Mennonite Weekly Review

This year, I forgot my mother’s birthday. I wrote it down on my calendar, circled it several times and told myself repeatedly: Don’t forget! But that wasn’t enough. The day came and went, filled with everyday distractions and tasks, and I forgot to call. I knew it was her birthday, but I allowed other things to redirect my focus.

Andres

This aspect of our human condition weaves into Peter’s second letter, in which he underscores that a growing and effective faith and healthy covenant community require an unwavering focus on living out of and building on our relationship with God.

Get to it now

Peter is writing to a group of believers hassled by religious teachers living and endorsing a way of life contrary to the way of Jesus. From the get-go, Peter underscores where our focus needs to be when facing distracting, deceptive and divisive influences: “deepen in your experience with God and Jesus” (2 Peter 1:2, Message).

God’s provides everything we need to live the new God-pleasing life he’s given us, says Peter, “through our knowledge of him” (3, NIV) — or, as The Message puts it, “by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God.” Peter reminds them that, through God’s promises, we’re now freed from our old corrupted life to participate in the very “life of God” (4, Message).

“So, don’t loose a minute,” he says: Make every effort to build on this new relationship and life by “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” (5-7). This is what keeps you from being “ineffective and unproductive” (8, NIV) and forgetting “that your old sinful life has been wiped off the books” (9, Message).

The stakes are high, Peter reminds them, so “don’t put it off; do it now” (10). Then “you’ll have your life on a firm footing, the streets paved and the way wide open into the eternal kingdom” (10-11). And even though they know “this truth and practice it inside and out” (12), he’ll not stop reminding them because he wants to make sure they’ll “remember these things” even after he dies (15, NIV).

Not an option

Our lives and communities depend on building everything on our new life in and relationship with God. “Striving for spiritual maturity is not an option in the Christian life,” says Douglas Moo in the NIV Practical Application Commentary. “We must use all the means at our disposal to cultivate the Spirit’s power in our lives.”

God provides us with those means — prayer, study and meditation on Scripture, worship, service — all those things that we call spiritual disciplines. And as we cooperate and walk with God this way, he transforms us as we become mature in our faith, goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, kindness and love.

This list of qualities ranges between the personal and corporate. “God has wired human beings for deep communion with God and each other,” says Christopher Hall in The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible. Both relationships are inextricably and organically related. We aren’t meant to have one without the other. A radical and focused relationship with Jesus is necessary for both a maturing faith and healthy community.

We need each other in order to remember and encourage us toward these things, lest we become nominal communities full of easily distracted, ineffective and unproductive believers. We play an important role in God’s plans to redeem his creation: We are called and enabled to be God’s covenant community through which, as Dallas Willard puts it, God “is tangibly manifest to everyone on Earth who wants to find him.”

Carmen Andres, of Woodbridge, Va., is a former editor of Chris­tian Leader, the magazine of the U.S. Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches.