So don’t lose a minute in building on what you’ve been given, complementing your basic faith with good character, spiritual understanding, alert discipline, passionate patience, reverent wonder, warm friendliness, and generous love, each dimension fitting into and developing the others. With these qualities active and growing in your lives, no grass will grow under your feet, no day will pass without its reward as you mature in your experience of our Master Jesus.
2 Peter 1:5-9 MSG
Whenever you feel lost and unsure of how to start up again, go back to the basics.
Basic Faith – the first step, the abandoned sin, throwing of oneself upon the mercy of God and walking forward into the unseen with the belief that you are not alone to develop.
Good Character – staying true to what you believe in the little things and letting those small choices of integrity overflow into the big things as you grow.
Spiritual Understanding – the moments you can’t explain, but know are true.
Alert Discipline – not allowing time, tiredness, busyness, past baggage, old excuses erode right habits, receiving grace and energy from God.
Passionate Patience – being able to expectantly wait for one thing while wholehearted working for another. Choosing to focus on being obedient, not on the results of being obedient.
Reverent Wonder – the awe of seeing God with the wide eyes of a childlike heart.
Warm Friendliness – the smile, the hug, the gentle knowing atmosphere of those who are confidently walking in their purpose.
Generous Love – being able to love those closest to us without fear or conditional embraces and the ability to love those we barely know with an authenticity that only comes from intimately knowing God.
These are my own definitions of the list of things to build on in 2 Peter 1:5. A way for me to see if I am working on and walking in them or maybe missing one or two of them.
These are not a to-do list by a Jesus-help-me-be list.
May you find your way back to the basics and thrive by the grace of God in each one today.
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