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Make Every Effort (2 Peter 1:5-7)

Scott Kercheville
12/18/22 - Sun AM

People in the world and even at church will sometimes question why we pursue godly living so intently. Many become consumed by this idea that Christian standards have become overbearing. Peter knew that as the time passed from Jesus’ first coming and as a second coming appeared to be delayed that people would rise up within the church with all sorts of unhealthy thinking, teaching, and living. Peter said some would question the authenticity of the testimony about Jesus: “These claims about Jesus have been twisted and inflated since the early days.” They would cast doubt on the certainty of a future judgment day: “Where is the promise of his coming?” They would promote cheap grace: “Ease up a bit — God has bigger fish to fry than worrying about whether or not you’re doing that!”

In the first four verses, Peter reassures us. We have a faith of equal standing with those early generations. We can indeed know our God and Savior Jesus Christ. He has granted us everything we need to live godly lives. In fact, he promises that we can share in his divine nature ourselves. The Divine One took on flesh eternally that flesh might escape corruption and partake in his eternal, divine nature. God doesn’t have much bigger concerns than our behavior — he’s quite invested.

What should we do with the fact that in Christ God has granted us very great promises and given us everything we need to partake in his divine nature? Peter says we are to make every effort to grow in Christian fruit.

He speaks of faith — our foundational belief, trust in, loyalty, and allegiance to King Jesus. Virtue is moral excellence and integrity. Knowledge is our ability to take what we know about God, what he’s done, what he promises to do, what we should do about, and put all that together in a meaningful and coherent way. Self-control refers to the ability to exercise restraint, discipline, and not be subject to sinful desires. Steadfastness is endurance in the face of suffering or evil — not because we are inherently brave or because we are Stoically detached, but because we trust and hope in God. Godliness refers to a general respect for and alignment to God’s will, and maybe even a life that is like God. Brotherly affection refers to the devotion, kindness, warmth, and family-like closeness that we should have for one another. And love sums all of these up — it is patient and kind, it does not envy or boast. We’ll come back to love shortly.

This text offers a great opportunity to help us plan to grow in the New Year. Let’s consider three things from this text that we can learn about Christian growth.

1. Christian growth is holistic (or, growth is an inseparable, interconnected web). Translating this list is challenging in English, and some translations might give us the wrong sense like we are just adding or piling up a bunch of qualities into a big disconnected basket. However, the idea is that each quality springs from the previous one: faith is the means by which we grow in virtue, and virtue is the means by which we grow in knowledge, and so forth.

Now, lists like these are common in ancient Greek, Jewish, and Christian literature; and while they tend to begin and end very intentionally, most interpreters discourage trying to explain an exact reason for the specific ordering of each quality. The specific order of these middle qualities is not the secret psychological recipe for Christian growth. For example, he says in verse 6 that by means of our knowledge we grow in self-control — the point is not to obsess over how knowledge and knowledge alone helps us grow in self-control. The point is to instruct us to grow in these qualities in a holistic way. We cannot pick our favorite qualities and just pursue those. Each quality is interconnected. They support each other.

Healthy living works like this. As we have been on this journey to eat more healthily over the last three years, we have experimented with a couple of extremely restrictive diets that focus on one or two parts of your body — like healing our gut. But the challenge with just thinking about one or two parts of our bodies, is our gut, brain, thyroid, metabolic health, and various systems are all carefully woven together. For example, our guts have over 500 million neurons talking to our brains. But, if we only try to work on our mental health by healing our gut, we may become very imbalanced and harm our thyroid or metabolic health in the long run, which may come back to hurt our guts and brains in the end.

Just as it’s not wise to “improve” one part of our bodies to the exclusion of the others, the same is true with these qualities. We pursue them holistically, all together. Growth in self-control will help us be more steadfast; a deficit of knowledge could ruin our ability to love; moral excellence will help us grow in brotherly affection, and so on. Now, individually and even as families or groups, we can tend to zoom in on a couple qualities. Maybe knowledge comes really easily to me, but not self-control. Well, that knowledge just isn’t going to do any good without self-control. Or we could be in a church culture that’s really good at brotherly affection — we’re always passing out holy kisses — but we aren’t very godly. That’s no good. And neither is virtue fruitful if it is devoid of brotherly affection. Growth is holistic.

2. Christian growth starts with faith and its goal is love. While it isn’t helpful to attach specific significance to how the middle is ordered in lists of virtues like these, they do begin and end intentionally. For example, Stoics tended to begin or end their lists with knowledge. In that thinking, knowing stuff was the beginning to getting anywhere and it is the goal at the end of the road. But knowledge, a vital quality we must grow in, is not the real beginning for us. We don’t start walking with Christ when we know everything — “hold up, Jesus, you’re going to need to explain a whole lot more before I’ll walk with you.” We start walking with Christ by faith, trust, and loyalty to him. And self-control is a vital quality we grow in, but it isn’t the supreme goal of walking with Christ — love is. And love is the goal of self-control, etc.

Christian growth starts with faith and its goal is love. All these qualities are built on faith and are perfected by love — as Paul says in Colossians 3:14, love binds all Christian qualities together in perfect harmony. So, if we look at our lives and see we aren’t very stable right now, or we are pretty disoriented, we need to come back to faith and love to get regrounded and reoriented.

