Peter's Command to a Comprehensive Love (1 Peter 1:22-25) | Worship Service

Well, good morning. Happy Sunday. We're glad you're here at Kootenai Church.

Would you all please come in and be seated if you're in the hallway? And we're going to get started this morning. We're going to stand and sing all creatures of our God and King. Psalm 147, it says, Praise Yah.

For it is good to sing praises to our God, for it is pleasant and praise is becoming. Yahweh builds up Jerusalem. He gathers the outcasts of Israel. He is the one who heals the brokenhearted and who binds up their wounds, who counts the number of the stars.

He gives names to all of them. Great is our Lord and abundant in power. His discernment is infinite. Yahweh helps the afflicted. He brings down the wicked to the ground. Let's end our first set this morning and sing, Oh, praise the Lord, for it is good.

Psalm 147.

Oh, praise the Lord, for it is good to sing of His righteousness.

You may be seated.

I'll try to combobulate this. So in your bulletins, everything's pretty much self-explanatory, but there's a pull-out. And the morning ladies' Bible study and the Thursday night ladies' Bible study, the time correction on the morning, Monday morning ladies' Bible study, or the date correction is to correct it to Monday, September 18th at 9 o 'clock.

Both of these can be signed up for after the service in the foyer out here. There'll be people there to take your name down and sign you up. Our Scripture reading this morning is from 1 Peter, and we'll read the entire first chapter.

The New Birth, Holiness, and the Living Word in 1 Peter 1

1 Peter chapter 1. Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who reside as aliens scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who are chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father by the sanctifying work of the Spirit, that you may obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with His blood.

May grace and peace be yours in fullest measure. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold, which is perishable even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

And though you have not seen Him, you love Him. And though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls.

As to this salvation, who prophesied of the grace that would come to you, made careful search and inquiry, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating, as He predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow.

It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you in these things which now have been announced to you through those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.

Therefore, gird your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance, but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves in all your behavior, because it is written, you shall be holy, for I am holy.

And if you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each man's work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay upon earth, knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your feudal way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood as of a lamb unblemished and spotless in the blood of Christ.

For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you, who through Him are believers in God, who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory so that your faith and hope are in God.

Since you have in obedience to the truth, purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart. For you have been born again not of seed which is perishable, but imperishable, that is through the living and abiding Word of God.

For all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls off, but the Word of the Lord abides forever. And this is the Word which was preached to you.

Let's prepare our hearts by praying. Father, as You bring Your Word to us today through Dave, we pray for wisdom, context, and care from him as we've come to expect from him. Lord, we pray that You would boldly proclaim through him Your Word.

You have told us to be obedient to the truth, and You have told us to fervently love one another through the heart. And as we look at these things, might our hearts be moved in obedience to do the very things which You have commanded us to do as Dave preaches Your Word this morning, and we thank You for it in Jesus' name.

Would you please stand, and we'll sing, With grateful heart, my thanks I bring, Psalm 138.

With grateful heart, my thanks I bring. Before the grave, Your praise I sing. I worship in Your holy place and praise You for Your truth and grace. For truth and grace together shine in Your most holy Word divine.

Your most holy Word is right to You, and You did say.

Ephesians 3, verses 17 -19. So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, and that you, being firmly rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth, and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.

Let's sing together, Speak, O Lord.

As we come to You to receive shake hands.

Well, good morning. I think you're already turned there. It's 1 Peter 1 this morning, and I'll kind of let you know, I heard from Jim this morning. He is on his way to Philadelphia for a conference with Justin Peters and some others, so surprise, I'm here today.

I'm going to pray here in a minute. I'll have my eyes closed, my head down if anybody would like to exit. I will not be offended. I haven't taken any screenshots. So we're good. I did think this morning, though, this is the first time I've preached that Jim hasn't stolen my thunder.

And then I came to Sunday school where David Hanke.

Had been working behind the scenes with Jim to steal my thunder. So if you were in Sunday school, we're going to continue the theme that David taught this morning. So let's pray together. Oh, first, before we pray, I have to say something to the kids.

