I'm a philosophy professor, and I love this passage because it's so orderly - faith leads to virtue, virtue to knowledge, knowledge to self-control, self-control to perseverance, perseverance to godliness, godliness to brotherly love, brotherly love to love. It's almost a mathematical progression.
But I've realized I've been reading it backwards. I thought I had to construct the ladder - start with faith, then work myself up through each rung. What if it's describing how grace actually works? You're given faith, and it naturally produces virtue in you, which opens you to deeper knowledge, which teaches you genuine self-control.
I spent thirty years as a Christian thinking I had to pull myself up by my spiritual bootstraps. Then I stopped. I quit the spiritual performance. I just sat with God some mornings and let that be enough. And the actual virtues Peter lists - godliness, love, brotherly kindness - they just started showing up in me without my engineering them.
I'm preaching different sermons now. Stop trying to build the ladder. Rest in grace, and the ladder builds itself.
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