St. Peter’s List By God’s Grace and Human Effort
St. Peter’s List By God’s Grace and Human Effort.
The List. “Because you have been given all these blessings, it’s time now for you to apply yourself with diligence to those gifts of grace; make every effort with all zeal to take your basic faith and develop moral excellence; and to that virtue add an intimate knowledge of God; and to your personal knowledge and understanding add an inner strength; and then in exercising that self-control develop patient endurance; to that steadfastness supply a fervent reverence; and to that piety add mutual affection; and then when exercising your brotherly/sisterly kindness add the most important quality in your spiritual transformation… unconditional love.” (2 Peter 1:5).
Make Every Effort: According to all the Study Bibles, there are many ways one could put this phrase… add your intense efforts to supplement your faith with…; devote yourselves to lavishly furnishing…; try your very hardest at supplying to your basic faith…; don’t lose a minute in building on what you’ve been given; urgently work with zeal as you add to your faith…; apply all due diligence in adding to your faith…; use every resource at your disposal as you add to your faith by developing…; earnestly exercise with intentional effort as you add to your faith… We don’t get the impression from Peter, do we, that the Christian life involves our passively resting the oars in our boat as we take a nap and blithely depend on God to get where we want to go. No, growing in the Christian life involves the seat and toil of putting our oars in the water and rowing upstream while recognizing our dependence on God’s power and grace to move from one point to the other.
Wendell Berry and His Potent Combination: “Life is the precarious interplay of grace and effort.” (from his short story, Watch with Me). One of the premier writers and thinkers of this century and the one before it, Mr. Berry would often include in his stories and poems the thought of grace and effort, and how both are a part of the mosaic of life itself. God’s grace and human effort. His Sabbath poem below reminds us that regardless of the work in which we are engaging, whether physical work or spiritual work, our active trust in God requires us to grow in living into this mystery of grace and effort, working in what he calls the “sabbath mood.” As we are being taught by Peter to make every effort to actively work on growing in our spiritual transformation, it is best if we remember the importance of leaning on God’s grace as we sweat in our toil. Maturing in our faith is far from a passive exercise…
“Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.
When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good. (Sabbath Poem #10).