Make every effort

Carrying on from yesterdays thoughts on 2 Peter 1, it is striking that Peter exhorts the believers to 'Make every effort to add to your faith'. Peter is not saying we can earn forgiveness and right standing before God because he has already said that the believers righteousness comes by faith in Christ and his achievements on the believers behalf. He goes on to say that (v3) God by his divine power grants us all we need for godliness and life. So God gives us everything we need but that does not remove the need to take and utilise what God has given us!

The word 'add' that Peter uses carried with it the notion of costly and generous cooperation. We are not just to pull our socks up on our own but we are to generously cooperate with God as he through his Word, Son and Spirit works in us to add to our faith these characteristics. How do we do that? I would suggest that it involve spending time in the Bible, the word of God, finding out what those characteristics look like en-fleshed as we see them in the life of Jesus. That making every effort is about having the desire to develop these godly attributes, it is to do with putting off sin and striving for Christ likeness.

It poses the question am I making every effort? Maybe even am I making any effort to cooperate with God? To reject such a great offer of help would be foolish in the extreme and as Peter says would show that one had not grasped the magnitude of events at the cross.

Right-ness

We are all obsessed with being right, with having the right answer, with being proved right in our dispute with someone else. But what does it mean to be right before God?

In 2 Peter 1 he starts this letter with a reminder that “To those who through the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours.”

To be righteous is to be in a right standing before God, to be able to face God without being in your sin. God is holy and as such cannot even stand to look upon sin, and one day he will judge all sin, all rebellion, all rejection of his kingship. Now therein lies the problem because our rejection of God’s way of living means that we stand guilty before God. We don't in and of ourselves stand right before God, in fact we stand under just judgement and condemnation.

But says Peter the believer can stand right before God, and the basis of the believers right standing before God is “through the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ” and it comes by faith. By faith in Jesus as the Messiah, God’s promised one, and Saviour, the one who dies in our place, saving us from the consequences of our sin, they and we can stand before God in a right relationship with him, viewed by him as his perfect children.

Do you see why faith is so fundamental? Because without faith in Jesus we have no chance of pleasing God, without faith in Jesus we are utterly bereft of any hope of ever escaping God’s righteous judgement for our refusal to acknowledge him as God and King.

But in Jesus, through faith we can be right!