Enjoy life

 

For

“He who would love life

And see good days,

Let him refrain his tongue from evil,

And his lips from speaking deceit.

Let him turn away from evil and do good;

Let him seek peace and pursue it.

For the eyes of the LORD are on the righteous,

And His ears are open to their prayers;

But the face of the LORD is against those who do evil.” – 1 Peter 3.10-12

‘If you would love life,’ James writes, there are some things you need to do.

 

Control your tongue

Hate evil and do good

Seek peace

Don’t answer evil with evil

 

We all want to love out lives, don’t we? We don’t want life to be a hassle. Most of us just want get on with life, be reasonably comfortable, and to leave the world a better place.

 

But life doesn’t always work out that way. The world can be a difficult place to negotiate. Because we live in a broken world sometimes we need to deal with its brokenness.

 

There are things we can do to make it better. We will still live in a broken world but we can bear up through it. If we try to apply some principles

 

We need to learn to control our mouths. We need to avoid evil. We need to refrain from lies and deceit.

 

We need to learn to hate evil and avoid it. We need to do good.

 

We need to chase peace and not conflict. Our goal should be peace with holiness.

 

We need to avoid reprisal and retribution and revenge.

 

That doesn’t sound too hard, but the broken world gets in the way of all those things. The world tempts us to speak evil. It tempts us to do evil. Conflict is easier than peace. And its never easy to be attacked and not respond.

 

We can’t let the world manipulate us. If we do we are hardly going to enjoy life and see good days.