The word of the day is Philadelphia. OK, but I may pronounce it that way or I may pronounce it Philadelphia. Either one of those count. OK, so you should be at two right now. OK. All right. Now let's pray.

Father, we do pray as we have sung. We pray that your voice would be heard through your word. Pray, Lord, that we would remember the words of your scripture, that your words, the Holy Spirit given words, OK, that we would apply them to ourselves, that this would be a time when we would contemplate our love for one another and we resolve to deepen that love as we're commanded to do here in this word.

Pray this in Christ's name. Amen. 1 Peter 1 .22 is really the our scripture for today. I know it says 22 through 25 didn't get there. So it's going to be verse 22 today. But let's read verses 22 through 25.

Since you have an obedience to the truth, purified your souls for sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart. For you've been born again, not of seed, which is perishable, but imperishable.

That is through the living and enduring word of God. For all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls off. But the word of the Lord endures forever.

And this is the word which was preached to you. As I said, focus will be on verse 22. I'll allude to 23 to 25 briefly, but we're going to be in verse 22. Now, when you read this verse, there are some thoughts and questions that arise in your mind immediately.

And I'd like to ask you what those are. But in this format, I can't do that. So I'm going to tell you what I see in it. And I'm going to pray that that answers a lot of your questions around it. Let's look at it.

First of all, the language of verse 22 is challenging to interpret. You may have a different translation than what I read. There's different translation choices. And on first reading, I'm not sure what Peter means by that first phrase.

Since you have an obedience to the truth, purified your souls for sincere love of the brethren. I'm not sure exactly what that means. I'm especially interested in what purified means here. But we'll have to study that whole phrase.

Second, the passage is clearly about love. You see that twice in verse 22. Apparently, this sincere love of the brethren is something that we have. Something we've acquired in some way. I have to understand that opening phrase to see how.

But then there's a command. This is the fourth and last command of chapter 1 of 1 Peter. There's a command in verse 22.

You see that.

Fervently love one another from the heart. That's the command. So there's a sense in which we have to make progress from something we possess to something greater. In both cases, we're commanded to love the same people, one another.

The brethren refers to the same people, our brothers and sisters in Christ, each other. So those are things we have to make connections around. We have to understand all of those things. We understand what Peter and the Spirit has intended for us to understand from the verse.

So that's what we're going to do today. If you like outlines, I have five points and six Ps. If you don't like outlines, I have five points and six Ps. But you can ignore them. It's in your bulletin if you have one.

If you don't, someone near you does so you can, I don't know, borrow, steal, barter, share. I guess it would be better in the context of the verse. Share would be better. So we're going to begin with a purification for love.

That's an attempt to understand that opening phrase. Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls. And then second, we'll look at the possession of love, the brotherly love that Peter claims that we have for one another.

Then we'll look at the progression or the progress of love. See what Peter means by that brotherly love being sincere. Then fourth, we'll examine the command to love. We'll see the pinnacle of love, that fervent love for one another from the heart.

Then we'll end with two applications. What I'm calling my fifth point, we'll call it 5A and 5B if you like. The practice and preservation of love. So we're going to understand verse 22 as well as we can, certainly as well as I can.

And then we'll apply it in a couple of ways at the end. At the heart of the verse lies the command we're to love one another. We don't want to lose track of that.

We won't.

That's going to be our emphasis. But before we can get to the command, there's a participle phrase that starts the verse. It's hard to translate, hard to interpret. It's one of the fun and challenging things about 1 Peter.

There's a lot of interpretive challenges in there. Peter's language is very sophisticated. It's interesting. It's challenging. And the man absolutely loves participles. This book is full of them. Now, a lot of kids know what participles are.

By the time we become adults, we generally have forgotten. The verb translated purified there is a perfect participle in the original language. So we would more literally translate it as having purified.

That's a perfect participle. It usually starts with having in English, having done something. And then the rest of the sentence. So having purified your souls. ESV, for example, has it that way. Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth.

So a perfect participle refers to something that has been done in the past, something that happened in the past that has ongoing effects. So we have purified our souls. Having purified our souls, we now have purified souls.

