📚 CLIMBING THE STAIRCASE
Adding to Your Faith, One Step at a Time
Booklet 6 of 6 • The Top of the Stairs
By CHUCK TRUSTY
Pastor | Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church
Keeping the porch light on, and what Peter promises to the man who climbs.
About This Series
Peter’s eight virtues are not a menu to pick from. They are a staircase, and every step holds the weight of the one above it. This is a study of 2 Peter 1:5–8, with Psalm 107 in the middle of it, asking what happens to a believer who stops climbing — and what happens when he cries out.
The series runs to six short booklets, released one at a time. Each one
stands on its own, but they are meant to be read in order — the whole
point of the book is that order matters. The full list is
here.
One thing said plainly at the start: none of this is about how to be
saved, or how to stay saved. A child of God cannot be lost. This is about how
near to God a saved man walks while he is here.
PART THREE
The Top of the Stairs
CHAPTER 19
Keep the Porch Light On
And to godliness brotherly kindness. — 2 Peter 1:7 Let brotherly love continue. — Hebrews 13:1
There are several words for love in the New Testament, and if we run them all together we will miss what Peter is doing here.
The word on this step is philadelphía — fil-ah-del-FEE-ah. It is two words stuck together: phileō, which is warm affection, the tender kind; and adelphos, which is a brother. Love of the brethren. The affectionate bond of people who share a family.
That is not the same as the word at the top of the staircase. Charity — agapē — is the divine, unconditional, self-giving love of God, and we will get there in the next chapter. But Peter puts brotherly kindness on the step just underneath it, and that is not an accident.
Let me give you the difference in two sentences.
Agapē says, "I will give my life for a stranger."
Philadelphía says, "I am glad you are my brother."
Both are real. Both are commanded. And you need both, because a church that talks about loving the world while the people inside the building barely know each other's names has a bumper sticker and not much else.
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Here is the plainest picture of it I know.
Watch what happens when somebody you barely know greets you at the door. You shake his hand. You smile. You say something pleasant about the weather. That is fine — that is appropriate, and there is nothing wrong with it.
Now watch what happens when your brother comes through the door after a long time away.
You do not shake his hand. You take hold of him. You hold on a second longer than you need to. You ask about the drive, and about the kids, and then you ask how he is really doing, and you wait for the answer.
That warmth — that glad-you-are-here family feeling — is philadelphía. And that is what a church is supposed to feel like to a person walking in the door. Not a handshake. A family reunion.
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Now the Bible does not leave this to our imagination. It gives us commands.
Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another (Romans 12:10). That phrase "kindly affectioned" comes from a word that described the natural, instinctive love of parents for children — the warmest thing in ordinary human experience. Paul says bring that into the church.
And "in honour preferring one another" means push the other fellow toward the front. Take the lesser seat. Let your brother have the credit. Out in the world everybody is climbing over each other to get to the top. In the family of God, everybody is supposed to be holding the ladder for somebody else.
Then there is a command so short you could miss it: Let brotherly love continue (Hebrews 13:1).
Continue. Not start. Continue. And that one word tells us everything, because it means this kind of love does not keep itself alive.
An oil lamp in the ancient world did not burn all night on its own. It needed oil, added on purpose, before the light went out — and you may remember there were some bridesmaids who assumed theirs was still full and found out at the worst possible hour that it was not.
Brotherly love is the same. A church that was warm and close five years ago is not automatically warm and close today. The lamp needs oil. It needs the phone call you make, the encouragement you offer, the forgiveness you extend, the grace you choose instead of the grievance.
It will not continue by itself.
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Let me show you what this looks like in the actual life of a church, because it is not complicated and it is not theoretical.
It shows up in the hospital waiting room.
When a member of this church gets the hard news — the diagnosis, the wreck, the surgery — who shows up? Not to preach at them. Not to fix it. Just to be there and to sit in that uncomfortable chair and say nothing much at all except, I am here.
The love of a brother does not need a speech prepared. It needs a presence. And a church with brotherly kindness in it shows up before it is convenient, before it is announced, and before anybody organizes it.
