The King of all heaven and earth is living in me, and it is His strength that enables me to share what He has given, that we, as His people, might be about what He is about; that we might be conformed into His image; that He might have the bride that He so earnestly desires.
May it be our desire to become who He has created us to be in the new creation. May we do the good works that He has made for us to walk in.
Turn with me, if you would, to 2 Peter 1, beginning at verse 1.
Simon Peter, a bond-servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,
to those who have received a faith of the same kind as ours
by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ:
Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord;
seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness,
through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.
For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises,
in order that by them you might become partakers of the divine nature,
having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence,
in your faith supply moral excellence,
and in your moral excellence, knowledge,
and in your knowledge, self-control,
and in your self-control, perseverance,
and in your perseverance, godliness,
and in your godliness, brotherly kindness,
and in your brotherly kindness, Christian love.For if these qualities are yours and are increasing,
they render you neither useless nor unfruitful
in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
For he who lacks these qualities is blind or short-sighted,
having forgotten his purification from his former sins.
Therefore, brethren, be all the more diligent to make certain about His calling and choosing you;
for as long as you practice these things, you will never stumble.
For in this way the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ
will be abundantly supplied to you.
The overview of the Scripture that we will be talking about this morning is this: the first four verses explain our foundation in Christ.
The next four verses concern our walk with Him and how He accomplishes that work in us that He wants to accomplish—the conforming of us into His image.
Then the last four verses, I see, concern our service in the temple—our service as His. I will explain that.
A lot of what I have to say is built on the brothers who have gone before me, beginning with Stephen’s message three Sundays before the conference; my brother Mac on the heart, the testimony, and the passing of the testimony of Christ from the conference; and then our brother Kenny, sharing so richly on the grace which is so much a part of everything that we are going to talk about today.
And then Jerry really touched every chord about the temple. We together, as brothers and sisters, are the temple of our Lord Jesus today. He lives in us, and so we reflect Who He is every day. We serve in His temple.
This temple has to be built, and He has a roadmap for building it. He has a blueprint. Our brother Peter, in this Scripture, lays before us an opportunity to see how He works this work in us, each one individually.
That is kind of the introduction. So, when Simon Peter is writing this, he is a bond-servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ. He knows the Lord, and he is writing to those who have the same faith as ours—an active, living faith; effective faith; a faith that is put to work in daily life.
And it is from our Lord Jesus, by His righteousness. His righteousness is our salvation. His righteousness is our righteousness, because we believe in Him. He has given us Himself.
“Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus, our Lord.” Grace is that unmerited favor that He has given to us in His Son, Jesus.
He has given us everything we need in grace to go through whatever we need to go through—whatever condition we have been born into, wherever we were born. He has a perfect plan for us, and He knows us individually. He has given us the grace to be able to live the life He has given us and to let Him do that work in us, that we might have everything that He has designed us for and to be.
Grace and peace be multiplied to you. Peace—that peace that passes understanding; that peace that keeps me from running like crazy from here. That peace lets us know that our relationship with our Lord and Savior Jesus is okay. We are at rest with Him. He gives us His peace.
If we are missing His peace, that is when we desire it the most, because we miss it. When we are out of that peace, it is a signal to us from our Lord that there is something amiss. We need to run back to Him. We need to find Him. We need to let Him bring us into repentance, that we might be restored and that peace might return.
Well, you know, it is interesting that Peter says this grace and peace is multiplied. Multiplied increases. This grace and peace is available to us more and more, and it is available in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
So, as we are in His Word and we know Him, He reveals Himself to us. We know Him personally. We begin to know what He is planning for us, what He wants for us. He might show us something that is short of what He would have for us, and we repent. He may lead us somewhere, and we follow. He may give us a word. He may speak to us, and we can obey.
Knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord is not just knowledge about Jesus. It is your individual knowledge of Who He is, that He has revealed to you and me.
The glimpses I have seen, I felt led to share at our last sharing time, but there was not time, and it could not have been done. So I asked my brother Jerry if I could share. I said I had something, and he said, “Well, let me have an outline.”
