Monday, February 29, 2016

What’s Love Got To Do With It? A Summation...


1 Peter 1:22

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

The entire letter, to this point, has been inclusive of what was involved in the purification of the souls of Peter’s readers.  From the opening lines, when he claims them as God’s own, through the Lord Jesus Christ, through a review of the power of Jesus as Savior, to the challenge of the present times, to the mission that Peter is calling them to on behalf of God, it is gathering here for the next step, the application, or at least the first application of being God’s community among them.

Purification of their souls came by the obedience to the truth, the Truth being our Lord Jesus, the man and the mission, the death and the resurrection, the teachings and the promises.  It is one gathered religious message that can be boiled down simply to ‘the truth’.

This coming to God through Jesus Christ comes with a purpose.  It is to bring purity to the love that the readers have one for another, to bring the real love of God into the lives and communities of faith.  The love is genuine, it is mutual, it is the bedrock of the success of the ministry among these followers of the divine.  It is the bedrock that Peter is laying down among them as believers.

True love from the heart, from which they shall love one another deeply.  Such is the product manufactured from the things of faith through Jesus.  Though not an end unto itself, it is the proper interconnectedness of the community of faith that will allow for more to go forward.


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