I think of it like a porch light. When somebody in the family is traveling and coming in late, you do not turn the light off at bedtime and figure they will manage. You leave it on, because they belong here and you want them to know the door is open and somebody is up. That is what brotherly kindness says to a wandering brother: the light is on. We are watching for you.
It shows up in how we talk about each other when the other man is not in the room.
Nothing tells you the temperature of a church faster than that. A brother speaks well of his brother when the brother cannot defend himself. A brother does not sit in on a conversation that is tearing down a fellow member. A brother says, "I would rather not talk about him that way" — and means it.
That is not being naive about problems. It is being protective. That is what families do.
It shows up in what we do when somebody else gets blessed.
Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep (Romans 12:15). Paul put both halves in one verse on purpose, because both are hard, and they are hard in different ways.
Most of us can weep with somebody. We know how to show up in pain. But rejoicing with somebody — really rejoicing, with nothing held back — when your brother gets the promotion you wanted, or the healing you have been praying for yourself?
In a healthy family, the boy who did not make the team cheers loudest for the brother who did. Not because he is not disappointed. Because his love for his brother is bigger than his disappointment for himself.
It shows up in noticing before anybody asks.
Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2).
Imagine the person sitting in the pew next to you is holding a heavy rope, and it is slipping through their hands. Their fingers are cramping. They cannot hold on much longer and they are too tired to say so — and you would never know it to look at them, because folks learn to hold a slipping rope with a straight face.
If you love that person, you do not sit there admiring how well they are holding on. You reach over and take hold of the rope with them. You take the weight off their burning hands until they can grip it again themselves.
But here is the part I want you to see. That only works if you are close enough to reach. If you keep your distance, if you sit in the back with your arms folded and your heart at arm's length, the rope slips right through your neighbor's hands and you are too far away to do a thing about it.
Love requires presence. You cannot help hold a rope you are not near enough to touch.
And it shows up in the hardest place of all — in being willing to tell each other the truth.
Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful (Proverbs 27:6).
A brother who loves you will tell you the truth. Not cruelly, not publicly, not with an audience — but privately, gently, and honestly, when you are headed the wrong direction. And he will do it because he loves you, not because he wants to be right.
And on the receiving end, brotherly kindness means hearing that as the gift it is. Not rejection. The most expensive thing a friend can hand you.
A church that has real warmth in it can have the hard conversations, because the love underneath is strong enough to hold the weight. The correction does not break the relationship. The relationship is what gives the correction its authority.
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Now I want to show you this in a man, because the Bible gives us one.
Everybody points to the good Samaritan when we talk about love, and rightly so — but the Samaritan is a picture of charity, of love for a stranger. That is the next chapter. For brotherly kindness you have to look at Jonathan and David.
The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David. Knit — woven together, bound, inseparable. And Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as his own soul, and then he gave him his robe, his sword, his bow, and his girdle. Every one of those things was a symbol — of identity, of authority, of inheritance. He was saying: what is mine is yours. Your future is my future. Your enemies are mine.
Then look at the cost. Jonathan risked his position, his inheritance, his relationship with his own father the king, and eventually his safety. He warned David. He defended David. He confronted Saul. He stood between David and danger.
And notice what Jonathan did not do when David was at his lowest. He did not flatter him. He did not comfort him with empty words. The Bible says Jonathan strengthened his hand in God (1 Samuel 23:16). He pointed his brother back to the promises.
And it outlived him. Years after Jonathan was dead, David went looking and said, is there any left of the house of Saul, that I may shew him kindness for Jonathan's sake? He found Mephibosheth, Jonathan's crippled son, restored his inheritance, and set him at the king's table like a son.
Brotherly kindness is loyalty that outlives circumstances.
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Let me close by saying why Peter puts this step where he puts it, because somebody will wonder why the order matters here.
Charity is the love that goes out into the world. It crosses every boundary — it reaches the enemy, the stranger, the man who has nothing to give back.
But a church that tries to practice charity without ever learning brotherly kindness ends up kind to strangers and cold to family. It preaches about loving the world from a building where the members do not know one another.
Peter knew what he was doing. You learn family love first. You practice warmth and tenderness and honest affection inside the household of faith — and then, rooted in years of bearing each other's burdens and rejoicing with each other and speaking well of each other, you have something real to give away.
Every river has a spring somewhere back up in the hills. It starts small and quiet, and then it gathers, and by the time it gets down to the flat country it is carrying water to places that spring will never see.
Brotherly kindness is the spring. Charity is the river. You do not get one without the other.
So let brotherly love continue. It is already here — that is what the word "continue" assumes. The only question is whether we are adding the oil, or assuming the lamp will take care of itself.
Keep the porch light on. Somebody is on their way home.
CHAPTER 20
The Campfire and the Sun
And to brotherly kindness charity. — 2 Peter 1:7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God. — 1 John 4:7
We have arrived at the top step, and I want us to take a breath before we set foot on it, because it deserves one.
Faith. Virtue. Knowledge. Temperance. Patience. Godliness. Brotherly kindness.
And now: charity.
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First, a word about the word, because a lot of folks stumble over it. The King James men translated the Greek agapē as "charity" here and in First Corinthians thirteen, and I have come to believe they were reaching for something our English word "love" cannot hold.
In English we use "love" for everything. A man loves his truck. He loves a plate of catfish. He loves his wife. He loves the Lord. One word for all of it, and it gets worn thin.
But charity, in the older sense, described an outpouring entirely for the benefit of somebody else. No self-interest in it. Given freely, expecting nothing back.
That is exactly what agapē is.
Now let me tell you what it is not. Agapē is not affection. It is not emotion. It is not sentiment or attraction or friendliness or niceness. It is a deliberate choice to sacrifice for the good of another, expecting nothing in return.
Agapē is not a feeling. Agapē is a decision.
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Here is the thing that finally made this step clear to me, and I want to take some time with it.
Nearly every kind of love we know is a response.
There is a love that responds to attraction — something in the other person pulls it out of us. There is a love that responds to friendship, built up over shared years. There is a love that responds to family, because that is our blood. And there is a love that responds to a man being our brother in Christ, which is the whole last chapter.
Every one of those is real. But every one of them is reactive. Something in the other person draws the love out.
Agapē moves first.
It does not wait for the other person to be lovable, or likable, or deserving. It originates inside the one who loves, not in the qualities of the one being loved.
But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).
Read that and let it land. God did not wait until we cleaned ourselves up. He did not wait for us to be worth it. He moved toward us while we were still His enemies.
That is what proactive love means. And that is why agapē is never convenient — it is costly. And never natural — it is supernatural.
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Let me set two pictures side by side, because it will show you the difference between this step and the one below it.
Brotherly kindness is a campfire.
It is warm. It is close. It is shared. You can see the faces of the people around it, and everybody there knows everybody. But you have to be near it to feel it. That is not a criticism — that warmth is real and good and a church cannot live without it.
Charity is the sun.
The sun does not choose whose field to shine on. He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5:45). It shines on the ground of a man who despises the farmer. It shines on strangers. It shines on enemies. And it shines not because of anything in the one it shines on, but because of what the sun is.
That is charity. It loves, not because the object deserves it, but because the love of God has been poured into a man and cannot help but pour back out.
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Which brings me to the question everybody asks at this point, and it is the right question:
How on earth are we supposed to do this?
Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Do good to them that hate you. Pray for them which despitefully use you. Forgive the unforgivable. Serve the ungrateful. Give to people who cannot pay you back.
If you have ever tried to work that up out of your own heart, you already know how it goes.
So here is the first thing we have to understand, and getting it wrong has ruined more sincere Christians than I can count. Charity is not something we produce and then distribute. It does not originate in us. It never has, in any man who ever lived.
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love (1 John 4:7-8).
And then John gives us the order of things in five words: We love him, because he first loved us (1 John 4:19).
Notice the sequence. We do not generate love and then aim it at God and at other people. What happens first is that we receive — God aims His love at us — and then that love flows through us and out.
The source is always God. We are the hose. We are not the well.
Paul says the same thing with a stronger word: the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us (Romans 5:5). The word behind "shed abroad" means poured out — flooded. Agapē in a believer's heart is not something he worked up. It was poured in.
Think of a light bulb. A bulb genuinely produces light. That is real light, and it will read a page for you. But it produces light only because it is connected to something. Cut the wire and it produces nothing at all — and it does not matter one bit how sincerely it wants to shine.
The believer genuinely loves with agapē. It is real love, truly expressed through him. But it is only possible because he is connected to the One who is love. The moment a man tries to produce this on his own — by willpower, by moral effort, by religious discipline, by sheer sense of duty — he is attempting the impossible, and he will end up doing one of two things. He will fake it, or he will give up.
This is why First Corinthians thirteen is so devastating to religious people. Paul does not say try harder to love. He does not say do more good works and love will follow. He says a man can prophesy, and know all mysteries, and have faith to move mountains, and give away everything he owns, and hand his own body over to be burned — and without charity, it profits him nothing. Nothing. All of it.
That is not a knock on good works. It is a warning that the engine has to be running or the wheels do not matter.
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So is charity actually possible for us?
Yes. But only because we got it from somewhere else.
Agapē is not the goal of human striving. It is the fruit of divine indwelling. Galatians five settles it — love is the first fruit of the Spirit. And fruit is not manufactured; fruit is grown, by a branch that stays connected to the Vine.
And this is exactly why Peter grounds the whole staircase back in the third and fourth verses, before he ever tells us to add anything. His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, and by His promises ye might be partakers of the divine nature.
Everything we have been climbing toward was already given.
That changes how you look at the whole staircase. All those steps below — faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness — they do not manufacture charity. They dig a well.
A well is no good until somebody digs it. But no amount of digging ever made one drop of water. The water was already down there, flowing, waiting. Digging only takes out everything that stood between the surface and the water.
That is what the climb is. Every step removes something that was in the way — the laziness, the ignorance, the appetite, the impatience, the divided heart, the self. And when a man has climbed all the way, what he finds at the top is not something he produced. He finds that he has finally dug down to the living water that was there the whole time.
You cannot dig your way to charity. But you can dig until you reach it.
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One more thing before I close this chapter, and it is the reason charity has to be the top step and not one of the middle ones.
Paul calls it the bond of perfectness (Colossians 3:14). The word behind "bond" means the ligament — the thing that ties everything else together and holds it in place.
Think of a stone arch. Old bridges were built without any mortar in the arch at all. The stones were cut so precisely that they pressed against each other and held each other up. But the whole thing depended on one stone at the very top. Take out any other stone and you weaken the bridge. Take out that one and the entire thing comes down in the creek.
Charity is that stone. And look at what happens to every other step without it:
Faith without charity turns into performance. Virtue without charity turns into pride. Knowledge without charity turns into arrogance. Temperance without charity turns into cold legalism. Patience without charity turns into stubbornness. Godliness without charity turns into a rulebook. And brotherly kindness without charity turns into a club.
But set that top stone in place, and every stone underneath it finds out what it was cut for.
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Let me leave you with one last thought, and it is the sweetest thing about this step.
Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for them which persecute you — and then He told us why. That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.
Not in order to become His children. Because we already are.
When a boy inherits his father's eyes, he did not earn them and he did not practice for them. They came with the birth, because the father's nature went into the child.
When a man is born of God, the Father's nature goes into him. And agapē is part of that nature. It does not come naturally to the flesh — it never will, not in this life. But it comes supernaturally to a new creature.
So every time you show real love to somebody who has not got a thing to offer you — the difficult neighbor, the hard family member, the church member who hurt you and never apologized — you are showing the family resemblance.
You look like your Father.
And there is not a higher thing that can be said about a man on this side of glory.
CHAPTER 21
The Portrait Paul Painted
Charity suffereth long, and is kind. — 1 Corinthians 13:4
In the last chapter we looked at what charity is — where it comes from, why it sits at the top of the staircase, why no man can manufacture it. Now I want to look at what charity does.
