Fullness of Life

2 Peter 1:5-10 “But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For he who lacks these things is shortsighted, even to blindness, and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins. Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure, for if you do these things you will never stumble.

This world-wide pandemic has shaken this culture to the soul and people are waking to the reality of their Maker and seeking peace in this uncertain time. Isolation and solitude has shined a revealing and telling light on existential crazies, fads, trendy living and godless pursuits as distractions from what true living is all about. Over 3 million infected by Coronavirus and over 211,000 deaths world-wide, so far. As people look inward and upward, they find that spiritual disciplines have incredible power for the transformation of character, soul care and ministry towards others in need. Author Dallas Willard, in his book on the Great Commission command of Jesus Christ states that Any activity that is in our power and enables us to achieve by grace what we cannot achieve by direct effort is a discipline of spiritual life.

As we seek to know Christ by incorporating appropriate disciplines into our lives, we keep in mind that they are not ways of earning merit. But they are indispensable wisdom. Once we learn that grace (the free unmerited love and favor of God, the spring and source of all the benefits men receive from Him) is not opposed to effort and action – though it is opposed to an earning attitude – the way is open for us to “work out” all that is involved in our salvation, not only “with fear and trembling” but also with the calm assurance that it is God who is at work in us to accomplish all of His goodwill.

Willard explains that many Christians are looking for ways into an intelligent and powerful Christ-likeness that con inform their entire existence and not just produce special religious “mountain-top” moments. Unless the interest in spirituality finds a foundation in the nature of human personality and in God’s redemptive interactions therewith, it will be at most a passing fad. The human soul is the fundamental but not the only component of the human person and life. The Soul (the spiritual, rational and immortal substance in mankind; that part of humans which enables them to think and reason) is an individual entity that has properties and dispositions natural to it. The soul is not a physical entity, yet persons do not exist without a soul. The soul integrates all of the components of his or her life into their life, one life.

Empiricism (aka positivism) arbitrarily specifies the senses or feelings as boundary markers for knowledge and reality. But it cannot guide us in the interpretation of knowledge and reality. The primary function was to replace religious orthodoxy with a secular, epistemological orthodoxy which creates the intellectual and moral chaos that rules society today. Biblical revelation is the true source of knowledge. When it is properly used, the Bible is a source of knowledge about the most important things in human life: the nature of the human being and its relationship to their Creator God.