Faith Supplements: Living Like We Mean It

Today, during my Quiet Time with God, I reflected on what God has to say through the apostle Peter in 2 Peter 1. God especially spoke to me in 2 Peter 1:5-11:

5 For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. 8 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. 9 For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. 10 Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. 11 For in this way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 1:5-11) 

Just before this paragraph, Peter has told his audience that God, by His grace given through Christ to those who believe, has given “all things that pertain to life and godliness.”  

In other words, through Christ, God gives the power of the Holy Spirit to believers to live and thrive in godliness. The Holy Spirit makes it possible for us to live in ways that are beyond our own capabilities, to live as people made in the image of God, set free from the sinful state into which we’re born. Jesus sets us free to love and live in ways that are foreign to the world and the power for which only God gives. (In fact, Peter uses the verb give, several times in these few verses.) 

Filled with this power, Peter says, pursue the practice of qualities that will confirm--to us, to the world, and to God, I surmise--the presence and power of God’s grace in Christ working in our lives.  

Verses 3 and 4 of this chapter make clear that Peter is NOT saying that the pursuit of these qualities are a means by which we save ourselves. Christ is the only One Who can save us.  

But when Peter says to “make every effort to supplement [some translations say add to] your faith…” with these qualities, I think he means this: The Holy Spirit implants every one of these qualities in believers. They exist latently, like barrels of beer (or, you prefer, soft drinks) waiting for the Christian to tap into and lap up. Or, they’re like blank checks of character just waiting for the Christian to cash and live out.  

Even Christians, of course, who know and trust in Christ, continue to be both sinners and saints. For the Christian not lulled into fatalism by their inborn sinful nature (this is part of what Luther is describing in The Small Catechism when he speaks of “despair and other great and shameful sins”), life with Christ is a constant war between the allurements of the old self, the evil of the world, and the evil laid before us by the devil, on the one hand, and the “narrow path” of life, a life of joy, peace, and hope that only comes from Jesus (Matthew 7:13-14). 

Paul speaks of his own struggle with this in Romans 7:21-25: 

“21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” 

Christ is the only way to win this battle to be truly human! 

It can’t be won by being virtuous. It can be won by tapping into the virtues that God gives to those who turn to Him daily through Christ.

So, Paul says elsewhere: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” 

In other words, quit asking questions like:

Am I happy?

Am I getting enough of the stuff of this life? 

Am I being appreciated?

Am I honored by others? 

Blah blah blah blah! 

If Jesus is all I need, my daily bread, my living water, questions like these are irrelevant. 

My call then is to tap into those qualities with which the Holy Spirit imbues believers in Jesus, to “supplement” my faith by living out the calls of these qualities.  

By pursuing the qualities Peter talks about in these verses, rather than pursuing happiness, others’ appreciation, money, and so on, I will put all earthly things in perspective and I will be on the path of God.  

So, Peter says, pursue virtue. Virtue means moral goodness, uprightness in actions, graciousness toward others. It’s living as the loving person I want, in my heart of hearts, to be. 

Peter says to add to virtue, knowledge. This references both knowledge of the facts and a wise reflection on the facts.  

Knowledge and wisdom are only as reliable as the sources from which they’re drawn, as we’ve learned painfully from the fake news sites that played such an important part in the past presidential campaign.  

The ultimate truth source, of course, is God. Jesus says in John 14:6 that He is the way, the truth, and the the life. And Proverbs 2:6 says: “For the LORD gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.” 

If I’m to supplement virtue with knowledge, I must begin (every single day) with God’s Word. I must be steeped in the Bible, God’s authoritative revelation of truth! 

I must supplement virtue and knowledge with self-control. This is an ongoing battle for me. I tend to be a grazer, allowing myself to be led along from one thing to another by what interests me at any given moment, then wonder where the time has gone and why I haven’t achieved what I set out to do, or to mindlessly munch on snacks, then wonder why I’ve gained so much weight.  

But God has given to me the ability to be self-controlled, if I will only tap into the power of the Holy Spirit residing within me as a believer in Jesus! Paul speaks of self-control as a “fruit of the Holy Spirit,” evidence of God having taken up residence in the life of a believer: “...the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…” (Galatians 5:22-23). 

Next, Peter says, we’re to supplement our faith in Christ with steadfastness. The idea here is patient endurance.  

This means honoring one’s godly commitments, whether they’re my commitments to follow Christ, stay in my marriage, take care of my kids, honor my parents, doing an honest day’s work, treating my body as a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19), respecting God’s ten commandments (all of them), and so on.  

