Add To Your...

                 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)

He said to them: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean.” (Acts 10:28)

 Given the priority given to love in passages like I Corinthians 13, the list above is interesting. Of course, it ends with love while I Corinthians 13:1-8 describes love. But you know that person or those people you know you’re supposed to love, but can’t? This passage suggests a place to start and how to build up to that love.

You start with faith, which can also be translated as belief or trust. But as I’ve noted before, faith, belief, and trust all require an object. Faith/belief/trust in what? For what? To What? You may have faith that the person/people in question are absolute jerks. That’s not what Peter had in mind. He may have thought back to his experience as recorded in Acts 10. God sent him to the home of a Gentile. For the Jews, Gentiles were sub-human jerks, but Peter learned that he was not to call anyone impure or unclean. Why? Perhaps because they were created by God, in the image of God, just like the Jews were. They were descendants of Noah (and therefore Adam), just like Jews were. They could be people of faith, just like Jews could be, and since they could be people of faith in God, that means they had to be capable of changing from what they had been into people of faith in God. Like the Gentiles of old, those folks we find so unpleasant and antagonistic are created in the image of God, by God, and are capable of change. In addition, God brings them into our lives. We can accept these things as a matter of faith, belief, and trust.

To act appropriately based on these beliefs involves seeking their good and doing good. As we do that, we are likely to get to know both them and God better, and perhaps to learn how better to serve them, God, and others whom we haven’t met yet. This will require self-control, because it’s tempting to run away or to respond in a way we know we shouldn’t. These desires are likely to grow stronger before they grow weaker. That means we’ll have to persevere. As we persevere, we will grow in godliness. As we grow in godliness, we’ll learn mutual affection, and that will grow into love. And I find we’re back to my mantra: “Do what you can with what you have where you are now.” If you need to change your mind so that you believe someone is created in the image of God, by God, and capable of change, then work at that. If that’s not a problem but you aren’t consistent in doing good, perhaps your prayer should be about self-control or persistence. Keep in mind that this list isn’t universal in the sense that your difficulty with one person may not be your difficulty with another. It’s also not permanent in the sense that while you may achieve mutual affection with someone one day, and the next be back to needing the faith to believe they have any value. That’s why we need self-control and perseverance.