Simply Angie
I hope you’ve all had a good week. Mine flew by so quickly, but I’ve been looking forward to tackling this next layer of spiritual growth that Peter describes to us. We have already laid our foundation in Faith, added the courage of Virtue, sought the heart of God in Knowledge, applied the daily brakes of Temperance, and learned how to endure the long, bumpy roads of life through Patience. But now, Peter tells us to add something that might, at first glance, seem like it was already included in all the others.
Why do we need to explicitly add godliness if we are already walking the Christian path? Isn’t that a bit redundant? Doesn’t this quality overlap with everything that came before it? In a sense, yes; and that overlap is the point. In the original language of the New Testament, the word for godliness is eusebeia. It means a proper reverence, a holy fear, and a sacred awe that results in righteous and holy living that flows from a heart filled with deep devotion. Godliness joins the idea of reverence with the idea of right action. It is not simply a feeling of awe toward God. It is fear of God that transforms into righteous living. To put it in everyday terms, godliness is genuine God-consciousness that affects every aspect of our daily lives. I’ve mentioned before how my mom instilled in me a constant awareness of who God is, how holy He is, and how deeply He loves me. She often reminded me that as His child, I no longer had the right to choose for myself, but must allow Him to choose for me.
In this current culture (even in religious circles), there is an underlying attitude permeating hearts and minds that glorifies the notion of personal independence, autonomy, agency, rights, and liberty. While there is some measure of those freedoms in a free society, those freedoms do NOT exist within the family of God. True believers learn that they are fully bought - body, soul, and spirit - by the blood of Christ and belong wholly to Him to command as He pleases and to do as He wills. I’m not trying to say that this is an easy mindset to achieve but rather a necessary acknowledgment and a goal to aim for. Look at 1 Timothy 4:7-8:
Notice that Paul tells Timothy to exercise himself unto godliness. Godliness is something trained for, something practiced, the way an athlete trains a body. That single instruction already tells us godliness is not a passive feeling. It is a direction a life is pointed in, and it is built the way any discipline is built: by repetition, by choosing the same thing over and over until it becomes who you are. Godliness is the attitude that changes our entire trajectory. In rocket science, the “attitude” of a rocket doesn’t mean its mood; it means its orientation—the exact direction it is pointing. Godliness is the orientation of a soul that is locked onto pleasing the Savior. If we believe God is holy, if we believe He is righteous, if we believe He has redeemed us at a price and has every right to expect our devotion in return, that belief does not stay locked away as private theology. It sets a trajectory. Paul describes the logic plainly:
We rightly love the verses about grace, mercy, and forgiveness, and we should, because they are the foundation of everything. But Romans 12 begins with “therefore.” Because of all that mercy, something is now asked of us in return. Godliness is our answer to that “therefore.” Godliness is gratitude that goes beyond the emotion in our heart and extends to every decision and action. Because He redeemed us, because He bought and paid for us with the precious blood of His Son, our lives are meant to be a living sacrifice of gratitude. Daniel: Godliness Under Pressure
I was teaching the children in Bible class this week about Daniel and the lions’ den, and the story turned out to be a perfect picture of godliness in action. Once the new law was passed forbidding prayer to anyone but the king, Daniel had options. He could have prayed quietly in his bedroom instead of at his open window. No one would have known. God could certainly have heard him just as well from a closed room. He could have easily reasoned with himself: “It is better if I stay alive. I can be more useful to this new king if I just fly under the radar for thirty days. God knows my heart.” Daniel did none of that. Daniel understood something vital about godliness. His devotion to God wasn’t going to be manipulated or curtailed by the machinations of men. Scripture tells us:
Daniel didn’t open his windows to show off; he kept them open because his orientation hadn’t changed. He was more conscious of the living God than he was of the king’s lions. That is what it means to live godly. Godliness refuses to be manipulated. Reverence for God will not negotiate itself down to something safer and less visible. Paul names the cost of that kind of devotion directly:
