THURSDAY December 1st
2 Peter 1:7
‘. . . and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.’
We come to the final supplement in this section, add to your faith . . .love.
The kind of love we considered in the previous devotion was that of the love that we should have toward each other, a brotherly affection, expressed in kindness toward each other. The root word for love today is a different one. Brotherly ‘love’ comes from ‘philos’, the love for our much-needed quality today comes from the Greek ‘agape’ which is a love that loves intensely, it is a true genuine strong love that can or will only be truly demonstrated from our lives if we have added all the other qualities we have looked at.
Love is the greatest of all characteristics, remember what Paul writes about love in 1 Corinthians 13, ‘Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’ (vv4-7). Paul also highlights faith, hope and love, three things, concluding that the greatest of these is love (v13).
It was out of his great love for fallen humanity that God sent his Son into the world, it was out of Christ’s great love for you and me that Jesus was willing to lay down his life for us. It is out of his love for us that God desires for us to grow in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord (2 Peter 1:2) It is out of his great love for us that God longs for us to spend eternity with him.
This kind of love (agape love) is far more than just expressing brotherly love or affection, (Philadelphia) or as we saw, kindness toward each other, it is a greater love, a deeper love, that in the words of Jesus and was evident in the actions of Jesus himself, in that we would even lay down our life for another. John 15:13 ‘Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends’.
I have to be honest, as I am considering this devotion, I realise how much I fail in regard to loving others in the same way or to the extent of which God has loved me, I can show ‘philadelphia’ brotherly kindness, but ‘agape’ love, too easily I see the things that would make me not want to love, not even like! but as I went to the Scripture, another text helps me in this and I trust it will help you as well, it is in 1 Peter 4:8 ‘Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins’. We must look beyond the faults and see the person that God loves, and we love them too. As I was writing this the words of a song came to my mind, which I will close this devotion with, it is the line in particular, ‘He looked beyond my fault and saw my need’. Imagine if God looked at our sin and decided he couldn’t love us! But thank God, he loved us even though we never knew him or even cared about him. (1 John 4:10)
Amazing grace will always be my song of praise
For it was grace that bought my liberty
I do not know just why He came to love me so
He looked beyond my fault and saw my need
I shall forever lift my eyes to Calvary
To view the cross where Jesus died for me
How marvellous the grace that caught my falling soul
He looked beyond my fault and saw my need
Amazing grace, with joyful heart I sing of it
For by Your grace, You set my poor heart free
And all my days I’ll never cease to sing Your praise
For all the glory, Lord, belongs to Thee