Tuesday, February 6, 2024
For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge, 6knowledge with self-control,a self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness, 7godliness with brotherly affection,a and brotherly affection with love. 8For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being uselessa or unfruitfulb in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9The person who lacks these things is blind and shortsighted and has forgotten the cleansing from his past sins. II Peter 1:5-9
Growing The Jesus Way
Many Christians have come to the place of just accepting our faith as complete as long as we can feel it whether it produces change or not. Many came to their faith early in their lives and have walked through life with eternal assurance but daily insecurities, fear, anger, and general personal chaos. The tragedy of most Christian lives is that they are filled with incomplete promise. God has given us so much more than we realize or experience in our daily lives.
There are good reasons to mature in our faith and discover the abundant and purposeful life God has designed for us. Immature and spiritually empty Christians will never unbelievers to God. Passive discipleship will not create the witness needed for change in people's lives. Christians must both display the fruit of their salvation and defend the absolute truths of God. Compromise of values and collapsing of morals may help Christians be accepted by men but such will never help men get accepted by God.
What is lacking in the world today is not more laws but better character. The value of a name is not defined by material possessions or political or social position, but character. All the money in the world can’t buy trust in a person. When we live The Jesus Way, we shape our lives to the absolute truths of God, not the relative opinions of men. The world today (and many Christians with them) rationalize their actions and demand tolerance. They firmly believe that, no matter how warped your conscience is, wrong is relative. It’s only wrong if it’s wrong to you. When we walk The Jesus Way, our whole lives are based on what God says is right and wrong. The only relativeness in our lives is what is relative to God's word.
Many times we are not willing to surrender everything completely to God. We don’t want to stop doing our favorite “sinful” things that bring division in our lives, and that cause a canyon between our hearts and our Savior. These idols we believe will fulfill us but they only create a chasm between us and the only One who can give us what we truly want and seek. We grasp within our clenched fists the things we are not willing to let go of. There comes a time, hopefully sooner than later, that we realize how tired and truly unfulfilled we are. The things we hang on to are not worth what we give up to keep them and they will keep us from reaching our full potential in Christ.
Christ called us to this life of godliness by His own glory and goodness. Christ attracts people enslaved by sin by His own moral excellence and the total impact of His glorious Person. Christ has given to me the capacity to rise above myself and my sin. He has blessed me with the wisdom and power of His Holy Spirit to sanctify me IN and not just AFTER my earthly experience. When we do not yield to it, but we are walking in the Holy Spirt (the Jesus Way), the power of sin is destroyed and Christ is Lord.
Whatever it is you are clinging to give it up. Surrender to Christ today and walk The Jesus Way.
Work out your salvation with fear and trembling: For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. Phil. 2:12-13
