Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
In my last Quay County Sun article (Sept. 19), based on a couple of recent incidents in which my 3-year-old grandson thought our preacher was God, I wrote about how God gives us everything we need for life and godliness so we can participate in his divine nature (2 Peter 1:3-11).
Besides helping us grow and protect our salvation from false teaching and Satan’s discouragement, this helps us reflect God’s nature to others so they’ll be attracted to him (2 Peter 2:1-3; 3:17-18; Revelation 12:10-12; 2 Corinthians 4:5-7; Titus 2:10).
God is love (1 John 4:7-21). And one way Christians reflect his divine nature is by showing our love for him by loving one another (John 13:35-35). When we express that Christian love in these ways, God’s love is made complete in us.
While in 2 Peter 1:5-7, love is the last in the list of things Christians are to add to our faith, love is listed first among the fruit of the Spirit, which God’s Holy Spirit produces in us to demonstrate that we participate in the divine nature (Galatians 5:22-25). We’re also to produce this fruit as God’s children as a matter of keeping in step with the Spirit because all creatures act and reproduce after their own kind (Genesis 1:1-28; Colossians 1:9-13).
Love may be the toughest fruit of the Spirit to express, but it also is to be the basis for everything we do (1 Corinthians 13:1-7). That might be why it’s listed first among the fruit of the Spirit, but last in growing in the divine nature. Perhaps we can only learn what love really is after we’ve forced ourselves to have self-control to the point of loving and doing good to our enemies, which is how Jesus showed his love for us (Matthew 5:43-48; John 3:16; Romans 5:6-11).
Once we learn that about love, we’ll also learn love covers a multitude of sins, the wages of which are death (1 Peter 4:8; Romans 3:23; 6:23; Revelation 20:11-15; Hebrews 2:9-15; 1 Corinthians 15:20-26; 1 John 2:1-2). In this way, God’s love for us and our love for him removes all fear (1 John 4:18).
But how can we say we love God and express his love toward each other and reflect it to the world if we haven’t done what God has told us to do from the beginning (Luke 6:46-49; Matthew 7:21-27; John 14:15-21; Acts 2:38-39; Galatians 3:26-29; 4:6-7)? How can the world know that there is a unified God who includes God, the Father; God, the Son (Jesus) and God, the Holy Spirit, if his children aren’t unified on Earth (John 17:20-26)? How can Christians reproduce after our own kind (lead others to God) when the world sees that those calling themselves Christians won’t even agree on what God says (1 Corinthians 1:10; Ephesians 4:3-6; Galatians 1:6-9)?
Christians, we must set aside our differences and follow only God’s word out of love for him (Mathew 15:8-14; 2 Timothy 2:15)!
Leonard Lauriault writes about faith for the Quay County Sun. Contact him at [email protected]