysterious form of love should stem in a sense from a sort of camaraderie; as the survivors of a shipwreck may cling together. This is indeed a fitting analogy, since the one survivor, finding a rescue ship, is not oft hesitant to deliver the joyful news of deliverance to his fellow oceanic refugees.

It is in this way that the Christian should lovingly share the Gospel with his fellow eternally-displaced members of a species shipwrecked on the desolate island of the temporal universe.