Is there any Christian who has ever gone without breaking at least one of these commitments? No.  

Whether in thought, word, or deed, we (I) have broken them all. But repentance is all about returning to God through Christ and once again living in His gracious power to help us be more conformed to the image of His Son (Romans 8:29).  

For an imperfect person like me, part of steadfastness is knowing Who to come home to when I have strayed. I need to remember to come home to Jesus Christ!  

Next, I am to supplement my faith with godliness. This means devotion to and reverence for God.  

When I think of a devoted or reverent person, I don’t think of someone who solemnly worships with liturgical correctness. (Though the liturgies of the Church built on God’s Word, can draw us closer to God.)  

I don’t think either of a person who seemingly floats above the lives of mere mortals, someone who wouldn’t, in the old phrase, “say s--t if they had a mouthful of it.”  

Strong’s Concordance says of someone who is godly: “...[their] inner response to the things of God which shows itself in godly piety…” It says that godliness: “...naturally expresses itself in reverence for God.”  

A godly person is one who seeks to live in accordance with the revealed will of God, who seeks to honor God by living a life of love for God and love for neighbor, including loving God and neighbor enough to be committed to making disciples for Jesus.  

A godly person seeks to wipe out the disconnect between what I confess on Sunday mornings and how I act on Friday night. 

After godliness, I’m to supplement by faith with brotherly affection, φιλαδελφίαν (philadelphian). This is inside baseball--inside the Church--stuff. We are to cherish each of our sisters and brothers in Christ in the Church. 

The reason for this is simple. It is impossible to be a disciple of Christ without a connection to Christ’s Church. Life with Christ only happens when we rub shoulders with other believers in Christ in the fellowship of the Church.  

The Bible calls fellow believers in Christ sisters and brothers, God being our Father. The Church is an extended family.  

In any family, there are bound to be tensions between siblings, including the ones who live in the same house.  

In fact, I think that the family (which Luther describes as “the little Church”) is designed to help form us as disciples capable of loving others even when disagreeing with others or being different from others by subjecting us to the very differences between people which, apart from Christ, would drive us into isolation and self-absorption.  

Just so, God places us in the Church so that we are forced to confront our own sin, our self-absorption, and our lovelessness. Christ puts us in the Church so that there are people speaking for Him who can tell us no, when we need to hear it, and yes, when we need to hear it. 

Proverbs 27:17 says: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” God gives us sisters and brothers in the Church to rub us the wrong way when we need it and to lift us up when we need it.  

He does this to form us as disciples, so Christ will be more and more essential to our lives and so that Christ will be more evidenced to others in us.  

The only new commandment Jesus gave has to do with His Church: “"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34).  

This differs from the great commandment, which Jesus reiterated but goes back to the Old Testament: It commands us to love others as we love ourselves.  

The new command is for Christians in Christ’s Church: We are to love each other exactly the way Jesus loves us, with a willingness to die for the sake of our sisters and brothers in the faith and for Christ Himself. Without constant turning again to Christ, I am incapable of being a true philadelphian. 

Finally, I’m to supplement my faith in Christ with love. The word in the original Greek is agapen.  

Strong’s says that this word describes love as a moral choice. In other words, love, as the Bible understands it, isn’t primarily about feelings. There may be brotherly affection, as mentioned earlier. But love is primarily the moral choice you make to seek what’s best for others, sometimes in spite of what you may be feeling at the moment or even what's in our own interest.  

Its biggest example, of course, is Jesus on the cross. Jesus had made it clear in the garden that He wanted to avoid the cross. Yet His love for the Father and for sinners like me caused Him to make the decision to take the cross.  

If brotherly affection is inside baseball, this is more about everybody else in the Christian's life. Our attitude and actions toward the world are to be characterized by love, even toward those who hate us. (Even when others force us to war against them, we must retain our love for them. If we allow ourselves to mirror the hatred of those who choose to war against us, we lose our moral grounding. Instead, when others make war against us, we must war back, but not engage in the savagery of hatred that might lead to indefensible acts like the murder of civilians or torture.)  

I can only supplement my faith in Christ with these qualities through deliberately, intentionally, and daily turning from sin and turning to Christ.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Learning to Be Like Jesus

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Matthew 14:13-21

I knew a man named George who served in the army during World War 2.

After VE Day, George was part of the occupying force in Germany. Every day, he encountered families and many orphans who had no food, no place to bathe, and no habitable place to live. It broke his heart and he never forgot it.

This experience became the subject of a promise George made to God. Wherever he found hungry people, George vowed, he would do what he could to feed them.

