Well, good morning. As you have been told, we are learning from 2 Peter 1, and so let me quickly invite your attention there, 2 Peter and chapter 1. We will commence reading the fifth verse, although I have already read my message will be from this page. First of all, it's just worth telling them, just to acknowledge that we are living in extraordinary times because of the coronavirus and its impact upon society generally. I was reading this morning that Approximately 160,000 lives have been lost, and that's a staggering number. 160,000 lives. Surely it can't be more. and calls us to times of self-remediation, it calls us to times of prayer, it calls all of us to seriously consider our relationship with God in the midst of taking all those preventative and precautionary measures that have been advised by government and also by health officials. We, for instance, strongly advise not to congregate and consequently, I am currently preaching in an auditorium that is as good as empty. However, grateful for technology that enables me to speak to those of you who have tuned in. So, I will read the second picture, chapter 1, beginning with verse 5 from the English Standard Version. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with selflessness, and selflessness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are lost, and by increasing they keep you from being ineffective or unsuitable in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Well, most of you who might be tuning in are not regulars, so what about the church might not know this, but prior to my being aware for the last six weeks, I've been taking a series of messages under the theme, Christian, grow up. Christian grow up. And basically, my urging was that it's important for those of us who are believers and realists that we are not simply to profess faith and, as it were, continue to merely exist and somehow try to keep away from sin and trouble until we find ourselves in heaven. The brother that we are in touch called to grow in Christlikeness. God wants us to become more fruitful, to be effective, to glorify him more and more and more as we live here again. And it is that growing up in him that, in fact, we begin to fulfill the purpose for which we truly exist. And that's the appeal that I'm making as we make our way through this passage of scripture in Second Vision. that we have no more reason whatsoever for us to dwarf in our spiritual experience, for us to continue in immaturity as we are living here on earth, because those who are spiritual giants of the faith have no more grace offered to them than the rest of us. The same faith that Peter had is the same one that God has given to us as well. In fact, earlier on, in this same passage, in verse 3, Peter has said, His divine power, referring to God's divine power, has granted to us all things that pertain to life and goodness. So really, we have been given all that we need for all of us to do true spiritual guidance. However, as we have been looking in the last 10 to 15 seconds, we have noted that we must now be the ones to make every effort to strengthen our spiritual muscle as it were, to ensure we are making progress. added to faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection and love. That's a responsibility that each one of us has and we need to ensure we are playing our role. in adding those qualities to ourselves so that we can become truly godly and spiritual. And one of the points that I have sought to play over and over and over again is that we need to notice that the qualities are spiritual. The apostle Peter is not saying, make sure you add to your faith diplomas, and degrees, and certificates, and wine, and children, and houses, and cars, and so on. No, no, no. Despite all that, it is primarily spiritual qualities that all of us must be aiming for, to become more and more like the Lord Jesus Christ. Second, when one sees the kind of things that religious people throw all their weight into, day by day, week by week, month after month, you find that it's nothing physical things. we begin to inquire what efforts they are putting into spiritual acquisition, we find scatterously very little. No wonder we are failing as believers to have an impact. No wonder, even in the days of the coronavirus, we are not really seeing believers who are taking occasion of this calamity in order to get an impact for Christ. It's primarily because of the fact that we are not growing, we are not putting everything to become like Christ, and therefore when the crisis hits, we are all scattered. May God have mercy. In fact, when you come to this date, you soon realize the spiritual incentive that the Apostle Peter gives for the reason why we should pursue these qualities, why we should possess and grow in spiritual qualities. Listen to the reason of the date, and you can't miss the fact that it is so that we might be effect. dear Isaac, even during COVID-19. Isn't it? For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being infected. Oh, I'm so full in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But to me, positively, this is what he's saying. That if these qualities are yours and what you're saying, they make you look good. They make you look good in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. That's what he said. He said, go for them. Because once you have them, and once you have them in your imagination, your life has a great beginning. Well, today, I just want us to think about possessing and growing in this spirituality. Trust me, that once we understand what that means, we will see what it is we should to be and seeking to do in order for our lives to really be impacted, possessing and growing in spiritual qualities. This program at PSAT assumes that every healthy believer possesses these qualities. Every healthy believer possesses these