Feeding the Sheep - Blessed Life 3

"Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing."

1 Peter 3:8-9

[This is the 33rd message of this series]

This lesson is intended for mature believers (or adulting believers). For a more orderly study, please go through all the previous messages first, if you haven't yet.

1 Peter

[This will be the 3rd of a series within a series]

Living the Blessed Life

Peter instructed the first church (among other things) to be sympathetic, to love, and to be compassionate with one another. [We bunched these all together because they basically are all the same thing]

Sympathy

Christ redeemed us to live a new life, a blessed life. This blessing was given us to live this new life here on earth. We live out our remaining life here and look towards living with Christ eternally after we leave this place. God gave us His Spirit, the Holy Spirit as a guarantee of this everlasting life and to guide us as to how to live out this blessed life.

This series walks us through how we ought to live this new life. And one of the things is by having sympathy with others, meaning we are meant to grieve with them in their time of sorrow and to celebrate them and rejoice along with them during their joyful moments.

Both are hard to fake. And of all the things real people hate, I think they hate fakers the most. Envy, jealousy, gossip, slander, sour-graping and one-upping -- these are not a part of the blessed life.

Compassion

Compassion is similar to sympathy, or having a strong push to feel what other's feel, or pull to go through the same things they are going through

To explain simply, compassion is having the same passion as with another person, this also involves loving the same things they love and hating the same things they hate. This is the same as having one mind, being like-minded, and being single minded as we discussed in the previous lesson.

Love

Basically living the blessed life means living a life full of love -- love for God and love for others.

Once we learn how to live this blessed life, a joyful life is inevitable. The uncomplicated happy life that God wants us to live is there right within our reach -- by walking daily with the Holy Spirit of God.

Let us learn how to do this, as we continue in this series of lessons.