He lived that promise. For the rest of his life, George would find out about people who needed help and somehow get groceries to them. Fellow members of the Lutheran congregation of which he was  a part got wind of what he was doing and asked how they could help. Eventually, George’s efforts became part of the congregation’s ministries and budgets. Well into his eighties, George was still taking food to people in need. And, whenever his personal resources or those of his church were skimpy, he would call area pastors and ask if they or their churches could help someone whose needs they couldn’t address.

When he died, people were asked to forget about sending flowers and instead, provide money for his church’s ministry to the poor. Thousands of dollars were raised.

George’s life is a story of Christian discipleship.

The word disciple—mathetes in the Greek language in which the New Testament was written—means student.

This doesn’t mean that the follower of Jesus is someone who compiles a lot of religious information, as if Judgment Day were going to be like a final exam deciding whether we get a “passing grade.” To be a student (or disciple) of Jesus means that, by the way we live, we’re learning each day to be more like Jesus.

And being like Jesus is the ultimate goal of every believer. This is mentioned often in the New Testament.

• 1 John, for example, says that when Jesus returns to the earth, “we will be like Him.” 
• 2 Corinthians says that as we follow Jesus, we “are being transformed into” His image. 
• Romans says that followers of Jesus are being “conformed to the image of His Son.” 

All of this is the work of God’s Holy Spirit, of course. We can’t make ourselves more like Jesus. But you and I can make the decision, each and every day, through a life style of "daily repentance and renewal" about whether we will be open to the work of the Holy Spirit to make us more like Christ.

This is why in one of the greatest passages in the New Testament, the apostle Paul says, “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…” In other words, confident in God’s love and grace for you, take the attitude of a servant. Let the Spirit work through your open heart and will to make you more like Jesus. Being like Jesus must mean, as it did in George’s case, being compassionately moved by the same things that compassionately move Jesus.

Our English word, compassion, is a compound meaning to suffer with. In the New Testament's original Greek, a common word for compassion reflects ancient people's belief that our emotions weren't centered in the heart, but in the gut. Compassion is that stirring of the gut that happens when our sympathies are aroused.

• It's what makes you want to pray or send a check to Lutheran World Relief when you see pictures of starving children in Somalia.
• It's what makes you want to intervene and pray when you're at the store and see children being neglected either by parents who fail to discipline them or by treating them unkindly.
• It's what makes you so concerned about the eternal destiny of a classmate or coworker that you want to share Jesus with them.

We give water away during our Kindness Outreaches out of compassion. Those who receive these acts of kindness may not need the water, but they do need the One Who sends us.

Compassion looks at the needs of others and is stirred to sympathetic action.

Compassion is the openness of heart toward others that comes to those whose wills and lives are open to the God we know in Jesus Christ.

In that connection, please pull out the Celebrate inserts and look at today’s Gospel lesson. It begins with Jesus learning that John the Baptist, has been executed. Jesus goes by boat to a spot where nobody lived, no doubt to pray and to consider how John’s execution foretold His own. He needed to process His feelings. But crowds sought Jesus out. We’re told in verse 14: “When He went ashore, He saw a great crowd; and He had compassion for them…”

This isn’t the first place we’re told of Jesus’ compassion for crowds. Another is at Matthew 9:36. Please turn to it in the pew Bibles, page 556. It says: “But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered like sheep having no shepherd.”

What aroused Jesus’ compassion for the crowds in these two passages represent the full breadth of God’s concern for all of us. In the Matthew 9 instance, Jesus has compassion for the crowds because of their spiritual condition. They’re disconnected from God, unaware of their need to turn from sin and to believe in Jesus to gain eternal life with God. All they know is that they have a hunger to be with Jesus.

In Matthew 14, in our gospel lesson, Jesus looks at another crowd and sees all that was wrong in their physical condition, their need for healing. Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, shows us that God cares for our whole beings.

As disciples of Jesus, people intent on learning to live like Jesus, our call is to have the same compassion for people that Jesus has. Bob Pierce, the missionary who founded both Samaritan’s Purse and World Vision, often prayed, “Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God.”

And it’s exactly here that, until this past week, I had always faulted the disciples as they’re portrayed in today’s gospel lesson. Look at verse 15. The disciples tell Jesus that they’re in a remote place and that he should send the crowds away so that they can get food.

I had always thought that the disciples were being selfish here, that they wanted Jesus to themselves, and that they didn’t care about the crowd. Some of that may be true. But one New Testament scholar has convincingly written that like the Savior they followed, the disciples felt the crowd’s need for food.

