TUESDAY 6th
2 Peter 1:10–11
‘Therefore, my brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election. For if you do these things, you will never stumble, and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’
We are saved by grace, we can do nothing, absolutely nothing to earn salvation or to save ourselves it is all achieved by the working of the grace of God through what Christ has done at Calvary. But here in our verses today Peter tells us to ‘make every effort to confirm your calling and election’. This means that we have our part to play once we have been saved. Paul puts it this way in Philippians 2:12-13 ‘Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfil his good purpose’.
We cannot come to Calvary and conclude, ‘well I am saved now’, and put up our feet so to speak, we must confirm, affirm our salvation, we have to grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we have to move from infancy to maturity, we have to display the fruit of righteousness, we have to ensure that we stand firm. Peter says that if we do what he has instructed in the verses we have looked at, we will never stumble. That is if we take hold of and receive the divine power that God is making available to us, (v3) and add to our faith the various qualities, (vv5-7) we will never stumble or fall (v10).
In verse 9, Peter has clearly stated that the one who lacks these qualities that he has instructed them to add to their lives, is so near sighted, that he or she has become blind, forgetting that he or she has been cleansed from their former sins.
We must never allow ourselves to fall into a position in which we forget what we have been saved from and to what we have become in Christ and go backward spiritually to the point of practising or living in the former sins that once entrapped us. We seek to do all that we can to make every effort, to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, realising that one day we will have to stand before the Holy God and give an account of our lives. We live in such a way that we ensure that ‘there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’. (v11)