These qualities refer to the virtues that Peter has identified in 2 Peter 1:5–7. Believers who abound in the qualities identified will not fall away from God.1 Stumble and fall has the sense of stumbling on the path to God’s kingdom and thus failing to arrive at your eschatological home.2 The person who walks and grows in Christian virtue will never come to the kind of eternal ruin that the heretics and their disciples face. Apostasy will not be your destiny if you continue to engage in the kind of moral behaviour marked out by the gospel. However, if you follow the way of heretics, you will also share their final end.3
10 Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall.