1 ³ His divine power has bestowed on us everything that makes for life and true religion, enabling us to know the One who called us by his own splendour and might. 1 ⁴ Through this might and splendour he has given us his promises, great beyond all price, and through them you may escape the corruption with which lust has infected the world, and come to share in the very being of God.
1 ⁵ With all this in view, you should try your hardest to supplement your faith with virtue, virtue with knowledge, 1 ⁶ knowledge with self-control, self-control with fortitude, fortitude with piety, 1 ⁷ piety with brotherly kindness, and brotherly kindness with love.
1 ⁸ These are gifts which, if you possess and foster them, will keep you from being either useless or barren in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 ⁹ The man who lacks them is short-sighted and blind; he has forgotten how he was cleansed from his former sins. 1 ¹⁰ All the more then, my friends, exert yourselves to clinch God's choice and calling of you. If you behave so, you will never come to grief. 1 ¹¹ Thus you will be afforded full and free admission into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

1 ¹² And so I will not hesitate to remind you of this again and again, although you know it and are well grounded in the truth that has already reached you. 1 ¹³ Yet I think it right to keep refreshing your memory so long as I still lodge in this body. 1 ¹⁴ I know that very soon I must leave it; indeed our Lord Jesus Christ has told me so. Or: I must leave it, as our Lord Jesus Christ told me. 1 ¹⁵ But I will see to it that after I am gone you will have means of remembering these things at all times.