Encore - 996 - Growing from Kindness to Love 2 Peter 1:7

Welcome back to the Follower of One podcast. We continue our discussion of second Peter chapter one verses five through eight. Today, our verse is verse seven. "And in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness love." If you remember from the previous episodes, we are supplying these things to our faith. The faith was given to us by God. And then we supply moral excellence and knowledge and self-control and perseverance and godliness. We have supplied those things. We've talked about those in previous episodes. Today, we want to talk about brotherly kindness and love. These are two Greek words that the Greeks use to distinguish between different kinds of love. And we tend to use the word "love" to mean both of them. Brotherly kindness. You maybe have heard people talk about "phileo" love. I believe it's where we get the word Philadelphia. It's this desire to do what's best for our brother to look out for our family and our friends. Brotherly kindness is an appreciation similar to what would be expected of us in a workplace. Brotherly kindness, being kind to the people that we work with, the people that we interact with. when we talk about appreciating others is one of our five daily activities at Follower of One. We're talking about brotherly kindness and love a little bit. We're vague because I believe both of these go together in our progression of our faith. Brotherly kindness, the first one is this affection that we have for people that we know. We look out for the people we know. And then we go on, we graduate into this next level of love. Again, remember that we bring it. It's not given to us, but we bring this love. The last love that we add to our brotherly kindness is "agape" love. This is a different Greek word, but this is a love that is intentional. Love is action. This love. Acts in the best interests of the people that we interact with every day. This love does what's best for others, even to our own detriment, in some degree. These are the kinds of love that are, it's our challenge to bring. We add them. It's our job to bring these qualities to our faith. God challenges us through the apostle Peter and through his word. To bring this kind of kindness and love to the interactions that we have every day at work today, I would like to challenge us what can we do to love the people around us more? Well, our first daily activity is to pray and maybe what we need to do today is ask God how we can show more kindness, more, love, more appreciation for the people that we interact with. Who do we look past? Who do we miss? Are there servers at food restaurants or male persons or other people that serve us in different ways? And we just look past them. Let's add brotherly kindness and love to the interactions that we have with people today. I believe that's our challenge as followers of Jesus Christ. When we see in this progression that Peter. As run us through faith results in love. And I believe that we even iterate through this. It's almost like it's a cycle. So our faith, we add moral excellence. We add knowledge. We add self-control perseverance, godliness, brotherly, kindness, and love. And it brings us right back to God. This whole process is an iterative process to grow us up in our face. The end result being that we end up like, God, God is love. Thank you for being a marketplace minister. And thank you so much for making a difference in the lives of others as you work your faith and your actions matter. And I'm excited that you're listening to this podcast, take a minute and share it with your friends, or if you'd like to join us at https://followerofone.org.