Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure, for if you do these things you will never stumble – 2 Peter 1:10.
So we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. There can be no loitering, we can’t just sit around and say ‘phew thank God I dodged a bullet, I’m saved yippy party time!’ There is work to do in the Kingdom. And God’s Word tells us as we are guided along by His Spirit how to live and do the works that Jesus did. If we are going to be like Christ, we are going to have to change some things, not by might nor by power but by the Spirit of God and obedience. Our old nature does not please God that’s why He gave us a new one and we are humble and deep in love with Jesus, the old nature gets overshadowed by the new man. It is not a daunting matter, but a question of faith working through love.
2 Peter 1 from verse 5 tells us, “But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For he who lacks these things is shortsighted, even to blindness, and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins.”
We are called upon to take stock of our lives so that we are not being deceived to live as we had before we received Christ. Carrying on as if nothing changed carries with it a risk of trampling the Son of God underfoot, as counting the blood of the covenant by which we were sanctified a common thing, and insulting the Spirit of grace. The Bible tells us that if we sin wilfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, there is a danger, we cannot take the grace of God as a license to sin. We have been released from the law to serve in a new Spirit-empowered life, not the old written code. We are encouraged to be diligent to make our calling and election sure by living in the Spirit because the aim is Christ-likeness.
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