2 Peter 1:5 For this very reason, having made every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. 8 For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins. 10 Therefore, my brothers, be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure. For if you do these things, you will never fall, 11 and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 12 So I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have.
Introduction: Is Christian Growth Hard?
Is the Christian life supposed to be hard? Is it supposed to be work, or is it supposed to be easy? Suppose you were struggling in your walk with the Lord and you spoke to two counselors. The first one told you, “You need to try harder, work harder—put your back into it.” The other one told you, “No—that’s bad advice. It should come naturally—like a tree bearing fruit. You never see an apple tree working up a sweat trying to push out apples. There should be no strain involved in the Christian life.”
Make Every Effort
Christian Living Is Hard Work
Which one of those has the ring of truth in your ears? Peter gives us his answer to that question in very clear terms in today’s passage.
2 Peter 1:5 For this very reason, make every effort ….
It’s three words in the Greek: The first one means to apply or bring to bear. The second one means all or every. And the third word, the key word, is spoude, which means effort, haste, or diligence, or earnestness. So apply or bring to bear every effort and all haste and urgency.
Should the Christian life be hard work? Yes. Should it feel burdensome? No. Should it feel oppressive or onerous? No. But hard work? Absolutely.
It’s a love relationship. There is no healthy relationship where one of the parties is passive. The better the relationship, the more energetic both parties are.
The people who say you need to be passive in your spiritual growth think that glorifies God, because it gives God all the credit for your growth. But in a love relationship, you don’t honor the person you’re in love with by being passive. You honor them by the level of enthusiasm and effort you put into loving them.
So do people who love each other put effort into loving each other? Yes. However, the stronger your love, the less all that work feels like work. It’s just what you want to do. So the Christian life should be vigorous, energetic, hard work that doesn’t feel like work. If making every effort to be godly starts to feel burdensome, then you need to make every effort to rekindle your love for God. But whether your emotions are where they should be or not, a love relationship always demands energetic input from both sides.
The Reason
So Peter says, “Make every effort. Every effort to do what? Before telling us what, Peter wants to tells us why. This is one of those cases where you need to know the reason for the command before you even hear what the command is because knowing the reason behind it will help you obey it.
So verse 5 begins, “For this very reason make every effort …” What’s the reason? What did he say in the previous verses?
What he did was show us how incredibly important it is to God that you live a godly life. It really, really matters a lot to God how you live.
In v.3, God opened the floodgates of his divine power to provide everything you need for life and godliness. Why would God do that? I’m going to go way out on a limb and hypothesize that God unleashed his divine power to give you everything you need for life and godliness because he wants you to live a godly life.
In v.4, he gave countless great and precious promises that enable you to escape moral corruption and share in God’s nature and moral excellence. In v.1, God gave you precious, grade-A, high octane faith—the same kind of faith he gave to the spiritual giants of the past. In v.2, God gave you access to abundant grace and abundant peace.
To suggest that it matters to God that you live a holy life is an understatement. He says it from every angle and provides mind-boggling resources to make sure you can do it.
Peter says all that, then he says, “For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith …” So when he says, “For this very reason,” he’s saying, “Because it’s so important to God, it should be important to you.” God made every effort to supply you what you need to do it, so you should make every effort to do it.
Whenever you do something godly, you are cooperating with a massive divine effort to bring about godliness. Whenever you do something wrong, you are opposing, fighting against that massive divine effort to bring about godliness.
Titus 2:11 The grace of God …12 teaches us to say "No" to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, 13 while we wait for … Jesus Christ, 14 who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.
How important is it to Jesus that you say no to ungodliness and live a life eager to do what is good? So important that he died to bring it about. Jesus didn’t just die to pay for your sins; he died to prevent them. He gave his life in order to create a people who are eager to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age.
So Peter’s point is very clear: If it matters that much to God that you live a godly life, see to it that it matters supremely to you. If God spared no expense to provide you with the greatest farmland, top of the line tractors, combines, and equipment, lots of irrigation and premium seeds, that’s a sign that he wants you to be serious about working that farm.
