Goodness – Godly Life Part 5

Scripture: 2 Peter 1:3-11 TPT (Click Link) 5 So devote yourselves to lavishly supplementing your faith with goodness, and to goodness add understanding, 6 and to understanding add the strength of self-control, and to self-control add patient endurance, and to patient endurance add godliness, 7 and to godliness add mercy toward your brothers and sisters, and to mercy toward others add unending love. (2 Peter 1:5-7 TPT) We’ve got a faith foundation, friends. Now let’s build on it! The first quality Peter wants us to build into our lives (on our faith foundation) is goodness. The New Living Translation calls it moral excellence, the English Standard Version, “virtue” and The Message, “good character.” I want that in my life, right next to my faith foundation, right where it’s locked in solid and won’t slip around when the weight of life presses down on it. Goodness, good character, moral excellence is a good thing to build on. Jesus, using the same word, says that a good tree produces good fruit, and that we’ll be known by our fruit. Luke, when describing Barnabas in Acts 11, calls him a “good man”. When you think about Barnabas’ generosity, his willingness to give young Saul a chance when others feared and rejected him, and later when he saw God’s grace at work in Antioch, he really was a good man. He had added virtue, moral excellence, and good character to his faith foundation. I want to be like Barnabas when I grow up! Paul used the same word, translated virtue and goodness, in his list of the fruits the Holy Spirit grows in our lives when we yield to his work in us. So goodness is both a fruit the Spirit grows within us, and a building block we build right near the bottom, right next to the foundation of faith in our lives. Goodness is what gives us our inner sense of right and wrong, our love for good and our revulsion at evil, our desire to know the truth even when truth reveals we’re wrong about something. Goodness is what helps keep our motives pure, and our moral compass true without having to check everything to see if it’s on the “sin” list. Friends, we’re building something every day on our faith foundation. Let’s build goodness right at the bottom, where it can bear the weight! Prayer: Father, Thanks for our freedom in Christ to choose. We choose goodness, virtue, moral excellence. Please work it into the fiber of our being with every choice. Amen!