2 Peter 1:10: Confirming What Was Already True

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election. For if you do these things, you will never stumble,

2 Peter 1:10 (NIV)

Confirming What Was Already True

In a hall closet, in a shoebox with the rubber band gone soft, there’s a baptism certificate from a church in Ohio, the date written out in fountain pen, 1974, and a name spelled wrong. The woman it belongs to is sixty-two and takes it out twice in a decade. The baptism has not needed the certificate once since the day it happened. She takes the paper out for herself, on the weeks when she cannot tell.

The people who got this letter already believed. Peter tells them what to add to their faith, goodness and knowledge and self-control among them, and then he draws a conclusion from it. Make every effort to confirm your calling and election.

The effort Peter asks for has one job, to confirm a calling the reader already has. The work gets put in the service of something that was already true before the work started.

You can believe for thirty years and still not be able to say for certain that it took. The usual move at that point is to go looking for a feeling. Peter points at practice instead, and self-control held for one month tells you more about where you stand than another hour of examining yourself after midnight.

Do these things and you will never stumble, the letter says next. Anyone who has tried this knows they stumble, sometimes badly, sometimes in the same place twice. The man Peter calls nearsighted and blind has forgotten that he was cleansed from his past sins, and that forgetting is slower than a stumble.

If the examining starts up again tonight, stopping it and going to bed is self-control, and self-control is one of the things Peter told them to add.