7 Qualities That Will Open Your Mind and Soul to God

A clear path to living each day for God with a reward and progressively maturing in Christ is laid out in 2 Peter verses 5-8 reading from "the Message" Bible:

5 So don't lose a minute in building on what you've been given, complementing your basic faith with good character, spiritual understanding, 6 alert discipline, passionate patience, reverent wonder, 7 warm friendliness, and generous love, each dimension fitting into and developing the others. 8 With these qualities active and growing in your lives, no grass will grow under your feet, no day will pass without its reward as you mature in your experience of our Master Jesus. 9 Without these qualities you can't see what's right before you, oblivious that your old sinful life has been wiped off the books.


This path ends with a sure guarantee :

"With these qualities active and growing in your lives, no grass will grow under your feet, no day will pass without its reward as you mature in your experience of our Master Jesus."

It Starts With Faith and Ends With Love
These stepping stones are book-ended by two powerful concepts. Notice "basic faith" starts the effort and love ends the effort. There are seven steps listed - seven being the perfect number of God. Some have called these the seven "fruits of faith".

Faith in God is Only the Beginning
As you can see getting "saved" is just the beginning. You received salvation as a gift and took a step of faith. This was given to you. You didn't have to strive or work for it. Salvation is a gift you can rest in. God is good and doesn't take away the gifts he gives us. However, stopping at salvation would leave you 7 steps behind where God would desire you to be.

How to Know God Better
Looking at the first step we are encouraged to:

1:5

make every effort to apply the benefits of these promises to your life. Then your faith will produce a life of moral excellence. A life of moral excellence leads to knowing God better. (NLT)

Moral excellence can be known as "goodness" (NIV), "virtue" (NKJ), and "good character" (MSG). Virtue, by definition, is "the quality of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong". Looking at the Latin root of the word we see that from "virts" we derive "manliness, excellence, goodness" and from vir, we derive "man".

I understand this as "doing the right thing". A virtuous person, when faced with a fork in the road does what people with "good character" do. We also see an element of courage represented here. We cannot have "manliness" or "virtue" without the courage to do the right thing. With our ego-centric minds isn't the easy road out usually the wrong thing to do? So their is a demand to "step up" here and embrace the challenge of "good character".

Basically, if we make right decisions and strive to have a good character the Bible promises we will "know God better" (1:5). How does this happen? It's like taking out the trash in our lives - something we do regularly at the place we live. When we first get saved we have a lot of junk and baggage and clutter hanging around in our hearts and minds. Our thought patterns at this point were based on our foundation of what we thought was the best way to live. For some, we were "good" people before we were saved, for many others we were selfish and ego-driven. Now that we are counted with God, we can actually see the trash and baggage in our lives. We were blind to it before. This demands action. What do you do to a messy room? You clean it up. Dirty clothes go to the laundry room. Clean clothes get put in their proper places. Random dishes are taken to the kitchen. The dust is swept up, things are put in order. And now the room is presentable to any friends or family that would come over. Same with God. It says that we will "know God better" (1:5) when we step out to develop "good character". God is welcome in a life of "good character". He can come in and leads us to the next level which is "spiritual understanding".