Do we feel like we’re not sure what is up or down, what we can hold onto for stability? Not sure where to start? That can happen when our trust and loyalty are compromised. Who have we given our trust and loyalty to? Friends or family? A political party? A substance? A device? Ourselves? Faith, trust, and loyalty towards Jesus is the foundation on which we build our lives. There’s not only a temptation to put our trust in something else, but also to replace faith with another quality. So, if we feel like we just don’t even know what is true any more — we may be tempted to seek knowledge and to build our lives on whatever knowledge we find. That may seem like a good foundation, but whatever we discover is often limited, biased, and our foundation will constantly shift as our body of knowledge changes. Or if we are in a bad place because of our own sin, we may be tempted to build our lives on our personal virtue. But what happens to our foundation when we inevitably slip? But if we trust in and give loyalty to Jesus — we hold onto him and build everything on him — we’ll find that this sends out strong roots that can withstand all winds.

Do we feel like we don’t where we are going, or what we are even supposed to be living for? Love for God and for our neighbor to the glory of God. Love must be why we wake up in the morning. Love is the aim of our faith, pursuit of virtue, or knowledge, self control, steadfastness, godliness, or brotherly affection. If I have prophetic powers, understand all mysteries, and give away all I have, but have not love, I am nothing.

3. Christian growth requires making every effort. Peter tells us to make every effort to increase our virtue by means of faith, and so on. Every effort. Elsewhere Paul talks about the Christian life as a race that we train for. Watching the Olympics is always so impressive. There was a show we watched a little bit of year or two ago that explored all the planning, effort, and training that went into being a gymnast. The families of these young women on the documentary spared no expense or effort to help them become the best gymnasts possible. They moved states, ended friendships, changed coaches, rearranged school, woke up early, went to bed late, changed their diet. They make every effort to gain a perishable crown — will we do that for an imperishable one?

The point of Peter saying this is not to say that we should stop sleeping and becoming imbalanced — growth is holistic, remember. The point is to say that growth in these qualities requires hard intentional work. In some spheres people call “making every effort” pharisaical legalism. Of course someone could be like the Pharisees, but that’s through pride and hypocrisy — not the intention to make every effort.

To make every effort in the coming year, we need to…

First, identify weaknesses and imbalances. Have we neglected part of the Christian life? Self-control? Brotherly affection? Moral excellence? Knowledge? Love? Making every effort means we are going to be honest and specific about what our weaknesses are. Let’s identify that today before we go to sleep.

Second, we need to make holistic plans — how are we going to address our weaknesses? If we just have a general plan to “grow in brotherly love” or “grow in self-control,” we’re not going to make it very far. Making every effort means making a specific plan about how we’re going to do that. But specific does not mean narrow-minded. If we consider these qualities in isolation, that will be less effective — we may seek to grow in steadfastness, but not understand the how or the why. So maybe we want to grow in brotherly affection and we’re going to start growing in that by having people in our home once per month, but maybe we need steadfastness to do that well in tough times. Or maybe we’re going to be accountable to a brother or sister so we can become more virtuous people, but we’re going to need to grow in brotherly affection to feel comfortable doing that. Or maybe we’re going to read this and pray in this way at this time to grow in knowledge, but that will require self-control, and we need to remember we’re doing this with love as the aim. Set specific goals. Write this out.

Third, we need to work hard and not quit when we fall short. Good intentions can make us feel good, but we have to follow through to become fruitful. Fruit isn’t born over night, but it’s done with patience. But, remember when you fall short that the foundation of our walk is faith in him, not in ourselves, our virtue, or our godliness. Falling short can be an opportunity to remember this and to recommit to growing, using all the resources he’s given us — his mercy, his word, his church.

Conclusion

You’ll wonder on January 2nd, why all this work and effort? We’ll talk more about that on January 1st. But for now, we must not forget that corruption is in the world because of sinful desire. The sickness, disability, and death of someone we fiercely love is because of sinful desires. And sin only opens the door for more confusion, shame, sickness, pain, death, blood, sweat, and tears. We make every effort because sinful desires take over our lives when these qualities are not our focused aim.

We have all been ensnared by sin and have all contributed to the corruption in the world. We may look at our hands and lives and wonder if it is beyond repair, hopeless. And suddenly, the false gospel of freedom from a future day of judgment can be very tempting to us. “Maybe we don’t have to feel guilt or shame, maybe this is just me not being merciful — wasn’t Christ merciful? Maybe sin’s not so bad.” But Satan’s trying to lure us in and take us captive. Sin is so serious it killed the Author of Life.

But God has granted us the promises that come with the true Gospel of King Jesus. He has promised that we can escape the corruption in the world. He promises to give us everything we need to lead godly lives. In short, he promises none of this — us making every effort — is in vain. He’s not asking us to prove we are perfectly virtuous or that we know everything. He’s asking that we make every effort. We can’t do this by looking inside ourselves and drawing from our own strength. We’re just going to get tired and fall on our faces if we do that. Unless the Lord builds the house it’s all vain. We can only persevere in making every effort when we do it by the strength Jesus supplies — and that strength is supplied by drawing near to him, listening to him, praying to him, worshipping him, receiving his body and blood in the supper, receiving his cleansing, his presence, and abiding in him. When we walk with him and his people, we come to know him more and he makes us better and better.

The question is simply not whether God cares about our growth in these qualities or whether we can or whether we have it in ourselves — we don’t! The question is whether we want to the freedom of being like Jesus more than we want the false freedom the world promises. The question is whether we’ll draw near to Jesus and make every effort.