Brotherly Kindness with Love

Scripture Reading - 2 Pet. 1:5-8 "But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Salvation brings to us great new abilities and these abilities come in the power of the Holy Spirit who takes up residence in everyone who has been born again. The ability through His power to live virtuous lives full of the knowledge in the Lord Jesus with the ability to have self-control and persevere through any circumstances with godly attributes which show brotherly kindness toward others with a great new Christ -like love. Now, in this short summary of 2 Peter 1:5-8 I hope to show you that these things do not automatically happen. We have to give all diligence, or for a lack of a better word, effort to these things. We have to purpose and pursue these qualities in our lives. Today I would like to concentrate on adding the qualities of brotherly kindness and Christ-like love to our lives as we walk with Christ. The ability to do so has been granted to us by the Holy Spirit. What we have to do is have faith in the fact that these abilities are indeed there and make every effort (all diligence) to having them surface in our walk with Christ.

Today, many of us will attend a worship service. When you pray ask God to help you show brotherly kindness and Christ-like love to all who you will meet today. One of the ways we can make this effort is to plan to arrive at your church early enough to go around and greet some people. Ask them how are the situations with certain requests they have given you to pray about are. If you don't know someone that well, go up and introduce yourself, place your hand on their shoulder, hug them, be friendly. Now if we are running late and get to church just as the service starts or even worse after it starts, we are not going to be able to do these things. That would show our lack of effort. I was told one time by a person that they were treated with more love and respect when they were into the bar scene than when they were in church. They said that even now that they were following Christ, they would be more likely receive brotherly kindness from the lost than from Christians. Now these things should never happen, and they happen because of our lack of effort in allowing the Holy Spirit to produce these qualities in our lives.

We are guaranteed only one opportunity to love and be kind to people and that opportunity is now. The power that we have been given by God in the Holy Spirit is the greatest power on this earth. He (the Holy Spirit) is not natural, He is supernatural. Let Him touch someone through you with such a kindness and love today that they will remember it for the rest of their lives. Give all diligence to these things and we will never be unfruitful and will always show the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Be Blessed and Live in the NOW!!!