Try Harder
People who are against the idea of hard work in the Christian life will often use slogans like “Stop trying and start trusting.” But that slogan assumes trying and trusting are somehow opposed to each other. Effort and faith are opposites. Peter demolishes that way of thinking when he says, “Make every effort to add to your faith.” Faith and effort go together. The more you trust God, the more you’ll cooperate with what he’s doing by utilizing the tools he’s given you.
Trusting someone would make you passive if you were trusting them to do something for you. But God doesn’t say, “I’ll do it for you”; he says, “I’ll do it through you.” Philippians 2:13 says he works in you to will and to act, which means you’re the one doing the willing and the acting.
1 Corinthians 15:10 … His grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them.
The effect of grace is harder work. You’re not usurping the Holy Spirit’s role by cooperating with what he’s doing.
One thing pastors and Christian counselors can’t stand is the “try harder” approach to spiritual growth. They never have good things to say about that—try harder will never work. But I don’t know if Peter would agree. He says, “You’ve been given everything you need for life and godliness, therefore make every effort.” Picture a father of a young child who has given the child everything he needs to do a task, and you knows the kid can do it. The kid tries and gives up right away. “Dad, I can’t get this. I don’t think it’s possible.”
“It’s possible. Keep trying.”
“Dad, I can’t do it.”
“Try harder.”
That’s basically what Peter is telling us here. You’ve been given everything you need. It can be done. If you’re having trouble, try harder. That’s not the only solution, but without hard work, none of the other biblical solutions will work.
Adding to Faith
Okay, so we are to make every effort … to do what, exactly? The NIV says “add to your faith.” The ESV and Holeman say “supplement your faith.” I don’t know if either one of those really capture the depth of this word. The word means to furnish or supply at your own expense. It was often used to describe a rich benefactor or philanthropist who used his own money to sponsor the arts or something for the general public.
That’s a surprising word choice here, because all the other times this word appears in the Bible it refers to God. It’s always God who supplies us with things—especially holiness, righteousness, and godly character. But here, you are called to generously supply all these virtues at your own expense. Peter calls you to supply everything except the faith.
The starting point is faith, and he doesn’t tell you to supply. That one you already have—you’ve had it ever since God dropped it in your lap back in v.1.
2 Peter 1:1 … To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours.
God gave you faith, he gave you divine power, he called you, and he gave you his great and precious promises. All that is your starting place, and now in v.5 Peter instructs us to use all that to supply your own character with these seven virtues.
And the grammar connects each virtue with the previous one. So it’s not just “Add all these virtues to your faith,” but rather “Use each virtue to supply the next virtue.” So you use faith to supply yourself with goodness, then you use that goodness to supply yourself with knowledge, then you use the knowledge to get self-control, etc. So the idea is that you utilize each virtue to grow the next virtue.
Whatever virtue you have in your life, use that to develop more virtues. Peter’s objective in this letter is to make sure we all keep growing spiritually. If you’re not growing, then you’re deteriorating. And the result of deterioration is described in vv.8-9—nearsighted, blind, ineffective, and unproductive. So in this paragraph in vv.5-7, Peter’s going to show us how to stop the deterioration and start growing again.
From Faith to Goodness
It all starts with faith, and our faith came from God in v.1. So you’re making every effort, but all the results ultimately trace back to God.
God’s Goodness
The first of the seven virtues is goodness.
5 Add to your faith goodness.
Literally:
5 By means of faith, supply yourself with goodness.
By starting the list with this virtue (goodness), Peter is sending a signal to show us how to think about this whole list, because if you remember back to verse 3, what was the source of all those promises that enable us to escape moral corruption and share in God’s nature? It was God’s goodness.
The last line of verse 3 says God:
2 Peter 1:3 … called us by his own glory and goodness.
That’s the same word for goodness. If you recall, the term goodness refers to God’s moral excellence. So by making that the first one in the list, Peter is pointing us back to God’s nature. This list of virtues that we are to make every effort to grow in is essentially a list of attributes of God. Peter is just spelling out in more detail what he meant by sharing in the divine nature.
