I want to be useful.

A few days ago I started going down this path of usefulness, purpose or worthiness. I quoted Emerson and I still like what he said:

The purpose of life is not  to be happy.

It is to be useful, 

to be honorable, 

to be compassionate, 

to have it make some difference 

that you have lived and lived well. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As good as I think these words are, there are some others in Scripture that help us to see how to be useful and fruitful. It is all based on the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For this very reason,
make every effort to supplement your faith  with goodness,
goodness with knowledge,
knowledge with self-control,
self-control with endurance,
endurance with godliness,
godliness with brotherly affection,
and brotherly affection with love.

For if these qualities are yours and are increasing,
they will keep you from being useless or unfruitful

in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
II Peter 1:5-8

So let’s look at this a little more closely.

Where does our faith come from? It partially comes from trust and experience, doesn’t it? If I go to turn on a light switch, I have faith that the light will come on. I don’t quite understand all I know about electric circuitry, but I know that it has happened a million times in the past – I’ve hit the switch and the light has come on.  My faith in God is not quite so simplistic but He has proven over and over again that He can be trusted.  So I do.

According to II Peter, I must “make every effort” to supplement my faith with goodness. Where is this goodness going to come from because I’m not naturally very good? It will come from the Holy Spirit. But did you catch the “making an effort” part? That means that goodness, and all the other things in this list, won’t come passively. They won’t just happen because we are Christians. We have to put forth the effort to add them to our lives. God through the Holy Spirit offers us these qualities or characteristics, but we have to actively put them into practice in our lives.

So if I started with faith and now have added goodness, then the next step is to add knowledge. What kind of knowledge is this talking about? I dare say it is not talking about carnal or worldly knowledge. No, I’m pretty sure it refers to spiritual knowledge. So where does this come from? Again, it is the result of our actively pursuing it and not expecting it to just appear from the Lord. Could God just zap us with this and other qualities? Yes. But it is far better that we make the effort and purposefully add them to our lives through our knowledge of Him. We can obtain spiritual knowledge through Bible study, scriptural research, prayer, worship services, and other avenues. God wants us to have it but it is totally up to us.

Ponder these things. Tomorrow we will look at the rest of this list.