“And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 1:5-8 KJV)
“Add to…” Why, add to? The ESV says “supplement”. Why either “add to” or “supplement”? Even more puzzling, the thing that you are adding to is “faith”. Clearly faith is the necessary foundation. You are not getting anywhere until there is belief and trust. Peter gives an ordered list here. How do these layers get from faith to love? From a state of trusting that something is possible to really knowing and experiencing it. Faith must be fed. Like a baby tree that needs to be nourished in multiple ways to grow. The nourishment does not make the tree, but it feeds it in such a way that it can grow. The nourishment does not make the tree less of a tree, but more of a tree. It makes it more of what the tree was made to be.
Conversely, things that are thought of as “one and done” are often set on a shelf or in a cryogenic freeze so that we can get back to what we were about prior to or aside from that. Things that do not grow; die. That which was core to the necessity of beginning no longer has a place. Are coreless people really alive?
“But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins.” (2 Peter 1:9 KJV)