Pip: My Lord, My Friend Ministries has been thinking about ladders this week — the kind you climb not with your hands but with your whole life.
Mara: That’s a fair way to put it. The posts from My Lord My Friend Ministries this week move through faith and endurance, the praise woven into creation, and the peace that edifies a community. Let’s start with the ladder itself — faith, growth, and what it costs to keep climbing.
Faith, Growth, and Endurance
Mara: The question running through this segment is how faith actually becomes a life — not a statement you hold, but a practice that changes you from the inside out.
Pip: From The Heart goes straight to 2 Peter 1, and the New Living Translation lays it out as a chain: “your faith will produce a life of moral excellence. A life of moral excellence leads to knowing God better. Knowing God leads to self-control. Self-control leads to patient endurance, and patient endurance leads to godliness.”
Mara: So the upshot is that this isn’t a list of things to achieve — it’s a sequence that flows. One virtue generates the next. The post draws a direct line to the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, noting that The Passion Translation calls these virtues “already planted deep within” and held “in abundant supply.”
Pip: That’s the part that lands — it’s not a to-do list, it’s an invitation to yield to what’s already there. The post closes with 2 Peter 1 verse 3: everything needed for life and godliness has already been deposited in us.
Mara: Faith In Action picks up the same thread but shifts the terrain. Growth in Christ, it argues, means expecting both pleasant and distressing experiences — not one or the other. It draws on Song of Songs to show that God is shade in harshness, sustenance through highs and lows, and present even when enemies make life difficult.
Pip: Which is either deeply comforting or a very honest warning, depending on your week.
Mara: Hebrews 13 verse 6 gets the last word there: “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me.” Then Planted asks a sharper question — are we growing old, or growing in God? Psalm 92 frames that distinction, and the post answers with John 14: peace as the ground you plant yourself in, not a feeling you wait for.
Pip: And Weekend Inspiration brings George Muller — a man whose early life included gambling, fraud, and drinking, who later sat orphans at empty tables and thanked God for food that always arrived.
Mara: The piece draws the conclusion plainly: “Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.” Endurance, it turns out, is something you learn.
Pip: Creation has something to say about that too — let’s go there next.
Creation’s Chorus and the Word That Grounds It
Mara: Scripture and creation praise might sound like a gentle detour, but this segment is asking something pointed: what does it mean that the whole created order is called to rejoice?
Pip: Scripture Verse of the Week opens with Psalm 96 — and it doesn’t stay small: “Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice; let the seas and all that fills respond. Let the fields and everything in them exalt. Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy.”
Mara: The post moves from that cosmic chorus to a harder reality — today’s creation is in bondage to corruption, it says, because of Adam’s sin. But God paid the price, and the invitation now is to stop hiding and walk in fellowship again. Jeremiah 29 verse 11 closes it: He has plans, plans to rejoice in and with the whole of creation.
Pip: From a cosmic choir to a personal invitation — that’s a lot of ground for one week’s verse. Peace is where we land next.
Peace That Builds, Word That Strengthens
Pip: This segment sits at the intersection of two questions: what does peace actually do in a community, and what’s the mechanism that produces it?
Mara: Our Weekly Encouragement anchors the answer in Colossians 3: “And let the peace of the Messiah, to which you were also called in one body, control your hearts. Be thankful.” The post’s argument is that this peace isn’t passive — it surrounds, permeates, and defines who you are in God’s family.
Pip: Peace as identity, not atmosphere.
Mara: Transformation Continuing takes the structural side of that. Edification — building up spiritually, intellectually, morally — is the mechanism. First Corinthians 14 verse 26 sets the standard: “All things must be done for edification.” Ephesians 4 describes the whole body fitted together, each part working so the whole grows in love. The Word, it argues, is the primary tool, and the early church knew it.
Pip: So peace is the climate, and edification is the construction work that keeps it livable.
Mara: From a ladder of virtues to a chorus in creation to peace that builds a community — the thread is the same: what’s already planted in us is enough to grow from.
Pip: Next time, we’ll see what else is taking root. Don’t miss it.