Bible verses and thoughts of late

Lately, I've been meditating on (and now I'm working on memorizing)1 Peter 3:3,4...


³ Do not let your adornment be merely outward—arranging the hair, wearing gold, or putting on fine apparel— ⁴ rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God.


And then listening to the Bible this afternoon, I discovered this passage to add to my thoughts (2 Peter1:5-7)...


⁵ But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, ⁶ to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, ⁷ to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. ⁸ For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.



In my little bit of studying the first passage, I discovered something rather fascinating... the word adornment is, literally in Greek the word kosmos, ie, world. I find this helpful to know as I tended to skip over this passage because, to be honest, I'm not always very good about caring about how I look. (!) And so I never really thought about how it could apply to me. But, if you apply this to your whole "world" or what you hold important to you, than that makes it much easier to apply!

I also used to read this passage and think "a gentle and quiet spirt?!, how boring does that sound?" I know, so bad, right? But, I'm learning that when one has a gentle and quiet spirit, it doesn't mean you can't still have fun and laugh loud, it means that it's actually much easier to do those things. Because if your spirit is right with God, then you are not weighed down with the cares of the world. And that's a lot more fun!

As for the second passage, I haven't mediated on it a lot yet, but I feel like as of late, the standard variety of temptations/trials I used to face are fading away - of course, maybe this is just asking for them to come back... or at least until I've forgotten the lessons I've learned, right? ;) And now as of late, I am beginning to discover another bouquet of trials that require the learning of more lessons. Oh, thank God for variety!