But they didn’t have food to give to the crowd, or very little of it. So, rather than having this whole throng in the middle of nowhere with nothing to eat, the disciples thought that the compassionate thing was to send them away to find food where it could be found, in the nearby towns. Their suggestion wasn’t a failure of compassion, but a failure of faith.

In verse 16, we come to the centrally important part of this entire incident. Jesus tells the disciples that the crowds needn’t go away. “You give them something to eat.” “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish,” they say.

Now, we’ve all heard or read about the feeding of the 5000 many times. But have you ever considered this: What if the disciples hadn’t told Jesus about the five loaves and the two fish?

What if they had pretended, as maybe all of us have when approached by someone asking for money, that they didn’t have anything "on them"?

The disciples felt compassion for the hungry crowd, but this was all they had…a few scraps of bread and two measly fish. What was so little in the face of so great a need?

We know what happened. Jesus took the bread and fish and fed the whole crowd, one composed, Matthew says, of five thousand men plus women and children. A conservative estimate of the entire crowd would be about 15,000 people.

But the feeding of all those people may really be the second miracle in this incident.

The first miracle may be that the disciples were willing to disclose to Jesus (and then give to Jesus) all that they had. The grace of God in Jesus had broken down any selfishness they might have felt and filled them with compassion for others!

How much of ourselves are we willing to give to Jesus?

On the cross, Jesus spent His whole life to buy your freedom from sin, death, and eternal separation from God. Jesus died and rose so that all who surrender to Him can have life forever with God.

The more we yield to Jesus—the more of ourselves we give to Him—the more He will do in our lives and the more He can do through us.

That’s what the first disciples learned the day Jesus fed the 5000. It’s the lesson that my friend George’s life teaches.

It’s a lesson we all can learn as we give ourselves to Jesus every day.

Recently, Ann and I heard from a dear friend. She was excited about exciting new developments in her life, a shot of unexpected joy, possibilities, and purpose. But then, she told us, it shouldn’t really be that surprising. “Not long ago,” she explained, “I did something I’d never done. In the past, I bargained with God. I’d tell God: ‘If you do this, I’ll do this.’ But not this time. I told God, ‘I’m wide open. Whatever you want!’” In the book of Ephesians, we’re called to give glory to the God Who “is able to accomplish abundantly more than all we can ask or imagine.” Our friend is learning that truth.

We all know that bad things happen to faithful people and that we live in a fallen, imperfect world. The mystery of prayers not answered as we expect them to be will be with us for as long as this present world exists. But what Jesus showed when He miraculously fed a huge crowd with the food offered by the disciples is that if we will offer our whole selves to Him, we can become conduits for the blessings of God on a world of great spiritual and physical need.

And as we give ourselves to Jesus, God’s Spirit will move us closer to the goal of being like the One Who died and rose for us. That’s God’s aim for our lives and for the life of Saint Matthew. May it be our aim for our lives and for Saint Matthew too. Amen

40-Days to Servanthood: Day 1

God’s goal for your life is for you to be like Jesus.

God has set apart every person called to follow Jesus Christ “to become like his Son, so that the Son [will] be the first among many brothers” (Romans 8:29, Good News Bible).

Does that seem impossible? It probably does.

After all, Jesus was (and is) not just a human being, but God. “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible...all things have been created through him and for him...in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell...” (Colossians 1:15-19, New Revised Standard Version).

But I’m not making this up. God means for you to become like Jesus.

Jesus is the prototype of a new human race. This is what the apostle Paul was talking about in First Corinthians 15 when he effectively designated Jesus the new “Adam.” “For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (First Corinthians 15:22, New Revised Standard Version). Sin infected the human family when Adam rebelled against God. Because human beings are the pinnacle of God’s creation, the only one of God’s creatures to bear “the image of God” (Genesis 1:26-28), all of creation bears the burden and the signs of our rebellion against God.

But God means to give fresh starts to all who turn from sin and surrender to Jesus Christ (Second Corinthians 5:17). Jesus is the new Adam, the resurrected first example and the pioneer of the new human race of which God invites all people to be a part.

In Christ, we are born anew (John 3:3). But just as our physical births are only the beginnings of our lives, so our spiritual births only begin our lives in Christ.

God’s goal for your life is for you to be like Jesus.

Bible Passage to Ponder: “God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him.” (Romans 8:29, The Message)

[This is the first installment of a forty-day series of extremely short devotional pieces which I wrote back in 2006. (Some have been slightly revised.) The pieces are being used at the congregation I serve as pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, as part of our Lenten walk toward Easter. I hope that you find them helpful.]