Well, in thirty-seven years, I had never been able to do an outline, because the white page was beyond my capability. It was not there—probably because I did not spend the time seeking. I did not spend the time looking. I coasted for a long time.
But something happened about six months ago. The Lord answered a prayer in the meeting after one of our brothers shared. When He answered that prayer, I met Him, and it has been really different ever since.
So we need to know Him individually. Know Him. Get to know Him. He loves us so much. He has made every provision for us.
“Seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.”
His divine power—the Godhead—has granted us everything for an abundant life. As Mac prayed this morning, thanking Him for that life, that abundant life: that life is ours. It is ours.
The reason we might not have an abundant life is because we are ignorant of what it is, how it works, and how it comes. It comes from knowing Him.
He has granted everything pertaining to life through the true knowledge of Him. That true knowledge, what He showed me as I was reading this section and studying it, is our knowing Him personally—that time we have spent with Him, where He has revealed His Word to us.
That Word He reveals to us is revealed in a way that we can understand it. Peter’s language is very difficult. Peter was uneducated, but he had something on his heart he wanted to share. In order to hear what he is trying to share, we have to get the Lord to translate it to us individually in a way that we can understand it.
So the Lord reveals His Word to us where we are, where we are right now. You could read this again in ten years, and you may have moved a lot further on. Then He is able to show you even more. It is not like we get it all at once. This is a walk with Him. It is a life with Him.
And godliness—godliness. He has given us godliness. How does that happen?
It happens because we are in Him, and He is in us. As we take up that cross and live the life that He has given us, we respond to His Holy Spirit. We are chastened by His Holy Spirit. We respond. We obey. We follow.
We allow His life to be reflected in us, as only He can do, because it is His life that is godly. It is His life that is undistorted by us when we are following Him and walking with Him. His life can be seen in us. It looks like a godly life, and not because we are anything.
We are reminded almost all the time that we are frail humans, subject to falling. But He loves us so much that He has given us His Son. Praise the Lord.
“For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, in order that by them you might become partakers of the divine nature.”
“Might become partakers” is an interesting phrase, because you can become partakers, and many of us that I personally know are partakers. Peter changed from “us” to “you” because he knew he was a partaker, and I think we are partakers also.
But by these, He has granted us His precious and magnificent promises. There are over two hundred promises that Jesus made.
Some require only one condition: that you know Him, that you believe in Him, that you believe He is Who He said He was. Some promises are conditional, and if you meet the condition, then that promise can be yours. Some conditions are for individuals and groups, and some of these promises are for now, while others are for the future. But each one of these promises has been granted to us by our Lord Jesus.
We have to go get them. We do not just have them until we go get them.
There is an interesting little preaching story about a preacher who one day held up a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Who wants it? It is yours if you want it.” A lot of people raised their hands. A lot of people thought he was going to toss it to them. But one young man worked his way up through the crowd, and he took it out of his hand.
Our Lord has given us all these promises. We have to go and take them out of His hand. We have to let Him make them living to us.
When we see that promise in the Word and we have some mountain facing us—something we need to overcome in our life that is keeping us from being who He has called us to be—we may be able to find one of His promises that the Lord brings to life and says, “Yes.”
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
And He makes that alive to us. He says, “Yes, this is yours.”
When you know His voice—and He says we will know His voice—we will know when He says to us, “The promise for that mountain: take that promise. Take that promise and believe it. Choose to believe it.”
Faith is the substance of things hoped for.
It is made real by faith—the conviction of things unseen. So you are convinced. You are convinced that you have it, and then it is yours. Stand on it. Believe it. Do not doubt it.
And whatever you do, do not ever try to fix it in the flesh. Abraham took twenty-five years to see that promise, but it took only a minute to try to fix it by the flesh, and the impact has been disastrous.
So take that promise and wait for the Lord’s answer. It will come.
“Having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.” You know, the corruption in this world is going to affect us. We can be hit by a speeder. Things can happen to us because of the corruption due to sin that came into this world.