And for that we have to go to First Corinthians thirteen.
Understand who Paul was writing to. The church at Corinth was full of gifted people who were also full of problems. They had spiritual gifts in abundance. They had knowledge. They had enthusiasm running out their ears. And they were divided, proud, competitive, and unkind to one another in ways you and I would recognize immediately if we walked in on it.
Paul does not answer them with a poem to hang on the wall. He hands them a mirror.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).
Fifteen descriptions in four verses. Paul does not define love in the abstract; he describes it in the particular — in the moment of irritation, in the moment of disappointment, in the moment when we have been wronged and everybody would understand if we returned fire. That is where love becomes real or stays a doctrine.
Let us walk through it. And I would ask you to do one thing as we go: think of a specific person. This chapter only works if it is personal.
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First, look at what charity does when somebody gets under its skin.
Charity suffereth long. The word means long-tempered — the opposite of short-fused. This is love that does not snap. It does not explode. It does not say, "Well, that is the last time."
There are meals that cannot be hurried. You put a tough cut of meat on in the morning and you let it go all day, and by suppertime it is something entirely different than it was at nine o'clock. Patience is the heat that does the work. You cannot shortcut it by turning the burner up — you will just burn it and still have something nobody can chew. Charity is slow-cooked. It endures the long, unhurried work of loving a difficult person, and things change over that low heat that could never have been forced.
And is kind. Kindness is the active side of it. Longsuffering is what you do not do — you do not snap. Kindness is what you do instead. You lean in. You find the good word when the sharp one was already loaded and ready.
A man coming in out of the field in the middle of July does not need a lecture. He needs a cold glass of water and somebody to say, "Here — sit down — I'm glad you're here." Kindness meets the moment with what the moment actually needs.
Is not easily provoked. Notice Paul does not say never provoked. He says not easily. Charity does not have a hair trigger. It gives the benefit of the doubt. It assumes the best before it assumes the worst.
A brand new skillet burns everything and sticks to everything. But a cast iron skillet that has been in the fire for thirty years does not react to much of anything anymore. It has been through enough heat that nothing sticks to it the way it used to. A believer who has walked with God a while stops taking offense so quickly, because he has been through enough of life to know that most of what stings us at two o'clock does not matter by supper.
Thinketh no evil. This one is about the inside of a man's mind, where nobody can see. Charity does not keep a running account. It does not replay the offense at night. It does not assume bad motives. When a wrong has been forgiven, charity does not file it away where it can be found later.
There are two ways to run a tab at a store. One way is to write down every debt and never erase a single one, until the page fills up and the customer is nothing but a column of numbers. The other way is to settle the account and start a clean page. Charity keeps a cleared ledger. It does not reopen a closed account.
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Second, look at what charity does with self.
Charity envieth not. Envy is about the quietest sin there is in a church, because it lives entirely inside a man and almost never announces itself.
Nothing will make a man more miserable than watching his neighbor's field come up green while his own is still bare dirt. And nothing tells the truth about a man's heart faster than whether he can look at that field and be genuinely glad. Charity can. Charity looks at the blessing on somebody else and says, "Lord, that's wonderful" — with no footnote, no but, and no quiet resentment dressed up as joy.
Vaunteth not itself. Charity does not brag. It does not work its own accomplishments into every conversation. It does not need to be seen.
Some of the most important work on a place is done before anybody else is up — the feeding, the checking, the fixing, in the cold and the dark, while the rest of the house is asleep. Nobody saw it. Nobody clapped. But the place runs because of it. Charity does the unseen labor and does not need the applause.
Is not puffed up. That is a different thing. Bragging is about what a man says; being puffed up is about what he thinks. Charity does not carry around a private sense of being more spiritual than the people it is sitting with.
And I will tell you what a puffed-up thing is good for. A tire with too much air in it looks fine — full, round, impressive. It is also the least useful tire on the truck, because all it can carry is air. The tire that actually bears the load is the one that is properly filled, not the one that is about to blow out on the highway. Charity carries weight. It does not strut.
Doth not behave itself unseemly. Charity is not rude. It does not embarrass people. It does not say the thoughtless thing and then laugh about how it is just being honest.
There is a way a man eats at his own table by himself, and there is a way he eats when he is a guest in somebody else's home. Charity treats every person as though it is a guest in their dignity — as though a man's sense of worth belongs to him, and we would not dream of tracking mud across it.
Seeketh not her own. This may be the most radical thing in the whole list. Charity is not calculating what it will get out of this relationship, this church, this situation.
You want to know if a family loves each other? Watch what happens with the last biscuit. In some houses there is a quiet race. In others — the ones where love runs deep — there is a pause. Everybody looking around to see who ought to have it. That pause, that instinct to defer, is charity sitting at a supper table.
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Third, look at what charity does with the truth.
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth.
Charity takes no pleasure in anybody's failure — not even the failure of a man who wronged us. It does not say, quietly, I knew it. It does not enjoy being right about somebody's downfall. When a person who hurt us stumbles, charity does not celebrate. It grieves, and then it moves toward putting him back on his feet.
You know the sort of person who loves to be the one who brings the bad news. They arrive a little too fast and they stay a little too long, and underneath all that concern something in them is satisfied. Charity does not have that in it. Charity is the one who wishes it had not happened, who brings the news only because somebody has to, and who stays to help instead of staying to watch.
And the other side of that coin: charity is genuinely glad about what is true. It loves honesty. It loves it when things are what they appear to be. When somebody does the right thing quietly, with no reward in it, charity notices and is glad. Truth is not a burden to charity. It is the air it breathes.
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Fourth, look at what charity does over the long haul.
Beareth all things. The word means to cover, the way a roof covers a house. Charity covers. It does not expose. When a brother stumbles, charity does not broadcast it — not by pretending it never happened, but by protecting the man's dignity while he is being helped back up.
Nobody thinks about a roof until the storm comes. And then the rain is driving sideways and the wind is up and the family inside is dry and warm, not because anything dramatic is happening, but because somebody built a good covering years ago. Charity is that roof. It takes the weather so that the people underneath stay dry.
Believeth all things. That does not mean charity is gullible. It means charity keeps extending the benefit of the doubt. It chooses to believe the best about a person until it cannot anymore — and then it still hopes.
A farmer who has been through hard winters does not panic when February looks dead. He knows what is coming, because it always comes. He has faith in the pattern. Charity has that same faith about people. It believes in what a man can become even when what he is right now is discouraging. It can see spring in the middle of February.
Hopeth all things. Charity never gives up on anybody. It keeps praying. It keeps the door open. And the reason it can do that is that its hope was never in the person to begin with — it is in the God who can reach anybody at any moment.
Endureth all things. And finally, charity outlasts. It does not quit when love gets expensive. It outlasts disappointment, and misunderstanding, and long seasons of coldness.
There are fence posts standing in Arkansas fields right now that were set sixty years ago. They have been through drought and flood, ice storms and August heat, and the ground has shifted under them more times than anybody counted. They are still standing — not because nothing ever pushed on them, but because somebody set them deep.
Charity is set deep. It endures, not because nothing has tried to pull it up, but because the roots go further down than the storms go up.
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And then Paul lays down the last thing, and it is only two words long in the English.
Charity never faileth.
Not rarely fails. Not usually holds up. Never.
He is about to say that prophecy will cease and tongues will stop and knowledge will vanish away. All of it goes. Everything else we have set our hearts on in this world will fail us eventually — money fails, health fails, friends move off, and one day this old body will quit on me altogether.
But charity never faileth. It is the one thing we will still be doing ten thousand years from now.
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Now let me tell you how to read this chapter and how not to read it.
Paul did not paint this portrait so we could hang it on the wall and admire it. He painted it as a mirror. And when a man looks honestly into it, he is going to find himself in some of those fifteen descriptions plain as day — and completely missing from others.
That is not a reason to be discouraged. That is a reason to climb.
Because everything in this portrait is what the top of the staircase produces. It is not a list of things to go out and try harder at. It is a description of what a life looks like when the love of God has actually been poured into it and is running back out.
So let me leave you with the question I have to ask myself. Not which of these is hardest in general — which one is hardest for you, in the relationships you are actually in this week?
And here is a harder one. If somebody who knows you well — not your best friend, but somebody who sees you on your bad days — read through that list and put your name in place of the word charity, which lines would fit and which ones would not?
Whatever that tells you, do not throw the book across the room. Take it to God and ask Him to pour in what is missing.
He has never once refused that prayer.
CHAPTER 22
Neither Barren Nor Unfruitful
For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. — 2 Peter 1:8
We have come a long way together, and before we finish I want to do something we almost never do. I want to stop and look back.
Not because we are going back. But because a man who does not know how far he has come cannot rightly appreciate where he is standing.
We started at the bottom step with faith — the foundation, the ground the whole staircase is bolted to. We added virtue, the decision to actually live the life. Knowledge, learning God's definition of right and wrong and gaining the eyesight to tell two things apart that look alike. Temperance, the self-control to throw the bag away instead of folding the top over. We stopped and dealt with the fractions of a divided heart, because a man cannot climb with two calendars. Then patience, the long road of doing it again tomorrow. Then godliness — stretching our steps toward our Father's footprints, and directing our worship the way He designed it.
And then we went down into the hundred and seventh Psalm and walked with everybody in it. The wanderers, who never rebelled a day in their lives and lost the landmarks anyway. The worn out, running on fumes and calling it faithfulness. The prisoners, who shrugged at one warning too many and woke up in the dark. The drifting heart, buying a bigger fuse instead of fixing the wiring. The fools, at the gates of death with a wound they gave themselves. The unsteady, wobbling before the wind ever rose. And the storm-tossed, faithful people who simply got hit with more than they could hold. Every one of them turned at the same place, on the same four words, and every one of them got the same answer. And then we watched God do more than rescue them — we watched Him turn the wilderness into springs.
Then brotherly kindness, the warm family love inside the household of faith. And at the top, charity — the love of God poured into a man and running back out of him onto people who never earned it.
Eight steps. And now Peter tells us what happens to a man who climbs them.
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First, the promise.
For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Peter 1:8).
Notice there are two conditions in that verse, not one. These things must be in you — really present, not admired from a distance. And they must abound — overflow, increase, multiply. Peter is not describing a man who barely checks the boxes. He is describing a life that has more of this than it knows what to do with.
And notice the result comes to us as two negatives, which somehow makes it land harder.
Barren is a field with nothing growing in it at all. Not a dead field, mind you — it still has soil, it still gets rain, the sun still comes up over it every morning. But nothing is coming out of it, because nobody worked it and nobody planted it.
Unfruitful is different, and I think it is the sadder of the two. Unfruitful is a field with plenty of activity and no harvest. It gets plowed. It gets watered. The rows are straight and the work is real and the man out there is genuinely tired at the end of the day — but the seed never went in the ground, and when the season is over there is nothing to show for any of it.
I have known believers in both fields, and I have spent time in both myself.
Peter says the complete staircase produces a third kind of field. Worked, planted, tended — and when the harvest comes it is real grain, and you can put your hands in it.
And understand what that fruit actually is. It is not a feeling. It is not a spiritual experience you get on a Sunday and lose by Wednesday. It is what your life produces in other people. The neighbor who came to Christ because of something he saw in you. The family that got put back together because somebody loved them through it. The church member who is still in the faith today because when he was at his most unlovable, one person kept loving him anyway.
That is the promise waiting at the top of the stairs. A life that cannot be empty. A life that cannot fail to produce.
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Second, the warning.
Every promise in Scripture has a warning standing beside it, and Peter gives us both.
But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins (2 Peter 1:9).
Three things happen to a man who quits climbing.
He goes blind — not in his eyes, in his soul. He cannot see God clearly and he cannot see himself accurately. And the worst part of that kind of blindness is that it does not announce itself. He thinks he is fine. A blind man in a familiar room can go a long time without bumping into anything — right up until somebody moves the furniture.