qualities. So the Peter says, so if these qualities are yours, then it is not one that is assuming that you can be a believer and not have these qualities. It's not like he's unsure about – it is rather saying, Look, if you have this, then this is what is going to result. It is that aspect that really has that is close to it. But in terms of helping this culture, teacher is assuming, and the point assumes, that every true believer will be like this. So really, I would be asking you, if you claim to be a Christian believer, do you possess these qualities? In some measure, do you? Have you added to your faith virtue? Have you added to your virtue knowledge? Have you added to your knowledge that fascinates? If you are dead to your selflessness, that you speak about in terms of self-control. If you are dead to your self-control, genuine brokenness. If you are dead to brokenness, brotherly affection. And if you are dead to brotherly affection, love. Can you describe it in those words? You see, when the Apostle Peter speaks in terms of having these qualities, if these qualities are yours, if they are in your possession, if you own them, he doesn't mind the way in which we own property. In other words, it's something that is yours, so it should be. And there are other ways in which people possess things and think they are actually theirs. In the morning, for instance, if you are driving out of the capital city of Saqqakhana and Senegal, towns as well, and you are heading out in the more rural areas, you will be cutting across individuals on bicycles, more acutely engaging the citizens with a lot of vegetables and farm produce from those bicycles. The farm produce is not theirs. They don't possess it. They may have wanted it, but there was no interest in getting it whatsoever. But as soon as they get into the city, they get into the marketplaces, they want to overthrow those countries so that they can give them over in exchange for money, head back into their homes. You see, that kind of opposition It's not what kind of position that Vita has in mind. That which is transient, which is that's here now and tomorrow's gone, when trials come, when temptations come, when COVID-19 comes, then this and this, and it disappears into nothingness. No, no! Vita has in mind the position that is tonight. So that these cadences describe you all the time. Come wind, come rain, come storms, come whatever will come. You can be described in these chants. That you are a person of knowledge. In other words, a person of excellence. That's the way in which you continue to live. That you are an individual who's always full of the knowledge of God. You possess that knowledge. You don't throw it away in the midst of difficulties and begin to question God, His purposes for you, His love for you. No, no, no! You remain that way, and that's the lesson I want to shift across this again, comes in here, with respect to self-control. So these are conditions, virtues, qualities that remain with you. And I'm going to go on to all the others, holiness, revelation, love, serenity. Can you be described that way? Can you, with your spouse as President, that even when difficulties are coming in the context of your own, between you as husband and wife, or between yourself and your children, can you still see that there is this consistency about you? with respect to these qualities, that this is beautiful. The point is, if your understanding is skin deep, and if it's only described in these words, when the weather is great, and everybody is being good to you. They are not temptations and not trials to rock the little boat of your life. No coronavirus has come into the world to wreak havoc around you. That's why I'm trying to describe it in these terms. But when trials come, When the flood hits against every part of your life, all these are lost. Most likely, you are not a true Christian. You are not. You are not a person that the Bible assumes that this is true about every believer. If those in the skin deep within each other, that easily gets lost in the storms of life, then you may need to go to Christ and say to Him, make me a real Christian. Make me a real Christian. fill me with your Holy Spirit, that so that I might feel the spiritual stamina that can handle all situations of life. Let me say it again, the Bible assumes if you are a believer you will have these qualities. The second aspect of what we believe in is that the Bible also makes it clear that healthy Christians grow in this country. Healthy Christians grow in this country. And that's what we're going to see in our text. Second Peter, chapter 1, at this point, for if these qualities are yours and are inclusive. If they are yours and are inclusive. I mentioned the fact that Peter uses the phrase, if these are yours. Really, his burden at this point is not so much the possession, after growing in these qualities. In fact, this time, down to the survey it was all about, we were saying, I have to fake virtue, and I have to acknowledge, and I'm so-and-so, and I said that, and so on. But really, it's in terms of growing these, rather than merely possessing them. In fact, the English word that we have there for increasing is quite a bit of an understatement. Because the equivalent in the Greek, the actual word that is there, is the same word from which we have here the word plenty. In plentiful supply. In other words, in abundance. So really, the best way of putting together this is that, for if these quantities are yours, and are increasing, plentifully. that could be a closer space to the actual Greek origin. In this example, you behave in a sort of manner that the people around you are going, whoah! Whoah! How impressive. It's a truth. And they notice this. And the reason is this. The way you talk about everything in your life is rich and endless with excellence. You are