Strength That Keeps Growing
What the upstream journey produces in the person who stays on it long enough
There is something that happens to a person who has been genuinely at this for a long time.
Not a person who has maintained a religious identity for a long time. That is a different thing and produces a different result. A person who has been genuinely engaged with the Christian life, who has kept faith and practice working together rather than pulling them apart, who has kept the roots going down rather than staying at the comfortable surface level, who has kept moving when the current pushed back. Something accumulates in that person that is not visible at any particular moment but is obvious over time. The spiritual strength the text describes, which grows as a person strives to work the works of God, is exactly this accumulation.
It is not produced by the striving. It is renewed through the source the striving keeps the person connected to. Peter describes the compounding nature of this in a sequence that is worth reading slowly: “add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love” (2 Peter 1:5-7, NKJV). Each quality in the chain grows from the one before it. Faith that is alive produces virtue. Virtue disciplined produces knowledge. Knowledge applied produces self-control. The chain is not a list of separate things to achieve independently. It is the description of a growth process in which genuine engagement at each stage produces the conditions for the next stage to become available.
And then Peter says what this produces: “For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:8, NKJV). Not barren. Not unfruitful. The person in whom this process is genuinely operating is continuously producing something, because the vine’s life is continuously flowing through a branch that has kept itself connected. The fruit is not a destination reached once. It is the ongoing expression of a life staying in the right conditions.
Now hold the whole week together. The deception of a faith that asks nothing of the life is what produces the barren believer, the person in whom the form is present and the power is absent. The balance of faith and works used together as two equal oars is what produces actual forward motion against the current of an unbelieving world. And the depth of the root system, the quality of the connection between the interior life of thought and the exterior life of practice and the Christ in whom both are anchored, is what determines whether the person can sustain the journey through the seasons when the conditions are not favorable.
Together they describe a person whose spiritual life is not a state they arrived at and are now maintaining. It is a direction they are moving, a growth they are experiencing, a transformation that is occurring from the inside out as the One in whom they are rooted keeps doing what He came to do. “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18, NKJV). Being transformed is present tense, passive voice, ongoing. It is something happening to a person who has made themselves available for it to keep happening.
The faith does not make the works redundant. The works do not make the faith unnecessary. The roots do not replace the rowing. They make the rowing possible over the long distances that require a strength that is not manufactured by the person doing the work. And the person who understands all three together, who is genuinely trusting and genuinely working and genuinely drawing from the right source, is not a person laboring anxiously toward a distant destination. They are a person in whom the destination is already taking shape, glory replacing glory, the image of Christ becoming increasingly visible in the person who keeps showing up to let it.
That is the upstream journey. And the extraordinary thing about it is that the current is real and the striving is real and the strength that sustains it never runs out. The person who discovers this, who has been at the oars long enough to notice that the strength available to them at the end of a hard season is not less than what they had at the beginning, has found something that the person still managing the drift on a single oar has not yet been positioned to find. The faith and the practice and the roots and the source they are drawing from are producing in them what no amount of effort in isolation could have generated: a life that is, quietly, increasingly, unmistakably, becoming something.
Focus Verse: "For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." — 2 Peter 1:8 (NKJV)
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