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Before Love

          For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (II Peter 1:5-8)
          It all begins with faith. It always all begins with faith. What we believe, really believe is the ground from which our behaviors grow. That’s why the self-esteem programs of the past couple decades are so dangerous. Their belief of what they’re told, with a childlike absolute faith produces negative actions (or more properly, reactions) when they discover that the rest of the world doesn’t agree.
          Strangely, what follows faith isn’t love. Love is the greatest commandment, but we’re not told to add it to faith. Instead, we’re told to add goodness. Why goodness? I believe it’s because goodness is simple and practical love. It’s doing to others as we would have them do to us.
          Next, Peter adds knowledge. Some people like to say that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care, but the Bible reverses it. Before you show how much you care, you need to know as much as possible that is relevant to the situation. This is where we so often go wrong. Loving, caring people hearing about some how bad things are in East Africa send clothing and destroy the textile industry that was starting up there. Loving, caring people hear about how bad things are in another area, and send a huge shipment of eggs, destroying the livelihood of local farmers. We’re so busy being compassionate that we don’t realize that our compassion is doing more harm than good.
          After knowledge, we have self-control and perseverance. Not only do we have to be good, and to learn how best to help, but we need to not go overboard, and we need to be in it for the long haul. On top of all that, we need to be godly. Godly? How’s that different from being good? If God is love, how’s it different from being loving? Godliness has to do with loving God, and living in a correct relationship with Him.
         It’s only when we are doing all these things that it becomes possible to rightly show mutual affection or love. Without all those other things, mutual affection and love turn into use and abuse.

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