Self construction

But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, - Jude 1v20

Until the recent crash the Irish economy was on a massive decade long boom. The skyline of every city, town, and even village was dominated by massive cranes. At one time I counted nearly twenty of the huge construction cranes on the Dublin skyline alone. People were busy putting up building as fast as they could.

It is interesting that I never saw a single building building itself. Someone had to lay out they plans, get building permission, gather the materials, and do the construction. All the building up was done by someone.

The same is true spiritually, in a sense. We could not be built spiritually apart from the Holy Spirit. But there is an aspect of ‘building up’ that we have to do as well. We build ourselves up as we remember the words spoken by the apostles, as we watch out for false teacher, as we pray in the Holy Spirit, and a few more things in the verses to follow. Peter wrote that we diligently add to the foundation of faith such things as virtue, knowledge, and self control.

Key to this self construction is prayer. Because we still live in the flesh and have to deal with it we could not do this building without a power source. Prayer is that power source. Based and reliant on prayer we must be at the work of constantly building up our faith so that it does not stagnate and wither.