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“5 For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge, 6 knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness, 7 godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. 8 For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being useless or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 The person who lacks these things is blind and shortsighted and has forgotten the cleansing from his past sins” (2 Peter 1:5-9)
One note about this list of virtues is that God is worthy of not just cultivating one virtue, but many virtues. We want to have a “complete piety” for God (Barnes). Since God is worthy of our lives, we should want to maximize the virtues and multiply the virtues in our life. We should not be satisfied with being a Christian with “great self-control,” yet we are lacking in kindness or lacking in love. We want to be a fully orbed and well-rounded Christian. We want to be a “three-dimensional” Christian, not just a “one-dimensional” one. We want to “tack on” as many virtues as we can for the glory of God. We want to look like God in his holiness as much as is humanly possible.
Other church traditions have called those who have lived exemplary Christian lives by the label of “saints.” Protestants (of which I am one) would firmly disagree with this “first tier…second tier” status of Christians since in the Bible “saints” refers to all believers. However, we can take at least half a page out of our friends’ books and say this at least to help us think about striving for holiness: If there were a way to be “sainted” in the Protestant church; if there were a way to obtain “sainthood” in the Protestant church, then let me strive for that goal! If there were a way to “stand out as more holy than others for the glory of God (and not for our own glory),” then let it be! Let that “wall of saints” be my goal, not because others have recognized it, but because God has recognized it as so! Paul said we should “run as to win the race!” One writer said that we can summarize these virtues in this way: cultivation, progress, and accumulation (Barnes). You can cultivate these virtues just as you can cultivate anything in your physical garden. You can progress in virtues, just like you can grow in progress in other areas of life. You can accumulate these virtues, just like you can accumulate anything else in this life. You can add and supplement them to your faith.
It must always be noted that whenever you see a list of virtues, you are not earning your salvation by adding as many virtues as possible. We are saved not by what we do, but by what Christ has done. Our trust in Christ alone saves us, not our number of virtues. The reason we “add” to our virtues (as Peter says) is because we are already saved by God’s grace. We want to grow closer to God because we love Him and want to know this God Who has reached out to us, undeservedly so. God has been good to us and has loved us, therefore we want to love and honor Him with lives worthy of His name.