But we do not have to be corrupt. We do not have to have that corruption in us. We can have that life of Christ in us, and we escape all of those things that a corrupt person might do.
When we are tempted to shoplift, when we are tempted to look at something that should not be looked at, when we are tempted to go somewhere, we can escape the corruption by just saying, “No, my Lord has given me something I need to do, and it is way more important than that. I am going to be about my Father’s business. I do not have time for that.”
And all of a sudden, as you walk in that train of thought, you find that you have escaped so many things that might have one time tripped you up.
Now, that is the foundation of what we have in Christ. That is what He has already done for us. That is His provision for us.
He has made every provision for us to be exactly who He created us to be, in whatever our condition is—whether we are rich, whether we are poor, whether we have some difficulty, whether we have a circumstance. He has given us provision to get through, to be who He has called us to be.
Now, whether we become who He has created us to be is up to us using our free will to choose His life, to choose to believe what He has said to us in these things that we go about doing.
As we choose Him, we choose His life. His life begins to live in us. He shows us where we are going, who we are, and what we are to do.
Whether I am a speaker or not, that is a gift, and whether or not I have it will be determined by whether or not He speaks for me. I am okay with that, because it is Him. It is not me. And it can be any one of you if He calls you to do it. You can accept it and let Him do what needs to be done. Whatever happens, happens. It is all Him.
As we move into the next verses, we are going to talk about some characteristics, or the virtues, of our Christian life together.
We all start at the same place. We all start as sinners saved by grace. The reflection of these virtues in each of us is different. There is an end state where the picture of each of these in us is perfect, and that is when we see our Lord Jesus face to face.
But along the way in this process, I want you to think about stones being fitted together. Think about a gemstone. When a diamond is found, it is covered with dirt. It has impurities on the outside. It has impurities on the inside. But the master jeweler comes in and washes it off.
Our Master Builder does the same thing to us. He saves us from our sins, and He cleans us up inside and out. He has done that.
But then there are these things about us—these rough edges, these facets that are not facets. They are more like jabbing things that jab each other, and they have to be trimmed off.
God has a plan for each one of us. It is unique, so that at the end, when all of this trimming is done, that stone He called you to be fits perfectly where He puts you—in the temple, in the house of God, in the New Jerusalem.
“Applying all diligence.” Diligence is a word that we are familiar with. Most of us learned in school that we have to be about doing our homework. We need not go outside and play; we need to do our homework first, and then we can do that.
Well, if you did not get that, then when you are grown up, the understanding of diligence needs to be refined by our Lord Jesus. You and Him need to have a conversation about diligence, about whether or not you have a right understanding of what is in His mind when He is talking about applying diligence.
So our brother Peter says, “Applying all diligence.” I urge you to ask the Lord what that means to you.
That is a high calling. It implies a quickness about being about His business. I think about our Lord when He was twelve years old. He told His parents, “I have to be about My Father’s business.”
I think about David when he was preparing all the materials for the temple. You know, a slacker would never have been able to do that. He was diligent for his life, and he accumulated all of the provision.
Where did that provision come from? It came from God. God is the provision, but David was diligent in going and getting it.
We need to be diligent about going and getting His provision—the hundred-dollar bill. Get it. He has something for you. The Lord has something for us in everything.
“In your faith, supply.” When I quoted Hebrews 11:1, the Darby is the best: “Faith is the substance.” It is the substance of things hoped for—the substantiating, the conviction.
This faith, when you exercise this faith, means you are believing. You are believing that it is a done deal, and it is a done deal. In the heavenlies, it is a done deal. All He asks us to do is choose to believe Him when He speaks to us.
So, in our faith, we are going to believe Him that this faith will supply moral excellence. How in the world do we have moral excellence?
I have a brother who was a raging alcoholic by the time he was in high school. He was an alcoholic for a while. He was a functional alcoholic. He was able to go to college, but he was an alcoholic nonetheless.
