This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

I want to welcome you back to day two of our look through 2nd Peter chapter 1.
Yesterday we started to look at the need to build your life by building on God's
promises. Verses 5 to 7 in 2nd Peter 1 tell us what happens when you do that.

Listen to these verses. For this very reason make every effort to add to your
faith goodness and to goodness knowledge and to knowledge self-control and to
self-control perseverance and to perseverance godliness and to godliness
brotherly kindness and to brotherly kindness love. Now remember we talked about
yesterday the truth that it all starts with God's promises.

He says for this reason in verse 5, for what reason? Because we have God's
promises and because of God's promises we can participate in God's nature and
escape the evil that's in this world. So for that reason it all starts with
God's promises.

You want more faith, you start with God's promises. You want moral excellence,
you start with God's promises. You want self-control, you want to love God,
people, you start with God's promises.

Notice that it says here for this reason make every effort to add to your faith
goodness and goodness knowledge. There is something that you need to do. You
have to make every effort to enjoy the benefit of God's promises in your life.

The effort that you put in is the decision to trust in God's promises instead of
your plan. That's the effort that you put in. It's not the effort of what you
can do to make yourself better.

It's the effort of trusting God instead of trusting yourself to make yourself
better. For this very reason make every effort. Now again for what reason?

Those three and four reminded us yesterday because God has given you everything
that you need for life and godliness. So out of what God has given you, you make
every effort. And when you do that, things start to change.

You start to change from the inside out. When you do that, you build qualities
into your life, characteristics into your life that are godly characteristics.
And Peter talks about eight qualities here.

They obviously build on each other. As he talks about you add this to this and
you add this to this. You might think of it like a building.

In a building you have to have all these parts and they're added to one another
along the way. And sometimes you can add them in any order, but other times one
has to build on the other in order for it to be strong. God does the same thing
with these eight qualities.

Sometimes they can be added in any order, but sometimes I got to have
self-control in order to have better perseverance so that I can have better
love. Sometimes they do come in order. That's just how God works.

Now let me just walk very briefly through these eight qualities that he talks
about here. First he starts with faith and that's where it always starts.
Without faith there is no trust and without trust there is none of these
qualities.

So you always start with trust in God. The faith that we're talking about here
looks back to those promises that we began to talk about yesterday. I have faith
that God will keep his promises.

So instead of trusting myself and doing it my way, I trust in God and I do it
his way. I have integrity in a situation in my business life even though I want
to cut that corner and I feel like I could make better money if I cut that
corner, I trust God rather than trusting myself or trusting the physical
evidence and then I watch how he works in my life. Because the truth of the
matter is God is about more than just building your business.

I think he is interested in your business. He'd like to see it built so that it
could be a glory to him, but even more than that he's about building you. He's
about building what is happening in your heart, in your life, because that's
going to last even longer than your business.

As important as your business might be to you, it's not going to last forever,
but you are. And so you start with faith, you start with trust in God, trust in
God's promises. And on that faith he says you start to build, you add goodness
to that.

You let that trust in God change your heart. You begin to become a different
person. You're not caught up in evil, you're caught up in good.

You're not focused on evil, you're focused on good. You're not thinking about
what thing could I get for myself. By the way that's evil, it's called
selfishness.

You're thinking about what could I do for God and others so that God could be
glorified. You start to think in a different way. And on that goodness he says
you add knowledge.

You build on that changed heart. You're changing, you're becoming good, a
deepening knowledge of God. Now remember the word knowledge in 2 Peter, it
doesn't mean school knowledge.

It doesn't mean sitting in a classroom learning more and more facts and figures
and theological terms about who God is. It's experiential knowledge. We're
talking about a deepening relationship with God here.

I know him better and better. I know what God would do in this circumstance. I
know what God would feel about that circumstance.

On faith you're building this goodness in your life and that's building into a
knowledge of how God would react in circumstances. And upon that he says you
build, you add self-control. You let your knowledge and your goodness and your
faith empower you to say no to temptation, to say yes to serving others, to say
no to selfishness and to say yes to service.

Self-control we're told by Paul is a fruit of the Spirit. It's interesting that
the Spirit enables self-control. Not selfishness but self-control.

So when God's Spirit is at work in my life, I'm able to say no to the
temptations of life and yes to God's opportunities of life. And on that
self-control, with that self-control you're building this building of what God
is doing, you add perseverance. You don't have self-control just for a short
time or some of the time, you persevere.

You have it through any circumstance. Oftentimes God will strengthen your
self-control to prepare you to endure a circumstance. There's no doubt about
that.

He will strengthen your self-control to prepare you to endure a temptation, to
endure a trial, to endure a persecution. He will get you ready for it. We're
still building this building and you see what's happening here.

Things are growing. There's the excitement of seeing a building go up, becoming
something. You're not staying stuck in your faith.

You might be stuck in your circumstances but you don't have to stay stuck in
your faith. No matter what your circumstances are, you can continue to grow
because you trust God for self-control. You trust God for perseverance.

And as you're trusting God for all of that, he says the next ingredient, the
next building that is added, part of the building that's added, is godliness.
That means becoming more like Christ in your character, in your attitudes. You
see that your perseverance and your heart and your faith all are building
together so that you become more and more like him.

And upon godliness, he says, you're building brotherly kindness. This is the
Greek word phileo, the idea of brotherly love or family kind of love. To be like
Jesus is to love.

And that has to start with the people that are part of the family. And here,
particularly, he's talking about your Christian family, the church that's around
you. It's not always easy to love people in the church because guess what?

They're just like you. They're sinners. They say wrong things.

They do wrong things. Sometimes intentionally even. Families love each other.

Families keep loving even through difficulties. So Peter writes and says you've
got to have that kind of love. Now here is a man who had experienced a lot of
difficulties in the church.

He knew what it was to love through difficult times, even his brothers and
sisters in Christ. And on that love, he says you build a godly kind of love, an
agape love, this last in the phrase. It starts with faith, and it builds into
love.

To be like Jesus is not only love your family, but to love even your enemy. Like
God loved us, even when we were yet his enemies. Even when I was God's enemy, I
was walking away from him, he loved me enough to send Jesus Christ to die on the
cross for me.

If I'm going to have a godly kind of love, I have to have that kind of love. Now
as you read through these eight things, the personal challenge in these verses
is, are you trusting him to keep you growing right now? Are you doing what we
just talked about?

Are you making every effort to trust him to keep you growing? Are you making
every effort to be good right now? Are you making every effort to increase your
knowledge of him?

Your relationship with him. Are you making every effort to trust him for
self-control? Are you making every effort to persevere?

Are you making every effort to be more like Jesus? Are you making every effort
to love fellow believers? Are you making every effort to love everyone?

Now, where do you need to make that effort? Not the effort to try harder, but
the effort to trust greater so that God can do these things in your life. Where
do you need to make that effort right now?

Let's start trusting greater through prayer right now. Would you pray with me?
And Lord, you've just spoken to our hearts.

You've just said this is where you need to make an effort to love this person,
to persevere in that circumstance, to get closer to you, to trust you for
goodness, for self-control, for perseverance. You've just spoken to our hearts
and we come to you and we say we make every effort not by trying harder, but by
trusting you. We bring this to you when we ask you for strength that we don't
have to persevere in that circumstance, to love that person.

We ask you for power that can only come through your love for us, your spirit in
us. God, change us, we pray, from the inside out. In Jesus' name, amen.

Tomorrow, we're going to talk about what happens in your life when you have
these eight qualities.