When your mind is fixed on the Lord, He gives you the strength to do what He wants rather than what the flesh wants, or what someone else is pressuring you to do; and that choice will not always be welcomed by the people around you. The Connection Between Godliness and Holiness
Is godliness the same as holiness? Holiness is not named outright in Peter’s list of qualities in 2 Peter 1, yet it seems impossible to separate from godliness. Godliness, as I understand it, is a God consciousness based on a clear-eyed understanding of who He is, paired with the reverence that understanding produces. And once that reverence takes root, we naturally want to please Him, which means living the way He has asked us to live. Peter himself draws out this conclusion elsewhere:
Holiness and godliness are not identical twins, but they are closely related. If godliness is the reverent, God-conscious attitude of our heart, holiness is what that attitude looks like worked out in our conduct on the outside. You cannot have a genuine, growing consciousness of who God is—that He is holy, that He is righteous—without that consciousness eventually shaping the way you live. Peter brings the two together again later in 2 Peter 3:
The Christian life isn’t a fancy coat we put on for Sunday morning; it is our entire identity. When you genuinely come to faith in Christ and begin growing in Him, it changes you from the inside out. The Beautiful Paradox of Captivity and Mastery
If we are being completely honest with each other, this Christian walk is hard. It is a constant battle against our own flesh. I can certainly tell you that I struggle in my own life. Even in small, daily choices, my submission to God challenges me to bring my flesh under subjection. The Apostle Paul knew this exhausting inner tug-of-war intimately. He wrote about doing the very things he didn’t want to do, and failing to do the things he knew he should. I could go down a rabbit trail here, so to avoid that I will just say, take some time and go read Romans 6-8. If the Paul wrestled with the gap between what he wanted to do and what he actually did, the rest of us are in good company when we feel that same struggle; regardless of whether the weakness shows up in our words, our time, our habits, or something as ordinary as what we eat. Godliness does not mean the struggle disappears. It means the struggle is no longer aimless. There is a direction we are fighting toward, even on the days the fight is hard. How do we find victory in this constant struggle? Paul answers this question in Romans with this declaration:
He elsewhere calls himself “the prisoner of Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 3:1). Paul knew literal imprisonment well; beatings, chains, guards, cells. However, I don’t think when he used that phrase he was speaking about his physical circumstances, but his mind and his will. A prisoner has no say over himself. He is at the mercy of whoever holds the keys, and whatever they say goes. That is the strange beauty of surrender to Christ: complete submission to Him is not bondage in the way the world fears bondage, because the One holding the keys is the One who loves us best. It’s getting to the place where we are entirely at His beck and call; where our own will is completely locked inside His. I long for that total surrender in every single area of my life. I confess, I would love to have the victory without having to fight the battle! But God has chosen for us the need to strive for mastery and maturity. I love how Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians:
Godliness does not arrive instantly and it does not arrive easily. But it does, over time, arrive more readily; not because the fight gets smaller, but because the Spirit of Christ is given more and more room to live through us. Peter places godliness right in the middle of his growth chart for a reason. It is the natural fruit of everything that comes before it (faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, and patience). We continue to grow by settling into a life that is genuinely, consciously oriented toward God. And the closer we draw to Him, the more that our God-consciousness deepens, and the more we find ourselves wanting what Paul wanted: to bring every part of life under subjection to Christ, gladly, as a living sacrifice, with a heart of gratitude and respect for the One who bought us at so great a price. It does not happen all at once. But it does happen, one determined act of faithfulness at a time, one surrendered habit at a time, as we keep adding godliness to our faith. Love and blessings, P.S. Godliness rarely bursts forth through dramatic circumstances. More often, it grows simply through a thousand small decisions made when no one else is watching. This week, ask yourself: If someone watched the ordinary routines of my life, would they see evidence that God is real to me? Talk to you again soon. Can’t wait?
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