Encore - 997 - Keep Growing Your Faith 2 Peter 1:8

Welcome back to the Follower of One podcast. I'm Mike Henry Sr., the founder of Follower of One. And I like to talk a little bit about the Bible every day and challenge us to go to work as people who make a difference in the lives of the people that we interact with. Today, we're wrapping up the series on second Peter, one, one through eight. I want to finish by reading second, Peter eight today. "For these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord. Jesus Christ. "I read from the New American Standard translation of the Bible. Those words "useless" and "unfruitful" are translated slightly differently in different texts. But the general idea is these eight qualities that we've just been talking about beginning with faith, moral excellence, knowledge self-control perseverance, godliness, brotherly, kindness, and love. These qualities are this process. I believe that Peter is talking about. In this process, God gives us the faith. Then we add moral excellence and knowledge and self-control and perseverance. We add these things. I always feel like the before picture, I've been a Christ-follower for a long time, but I still often feel underdeveloped. I feel like I should have more faith or I should be able to trust God more. I should walk more in my ability to trust him and to obey him and to do what he says. And I don't often measure up. And that is a problem for me. I work on that regularly. Maybe you feel that way. I think what we need to do is give ourselves a little bit of a pass because what we learn here is we iterate through this process. Faith, moral excellence, knowledge. All of these qualities are a process and we grow in them. We make another lap around the track. I would consider this a lap around the track. So we exercise our moral excellence and our knowledge and our self-control and our perseverance through a series of activities that occur over a period of time in our lives. And at the end by adding brotherly, kindness and love. We grow in our faith. Our faith grows. God gave us the faith, but he didn't give us a fully developed faith. It's still our responsibility to grow it. That's the challenge that Peter gives us here with the phrase "increasing". We need to be increasing. We need to be growing our faith. And that requires that we grow our moral excellence and our knowledge all the way through to love. We want to continue to grow and those things are ours to do. In fact, I think what I'll do is I'll add one more episode to this and talk about verse nine tomorrow. To continue growing, eventually we grow to reduce the uselessness or the unfruitfulness of our knowledge of our Lord, Jesus Christ. If you remember back in verse two, it talks about the knowledge of God and in verse three, the knowledge of God results in us, getting everything pertaining to life and godliness, Peter's helping us grow in our knowledge. I want to help you grow in your knowledge, but it's not through any teaching of mine. Let's read the scripture and let's trust the Lord. Let's spend some time obeying him today. Ask him, go ahead and pray. That's our first daily activity. Punch in, get on the clock and ask God to show you where you need to grow today. What can you bring today? Is it godliness or is it brotherly kindness or is it love? Let's bring some more of these qualities to our workplace. Eventually, God guides us through this process. Our faith grows and we become more useful and more fruitful. In the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. That's my prayer for us today. My prayer is that we become more useful and more fruitful, right where we are in our workplaces, however, we spend our time each day. We become more useful and fruitful. Thank you for being a marketplace minister. Thank you for growing in your faith. Thank you for actually investing a little energy every day, to try and continue to increase these qualities and become more useful and fruitful. The difference that you make matters. Over time, this changes and God uses us in the lives of people. Thank you for being a marketplace minister. And also thank you for checking out https://followerofone.org. That's our website. Go there, check out our online community and also sign up for the next Marketplace Mission Trip, where you get to practice these things a little more every day. Thanks very much.