never an individual who's content with averages, with mediocre, especially in this case with your age. You are a person who is given, who is committed, and you go all the way. who looks at your spiritual activities, your social activities, your work activities, your school activities, whatever that is, they are seeing somebody who is pushing himself, pushing herself to the limit. You will recall the phrase that I referred to in the last chapter of Proverbs, the excellent wife. as a virtuous wife, a virtuous woman. And when you read that chapter, you see how the husband at the end of it goes, well, you know, a lot of women who conflate and so on, but you accept them all! You prevail! You are excellent in all of them! Now, it's inappropriate! This is not a woman with a wife who is just somehow trying to survive and continue to live her life. It's somebody who is insane! And as you close, she fears the Lord. Just like Christ did. As you close, she fears the Lord. Beauty is vain, the husband says. But the woman who fears the Lord is too precious. So the assumption here is that you are so growing in each of these qualities that those qualities are shining with the brilliancy of the new design. that in terms of your growing in knowledge, assuming you're a full believer in Bible study, they are able to say, wow, which Bible school did you go to? And you say, Bible school? No, I went to another church. I stand in the Bible and read Christian books. I want to know my God and everything about this God. That's what I'm standing for. I'm going to read my Bible half asleep, so that in the end, I don't remember what I read two minutes ago. I still believe that I know my God and I know His Word. And so on. We can go through all these lectures. The point I'm emphasizing here is the point of ABAGAS. Glowing Flesh of Sin. so that it's obvious to all that he is somebody who has made serious, serious, serious progress. And then I also want to notice in this text how he uses the present continuous tense. He said to me, for these qualities are yours and are increasing. You know that, right? So that loneliness is not something that is now yours and you will grow into automatic happiness. It's that you are still continuing to try. You're still continuing to try. Often, when you're in an airplane and you take off, you have the pilots still getting the seatbelts signed on. And basically, after that point, you're not allowed to move around anywhere. You must still remain. And anyway, you can't tell, because that angle of the airplane is getting a little bit shorter. So you're likely to fall down if you try to move anything. But at some point, The standing edge goes up and the coming boom maybe they are announcing that, that you are now free to move around but each time you see it doesn't show you, you put in the scissors. In other words, you've now crossed the stage. There's no need to keep climbing in any further. In fact, sometimes you can even see the pilot come out of his cabin, sit around, get himself a drink or a chat, go back in. This is not a relaxed stage. The Christian faith is never like that. There's nothing in the world who's now got the upper hand. Therefore, we can now get into a cruel state until we get to heaven. Does that make sense? It is ever-changing, ever-changing. And this is what is obvious. We want to be like Christ, and Christ is infinitely glorious. We want to know something of this excellence in our beings. We never have been made. We want to know this truth. For this one is like the sun, when we doubt it's here, it's like an ocean, we doubt it's like a shore. You're going to keep going, and going, and going, and saying it's not here. So how can you begin to say it's not an island? Why should I admit further? Come on! Your God must be an island. Just to give you a couple of ideas. Just a few. And we can keep going in terms of this fight. The point is, we can never run. Therefore, unlike the Europeans that finally go off and move into the one-circle phase, for you, it is continue to climb, despite the upheavals, continue to climb, despite the upheavals, until you disappear into That's what is happening right here. Do these qualities in an ever-increasing measure describe you? Because you see, it is as they remain fresh and are abundant in you that as you shall be seeing in a few minutes, they become the means of your effectiveness. Disease, like a virus, as long as it's just an incomplete or fixed immune, it never affects you. But in that sense, all of us are sick. You may not want to believe me, but you are. There's some bacteria, some virus, some something which is waiting for you. I don't know if you're aware. But you see, it's when these parasites multiply that things go wrong. The people in the medical world have been telling us, and I'm sure you did it, that the COVID-19 So the first of those cells somewhere in your being enters into some cells in your body, either in your nostrils, or a person in your mouth, and so forth. And that's where the virus multiplies, and multiplies, and multiplies. And then rests that particular molecule in your body and finds their way down into the lands, trouble, huge. So people say, why don't you know a white person? Why don't you bring revenge? That's the stage, because with the mountain man in abandonment, Then, one time, 13 years after that, we have an anti-violation bill, and someone in order to get your food from out of the river going back into the water. And what it says? The point here is this, it's a notification. It is the abandonment that induces and kills us. With the same decays in the whole world, it is what drives us all to demise in the human body. Kills. Well, that's a negative feeling. Yes, now I'll change that negative into a positive. It is when these qualities melt. when there are abandoned governments in your place, when there