Are you living the life that God planned for you to live?
We are able to live the life that God intended for us to live. We are offered everything we need to become the person God intended us to be.
This is the eighth of a series of posts discussing qualities we need to develop in our lives that will help us live the life that God intended us to live.
2 Peter 1:5-8 lists seven qualities that will help us become the person God wants us to be.
This post addresses the final quality, love.
For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. (2 Peter 1:5-7 ESV)
For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 1:8)
If you want to be the person that God wants you to be, you need this most important quality of love.
The Great Commandment
… a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself….” (Matthew 22:34-40 ESV)
You are commanded to love God and to love your neighbors as yourself.
This love comes from God.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. (1 John 4:7 ESV)
We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19 ESV)
This command to love is repeated throughout scripture.
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. (John 13:34 ESV)
Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4:8 ESV)
Let brotherly love continue. (Hebrews 13:1 ESV)
A definition of love.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7 ESV)
Prayer: Father, help me to love you and my neighbor.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13 ESV)
Be sure to read “Living the Life God Planned for You to Live (Part 9”) the final post in this series.
Click here to view previous posts on the Seeking His Kingdom website.
