Monday, November 30, 2009

Love vs. Peace

Poker players can come up with curious online names. We watched a head-to-head fight over the weekend between "Peace4Twenty" and "LoveLiftedMe."

Peace4Twenty won a pot with a pair of threes. And it led us to spark a discussion, as the game continued:

Me: Peace over love
_pokerdiva: lol
TheHoy: lol
Me: Different from how I've seen that listed....
Dealer: Peace4twenty wins Main Pot ($820)
Dealer: loveliftedme wins Main Pot ($4554) with One pair, nines
Me: Love, joy, peace is the order I read in a book once.

No one responded to that comment. Do you know which "book" we're talking about?

If you visit us regularly, you probably guessed we're talking about the Bible. Galatians 5:22 has an even more complete order: "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness...."

Some ministers say the fruit are listed in that order for a reason. We won't go into that here. Our point is that you need God's Holy Spirit to develop those fruit properly.

How do you obtain the Holy Spirit? Peter gave a two-step formula in Acts 2:38. "Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of you sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." (NASB)

Peace4Twenty soon fell out of the game. But LoveLiftedMe kept building chips, as we return to the chat....

Dealer: loveliftedme wins Main Pot ($9085) with Full house, sixes full of threes
Me: Love hurts.
loveliftedme: love prevails
Me: Now -- and ultimately. :-)
loveliftedme: yes

As Paul put it in I Corinthians 13:8, "Love never fails." Especially the love of God, if you care enough to obey Him. Do you?

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