UBC Wed For Life

The previous message focused on Jesus and several of his traits. His defining characteristic, however, was purposely saved for later discussion. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. - 1 John 4:7-9 God is love and Jesus is God who came in human form, so he too, is love. If we’ve truly added godliness to our Faith, then the end result should be the display of godly love. That is what Peter said in the order of operation he provided. However, when we look at Peter’s order, we see that he gave us a step in between godliness and love that he referred to as mutual affection. To understand mutual affection and why Peter mentioned it, we have to acknowledge that love as God displays it and how he wants us to display it...

In the last message, perseverance was discussed. The next step in the plan Peter laid is adding godliness. When someone perseveres, they are typically working towards something. A state of godliness is what Believers should be trying to achieve. At first, one may think that sounds silly. How can we as flawed humans ever reach such a state? What would a truly godly human being even look like? Luckily for us, those questions have already been answered. God has already provided for us the model of a godly human in his son, Jesus Christ. As we’ve mentioned before in this discussion, our goal should be to become more like Jesus. That’s what it means to seek godliness as a human being. Christians speak a lot about Jesus’ death and resurrection, as well we should. After all, it was Jesus’ death and resurrection that opened the door for our salvation. However, in our attempts to honor his sacrifice, we shouldn’t forget about the life that he lived prior to giving it up. It was d...

As discussed previously, 2 Peter gives an order to follow after coming to the Faith. So far, we’ve established that the first step is to make a conscious effort to do good and avoid evil. After that, we must look to the Bible to gain greater knowledge and understanding of what is good, so we can refine our efforts towards that goal. In the last message, we identified self-control as the trait that we need to develop to ensure that we are able to consistently and continuously avoid the things that can inhibit our abilities to do good. The next step is to add perseverance to our self-control. Perseverance is defined as steadfastness in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.[1] The Bible tells us that perseverance is necessary. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. – Hebrews 10:36 Life throws a lot at us. After working to develop self-control, many of the smaller temptations will b...