TUESDAY 22nd
2 Peter 1:5–7
‘For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.’
In today’s devotion we come to what I will call the bottom step or rung of the ladder, not because it is not important, but because faith is the first essential step we have to take. The initial faith we have is saving faith and it is to this faith we add the supplements or qualities that follow, as I have already mentioned each could be added in any order, but we will follow Peters order.
Faith is the gift that God gives us for us to be enabled to believe in him and to come and to accept what Christ has done on our behalf at Calvary. Ephesians 2:8 ‘For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God’, in a sense it is this faith that causes us to come to an end of ourselves and any of our own attempts to earn salvation etc. and to trust fully or entirely on what Christ has done. Saving faith is also a trusting faith, it is also a believing faith, it enables us to believe that with God all things are possible, it enables us to come to the point of surrendering our own will over to the will of God the Father. Faith enables us to say, God you know what is best, I will depend utterly on you and in you. I trust everything into your safe hands.
Faith is as we read in Hebrews 11, ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’, faith in the unseen leads to that which is eternal, ‘as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal’ (2 Corinthians 4:18). Faith causes us to love God who we haven’t seen and to believe in God who we have never seen, and as a result leads to the salvation of our souls. (1 Peter 1:8) Saving faith is not a leap into the dark, it is a leap into the safe keeping of the hands of God, while at the same time we need to be willing to exercise faith and step into the unknown, but we do so with an assurance in our hearts that what we don’t know, we have confidence that He knows!
May we all be sure at this point, before we move onto the next step, that we have placed our faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. For those of us who have already trusted, let us remind ourselves that as we continue on our journey, that ‘without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever draws near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him’ (Hebrews 11:6).