One day, he met the Lord through AA, and he was delivered—completely delivered. Ten years free, maybe more now. But it was all the Lord.
He had a little saying, and I think it applies to this moral excellence. He learned it, and he says it all the time: “Just do the next right thing.”
So how does doing the next right thing lead to moral excellence? Well, God has written His laws, covenants, and statutes on our heart because we have a new heart. We know what the next right thing is.
There is no one in here who can say they do not know what the next right thing is in their life. So all we have to do is choose the next right thing. If we are choosing the next right thing over and over and over, guess what? Those wrong things are not getting chosen.
And so it appears as moral excellence. But really, it is all Him. It is all Him, because we could fall in a second. We can fall in an instant except for His keeping grace. It keeps us.
It is wonderful. It is absolutely wonderful that our faith can supply moral excellence.
And in your moral excellence, knowledge. Knowledge comes along because, in order to see the effects of a miracle, Jesus needed to know about rolling a stone away. He knew that in order for Lazarus to walk out, that stone had to be rolled away.
So, in my case, in one particular mountain I had, I needed to know why my behavior was a certain way. I asked three brothers, and all of them came from a different point. But the result was that I had a mental understanding of the source.
The Lord was able to use that to deliver me, and He will deliver you. But get the knowledge that you need. Do not stay ignorant. Get the knowledge that you need about the thing that is keeping you.
We learned a lot of stuff in the old man, in the way we were growing up, in the way our parents were. We learned a lot of things that were not necessarily the way the Lord thinks about that thing.
So we need to know the lie that the enemy told us, that we believed for a long time, that may be leading us to have a behavior that we should not have. In Him is the deliverance.
But we do need that knowledge. And in your knowledge, self-control. Well, self-control is probably the toughest one for me—maybe the toughest one for all of us—because most of the big holes I fell into were caused by a lack of self-control.
But self-control is interesting, because the Lord has given us a mind. He has given us a mind that can control our body, that can tell our body what to do, and the body has to yield to the mind.
So we can choose to have self-control. We can exercise self-control. But that mind has a will of its own too, so it has to learn to submit itself to the Holy Spirit.
When the mind is in agreement with the Holy Spirit, then the mind can operate the way the Lord would have us operate, and we can exercise self-control—controlled by our mind, controlled by the Spirit in us.
Christ in me—He lives in me. He wants me to let Him have all of me. And He really wants all of you. He does not want just some piece of you. He wants all of you.
Surrender. If there are things that you are hanging on to, the abundant life is available in Him. It is not in those things that we hang on to. It is not going to be in this world. The abundant life is finding Him to be your all in all.
And in your self-control, perseverance. Perseverance is taking that grace that He has given us and going through the circumstance.
Whatever it is that is in your life—the challenge, the temptation—take that grace and go through.
Again, really, whether it is your physical condition, whether it is a mental condition, or whether it is just a circumstance—a demanding boss, a job that wants too much out of you, a brother or sister that grates your last nerve, leaders that do not get it the same way you do—it can be any number of things.
But we persevere because we know that in Him, the outcome is a done deal. It is a finished work that He has done. “It is finished.” He has finished that work. We just have to choose to agree that that work is done in us. So we do that. We persevere.
And in your perseverance, godliness. Again, godliness is His life being expressed in you. If you are walking with Him and that Holy Spirit is leading you along the way, then His life is going to come out in you.
You will be His hands and feet. You will be His spokesman. You will be the helping hand to a needy brother. You will have a godliness.
And in your godliness, brotherly kindness. These first virtues that I talked about before these last two are individual virtues that are worked out by the Lord in each one of us.
These virtues are you and Him, getting to know Him. As you get to know Him and He reveals Himself to you, these virtues become apparent in your life, and they are one-on-one. This is the work of building the temple. This is the work of preparing that stone to be built together, and it will be built together.
These last two are more corporate virtues. They have a lot to do with our interaction with each other. In one sense, a lot of the polishing action is occurring in this brotherly-kindness virtue, as we take care of each other, as we have Christ’s heart for you extended from you to your brother.
