How Christians Keep Seeking Christ

[Portions adapted from Tom Nelson, Denton Bible Church, Denton, TX, "954-070101-2 Peter 2"]

Because we have Jesus through justification by faith, we look for His face with zeal in all we do everyday.  Because we have seen His love, we search for it to apply to each part of our lives.

2 Peter 1:5-7

1) Moral Excellence
(The fear of YHWH is the beginning of knowledge - Proverbs 1:7)
2) Knowledge
3) Self-control in obedience (temperance; continence)
(over a long period of time)
4) Patience
5) Godliness (delight in God; respect and reverence and piety towards God)
(Love God first, then self and others)
6) Filao - Brotherly Kindness - Love of the Siblings in Christ - social manners - seeks mutual solace
7) Agape - highest love - God's love toward us, which He puts into us, with which we love Him - love not due to the lovliness of the object of that love, but due to the agent; this love is due to the character of the lover instead of, as with other types of love, due to the character of the beloved... and God, at the end of this sequence, causes us to have it!  Praise God and thank God for His love He puts into us, with which we love Him, ourselves and others!  Sacrificial action seeks the highest good for the object of love.

Christians, beware: you cannot love another against biblical wisdom; namely, that other Christians who will not stop sinning, after being told, told in front of another witness or two, and told in front of the whole congregation, then they MUST be shunned, and no Christian can offer them relief, physically or soulishly, FOR THEIR OWN GOOD, so Satan can hurt their flesh and their spirits might be saved.  When we think we are helping the wayward Christian - this doesn't apply to the World - we are, in fact, hurting them severely by giving their flesh opportunity and actual aid to continue attacking the Christian inside it.  If that Christian says "I repent" (and isn't, as a part of their wickedness, simply lying for gain), then we forgive and help - even seven times in one day (that's an idiom that means over and over again, infinitely)!  We DO love them by obeying God's Bible, and our own sympathies might be the furthest thing from actual love when we aid and abet evil in the heart and practice of the Christian sibling.  God will teach them as they eventually come away from the pig-pen to the father's house and as they reach out toward God; we don't need to help them physically, soulishly or even spiritually while they are in that state.  It is unloving to do so!!  Understand?  Will you accept it??  Will you DO it out of love?  Separate from any congregation that does not allow this, because they are also in that unrepentant sin.  If a congregation gives money to charities that allow sin, then the congregation is sinning.  Understand how deep this goes!  And it's for a purpose!  See all these exclamation points I'm using here?  It's in the top part of the list of worst things in modern Christianity that we allow the sibling to continue thinking they are okay when they are suffering sin.  It is entirely unloving.

Now, the World is able to attain some forms of some of these things.  The Stoics and Neo-Stoics attempt moral excellence (1), self-control (3) and patience (4), the Gnostics think they have a form of knowledge (2), but it isn't knowledge, and the Hedonists value some form of filao (6).  Only Christ can give His Christians all of these, because only by Christ is God known, and we DEliGhT in seeking God!  It is a joy to us.

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