the Fourth Week after Easter
Click here to learn more!
Daily Devotionals
John Gossner's Treasury
Giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue knowledge temperance patience godliness brotherly kindness charity. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye "do these things, ye shall never fall. 2 Peter 1:5-10.
There are some so-called awakened persons who have a little Bible in which is found nothing but that which serves to reassure and console their slothful flesh; that is, they take only a few comforting passages out of the Bible, that do not concern them at all, because they will have nothing to do with the rest of God’s Word. The Bible becomes to them a fence by which they are enclosed so that they cannot get by their own flesh and blood to Christ. The Bible ought, however, to be a spur, each day driving them closer to Christ. Such a spur is also this passage in the epistle of St. Peter. It must be read as a whole and earnestly considered. He has first mentioned the most glorious promises of God; then follow these wholesome exhortations that no one must regard as superfluous even though he may have been with St. Peter on Mount Tabor or with St. Paul in Paradise. You may already have received many evidences of grace from God. Thank God for them. But if you do not use diligence in making your election and your calling to true’ Christianity sure; if you do not strive together with your "I believe in God the Father, I believe in Jesus our Savior" to unite Christian virtue, true godliness, patience and temperance and all that which the eye of Jesus desires to see in you and which He expects to see in His disciples, then hear what St. Peter has to say to you: you are blind, you close your eyes, and you have forgotten the purging from your former sins. You will fall or you are already fallen, because you have forgotten the true imitation of Christ and the likeness to Him. On the other hand, if you possess all those things which St. Peter requires, and if you are not idle and barren in the knowledge of Jesus, you are a true disciple of Jesus and know how the Bible is to be used. Nowadays, however, most people like the Bible in pocket size. Still even in such a Bible there is enough to wound and heal if they only would suffer themselves to be wounded and healed.
Lord, make us ready with Thy powers,
Strengthen the flesh in weaker hours,
That as good warriors we may force
Through life and death to Thee our course!
