Message from Scripture: 8/3/2021

 

Our message from Scripture today is 1 Pet. 1:22. “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart.”

 

It’s interesting to read these words of Peter, and to realize that obedience to the gospel should result, or terminate, in a genuine love for one another. While we associate obeying the gospel with salvation from sin, which is true, it also should bring about genuine love as well. It should be foreign to every child of God, in our relationship together in Christ, to allow selfishness and hatred to exist. 

 

What blessings belong to us in the Lord’s church by counting seriously loving one another, just as we do our own desire to be saved?  There is less strife and more service. There is greater humility and more glorifying of God.  There is more consideration of how to help others overcome sin.  The church becomes more of what God wants it to be, and more of a testimony to a world filled with sin that we truly are His children. Jesus prayed, “That they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21).

 

Paul would write the church in Philippi, “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.  Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:3-5). This is what a sincere brotherly love, where we love one another earnestly from a pure heart, does. Today, lets go out to serve our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ from such motives, that the world will know we belong to Christ. God bless.

 

Robert