Week 50 2 Peter
I start reading Peter’s second letter with my usual goals: a) cover the ground, and b) absorb what I can. But by the fifth verse I’m doing neither. Peter says:
So make every effort to apply the benefits of these promises to your life
Then your faith will produce a life of moral excellence
A life of moral excellence leads to knowing God better
Knowing God leads to self-control
Self-control leads to patient endurance
And patient endurance leads to godliness
Godliness leads to love for other Christians
And finally you will grow to have genuine love for everyone.
The paragraph slows me down, stalls me.
These sixty-eight words are part of the answer to the question: what happens when I believe in the Lord? Simple enough question…not as simple an answer.
The way Peter writes the paragraph makes it seem like a ladder. There’s the first step, then the second, then third. Faith happens, then moral excellence starts up on a tangent to faith, a step-by-step evolvement. Or I guess it could be an untidier overlapping-type development. Or maybe everything moves ahead in a roughly simultaneous way.
But one way or the other life after belief is a compound made up of several elements – in this case there’s seven or eight of them. Interconnected things. Which is very, very useful to know. But knowing is only part of it.
Note: quote taken from 2 Peter 1:5-7 (NLT)