That's right. It's something that has happened to us in the past and has changed something about us, and that's still with us. So that's our first point, the purification to love. But what does it mean?

What does it mean that we have purified our souls? What did we do? We're given a couple clues in Peter's statement. The purification of our souls was done in obedience or by obedience to the truth. So whatever it means, it has to be connected to that.

The other clue is it was done for or unto sincere brotherly love. We have those clues, but what does it mean? Now, it's interpreted in at least two ways. Both of them are good, God-glorifying interpretations of the text.

I think one of them does a better job of paying attention to the subject here. I think it is more true to the way the word is used in the Scripture elsewhere, and I think it's better connected to the immediate context of chapter 1, and particularly the other commands.

So the first interpretation, the one I'm going to disagree with mildly, is that the purification of the soul is regeneration or conversion, being made alive in Christ, given repentance and faith. So in short, this would mean our salvation.

Then if this interpretation is correct, so if having purified our souls means being saved, then what would be entailed in obedience to the truth? If we were saved in obedience to the truth, what would that truth be that we obeyed?

It would be the gospel. Right? The gospel. We live in obedience to that gospel. And there's a lot to like about that interpretation. Obedience is sometimes used to mean that initial saving faith. We see that a couple times in Romans, where it's referred to the obedience of faith.

But here are some of the problems that I see with that interpretation. I think it's unlikely. First, look at your verse. Who is said to be doing the purification in the verse? Who's doing it? Us. You.

Right? The readers. So Peter would, if this is salvation, then Peter would be claiming that we have at least some part in our salvation. That's something that the Bible doesn't support. In fact, look at verse 23.

We're born again through the living and enduring word of God. In what Cornell read earlier, back in verse 3, it says that God has caused us to be born again. So I think that's misplaced. Second, the word for purification of the type we're talking about here, the word that's used doesn't normally mean conversion.

It usually means sanctification. The word for purified is hognizo. It's from hognos. It's the base for words like pure and purified, purification in your New Testament. It's used either to refer to ceremonial purification or to being made more holy, doing the work of sanctification.

This is James 4 .8. So that's an act of the person to purify their hearts, to sanctify themselves. Now, it doesn't mean sanctification is solely the work of a human, but we strive in sanctification. We participate in it.

This word always refers to something a person does to himself. It never refers to something God does to the person. Third is the context. Living a holy life, that's Peter's emphasis. Sanctification is Peter's emphasis.

You see that in the immediate context. Be holy in verses 15 and 16. Conduct yourselves in fear in verse 17. So I agree with Grudem. He says in his commentary,. So I think you can see what I think is a more reasonable interpretation.

Purification isn't salvation here. It isn't conversion and regeneration. It's post-conversion growth and moral purity. It's sanctification, progressive sanctification, that process. So then what would obedience to the truth here mean?

We could take it at face value. It's plain reading. Obedience to all the truth of God's word. In particular, the ethical requirements of the new covenant. Living in obedience to those, to what Paul calls the law of the spirit, or the law of Christ.

Now, you understand there are laws, there are commands of Scripture that pertain to the believer in the New Testament. Here's one now. Love one another. You see that? That's a command that pertains to us.

So we have commands that we have to follow. There are other commands in 1 Peter. You can see more and more of them over the years as we go through 1 Peter. But you know, there's lots of commands in the Bible that pertain to the believer in Christ.

And we obey them. We live in obedience to them. Not in order to be saved, not to obtain justification, but because we have obtained justification. And so we live in obedience to Christ, although we've been saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

So I'm interpreting this to mean, kind of paraphrase, since you've grown and are continuing to grow in sanctification by living in obedience to all the truth of Scripture that pertains to you, including the saving truths of the gospel, and all the sanctifying commands of Scripture, you have gained a sincere love of the brethren.

Your sanctification has grown to include a sincere love of the brethren. I think that's what Peter is saying. So I have to take a little bit of step off of 1 Peter to establish a fact, so that we don't get confused about this.

It's one of the key lessons of 1 John, David. Christians, all Christians love one another. Christians love one another. That's the lesson of 1 John. We just do. If you read 1 John, you'll see John does not usually or generally express love for the brethren as a command.

