As we look toward Tres Dias Weekend 53, I find myself thinking less about what might happen during three extraordinary days and more about what will remain when those three days are over. A renewal weekend can become a meaningful marker in someone’s spiritual journey, but Scripture consistently draws our attention beyond moments and toward formation. The question is not simply whether we encounter God profoundly for a weekend, but whether our lives become increasingly rooted in Him afterward. This is precisely where 2 Peter 1:3–11 offers an important framework. Before Peter tells his readers what they must cultivate, he reminds them of what God has already provided: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Pet 1:3). The order is important. Divine provision precedes human participation. Grace is not the reward at the end of Christian formation; grace is the ground from which Christian formation begins.¹

Peter deepens this claim in the following verse by saying that through God’s promises believers become κοινωνοὶ θείας φύσεως (koinōnoi theias physeōs), “participants in the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). The noun koinōnos communicates participation, association, or the sharing of something held in common and belongs to the same linguistic family from which we receive koinōnia. Peter is certainly not suggesting that human beings become divine beings in an ontological sense. Rather, participation in the life of God produces a people increasingly shaped by God’s character.² This makes the virtues that follow exceedingly important: goodness, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, and ultimately agapē. They are not entrance requirements by which we earn participation with God; they describe what begins to emerge from a life already participating in what God has graciously supplied. Richard Bauckham appropriately describes agapē at the conclusion of Peter’s list as the crowning virtue that encompasses what precedes it.³

This is why Deeply Rooted provides such a compelling image for Weekend 53, even though we should recognize that Peter himself does not employ the metaphor of a tree in this passage. Rather, the imagery emerges when Peter’s vision of spiritual formation is read within the larger canonical world of Scripture. Psalm 1 describes the faithful person as כְּעֵץ שָׁתוּל עַל־פַּלְגֵי מָיִם (keʿēṣ šātûl ʿal-palgê māyim), “like a tree planted by channels of water” (Ps 1:3). The verbal form šātûl, from שׁתל (šāṯal), describes something planted or transplanted.⁴ This is more than decorative agricultural imagery. In the climate presupposed by the biblical writers, access to water determined whether vegetation merely appeared for a season or endured long enough to bear fruit. John Goldingay observes that the long dry season of the Middle East made proximity to a dependable water source particularly important precisely during the period in which fruit matured.⁵ The psalmist therefore portrays the flourishing life not primarily as the result of extraordinary strength within the tree, but as the consequence of where that tree has been planted.

Jeremiah 17:7–8 develops the same biblical imagination. The person who trusts in YHWH is compared with a tree planted beside water that “sends out its roots by the stream.” Here the Hebrew שֹׁרֶשׁ (šōreš), “root,” draws our attention beneath the visible surface of the tree. The foliage and fruit may be what others eventually see, but they depend upon a hidden system of attachment and nourishment. This tree imagery participates in a much broader biblical and ancient Near Eastern symbolic world in which trees, gardens, flowing waters, and flourishing vegetation regularly communicate life, fertility, divine blessing, and ordered creation. Yet the biblical writers repeatedly redirect the imagery toward covenantal dependence upon YHWH. Psalm 1 connects flourishing with sustained meditation upon Torah, while Jeremiah connects it explicitly with trust in YHWH. The fundamental question is therefore not simply whether a person appears fruitful, but where his roots have gone for life.

Read against that background, Peter’s language becomes even more significant. In 2 Peter 1:5 he calls believers to “make every effort” and employs ἐπιχορηγήσατε (epichorēgēsate), from epichorēgeō, a verb carrying the sense of supplying, furnishing, or providing what is needed.⁶ Peter’s language requires genuine human participation; grace is not passivity. Yet that participation occurs only after verses 3–4 have established God’s prior provision. The virtues of verses 5–7 are therefore neither a spiritual ladder by which we ascend toward God nor independent achievements accumulated through religious determination. Peter describes a life in which God’s provision and human response belong together. Faith matures into embodied character, and that character touches knowledge, desires, endurance, worship, relationships, and finally love. These qualities are interconnected expressions of a life being formed in Christ rather than separate accomplishments to be checked off one after another.