If you could get an x-ray machine or some kind of scope that could show you the inside of God’s heart, you’d see all these marvelous, beautiful, spectacular, amazing traits. And the point of this whole list is to get to where the inside of your heart will come to look like that. All those marvelous, beautiful, magnificent things that make up God’s character will make up yours. Growing in these virtues means to lose yourself inside of God’s nature. You could summarize the whole list by just saying, “Make every effort to be like God.”
So God reached down into the cauldron of his own moral excellence and formed promises designed to draw you in to share in his nature, so that you have inside you that same cauldron of moral excellence. And this word goodness (or moral excellence) also carries the nuance of energy. It’s energetic moral excellence. Not just an absence of bad habits, but a vigorous pursuit of what is morally beautiful.
A Will Like God’s
And the beginning point is in the area of God’s will. Morality is mainly a function of the will. It’s about what you love, what you hate, and what you desire.
That’s the biblical concept of morality. The world tries to turn morality into a code. You’ll hear them speak of a moral code. These actions are moral, those actions are immoral.
But morality is not first about actions. You hurt someone or even kill someone by accident, through no fault of your own—that’s not immoral. Morality is a matter of the will—what you intend, what you desire, what you love and hate. If you’re driving and have a stroke and run over a little child, you didn’t do anything immoral. But suppose a bystander sees that happen and thinks it’s hilarious. He loves seeing people suffer, and he’s glad that that child’s family will be in agony. That guy didn’t do anything, but is he immoral? Very! That’s about as immoral as you can get.
So morality isn’t first about what you do; it’s about what you love, what you hate, and what you want. So growing in goodness or moral excellence means immersing yourself in God’s will so that your will conforms more and more to his will. You desire what God desires, you love what he loves, you hate what he hates. That’s moral excellence.
Through Faith
And how do you get that? How do you increase your moral excellence? Peter connects it to faith. Add to your faith, goodness (or utilize your faith to supply yourself with goodness).
We answered this one last time. Faith is trusting in God’s promises, and God’s promises reflect God’s moral excellence and are designed to conform you to his nature, so every time you trust a promise you are increasing your moral excellence. Every time you trust any promise. Matthew 5:5 Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. “Okay God, I kind of feel like lashing out at this person or giving the cold shoulder, but you said if I have a gentle response you’ll make it worth my while. I trust you.” You give a gentle response—you just trusted God which means you just increased your moral excellence. Your soul will learn from that how meekness is beautiful and good. And that will make you love meekness and dislike hostility and desire gentleness. You will is moving in the direction of God’s will. You’re absorbing his goodness. That’s how you use your faith to increase your moral excellence.
Isaiah 41:10 Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
“Okay God—I believe you. You’ll be with me.” And as you think about that, your fear starts to dissolve. You feel courage start to rise in your heart.
And your soul learns something. You think, “I like this. I like the feeling of safety and security that comes from realizing God is with me.”
What just happened? Your values just changed a little bit. You loved God’s watch care over you before, but now you love it a little more. Loving things you ought to love—that’s moral excellence. You trusted a promise, you liked the result, and now you love that attribute of God a little more. Using your faith to increase your moral excellence.
But none of that is going to actually happen unless you roll up your sleeves and make every effort. If you don’t put forth major effort, you won’t even notice the promises in Scripture. And if you do notice them, you won’t remember them. You won’t make the effort to trust them. And even when you trust them, you won’t do the mental work required to connect the dots in your mind so that you connect the good result with the promise you trusted.
So make every effort. Every time you listen to a sermon, make sure you walk out of the church with a promise you can trust that week. Every time you read the Bible in your morning devotions, don’t put it down until you have a promise that you can focus on trusting that day. Keep track of the good results of trusting those promises and connect the dots with God’s attributes so you learn to love them more.
Knowledge
Okay, on to the next one—knowledge.
5 By means of faith, supply yourself with goodness, and by means of [that] goodness, supply yourself with knowledge.
In the first one, you immerse yourself in God’s will. This one, you immerse yourself in God’s thoughts. We’re moving from the heart to the mind. In the first one, you’re learning to love and hate and desire like God. Now you’re learning to think like God.
