2 Peter 1:5-7

PRACTICAL CHRISTIAN LIFE

‘And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.’

2 Peter 1:5

Such words are evidently addressed to those who are professedly separated from an evil world. They have ‘escaped from the corruption of the world through lust.’ But the Apostle would have them making good their escape by putting as wide an interval as possible between their old life and their new. ‘Beside this’ escape, he says, there is something else, ‘make your calling and election sure’ by ‘working out your salvation with fear and trembling.’ ‘Giving all diligence’ complete the work which is begun. The Revised Version renders the words more exactly, ‘Yea, and for this very cause, adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue,’ etc. The meaning is substantially the same. The idea is that of Christian progress.

I. There is the starting-point, faith.—If we are seeking a destination, the place from which we set forth is of the greatest importance. So in the Christian life. Faith must come first. Without faith—and it is essential that we should learn the lesson—it is impossible to please God.

II. From faith to virtue.—Christian virtue is moral manliness, fighting the battle of life with a brave spirit in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. No doubt the Apostle remembered that spiritual enemies and dangers surrounded Christians at all times. There is nothing more perilous than having faith without the support of manly life. The individual or the community which attends much to doctrine or to feelings, without moral earnestness, without practical endeavour, will be tempted to Pharisaic pride or inflated fanaticism. ‘Devils believe and tremble,’ but ‘Satan cannot love.’ What the world especially wants is not so much confident believers to dogmatise, but Christ-like men and women sending forth spiritual influence like streams of new life into the moral wilderness. The ‘virtue’ is something that all men can appreciate. It is not only light, but heat. It appeals not only to the head, but to the heart. When it touches men in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, it bids them rise up and walk, and spiritual miracles testify to the truth with a power which ‘none of the adversaries are able to gainsay or resist.’ For our own sakes, that we may be held up in a time when many fall, for the world’s sake, that the truth may be glorified in us, let us add to our faith virtue.

III. From virtue to knowledge.—In Bible language, knowing is not a mere cultivation of our human faculties, nor a mere receiving goods into a warehouse. In the Christian life, knowledge calls in the light of God into the treasury of a sanctified intelligence, whence the steward brings forth continually things new and old. ‘The entrance of Thy words giveth light, it giveth understanding to the simple.’ ‘I have more understanding than all my teachers, because I have kept Thy word.’ In a busy age like ours, energetic life makes great demand upon us. The multiplication of efforts and interests is necessary in all departments of practical Christianity. But our activity is prone to dissipate itself for lack of concentration, to exhaust itself prematurely for lack of nourishment. Knowledge, when it is derived immediately from God, obtained by prayerful search into the Scriptures, thoughtful inquiry after the mind of Christ, diligent cultivation of fellowship with higher and holier minds than our own, wonderfully feeds the vital strength, lifts us up into the higher life.

IV. Faith, virtue, knowledge, these are the leading graces of the Christian character, and those which follow them in the Apostle’s exhortation are fruits of the Spirit, which abound wherever the Word of God strikes downward into the heart and comes forth into the life—temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness, and charity.

Illustration

‘If you would succeed in your efforts to make progress in the Christian life, every plan should be formed, every business entered upon, every work, engaged in, with prayer. Sir Matthew Hale once observed, ‘If I omit praying and reading a portion of God’s blessed Word in the morning, nothing goes well the whole day.’ The late Earl Cairns was known to go constantly from his knees to important meetings of the Cabinet. Such men were Christians indeed. They brought everything to the touchstone of their religion. And they brought their religion into everything. We want more effort in the Christian life, more decision for Christ, more determination to be separate from the world.’