Faith Builds

For the very reason (God's very great promises given to us), make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness, godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.

For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they will keep you from being useless or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The person who lacks these things is blind and shortsighted and has forgotten the cleansing from his past sins.

Therefore, brothers, make every effort to confirm your calling and election, because if you do these things you will never stumble.

For in this way, entry into the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and saviour Jesus Chrust will be richly supplied to you. 2 Peter 1: 5-11

When in receipt of salvation, that which we received by faith given to us, we have an open door to the great promises of God. To appropriate these promises we begin to supplement our faith with goodness, knowledge, self-control, endurance, godliness, brotherly affection, love. These graces are considered the ladder of faith. Because they are graces, they are available to us from God, not manufactured inside from ourselves. We will never progress if we think we must produce goodness, for example. We will be stuck in first gear forever rolling back and forth unable to move on.

The grace that enables us to produce fruit is given so that the fruit will be produced by faith. faith is he soil of the fruit of the spirit.

Whilst we are focussed on obtaining the grace for the fruit we are being productive, far from useless. If we fail to grasp this truth we become useless and short sighted. There is only one solution repent and grasp hold of faith and the promise of grace. Sitting around miserable and bemoaning the fact that we have failed is a waste of space. Forgiveness is given freely and so is the grace to get going. Amen! It is never too late.