The Will Must Be Guided By the Mind
Many commentators say the order of these virtues is irrelevant. They say when Peter says, “Add to this one the next one, and add to that one the next one,” he doesn’t mean to actually convey a specific order. It’s just rhetorical flourish.
But I’m not convinced. I think if Peter says faith is connected to moral excellence and moral excellence is connected to knowledge and so on, we should take that at face value.
So is there a connection between moral excellence and knowledge? Yes, there is a very important connection.
Proverbs 19:2 It is not good to have zeal without knowledge.
Romans 10:2 For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge.
Moral excellence won’t get you anywhere without knowledge. Morality must always be informed by truth, and the will must always be guided by the mind. If you love and hate and desire all the right things, but you have no knowledge, you won’t know how to obtain those good things you desire. You won’t know how to fight against those bad things that you hate. And you won’t know how to bring about or promote those good things you love.
You might feel the right way, but without knowledge, you won’t know what to do. Some issues are complex. Suppose you have moral excellence when it comes to compassion for the poor. You really feel for them and want to help—that’s great. But what should you do? When is it best to give them money and when does that do more harm than good? When should you give soft love and when should you give tough love? Those aren’t easy questions. They require knowledge. Morality in your heart is lost without some knowledge in the brain to guide it.
Beyond Education
Don’t ever downplay the importance of knowledge for living a godly life. Sometimes preachers will downplay knowledge. I’ve heard preachers say the problem with the Pharisees was they had too much knowledge and not enough obedience. Very often you hear preachers decry what they call head knowledge.
Now, is it a bad thing to have a lot of information and fail to act on it? Of course. Jesus said that’s like building your house on sand.
Failure to act on what you know is bad, but the solution is not less knowing; it’s more doing. And lack of doing is usually due to lack of knowledge. The Pharisees’ and scribes’ problem wasn’t too much knowledge; it was not enough knowledge.
Luke 11:52 "Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered.
They were locked outside the door to knowledge. They knew a lot about traditions and rules, but they didn’t understand issues of the heart. And Jesus’ solution wasn’t to get them to reduce their knowledge. His solution was to teach them—give them more knowledge—better knowledge.
The thing that set the followers of Christ apart from everyone else was knowledge.
Matthew 13:11 He replied, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. 12 Whoever has will be given more …. –more what? Knowledge.
Whoever has knowledge about heaven will be given more knowledge
… and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have (knowledge), even what he has will be taken from him.
The Messiah’s mission was to come and give God’s people the knowledge of salvation (Luke 1:77).
These teachers who talk down the value of knowledge—I always want to ask them, “If knowledge isn’t good, why are you talking? Why are you writing? Do you want people to learn the truth of what you’re saying? Do you want people to know this information you’re conveying? If knowledge is so worthless, why are you trying to impart more knowledge?
You see, any teaching that disparages the importance of knowledge is ultimately self-refuting. They teach that teaching isn’t important because they want you to learn that learning isn’t necessary. So they write a book about how you should stop reading books.
So why is it common for preachers to disparage the role of knowledge? I think it’s probably because they have too narrow an understanding of what knowledge is. They confuse knowledge with education. Being able to summarize the pronouncements of the Council of Nicea is education. Knowing how to be a peacemaker and guard the unity of the Spirit—that’s knowledge. Being able to chart out dispensational eschatology is education. Knowing how to increase your hope in the Second Coming is knowledge.
When I went off to Bible college after high school, I remember thinking, “Four years from now, my family will hardly recognize me I’ll be so godly.” I really believed that. Four years later, only a skilled detective could have discerned any difference in my character.
Why? Part of it was that I graduated with so little knowledge. I knew a lot of Greek, systematic theology, biblical studies, and a few other topics. But had I learned anything about how to trust God’s great and precious promises or how to use my faith to align my will with what God loves and hates and desires? Not that I remember.
