Added To Your Faith
Go to Calvary and let God wash your own soul with His love and cleanse your life by His truth and begin to make your personality shine with His Spirit shining out of you. You'll find your relationship with people is vastly improved.
Transcript
Alright. Thank you very much and hello again, radio friends. How in the world are you? You’re doing all right today? Well, I trust so. Bless your heart. This is your good friend, Bob Cook. I’m glad to be back with you to share from the Word of God. What a privilege it is for me to be with you in these precious moments around the Word of God. And thanks to you for being there. If you weren’t there, there wouldn’t be anybody there, would there? Oh, God bless you. I’m just glad for the opportunity that’s given to yours truly through these many radio stations to share a little something from God’s infallible, inerrant, eternal Word, the Bible.
We’re looking at II Peter Chapter 1 and you remember the progress of the truth there? The first thing we said was what really holds us together is our commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. Peter calls it “like precious faith.” The second thing we said that this passage is telling us is that God has already given you everything you need to succeed as a Christian. “His divine power has given,” has, past tense, “given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness.” Third, the process by which this is implemented is through the Word of God whereby are given unto us. Again, past tense, “has been given,” are given unto us. “Exceeding great and precious promises by that by these promises you might be partakers of the divine nature having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust, unbridled desire, dirty as your soul, the Word of God engrafted in your heart and mind and memory keeps your soul clean.”
Now, he said, “Beside all this, giving all diligence,” he says really get at it. Here is something that you and I must do. It’s something that we can’t depend on God to do sovereignly. It’s something we have to work on by faith. He said, “Add to your faith. In other words, you do this by faith, by believing God, and by working at it. So you add to your faith virtue and to virtue knowledge and to knowledge some temperance. It’s a concept of inner strength and to temperance patience, the concept of staying down, don’t give up or pop up or blow up, patience, and to patience godliness. That’s the quality of God in everyday life and to godliness brotherly kindness and to brotherly kindness love. And all of these characteristics can be added to your personality and to mine as we work on them by faith. You can take from the Lord Jesus what you need, those areas of your life in which you are deficient and in which I am lacking. We can work on them by faith. We can trust God to do something in our own lives as we trust him by faith.
Now, that’s as far as we’ve gotten so far. Now, he says, “Add by faith brotherly love.” It’s a Greek word that’s very familiar to us. It’s from the word from which we got the name of the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia. It’s almost an exact Englishization of the Greek word “Philadelphia.” And he said, “You add to that brotherly love.” That’s a combination of two words, “philos” and “adelphos,” love of brother so you get brotherly love.
Now, that’s a great order but what do you really do about it? Yes, born Again Christians are my brothers and sisters but some of them are so blessedly difficult and others put thought into being impossible. Isn’t it true? “To live above with saints we love, oh, that will sure be glory. To live below with saints we know is quite a different story.” And this whole matter of brotherly love sometimes is a bit — it’s a theory. It’s out-of-reach. You have to deal with real people who have real feelings and real biases and real prejudices and real desires which sometimes are not synonymous with our own. Oh, boy, what are you going to do about it? Well, let’s talk about it, shall we?
First of all, brotherly love is something that starts at Calvary. I’m looking now at I Peter 1:22: “Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit…” Now, that is the process. He is describing the process of what happens when you commit yourself to the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit begins to work in your life. Agreed? This is a description of what happens when the Holy Spirit begins to work in your life after you’ve committed yourself completely to the Lord Jesus Christ as your Lord and as your savior. “Ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit.”
Now, what’s the result? The first result is unto unfeigned love of the brethren. Paul says in Romans 5:5, “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given unto us.” And that love manifests itself here, unfeigned love of the brethren, brotherly love. And it’s our word “Philadelphia” again in that passage but he goes on. This is remarkable the way it develops. He says, “You’ve purified your souls,” here I’m looking at my great New Testament, “the souls of you had been purified in obeying the truth unto brotherly love,” Philadelphian, without hypocrisy. Now, he says, “In your hearts love,” Calvary love, agape love, Calvary love, John 3:16 love, “In your hearts, use John 3:16 love to each other fervently.” Now that is almost a literal translation there of what Peter says.
So he says brotherly love. You got to go to Calvary to get it. And if you come away with brotherly love, you will also find that Calvary love is involved in your relationship with other people. Brotherly love starts at Calvary.
I look back across my life and I realize that every time I really sought God, I mean really opened my heart honestly to Him, confessed my sins, worshipped Him, thanked Him, praised Him, made my supplications to Him, every time I’ve really sought God, I came away from that time of prayer feeling warmer and more loving toward people around me. This is a guaranteed result of kneeling in the presence of your Lord at the foot of the cross as we say and receiving His blessing, His forgiveness, His cleansing, and His healing touch for your soul. Seeing you’ve purified your souls.
You know, one of the problems in getting along with people is that we have our own private agenda oftentimes a private agenda which involves unconfessed and unforsaken sin. You look back in your own life and find the times when you were in disagreement with other people. Can you put your finger perhaps on some areas of your life which even then were in conflict with what you knew to be the will of God purified your souls through obedience, through obeying the truth through the spirit? If you want to get along better with your brothers and sisters, start obeying God personally. Evelyn Christensen said in one of her books that after she’d had a very painful experience involving, I guess it was some members of her own family, she began to pray, “Lord, change me.” She’d been praying before that, “Lord, change them.” And of course, that’s how we all feel, isn’t it? We feel like new something with the other fellow. But in one of her books, she says, “I began to pray, ‘Lord, change me.'” And after a while, God did a gracious work in her heart and at the same time brought about a healing of the relationship that had been traumatized months before.
Go to Calvary, beloved. You want to love other people with a genuine concern, do you? You want really to manifest brotherly love as a Christian? Go to Calvary and let God wash your own soul with His love and cleanse your life by His truth and begin to make your personality shine with His Spirit shining out of you. You’ll find your relationship with people is vastly improved. Well, what else? You find Peter saying that you ought to love each other with a pure heart fervently in obeying the truth through the spirit unto unfeigned, that’s without hypocrisy, love of the brethren. See that you love with a Calvary love one another with a pure heart fervently.
Now, he says you’ve purified your souls and on the basis of a pure heart, you can extend real Calvary love to other people. The world is full of people who have taken advantage of other folk under the guise of being concerned about them. A renegade counselor, for example, or a person who has his own private agenda in dealing with persons, and all of us have run up against either in our own lives or in the lives of others situations where folk have taken advantage of people under the guise of being concerned for them and of manifesting love for them. Now, he said, you love with a Calvary love. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son.” You love with that kind of a love out of a heart that’s been purified, doesn’t have any acts to grind, as we say, any private agenda and you do that fervently. That is to say the idea of fervor comes from a concept of a pot that’s bubbling and boiling over. He said you just boil over. You just spill over the pure redemptive love of God. Psychologist calls it “unqualified personal regard.” You accept the person just as he or she is, faults and all. Brotherly love.
Now, I’ve spent a little time in what you may think as walking around the point. But I have to tell you, all the advice in the world about brotherly love is not going to help you or me unless we first go to Calvary to get our hearts touched by God’s love then we can manifest these two scriptural kinds of love, brotherly love, Philadelphia, and Calvary love, agape to the people roundabout us. You want to work on that?
I’ll come back to this again the next time we get together because there are some other things that you and I need to think about.
Dear Father, today, oh, may we show love to other people through Jesus, our Lord. Amen.
Until I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!
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