He cannot see afar off. The Greek word there is myōpazō, and it is where we get our word myopic. Nearsighted. He can still see what is directly in front of him — the immediate, the comfortable, the familiar — but he has lost the long view. He no longer weighs today's decision against eternity. Everything in his life has gotten close and small.
And he hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. That is the most sobering line in the passage. He has forgotten what he was before grace found him. He has forgotten the pit he was dragged out of.
There is a kind of pride that grows in a man who has been comfortable long enough that he cannot remember when he was not. He forgets the early years — the empty checking account, the borrowed truck, the neighbor who carried him through a bad season. And because he has forgotten where he started, he has no mercy for anybody who is still there.
That is what happens when a believer forgets the purging. He loses the gratitude. And when the gratitude goes, the hunger goes with it, and a man with no hunger will not climb one more step as long as he lives.
Look back at the wanderers of Psalm 107 and you will see it in every one of them. They had all, in some measure, forgotten what they had been saved out of. Every one of them had lost the long view. And every one of them needed a watchman to holler: look up, look far, look back — and then come back to the stairs.
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Third, the call.
Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall: For so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (2 Peter 1:10-11).
Peter does not end with a warning. He ends with a job.
Give diligence. The word means to be earnest about it — to make it your serious business, the way a farmer is serious in planting season and a builder is serious about a foundation.
And look at what he attaches to it.
Make your calling and election sure. Not earn it. Not produce it. Make it sure — meaning visible, confirmed, evident. The staircase is the evidence. When a man's faith is producing virtue, and his virtue is producing knowledge, and his knowledge is producing self-control, and on up the stairs — the whole direction of that life says out loud: this man belongs to God.
Ye shall never fall. Not rarely fall. Not fall a little less often than he used to. Never. Because a man who is climbing is not falling. The climb itself is the protection. Stop climbing and the drift starts; keep climbing and the drift never gets a hold of you.
An entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly. When this life is over, the believer who climbed does not slip in through the back door with nothing in his hands. He enters abundantly. Richly. Not merely saved — and never merely saved was the point — but entering into the fullness of everything God ever intended for him.
A river starts as a trickle. A spring up in the hills, a little stream working its way through the rocks, and if you saw it there you would not think much of it. But it gathers as it goes. Every creek that joins it adds something. Every mile makes it wider and deeper and stronger, until by the time it reaches the sea it is nothing like the shy little thing that started in the hills — and it is carrying with it the deposit of every mile it traveled.
That is the life Peter is describing. Begin with faith. Add virtue. Add knowledge. Add temperance. Add patience. Add godliness. Add brotherly kindness. Add charity. And by the time that life reaches the sea of eternity, it is carrying everything God ever meant it to carry.
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Let me say one last thing, and then I will let you go.
Peter did not write this for perfect people.
He wrote it for people like the ones in Psalm 107. People who had wandered off and could not tell you when it started. People who had fainted under a weight they never saw coming. People who had been in a bondage of their own making. People who had been fools. People who had been storm-tossed and were at their wits' end and had nothing left to say to God but help.
He wrote it for the man who cried out from the bottom and then asked the only question that mattered next: what now?
And the answer is not complicated.
Climb.
It is not fast. It is not easy. It will take the rest of your life, and there will be seasons when you are not sure you have moved at all. But it is sure. And every step upward is a step away from the drift, a step toward being useful, a step toward an entrance that will be ministered to you abundantly.
The staircase is not something I built for you in this little book. It was here long before either of us. All I have done is walk up and down it a few times and try to describe what I saw.
His divine power has already given us all things that pertain unto life and godliness. The promises are already ours. The Spirit already lives in us. The water is already down there under the ground.
So dig. And climb.
Faith. Virtue. Knowledge. Temperance. Patience. Godliness. Brotherly kindness. Charity.
These things in you, and abounding — and you will never be barren, and you will never be unfruitful, and you will never fall.
The staircase is complete. Now let us climb it.
❦ T H E E N D ❦
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— Pastor Chuck Trusty, Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church • yes.areyousaved.net