Peter makes that continuing dimension explicit in verse 8 when he speaks of these qualities as ὑπάρχοντα καὶ πλεονάζοντα (hyparchonta kai pleonazonta)—being present and increasing. Christian formation is not static, and this may be one of the most important truths for us to remember as we enter a renewal weekend. The goal is not simply to experience something powerful enough that we can remember it years later. The goal is that what God begins, reveals, restores, or reminds us of becomes increasingly visible in the ordinary life that follows. Jesus expresses the same reality through the vine imagery of John 15 when he repeatedly uses μένω (menō), “remain,” “stay,” or “abide.” The branch bears fruit not because it experienced a remarkable moment with the vine but because it continues in the vine (John 15:4–5). Paul similarly speaks of Christian character as καρπὸς τοῦ πνεύματος (karpos tou pneumatos), the “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal 5:22). Biblical fruitfulness is consequently less about religious achievement and more about sustained participation in the life of God.

This changes how we might think about Tres Dias Weekend 53. We certainly pray for powerful encounters with God, meaningful worship, reconciliation, healing, friendship, laughter, confession, communion, and moments in which the presence of Christ becomes unmistakably real. But none of those moments are ends in themselves. They are invitations into something longer. In the language of Tres Dias, the weekend exists for the Fourth Day. The rector’s vision rightly emphasizes this point: the weekend may help plant and nourish, but the cultivation of a life takes place over months, years, marriages, friendships, churches, disappointments, victories, ordinary Mondays, and countless opportunities to choose the way of Jesus. Success therefore cannot finally be measured at Closing on Sunday evening. It becomes visible as men remain rooted in Christ, their churches, their families, their reunion groups, and one another long after the weekend has ended.

Perhaps, then, our prayer as we approach Weekend 53 should be both expectant and humble. We should expect the Holy Spirit to work among us, while remembering that none of us can manufacture the transformation we desire to see. We can prepare carefully, teach faithfully, serve sacrificially, extend agapē, create space for genuine koinōnia, and make ourselves available to one another, but God remains the giver of life and growth. The deepest work of the weekend may not even be recognizable while the weekend is happening. A seed planted in conversation, a wound exposed to grace, a friendship begun, a truth finally believed, or a calling quietly awakened may not display its fruit until much later.

As we look toward Weekend 53, that is what I am praying for: not merely men who have experienced an unforgettable three days, but men who are becoming deeply rooted—rooted in the grace of God, rooted in Christ, rooted in Scripture, rooted in genuine brotherhood, and rooted deeply enough that the life of Jesus increasingly becomes visible through their own. Peter’s language leaves us with a vision larger than a weekend. God has already supplied what pertains to life and godliness; our invitation is to participate in that gift and continue cultivating what He is producing within us. The weekend eventually ends, but the life into which it points us is only beginning.

De Colores.

Notes

1. Richard J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 50 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1983), 181–87. Peter’s exhortation in 1:5–7 follows and depends upon the divine provision described in 1:3–4; the literary relationship between these sections is significant for avoiding a purely moralistic reading of the virtue list.
2. Walter Bauer, Frederick William Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. “κοινωνός.” See also 2 Pet 1:4 for Peter’s distinctive expression koinōnoi theias physeōs.
3. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, 187. Bauckham observes that agapē functions as the climactic virtue and embraces the virtues that precede it.
4. Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, and Johann Jakob Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. and ed. M. E. J. Richardson, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000), s.v. “שתל.”
5. John Goldingay, Psalms, Volume 1: Psalms 1–41, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 58. Goldingay notes the importance of dependable water to fruit-bearing trees during the long Middle Eastern dry season and understands the “channels” of Ps 1:3 as potentially natural streams or irrigation channels.
6. Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, and Roderick McKenzie, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), s.v. “ἐπιχορηγέω.” The verb carries the basic sense of supplying or furnishing and is used elsewhere in the New Testament for God’s provision (cf. 2 Cor 9:10; Gal 3:5).