Spiritual progress: it's a journey

PROGRESSION OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH - The progression of spiritual growth starts from the bedrock of God’s “divine power [that] has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness.” (2 Peter 1:3, emphasis added). 

God’s “precious and magnificent promises” make it possible for us to “become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust” (1:4). This escape comes about by putting forth our best efforts (“applying all diligence,” 2 Peter 1:5) to add the following things to our confidence in Christ (see 2 Peter 1:5-7):
Moral excellence or virtue. Train yourself to do what is good and right.
Knowledge or understanding. Come to know why the good and right you do is good and right.
Self-control. Develop the capacity to carry out your intentions and not be thrown off by any turn of events.
Perseverance (endurance, patience). Demonstrate the capacity to stick with the course over the long haul regardless of how you may feel.
Godliness. Strive for depth and thoroughness in the preceding attainments of grace.
Brotherly kindness and gentleness of care seen among siblings and true friends. Extend family feeling and action to those in your community. 

Think of what that would mean to this wounded world. This superhuman thing is possible only through the goodness and strength of godliness. Agape love. Offer the kind of love that characterizes God himself and is spelled out in heartrending detail on the cross of Jesus and in 1 Corinthians 13. We are not to love simply as family but as he loved us (see John 13:34). If we do these things, we will “never stumble,” and “entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be abundantly supplied to [us]” (2 Peter 1:10-11, emphasis added). 

The mistake believers most commonly make is to assume they are supposed to do all these glowing things apart from inner transformation into Christlikeness, without loving God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength in all the dimensions of the self. In fact, they think they must do them while they are still strongly inclined in the opposite direction, against God. To the person who is not inwardly transformed in each essential dimension, evil and sin still look good. But sin looks stupid, ridiculous, and repulsive to those cleansed by Christ who see the law as a beautiful gift of God, as precious truth about what is really good and right.