He doesn't usually. It's usually as evidence of genuine conversion. He says that Christians love one another. He's not ordinarily commanding Christians to. He does do that. We'll see that here. But let me give you the flavor of the message of love in 1 John.

This is 3 .10. By this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifested. Everyone who does not do righteousness is not of God, as well as the one who does not love his brother. 1 John 5 .1.

Listen to this carefully. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God. And everyone who loves the one who gives new birth loves also the one who has been born of him. If you are in Christ, having been born of him, you love all who have been born of him, if you love the one who gives the birth.

That's his point. Christians love one another. If you claim to be united with Christ, you share in the life of Christ, you don't have love, you don't have that preferring sacrificial love, for those for whom Christ died, you're a liar.

That's John's message. Christians love one another. It's just part of the new birth. It's something we possess by virtue of our joint union with Christ. It's a possession of every believer. So that's our second point, the possession of love on the part of every Christian for one another.

Okay, so you may be thinking through this a little bit. If my understanding of the participle phrase in Peter is correct, then Peter seems to be contradicting that message of John's, right? You see that?

If Peter is claiming that we've achieved brotherly love through the work of sanctification, purifying our souls by living in obedience to the truth, that's different from what John is saying, that we have brotherly love by virtue of our salvation, our regeneration.

So that's the question. Is brotherly love something we have, as John says, or is it something we get over time, as Peter seems to be saying? Is love for the brethren a gift of the Holy Spirit that we acquire as part of our regeneration, or is it something that only happens when we reach a certain point in our sanctification?

It's an important question. Well, that's where the adjective comes in. There's an adjective here describing our love of the brothers in verse 22 as sincere. That's one of the adjectives. Sincere or without hypocrisy or unfeigned.

So that word has the alpha, the A, in front of a word meaning hypocrisy. The word for hypocrisy had its origins in saying lines as an actor in a play. So it's saying this type of love is not like that.

It's not just playing a part. It's not just speaking or acting in a way that's inconsistent with your affections. So this is a love that moves beyond feeling, and it's reflected in action. Your words and your thoughts and your deeds are consistent, all of them feelings of love toward one another.

So this sincere love is not an immediate gift of the Spirit to all believers. This is something that we grow into. This is the progress of love, our third point. All believers have a preferring affectionate love for one another.

We get that by nature of our conversion, our being united in fellowship with Christ and so with one another. But it's not true that our actions are immediately consistent with those feelings. We have to learn that kind of love.

We have love for one another, but we have to learn it. It's true in 1 Peter and in 1 John. So John clearly says that brotherly love is something we gain at regeneration, but he also commands sincere love.

Listen to this, 1 John 3, 17 and 18. That's a command from John. We saw a command in what David read this morning in Sunday school. So we're taught that Christians love one another. Christians also are commanded to pursue love in action, to make brotherly love consistent or sincere.

So that's what's happening. I'm trying to put all this together in my head. So by following, by living in obedience to the commands of Scripture, we gain, we grow in sanctification and gain a more sincere form of the love that we all have by virtue of our regeneration.

That's the message. Okay, well, that's good. That makes sense, right? But why do we need a command then? If Peter is saying we have accomplished that sincere love of the brethren, then why do we need a command?

Why does he tell us to fervently love one another from the heart? Why tell us to do something we're already doing? That would be curious. Well, let's understand exactly what that command is. And this is the heart of this verse.

What exactly does this command mean? The first point we have to make is a difference in the verbs. There are two verbs translated as love in the verse, two different Greek words. The love of the brothers and kids, you're thinking, is he ever going to say the word?

Get your pencils out because it starts now. And there will be a burst of you putting your little notches on the papers, okay? I don't know how many there are. I'd just tell you and we'd just shortcut the whole thing.

So the two verbs, the verb that is translated as brotherly love, the love of the brothers, is that philadelphia. That comes from phileo for love and adelphos for brother. The love in the command is that familiar agapa or agape love.

