Living in Eternal Light
By: Pastor Bailey Miller
The phrase due diligence often carries a legal connotation: reasonable steps taken to satisfy a legal requirement, especially in buying or selling something.
But what about spiritual due diligence?
In the same way that legal due diligence ensures integrity in a transaction, spiritual due diligence is the ongoing commitment of the son or daughter of God to live as one who has been purchased by Christ’s blood by dying to self and walking in righteousness as an act of worship.
Responding to Grace
Because God has atoned for our wrongdoing, defeated death, and is putting sin to death within us as His own, our reasonable response is a life marked by righteousness. To live otherwise, whether chasing our own whims, indulging our fragile flesh, or following the ways of the world, leads only to death.
Peter’s challenge to the believers is piercing:
How will you be found when the Lord returns?
Not to be found by Peter, the angels, or the watching world—but by Christ who will find us on that day.
Purity & Peace (2 Peter 3:14–16)
When the heavens and heavenly hosts melt away and the earth is purified, all things will be made new. But it also begs a sobering question: What remnants of our old selves will we still be clinging to?
God’s fullness of light will purify completely and the presence of His light within us by the Spirit calls us even now to live pure lives. We can speak truth with our lips yet still be wrong if our lives are not conformed to the image of Christ.
Peter begins by reminding us that our greatest hope must be the return of our Lord. Yes, we may have other good and biblical aspirations: leaving our children an inheritance, seeing the faithfulness of the church, or growing old with the spouse God has given us. But none of these should outshine the joy of Christ’s promised return.
Our diligence in how we are found is inseparably linked to our desire to be found at all. In creation, Adam and Eve were made perfect, fell into sin, and hid from God. In the covenant of grace, we are born sinful, raised to new life in Christ, and now desperately await to be found at His return.
The patience of the Lord is our salvation. Every moment we wait is not evidence of delay, but of mercy. What we receive from Him is never the result of our work or might, but always a reflection of His steadfast compassion.
Scripture’s call to spiritual due diligence isn’t a burden, but an invitation. An invitation to live in purity, to anchor our hearts in the hope of His coming, and to walk daily in the peace that comes from knowing we are His.