Saturday-Preventive Medicine

For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.

2 Peter 1:8,9

There are all sorts of things we can do as preventative medicine. I’ve lost count of all the ways that we can make our health better. If something’s missing, then we need to add it. It could be through a supplement or vitamin. If we need Vitamin D, we could start spending more time in the sun. Or we could start eating something new, like oranges for Vitamin C.

Sometimes we can improve our health by cutting back or cutting something out. If our cholesterol is high, we’ll need to stop eating foods with bad fats. To lose weight, we should make our portions smaller. we something to give you added strength or nutrition.

And then there’s those times when we need to add something to get rid of something. For example, I was told by my doctor to start adding Red Yeast Rice to my daily diet to reduce my cholesterol. And it worked!

While this is true when it comes to our physical health, it’s also true of our spiritual well-being. After listing eight qualities in the prior verse, Peter’s telling his readers that they need to do better than just having some of them.

Following Jesus isn’t coming to a spiritual buffet where we get to decide what and how much we get. We also can’t just take little bit of everything either. Oh no. We don’t get to make those kinds of decisions. We can’t take lots of fried chicken and just three green peas.

We don’t get to decide which ones to work on. When it comes to these eight qualities, we’re to be increasing all of them. None of them is more important than the other. We can’t play favorites with the ones that are easy for us either. Just because we like knowledge, we can’t spend all out time and energy on it at the expense of any of the others.

When it comes to increasing measure, this isn’t just adding a little pinch here and a dash there. God’s goal for you and me is that there will be plenty of all eight in our lives. They should be like an eight-cylinder engine that gives power and movement to our lives.

But it’s more than that. What happens when one cylinder isn’t working to its full potential? The entire engine suffers. It makes this unmistakable sputtering sound[1] as it rocks back and forth. When you press on the accelerator, the car slowly moves forward as the engine struggles to go faster.

Imagine the difference between carrying water one bucket at a time and turning on a faucet. Yes, buckets will get the job done, but at what cost? Lots of time and energy to move just a little bit of water. But opening a faucet brings a flood of water and there doesn’t seem to be any end to it.

This is what increasing measure looks like. It’s above and beyond just about anything and everything. The difference is more than huge. Increasing measure brings so much that it overflows our life so that the people near us can’t ignore it. An increasing measure also refreshes our life and that of our friends, family, and total strangers.

But we can’t just have some them in our spiritual bank account. It’s more than just holding onto them. What happens when all eight of them aren’t growing? Aren’t increasing? Becoming more and more important and influential in our lives? Peter’s answer isn’t at all encouraging.

• Ineffective. Without growth, we become Inactive. Our lives turn idle. We stop working.

• Unproductive. Anything that was being done changes into ineffective and unfruitful effort. Not worth anything.

When we’re ineffective and unproductive, we’re never going to move forward. We’ll never reach our goal. Our destination will forever be somewhere over the rainbow. We can wish for it all we want, but it will never come about.

If this wasn’t bad enough, it’s worse. Much worse. We’re nearsighted and blind. We can’t see past our nose because our head is looking down at the ground under our feet. into eternity

Someone who’s nearsighted and blind has a lot of problems trying to live a normal life in this world. They might have a little bit of sight, but there are so many problems seeing that it makes even the most basic and simple tasks in life tough at best. Impossible at worst.

I’m sure that this sounds impossible. Increasing all eight at the same time, are you out of your mind? And you’d be right, it’s totally outside our ability and strength. But the good news is that it’s not totally dependent on us. God’s Holy Spirit inside of us give us more than we need for God’s preventative medicine to change us.

Noodling Questions

• List two preventative medicines are you taking right now.

• How do you feel about all eight increasing in your life? Describe.

• What are you doing to bring all eight to greater influence in your life?

[1] https://youtu.be/XJM25zGp-0M?si=Li8SHKOxUFuBBVuP