So we're assumed to have a sincere version of the one, philadelphia, and we are commanded to have a fervent agapao that's from the heart. So Peter, and Peter more than the other writers of Scripture, seems to see a progression in intensity between the two words.

To Peter, philadelphia seems to be less intense, lower than agapao. So Peter here declares we have a sincere philadelphia brother love for one another. Then he commands a fervent agapao love, implying that his readers don't have that.

They don't always have it in the right intensity to the degree that they should. You can see Peter's view of these two types of love in 2 Peter. It might be worth turning to 2 Peter 1. It's right after 1 Peter.

Yeah, they arranged it nicely there. They also put all the T's together in the New Testament, which I find very helpful. 2 Peter 1. In verse 3, he tells us there that God has given us everything pertaining to life and godliness.

He tells us in verse 4, we are partakers of the divine nature. That sounds very much like 1 John. Then he commands us to make diligent efforts to supply or add to our lives a list of virtues that seem to be, if you look at them, of increasing moral quality, moral intensity.

Look at verses 5 -7. Now, for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness.

That's philadelphia. And in your brotherly kindness, love.

That's agapao.

The list ends with those two. Philadelphia, then agapao. Brotherly kindness, then love. So if this is a list of moral virtues that is increasing in value for Peter, then the two highest virtues are there at the end with love, agapao, surpassing philadelphia, brotherly kindness.

So let's talk about Peter for a minute. You can't get away from this. I think some of you know where you have to go when you start thinking about Peter's use of these words. Peter learned a lot about love from his own life with Christ.

I think this may account why Peter has such an emphasis on the progress of love in the letter. So you remember the record of Peter's betrayal of Christ and his restoration after Jesus rose from the grave.

I want to talk about that a little bit. You may not remember. Peter had betrayed Christ after he declared he never would. Even though all may fall away because of you, I will never fall away. Jesus said to him, Truly I say to you that this very night before a rooster crows, you will deny me three times.

And you remember what Peter said? Even if I have to die with you, I will not deny you.

Wow.

So you know he did. He did it repeatedly, obstinately, loudly, even profanely. Peter denied he even knew Christ. He betrayed him after he had so self-righteously and emphatically said he never would.

I'll go to death for you. Luke records in his gospel at the time of his betrayal, Jesus looked at Peter and Peter remembered what he'd said. And he went out and cried bitterly, Luke says. So then after his resurrection, you know the story after Christ's resurrection.

You can follow along with this in John 21 if you like. It's John 21, 15 through 18 I'll be referring to. Jesus orchestrates an event where he has breakfast with Peter on the beach. Remember that? He asked Peter three times if Peter loves him.

Three times Peter says he does. Three times Peter expresses his love. And each time Jesus tells Peter to tend or shepherd his sheep. The first two times Jesus asks the question, he asks Peter, do you love me?

Using a form of agapao. Do you love me? Both times Peter responds with, you know that I love you. But he uses phileo, which is the same word for love in Philadelphia. It just doesn't have the brother part on it.

It's that same strength and intensity. Third time Jesus changes it up. He says, do you love me? This time he uses phileo. And Peter was grieved by the question, it says. He again claims that he loves phileo Christ.

Peter never would claim, at least he's being honest this time, right? He can't claim that he has that agapao, that agapao love for Christ. He can't do it. Not even now. He recognizes, I didn't demonstrate that kind of love.

I'm not sure I can claim that even now. So when Jesus switched his words, what was so grieving to Peter. So Jesus is admitting the same thing. He's confronting him with it. I've asked you twice if you love me with this most intense sacrificial type of love and twice you have deflected.

So now I'm only going to ask you if you have affection for me. And he says, yes, I have affection for you. Then Jesus tells him to tend his sheep. We see that again. But then he gives him a prophecy about how he's going to die, about how Peter's going to die.

So Jesus knew that Peter would, in fact, grow into that kind of love. He knew that he would. So for our purposes, they both had an understanding there's a difference of some kind between these two words for love.

Peter had the one, Philadelphia, but he hadn't shown the other, Agapao. And on the beach, he didn't possess that intense kind of love. So what's the difference? What is the difference between those two?

