"Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing."
~ 1 Peter 3:8-9
I don't know about you, but I really struggle with some of the characteristics listed above.
You may read that and say: "Live in harmony with one another? Is that the same thing as tolerance? Aren't we supposed to live in the world but not of it? How do these things go together?" Well, I think this passage is talking about within the church. As a church body we should live in harmony, and that just doesn't always happen. There is hostility between certain branches of the Body and that breaks my heart. Denominations like to pick out all the difference and just argue. Why can't we all just say, "We may have differences, but the heart of the matter is Christ, and because we have Him we are one in the Body." Paul wrote somewhere that different parts of the body serve different purposes but those parts have to work together.
Sympathy and compassions are pretty heavily ingrained. I am an empathizer, and because of this sympathy is not really a problem for me, and neither is compassion. We are called to help our brothers, and without these two things, we can't help others.
Love as brothers. This isn't always easy, but it ties in with the afore mentioned characteristics.
Be humble. Wow. This can be incredibly difficult. It's really easy to get into this mindset that we are better because we are Christians and we have a strong moral center. (Or we should.) It's important to remember that everything we have is from above and not of ourselves.
It's really easy to want to retaliate against evil and insult with evil and insult. We need to remember that Christ died because of us, because we are evil and we insulted Him, and so He should have repaid that death with death, but instead He gives us life.
We were called to be loving. We were called to be CharacterStrong. Our greatest blessing is the salvation we get from Christ.