During this Lenten season I have been reading and studying nothing but 1 Peter. If the first chapter was an opera, verses 22-23 would be the aria. The pinnacle of maturity as a follower of Christ is love. We find here the secret for the context and content of love, as God would have us express it to our brethren in the world. I wrote the following during a train ride into Manhattan after meditating on what it meant when Peter said, "Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart."
“The degree of love I exhibit is directly related to how well I obey truth as God reveals it. The refining process of obedience distills my character to the essence of the seed of salvation—the seed of love, which the husk of service encases. When I trust God to obey Him, He will lead me into unfamiliar, unkind, unresponsive and unrefined places and people, to whom I am called to love. What I don’t often realize is that the first ministry is love—the SEED! The husk of service blinds me to God’s ultimate desire and destination. We can fall into the trap of saying our ministry is our expression of love, but this is only the husk! If I stumble this way on the husk, I miss the purpose for His leading me in the first place—to love earnestly from the heart—to activate the seed of God’s love.”
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