because His divine power has given us everything that is needful for life and piety, through our full knowledge of Him who through His glory and excellence has called us to Him.

Now for this very reason you must do your level best to supplement your faith with moral character, moral character with knowledge,

For if you have these qualities and they continue to increase in you, they will make you neither idle nor unproductive in attaining a full knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For whoever lacks these qualities is blind -- or short-sighted-- and forgetful of the cleansing that he has received from his former sins.

Therefore, brothers, be all the more in earnest to make certain to yourselves God's call and choice of you. For if you cultivate these qualities, you will never slip,

for it is in this way that to you will be generously granted a triumphant admittance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

For it was not mere stories of fancy that we followed when we told you of the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of His majesty.

For when He received such honor and glory from God the Father, when from the majestic glory there was borne to Him a voice like this, "This is my Son, my Beloved, in whom I take delight,"

for no prophecy has ever yet originated in man's will, but men who were led by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but hurled them down to Tartarus and committed them to dark dungeons to await their doom,

for as long as that upright man was living among them, his upright soul, day and night, was always being tortured by what he saw and heard in their lawless actions --

surely, then, the Lord knows how to rescue godly people from trial and to keep wrongdoers under punishment for the day of judgment,

whereas angels who are far superior in strength and power to these beings bring no abusive accusation against them before the Lord.

These men, like irrational animals, mere creatures of instinct created to be caught and killed, abuse the things that they do not understand, and so by their corruption they will be destroyed, suffering wrong as punishment for their wrongdoing.

but was reproved for his offense; a dumb animal spoke with a human voice and stopped the prophet's madness.

For by uttering arrogant nonsense, through base desires of the lower nature, they entice into immorality men who are just escaping from those who live in error,

promising them freedom, though they are slaves of destruction themselves; for a man is the slave of anything that conquers him.

For if, after men have escaped the corrupting ways of the world through a full knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they again become entangled in them and are conquered by them, then their last condition is worse than their former one.

For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of uprightness than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command committed to their trust.

and saying, "Where is His promised coming? For ever since our forefathers fell asleep everything has remained exactly as it was from the beginning of creation!"

For they willfully ignore the fact that long ago the heavens existed and the earth that had been formed by God's command out of water and through water,

But by the same command the present heavens and earth are stored up for fire and are kept for the day when godless men are to be doomed and destroyed.

The Lord is not slow about His promise, in the sense in which some think of slowness, but He is really dealing patiently with you, because He is not willing for any to perish but for all to have an opportunity to repent?