August 3
“…applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love. If these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For he who lacks these qualities is blind or short-sighted, having forgotten his purification from his former sins.” (2 Peter 1:5-9)
I really wish I were better at discipline and diligence. These are areas I have struggled with for years. It seems like I can do well for a while, days, weeks, months, even years and decades, and then find myself struggling with the same sins all over again. I think what is going on is that the Lord brings us along in our Christian walks with differing sets of circumstances, different places in life, different levels of maturity, differing levels of knowledge, etc. And we gain some abilities and self-confidence, and perhaps we begin to take certain things for granted and think we are not so vulnerable to the sins that used to beset us, and perhaps we get careless and get too close to the edge, and we realize all over again how frail and unable to resist temptation in our own strength we really are.
Or when we enjoyed a level of victorious living, it was during a time when things were going relatively well, and we were enjoying a certain level of success in our work and ministry. Relationships were good, we were respected and solid contributors to our church, family, and society. But then perhaps we lost a job, or had a season of illness, or a very difficult period of conflict with one close to us, or perhaps someone close to us died or began to take interest in others, or perhaps we entered a time of financial stress, or perhaps our close friends in the Lord moved away, or the dynamics of our great church changed over time so that we feel we are sort of lost and don’t matter anymore. The list of circumstances in our lives that can change and bring along with them a new set of temptations (or an old set of temptations that we thought we conquered which now come raging back from an unexpected direction, with seeming unusual strength and resistance to our previous means of defeating them, with us taken by surprise and not sure how to respond to them, and with our willingness to resist them at a apparent all time low) is almost endless. The point is that things are changing around us, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, and we need to understand that there may have been reasons that made it easier to be victorious in the past, the support of loving friends and family, for example, which can be taken away. Then we need to learn the disciplines of overcoming temptation in an entirely new light and new set of circumstances, possibly requiring different habits, different mindsets, different disciplines, different motivations.
In all of this, if you find yourself feeling like your are digressing in your holiness and struggling and failing with things over which you were once victorious, one thing I will recommend above all to you is that you never, never, never give up trying, praying, seeking and knocking, and struggling for discipline, diligence, and victory in these qualities of righteousness. NEVER. Never view your life of usefulness as finished, your struggle for victory over sin hopeless, your ability to walk with a clear conscience before God as out of reach. Those are Satan’s ideas, and if I had succumbed to them, I would not be writing these things to you now.
Never doubt that Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit can make you holy, and never doubt that He desires that for you, His Beloved saint. If you know Jesus, if you are born again, that is one thing you can be sure of, that He desires your purity and holiness and wants very much to bring it about. We just need to align ourselves with His purposes and His power to bring it about. More on this tomorrow.