," and then if I'm not careful, I slip into a mode of passivity and say, "I've got it all, so what else"? but you can't do that if you read the verse that comes before it: "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence," now watch this, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling". In verse 13, it sounds like it's all of God and in verse 12 it sounds like it's all up to me.
Now, which is it? It's both. If I were to come up to you with an attorney and say, "For years I have owned one of the most productive goldmines in the world and I have decided that I am going to give it to you and here's my attorney and I'm gonna write my name at the bottom of this deed and we're gonna deed this goldmine to you". That's a nice thought, isn't it? Everybody just sort of ponders that in their mind, gold being what it is and everything else being what it is. Now, technically, you are in possession of that goldmine. It's yours. I signed it off to you. I have diligently given you everything you need to be the producer of gold. But now it's up to you to go get it.
Now you have to go into that goldmine and you have to take your pick and your shovel and you have to go get the gold. You have to take out of that mine what has been given to you, and there's a sense in which you could say, "It's not yours until you do it". It may be yours technically, but practically you do not benefit from that gift unless you go into that mine and you diligently work out what has been worked in. And that's exactly what Peter is saying to us. He is saying God has given us richly everything we need for life and godliness and he's given it to us in the precious promises of the Word of God. And we have it. It's ours.
How many of you have a Bible this morning? You all have a Bible. It's my Bible, right? But it doesn't do me any good if all I have is the deed to it. He's now gonna tell us that in order for us to experience what we need, and I believe this is more important today than it's ever been, and I really believe that God has us on this track for a specific reason, it's more important than it's ever been for us to understand that, yes, there is a divine command, but there's also a divine cooperative, that what God has given to us, we're to take that and diligently allow it to be applied to our own lives. To put it this way, what God has worked in, we need to work out. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling". It doesn't mean you work for your salvation. Please don't get mixed up about that. You can't work for your salvation, but now that you have your salvation, you are to live as ordered by God.
Now, interestingly enough, in this passage of Scripture, Peter not only gives us a divine command and the divine cooperative but he actually gives us the divine curriculum. Notice in verses 5 through 8 he says, "Giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge self-control, and to self-control perseverance, and to perseverance godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love". Now, that's one of the lists of the Bible. How many of you know the Bible's got lots of lists? Paul's really into lists. Peter gets into it a little bit. This list was not meant to give us an exhaustive description of every part of the Christian life, but rather to give us some of the key principles of what it looks like when you live the Christian experience.
And I do not have any intention of taking you on a word-by-word verse study this morning but I'd like to make some general comments about this list. First of all, this curriculum is conditional. Look down at your Bibles and notice it says: "For this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith". And I wanna suggest to you that until you have faith, you have no place to go. If you were to go to college and you wanted to take an upper-level course, they might tell you there is a prerequisite course you must take before you can take that one. Before you can get involved in giving all diligence to your Christian life, you have to enroll in the course of faith. You have to become a Christian. There's no such thing as growing in Christ until, first of all, you know Christ. You can't grow if you don't know.
And so, the Bible says that the beginning of your Christian walk is to know Christ, to become a Christian, to add to your faith virtue. Let me pause for a moment and say: If you don't know Jesus Christ as your Savior, if you've never trusted him, if you've never placed your faith in him and become a Christian, then you will not be able to take this course. Faith is the prerequisite. The curriculum is conditional. And then notice, it's consecutive. These words are not placed willy-nilly in the text. They are there in a consecutive order. Faith comes before virtue. Virtue becomes knowledge. Don't try to take these subjects out of sequence. They are placed in order for a good reason. Everything starts from faith and culminates in love. And all the graces in between spring out of faith and find their greatest and highest glory in the concept of Christian brotherhood. They are built one upon another.
I thought through these things this week and thought about how a new Christian functions and how these things fall into that sequence for a new Christian. First he has faith and then he adds to his faith virtue. What does that mean? He starts to live differently. How many times people have come to me and said, you know, "I accepted Christ last month and I don't do this, and I'm stopped doing". Who told you? "Oh, I don't know. When I got saved, those things just didn't seem important to me anymore and I kind of had a feeling maybe I should not do them". Add to faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and then when you find that you have begun to understand some things as a Christian, then you add to that the other virtues. And one by one, they all go together until you get to the end, brotherly love. That's what happens in the body of Christ and the church, and then love which is what we do to love the whole world, even as our neighbors, we're to love them, according to the Scripture.
So the curriculum is conditional and it's consecutive and then it's comprehensive. He says in this passage of Scripture that everything we need for life and godliness is here included. Not most of the things, not some of the things, but everything. And that means that this needs to be studied as a whole. You don't just take part of the curriculum and say, "Well, I'm gonna major on this and let somebody else study that". No, you want the whole counsel of God. There's a kind of comprehensiveness to our faith that doesn't seem to make sense to people outside of the church, but it's the way we understand who we are in Christ. We study the Word of God and, while we're studying this chapter here, we may not understand how it fits into the rest, but lo and behold, as we continue to study, God brings this back to our mind and we think, "Oh, so that's what that means".
I'm finding that kind of ah-ha experience happening more and more to me as I've studied the Word of God for so many years. I think of it, and I think, "You know, I preached on that, but I didn't fully comprehend it, but now that I see how it fits with this, it's a comprehensive truth and it's incredible". And that's why it is so important for us never to get discouraged when we're studying the Bible. We may not comprehend everything that's important in that passage now, but if we will just be diligent and faithful and give ourselves to the study of the Word of God, over a period of time, God's Word will become so important to us that it will start to control, we will have the mind of Christ as we talked about last week.
And do you know, one of the reasons I want to say that is because, I'll be honest with you, sometimes when you're reading the Bible, you can have wonderful days of reading the Bible and you can have some pretty blah days of reading the Bible. Can I get a witness? Isn't that true? Lord, whatever in the world does this mean? And couldn't I find something more appropriate for what I'm going through today? And Lord, I need a blessing, not a riddle. But when you faithfully stay after it and you continue to discipline yourself to diligently study the Word of God, God begins to give you a comprehensive sense of who he is and what this whole experience is about.
Do you know how so many Christians study the Word of God? Somebody has called it "lucky dipping". Do you know what lucky dipping is? "Lord, I need an answer from you... Oh"! That's a very dangerous way to study the Bible. I read about a man who did that one day. He was trying to figure out God's will for his life. Stuck it down in the