Virtue-Based Christianity

Brothers and sisters, if you feel stale in your spiritual walk—unfruitful, unmotivated, or lacking passion, love, compassion, or empathy—then you need to make every effort to add virtue to your life. Too many Christians who are in a spiritual slump fear God’s disappointment and ensuing punishment. Fixation on these outcomes leads to spiritual insecurity, feeling like a failure, and doubting God’s promises in one’s life, including the promise of salvation. While it is helpful from time to time to receive a proverbial kick in the rear, most Christians need to begin—or restart—their transition from milk to solid food in the manner that Peter describes. Let’s commit together to the passionate pursuit of goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, and godliness so that we can excel in mutual affection and love in a manner that reflects God in the way He desires to be revealed to a lost world. This is part of the mystery that the prophets could not see because they could neither see nor comprehend God in the flesh. Let us ensure that we who are privileged to see God in the flesh will make every effort to become godly (Godlike) and accurately wear the name we have been given, Christian

For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (Colossians 2:9–15)

What magnificent imagery! All the fullness of God lives within the bodily form of Jesus. But it doesn’t stop there. You are being brought to fullness in Christ. How? First by a circumcision done by Christ through baptism but then by the indescribable privilege of imitating God in bodily form by wrapping yourself in His virtue and allowing that to drive you to the finish line. My passion is that, by the end of this book, you will be inspired and equipped to become as God already sees you and that in doing so, you may truly enjoy His favor without inhibition in this life and the next.