To truly love as Jesus loves is a lifelong process. We know from the beginning of our walk with God that we should love as Jesus does, yet we also know soon enough that we are not capable of sustaining that level of selflessness for very long.
Although graciously given nuggets and moments where we are used by the Lord, to show His love to others in very special ways, we also find ourselves falling far short many times as well, blowing opportunities left and right.
In the face of this ongoing reality, we can choose to fall away from Jesus in frustration over our failure, blaming Him for making the journey so difficult for us, or blaming others for being so unlovable.
Or we can recognize and receive the ever present love and forgiveness Jesus freely offers us every time we fail, and walk on with Him, learning to love through the valleys of our lives, as well as on the mountaintops with Him!
Once we have settled the issue that Jesus is always for us, and never against us, we can reconnect with Him and allow Him to guide us and enable us to love better another day.
This journey is greatly helped if we incorporate the wisdom of those who have walked it before us, especially the anointed, inspired words of Jesus’ closest friends preserved supernaturally for us in the Bible.
One of these friends was Peter the apostle, who begins his second letter to the churches by stating that he is writing to those who have the same kind of faith as he has.
Just a brief overview of Peter’s experience with God, shows us that he has the unique experience of publicly denying Jesus as He was being falsely tried and convicted, as well as being rebuked by the Father (Luke 9:33-35), Jesus (on multiple occasions: Matthew 16:21-23, Luke 22:31-33, Mark 14:37-38, John 18:10-11), the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:9-16), and the Apostle Paul (Galatians 2:11-15).
These difficulties Peter went through were far greater and more embarrassing then almost anything we could ever experience, yet he did indeed have the kind of faith in, and love for Jesus, to keep himself focused and moving forward no matter what!
Peter’s second letter goes on to give us a detailed map of the faith journey we would do well to heed, because it will lead us to become more and more consistent in loving like Jesus:
2 PETER 1:4 By means of (God’s power and glory, and our full personal knowledge of Him in Jesus), He has bestowed on us His precious and exceedingly great promises, so that through them you may escape [by flight] from the moral decay (rottenness and corruption) that is in the world because of covetousness (lust and greed), and become sharers (partakers) of the divine nature. 5 For this very reason, adding your diligence [to the divine promises], employ every effort in exercising your faith to develop virtue (excellence, resolution, Christian energy), and in [exercising] virtue [develop] knowledge (intelligence), 6 And in [exercising] knowledge [develop] self-control, and in [exercising] self-control [develop] steadfastness (patience, endurance), and in [exercising] steadfastness [develop] godliness, 7 And in [exercising] godliness [develop] brotherly affection, and in [exercising] brotherly affection [develop] Christian love. 8 As these qualities are yours and increasingly abound in you, they will keep [you] from being idle or unfruitful unto the [full personal] knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One).
This very fallible human and yet, great apostolic writer grounds our spiritual growth completely in the sovereign work of God, even as we can see that the Lord has also given us sunshine, the atmosphere, rain, and mineral filled soil to root our plants into, in the natural realm.
It is God that has shown us His power and His glory, and revealed to our hearts Who Jesus really is, as the true foundation of all His promises to us.
These are corporate promises to all believers, as well as individual promises to each follower of Jesus, revealed in His word and underscored by the Holy Spirit’s promptings within our spirits, which as David wrote to us, were beyond our capacity to calculate or even beyond any attempt to enumerate! (Psalm 139:17-18)
The reverence and awe that Peter shows for God’s promises, come from his own experience of seeing the Law of Moses and the Prophetic writings come to life before his eyes in the divine Person of Jesus, Who walked into His life and totally transformed it!
His exhortations concerning these promises are also because he himself had been plucked out of the slime of our natural human existence, to become someone transported into the highest and most powerful interactions any human has had with the God of the entire universe.
Peter is not focused in these verses, on those historic experiences with God, but instead on his own internal transformation. He has seen himself escape from his own corruption, rottenness, covetousness, lust, and greed, to become a sharer, a partaker in something greater than being a close friend to Jesus and a pre-eminent apostle of the living God.
Peter exults only in one greater fact:
He who was the loud denier of Jesus, with cursing and cowardice in the very moments Jesus was being terribly treated, and a hard-headed lout, worthy in himself only of being rebuked at every turn, was now beginning to understand and communicate to all of us that he, and we are meant to share in the very divine nature with our Father, our Lord Jesus, and the Holy Spirit forever and ever!!!
This highest goal of the redemption offered to us in Jesus our Lord, is the incredible outcome of focusing our full faith and giving our all, walking closer and closer to Jesus each and every day of the lives that we have been offered here on the earth.
It is the surrender of our selves fully into this faith walk with Jesus that will bring forth the virtues listed here by the apostle. Each step adds new depths to each virtue, as they accumulate and accrue throughout the entirety of our lifelong journey.
Although each virtue is sacred and precious in itself, they are each facets of the total of Christlike godliness that finds its greatest expression in the increasing development of brotherly affection into agape love.
God’s love is the ultimate expression of God’s Presence within us that most powerfully shows Jesus to the world around us.
God’s love is not an individual element that flows out of us by itself, but is the effluence, the effulgence of all the other attributes or qualities which Peter is encouraging each of us to grow into.
It is the composite, interdependent, ever expanding reality of all these qualities that brings us out of our idleness, and into a true and tangible fruitfulness for God in all we think, feel, say, and do.
Living and loving in this greater capacity, leads us into an ever deeper cycle of knowing and growing closer to Jesus in greater measure, both more completely and more intimately, which also leads us into knowing and loving many others more completely and more intimately.
Neil Uniacke
Executive Director
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