December 7, 2025 - 2 Peter 1

“For this very reason (because God has given us all things, and we are becoming more and more like him), make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.  For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:5-8)  Peter provides here a good and revealing mirror into which we can gaze throughout the day and measure our lives as we live in the world.  Too many times, rather than virtue, vice; rather than knowledge, ignorance; rather than self-control, unrestrained; rather than steadfastness, inconsistency; rather than godliness, worldliness; rather than brotherly affection, malice.  Too often, we look too much like the world and too little like Christ.  Let us make every effort to follow Paul’s counsel:  “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children” (Ephesians 5:1).  Until we are fully all that God would have us to be, there is comfort in the words of Augustus Toplady.

Soon shall our doubts and fears

Subside at his control;

His loving-kindness shall break through

The midnight of the soul.

Blest is the man, O God,

That stays himself on thee:

Who wait for thy salvation, Lord,

Shall thy salvation see.   --Augustus Toplady (1772)