GLEANINGS from the Daily Office – Grow Up!

GLEANINGS (from the Daily Office) – Grow Up! – Year Two, Advent 1, Monday, November 30, 2015, 1 Peter 1:1-11

“Be the more zealous to confirm your call and election”

I cannot make myself grow spiritually. That is a work of God. That is in the wheelhouse of the Holy Spirit.

However, I can acknowledge there is a process and where it begins.

The process is this. Add virtue to faith, knowledge to virtue, self-control to knowledge, steadfastness to self-control, godliness to steadfastness, brotherly affection to godliness, and love to brotherly affection. You move from faith to morality and morality to relationships rooted in love (as opposed to ulterior motives and self-preservation). It never ceases to amaze me the number of us, including me, who think we are a finished product, that, somehow, we have arrived. Accordingly, people are surprised that they need to learn to forgive at 60 or be concerned for the marginalized at 70 or resolve disputes with fellow Christians in a godly way at 80. We have not arrived regardless of how much God has achieved since we first believed.

And the process begins with a faith born of and produced by being cleansed from my “old sins.”  Can you imagine the bank notifying you that your mortgage has been satisfied by someone you through under the bus in your youth. First, there is the joy of the mortgage being satisfied. No more debt. This home I own. Second, there is the shock and awe that the debt was satisfied by someone who has no earthly reason to regard me. Indeed, he could justifiably demand my incarceration. But instead he pays of my mortgage, the Damoclean sword hanging over my head.

Those are gifts undeserved and beyond one’s wildest imagination. Peter takes us back to this first truth. It is the thing that inspires us to submit to the process. Grace.

–Frodo: “I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”–