MONDAY 21st
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.’
A long time ago I did a series on just these few verses, going through them over a number of studies, covering each of the qualities mentioned. I used as a basis of my studies a picture of a set of steps starting at the bottom left of a chart and ascending up to the top right hand side of the chart. Each step leading from faith through each supplement or quality until we reached the penultimate step which was love, then the final step, the place where each of these virtues will lead to, which is our being effective and fruitful in the knowledge of Christ. (v8) I illustrated that adding these qualities or supplement to our lives moves us from being just nominal in our Christianity, to becoming practical in our Christianity.
So, over the next few devotions we will take each of the steps, and seek to supplement our faith. Now remember I mentioned in our previous devotion the lady who had a cupboard full of supplements, I don’t know how many of them she actually used, but what I want to recommend as we go through each supplement / quality is that we don’t shelve them after we have read about them, but that we take them and apply them on a daily basis to our lives so that we will become spiritually fitter, stronger and more effective.
When it comes to these qualities, although they have been set out in a particular order in these verses, it isn’t something that is what I will call a fixed order, in fact we should already be displaying something of each of the qualities as believers anyway, but it is Peter’s way of expressing how these qualities should grow and be multiplied in us. I could look at them in a different order, and it would make no difference to the fact that we need to add them to our faith. And it is to faith we will go to start our journey up the steps tomorrow.