is a copious supply of these politicians in your city, that you cannot help but be effective in your work, because now the things the politicians try to do to be the kind of person that God wants you to be. What does that mean? Because that's really the point that I want us to make as we hurry on to close. Because the biblical fact is that these qualities are the fountain of thoughtfulness in the Christian life. The fountain of thoughtfulness. Back to our text. So if these qualities are yours, They keep you from being effective or acceptable in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus. Eventually, we will go into a lot more of the details concerning this being kept from being infected and unfruitful in a ritualized way. But today, I just want us to know this as a fact. That this is what it means. And I just want us to know this as a fact. It's quite simple. is that we must never aim to be effective and fruitful as Christians directly. We must never do that. Because if we try to aim at being fruitful and effective directly, we soon run out of ways. We soon run out of ways. The church leaders are very concerned about the lack of commitment of church members and so they are meeting in various meetings and saying so what should we do? Let's invite Fr. Soros, because he is the top preacher. He is the father and predecessor of the preacher. Let's invite him to come and preach. This is the idea, that when we come to preach, we should give him the topic, Christian Communities. Because he will never come as a Christian and he is going to put his fire under the seats of our church members and really make them see that they are terrible Christians because they are not committed. And that way we may get some real creativity out of the members of our church. Well, the truth of the matter is, the future comes, and there are good seats, good candidates, and for the next week, two weeks, you have quite a lot of zealous candidates. By the day they're going to be back to square one. You know you're going to be right back to square one. And for how long? You don't aim for effectiveness and fruitfulness directly. Look, I have seen that some of you get too nervous to look at it. Or, you yourself, when you convince yourself that, I am energetic, I am meaningful, I am everything. Rather, what you do is this. You grow up spiritually. You mature, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you as you possess these, and as you possess them, being able to be measured. It's like, for example, in terms of a group that goes through weight loss programs. You don't lose weight by trying to attack a fat guy. You don't. How do you do it? It's simple. If less calories than you are consuming in your activities. It's possible. It's simple. Less calories going in, more calories going out. Your body thinks, well, I need to find a balance. What do I do with that? Where do I find the balance? So all you need to do then is concentrate on not eating too much on one side, and then you want to do activity, exercise. Yeah! And as the baby is looking, the baby is looking, the baby is looking, before long, if someone was there to say, hey, what's the matter with you? You seem to be looking a little bit If you were concentrating on something else, this was the result. In the same way, concentrate on growing up as a Christian. That's it. Concentrate on being these qualities you like. Throw all your weight into your spiritual maturity. I want to assure you, you will be effective. You will be fruitful. You don't need to concentrate on Christ. Your level of humility will be enormous. And that will be achieved by your concentrating only directly on Christ. So, remember this, that this quality is coming as you deliberately argue to life, a life, concentrating on those areas, and then out comes a life that is truly impactful in your deliberation. By the time your life comes to an end, by the time you are buried, everyone will say, he or somebody who impacted our connection to Christ. That was it before. It wasn't what you were presented to. All you wanted was to be like Christ. And in that glorious place, growth, Well, let's have a moment to close, as I said, as we deal with this aspect next week. What can we learn from this? The same message I've been giving you all along, and it is this, Christian, grow up! The world needs believers who consider this a scripture. Grow up! And there has to be fathers and mothers who consider this a scripture. Grow up! The Buddha's friends and family and neighbors mustn't listen to this. Grow up! Stop being a dumb, sappy beaver. Grow up! And the Vedas also say that if you're a Buddhist, at least you learn to listen. What we have to add to our lives. Be deliberate about it. so that humanity be something of what Christ wants us to be. After the world been set free of us, after the children been set free of us, after family, neighbors been set free of us, friends been set free of us, but even more so, the day in which we are, with COVID-19 written in blood, the world desperately It is the kind of Christians who are not simply thinking of their self-preservation, profanity, or afraid to capitalize on the world. The world needs believers. who cannot die, but may be fed, and be fruitful in the midst of all the promotions and prevention measures being taken. They can sit down in their souls that cannot be shut. God, they must do good for the brethren. They must do good for the world. They must live brotherly affection. They must live love. And that diamond will shine in the world. Because they've grown up. They've grown up. They have the ability to grow. One of the things we often see at Kawaribata's church, several of the same old ones that are on the walls. New ones are being instigated. And I'm praying as I go along. Lord, grant me faith for a little while. It's got to be from the roots.