Love Or Hate ?
1st John 4:7-8 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
Dearly Beloved: May God’s grace, peace, love and glory be ever upon you. I want to talk to you about the oldest and most lethal disease known to mankind. Hate! It is a disease that is both deadly and highly contagious. Hate and evil are one. If we embrace hate, then we embrace evil. When we allow hate to take over our minds, we become accomplices to evil. The very act of hating invokes evil in us and gives us license to condone the darkness of this world. Hate turns us into instruments of evil. We become mindless tools and pawns. As if black clay, we can be shaped, molded and ultimately malformed by hate. I have been faced with so much hate these past three and some odd years. Only love can shield us from hate. If it were not for the love of Christ, I may have been consumed by hate; enveloped in the total darkness of evil. I may have become spiteful and devoid of light; angry and full of pain. My heart may have been a sub-zero slab of stone. Let me tell you, my beloved, it is so easy for any one of us to fall victim to hate; so easy to succumb to the darkness – especially when we are faced with such great adversity such as I am now. (more…)
Proverbs 27:5-6 Open rebuke is better than love carefully concealed. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
Dear Readers:
“Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble! But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect? And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” And he was called the friend of God. You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only. Likewise, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way? For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.