It's mainly a difference in emphasis. Brotherly love or Philadelphia stresses affection and feeling. It's used outside of the Scripture to mean exactly, literally, love between brothers. So if you have a sibling, you love them.

It's kind of natural for you to love them. You may fight with them more than anybody else, but you love them. It's natural for you to have a concern for them, an affection for them, an emotional bond.

You have each other's back. You can beat each other up, but nobody can, type of, you know. That's natural. Now, when we are united in Christ, that sort of affection is extended to one another, to your brothers and sisters in Christ.

That's natural. Agapao love, on the other hand, that's different. That places an emphasis on preference, actually esteeming the other more highly than yourself, and on will, determination to follow that feeling.

It doesn't leave out the affection, but it includes and emphasizes decisiveness, this type of love. It's a love that flows from reason and will. So to love this way is to prefer—an easy way to think of it is preferring one another over worldlings and also preferring others even over ourselves.

It extends that far. It's to live out preference by action, by sacrifice for one another, putting each other ahead of ourselves, actually thinking that other people are more important than us and acting that out.

Hebert puts it this way in his commentary in the passage, Agape does not make prominent the emotional aspect of Philadelphia. It is rather the love of full intelligence and understanding coupled with corresponding purpose.

The love of full intelligence and understanding coupled with corresponding purpose. It is a love of rational goodwill that desires the highest good for the one loved, even at the expense of self. That's a high love.

Now, Peter's an interesting case study in love. I think understanding his life helps us understand what he intends here. Peter had to learn love, didn't he? He hadn't loved Christ, certainly not sincerely, certainly not without hypocrisy.

You see the hypocrisy, I will die before I deny you. I don't know who he is, never heard of him. That's hypocrisy. That was Peter's certainly not sincere love, insincere. Jesus had sincere love, didn't he?

Jesus was willing to make the sacrifice that Peter needed for his good and for ours. Peter wasn't. So Jesus told Peter at his restoration to do something. He told him to do that which would be an expression of genuine love by Peter for Christ and for his sheep, for Christ's sheep.

He told him to tend the sheep. That's how Peter would demonstrate love. As chief among the apostles, as an elder, his work was to show love for Christ by showing love for the sheep through shepherding, through loving and sacrificial leadership.

That was to be his expression of love. So by the time Peter wrote this, he knew about love. He knew about hypocritical love. He knew a lot about that. He knew about insincere love. He also knew now about sincere, practical, preferring love.

He understood fervent love. He understood love from the heart. He'd seen it. He'd seen it in Christ and he spent the rest of his life expressing it for his sheep. We see that from the rest of Peter's life.

We see it in Acts. We see it here in his letters. The prophecy of his death and the tradition of how he died. He followed through. So now we can see the content of the command. We can see the progression here.

Brotherly love is the possession of all Christians. If you're a believer, you love one another. We can't help but look to our fellow believers as having that same central core of our being in common. At Liam and Molly's wedding, I met someone I'd never met before in my life.

Can't remember his name. He's my friend. You've experienced that. Somebody you've never met before. You're on a plane. You start talking about, oh, they're believers. Maybe you try to share the gospel with them.

It doesn't work because they're trying to share it with you. It doesn't. Immediate friendship. That we all have in common. But a sincere love of the brethren grows over time as part of our sanctification process.

We make progress in love. We grow increasingly willing to suppress our own self-interest.

We grow.

So Philadelphia that is sincere, that's a more mature brotherly love, more sanctified brotherly love. Pervades more of our actions, more of our faculties. Takes more of our time and our money and our affection.

Becomes sincere. Then as we continue to grow, we tend toward agapao. And not just a bare or mere agapao. That would be very similar to a sincere brotherly love. But to a fervent agapao and one that's from the heart.

We're to love fervently and from the heart. Let's look at those words. Fervently. I was going to bring something, but I forgot to bring it. I was going to bring a bungee cord. Nobody ever does illustrations really like that from here, so I decided not to.

But then I decided I would this morning, then I forgot. Jamie talked me into it, and I forgot. But that's what, if you imagine something that has some stretch to it, it gets to the end of its stretch.