Did I memorize thousands of answers to test questions? Sure. But did I learn how to leverage my faith into godliness and self-control? I think I might have had less self-control after college than before. There isn’t a ton of overlap between what the writers of the NT say is important to know and the writers of college curricula think is important to know.
So, is education essential for godliness? No. But knowledge is.
First Goodness, Then Knowledge
Okay, so how do you get all this knowledge? Remember, for each one of these virtues, we’re told to use the previous virtue to bring it about. You gain knowledge through moral excellence. These two virtues are symbiotic—interdependent. You need knowledge to guide your moral excellence, and you need moral excellence to increase your knowledge.
But how does that work? How do you leverage your moral excellence to increase your spiritual knowledge? How do you use goodness to get smarter?
When a piece of information comes in through your eyes or ears—you see something happen, you read something in a book, you hear something in a lecture—that bit of information doesn’t go directly into your belief system. Before it lodges itself anywhere in your belief system, it has to go through processing. It has to pass through your moral grid. If it’s something you hate, your brain will process that piece of information very differently than if it’s something you love.
We like to think our brains are just impartial computers, crunching information as raw data. That’s not how it works, nor would that be a good thing. God designed us to interpret all data through our moral grid.
The more your heart is like God’s heart, the more accurately your brain will process new information. If you’re morally crooked or morally confused, information will get twisted into wrong beliefs.
If I’m in love with some sin, that’s going to distort my mind and affections so that I’ll value the wrong things, I won’t see clearly, so if you show me something that threatens my freedom to do that sin, I won’t be able to fully accept that truth in my heart. Sin distorts your ability to think straight and to have correct values. It mucks up the whole process of gaining knowledge because in order to understand something, you have to know how it relates to other truths. It has to be filed in the right spot in your brain and connected properly to other relevant information. But if you don’t have the right values, your brain will file it the wrong way.
Anytime you don’t have the right attitude toward a piece of information, you don’t really understand it. If I witness someone stealing a car, and it doesn’t bother me, I don’t understand what happened. I saw it, I was an eyewitness, I can accurately recount the events, but I don’t have knowledge about it. I’m ignorant.
True knowledge includes not just awareness of a fact, but also your attitude toward that fact. If there’s a fact that God loves, and I believe it’s true but I can’t see what’s so beautiful about it, then I lack knowledge. But when I love what God loves and hate what God hates and desire good things, that gives me a clear understanding of the world. And I have a clear understanding of God.
It’s what Jesus was getting at when he said the pure in heart will see God. There are vistas of God’s glory that can only be seen from the place of purity. Those parts of God can’t be seen from any other angle.
So are moral people smarter than immoral people? Absolutely.
That’s not to say they are more educated. You can get a PhD and be a moral wretch. Moral excellence doesn’t help you gather information or raise your IQ. But IQ is the world’s way of measuring intelligence. What’s the biblical way? Very simple—intelligence is the ability to think like God. You don’t know have knowledge about a topic until you think about that topic the way God thinks about it.
Could anything be more obvious than that? If your way of thinking about something differs from the way the omniscient Creator thinks about it, your way of thinking about it is incorrect—regardless of how the world might measure your IQ.
So knowledge is thinking like God, and you can’t think like God without moral excellence—loving and hating and desiring what God loves, hates, and desires. When you’re thinking through a situation in your life, always ask, “Am I thinking like God about this? And judging by my attitudes and emotions, can I say I truly understand this issue?”
Conclusion
Time is gone now, but next time we’ll start with how to use your knowledge to develop the virtue that everyone wants more of—Christians and non-Christians: self-control. But for now, I hope you have a specific promise that you are currently making every effort to trust in. If you don’t, just use Isaiah 41:10 until you find another one. Isaiah 41:10 Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
Summary
Peter is clear that spiritual growth requires intense effort. God did a lot to provide all you need, so you need to make it the utmost priority. The beginning point of virtue is faith, which God already provided. Make every effort to use that for the first of the 7 virtues (goodness). Then use each virtue to acquire the next. Use faith to develop moral excellence by trusting promises. Use that moral excellence to increase in knowledge (true understanding only comes through loving, hating, and desiring the right things).
