“In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone.”
2 Peter 1:5-7 NLT
Peter lists a number of qualities to supplement our faith. He started with “moral excellence” and then added “knowledge”, “self-control”, “patient endurance”, “godliness”, “brotherly affection”, and “love for everyone”. But again we notice that these qualities, hallmarks of good Christians everywhere, are to be “supplements”, to be sought after and added to our faith in Christ. How will that happen? Well, the “university of life” is a good environment for working out all that God has for us. As we rub shoulders with humanity around us we find many opportunities to behave in God-ways, and not our selfish ways.
There is a process that we follow, and it starts with God’s grace and our faith in Christ. The qualities that Peter listed are not automatically present in a new believer. They may be to some extent, but we acquire them principally by searching the Word of God diligently and applying what we read and learn to our lives. Then the qualities God demands start to emerge. We note also that faith on its own is not the ideal position for a believer. We read in James 2:17, “So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless“. We get the picture that the qualities Peter listed are to manifest themselves in “good deeds” for the benefit of our fellow believers, friends and neighbours. In fact, the Apostle James was quite blunt in what he wrote. James 2:19-20, 24, “You say you have faith, for you believe that there is one God. Good for you! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror. How foolish! Can’t you see that faith without good deeds is useless? … So you see, we are shown to be right with God by what we do, not by faith alone“.
Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:8-10, “God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago”. There is a balance between our faith in Christ, and the qualities we learn from Him being outworked in our lives by “good deeds”. We are not saved by what we do but we are saved for the good works that Jesus planned for us.
Salvation is a process and not a once in a lifetime event. God loves us of course, right where we are at, warts and all, but as has been said many times, He loves us too much to leave us there. At the point of a heart-felt and genuine decision for Christ, we receive the Holy Spirit and He then continues the process of sanctification throughout our natural lives. We read in Ephesians 5:22-23, “But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!” We notice that these include the qualities that Peter wrote about. We now put aside our worldly sinful lives and live God’s way through the power of His Spirit.
So are we taking our “supplements” or are they absent, bottled up in our selfish ways? Are we being “generous” in our “provision of moral excellence”? Is our faith balanced with “good deeds”, as James wrote? On our journey through life we have much to do, but we will find great rewards in the process.
Dear Father God. Thank You for loving us, even when we are unlovely. Please help us, as we journey through life, to become more like Jesus, day by day. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 