When you live brotherly kindness, and you see a brother in need, and the Lord has given you the instruction that you need to be the helping hand, when you respond to that as the hands and feet of Jesus, you are expressing Christ to that brother. You are meeting that brother in his need.
It happens all the time. When you see it happening, you are seeing Jesus. You want to see Jesus all the time? Just look around and see brothers taking care of brothers, and sisters taking care of sisters. He is everywhere.
He is living right here in our midst, in each one of us, being expressed in some measure wherever you are along the road. If you are well advanced along the road, then you are living a sacrificial life for your brothers and sisters. If you are not far along, then occasionally you are helping.
If you are still a little bit self-centered, then you are really not seeing your brother in his condition, or you are seeing him in his condition and not knowing that the Lord has a supply for his condition—and it is us; it is me.
In your brotherly kindness, Christian love. What can I say? For God is love. He is love. It is His love.
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish,
but have everlasting life.
This virtue is related to Christ in us, related to the world—the world around us, the people we see, the people we run into. Do we have a heart for them to be saved? Do we have a heart for the ones who are less fortunate?
Do we express the love that Christ has given us to those around us who do not come here, who are out there? Are people getting saved because the life in us is living and responding to the world around us? Are we expressing Christ to the world?
Christian love—it is the last virtue in the list.
They will know you are Christians by your love.
For Christ to make an impact on this world, this virtue needs to be expressed, and it is Christ in us that needs to be expressed.
In this last section, you know, every process that we go through at work or wherever, there is usually an audit. So our brother Peter has given us a little audit. It is a chance for us to do a gut check with the Lord and say, “Okay, where am I?”
“If these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
So these virtues are apparent. Are they increasing? Do we have them, and are they increasing? Are you the same Christian you were last year, or has He brought you into something new, some new aspect of Him that He has revealed to you?
Are you going on with Him? Are you allowing Him to work in your heart and in your life? He does not quit. We are the only ones who can quit. He never quits.
So if somehow you stopped along the way, just get with Him and say, “Hey, I need a checkup. Show me.”
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way.
Show me, and I will repent. Lead me, and I will follow. Speak to me, and I will obey, by the power of the Holy Spirit that is in me—even Christ.
“For he who lacks these qualities is blind or short-sighted, having forgotten his purification from his former sins.”
It does not say where you are in the path. It just says if these virtues are not present, you have not progressed. He is not interested in where you are; He is interested in whether you are progressing.
If you are blind or short-sighted, remember His purification for your sins. Remember your salvation. Repent, and go back to Him.
He wants you desperately. He wants you to have all of Him. He wants you to be everything He created you to be.
The Master Builder knew what that stone was supposed to look like. He knows what He made you to do. He made you who He wanted you to be. All you have to do is get with Him and say, “Lord, I want to be what You want me to be. I want to do what You want me to do. I surrender all.”
“Therefore, brethren, be all the more diligent to make certain about His calling and choosing you; for as long as you practice these things, you will never stumble.”
Well, if you are in the light, and Jesus is the light, our brother John says you will not stumble. My brother Peter knew that the keeping power of our Lord Jesus is about the practicing of these things that He showed us.
If we live in that foundation He has given us and practice these virtues, then we will never stumble.
“For in this way the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be abundantly supplied to you.”
Now, this one is very interesting because most of the commentaries say that the entrance is after you die. But the Lord was showing me, and I will just give it to you the way He showed it. Then you can be a Berean and judge for yourself.
This entrance—obviously, how do you make an entrance abundant? I just prayed about that.
If we are who He has called us to be, and what we are doing is what He has called us to do, then there is going to be a spiritual impact. There is going to be a spiritual result.
That spiritual result will be wide, and the entrance will take it all in, because it is the glory of our Lord and Savior Jesus, Who gave us these things to do.
It is our Lord and Savior Jesus Who made us who we become. It is His glory that He can take a sinner such as I and conform me into His image on that last day.
He is with us. He is in our midst. He wants all of us—every bit of us.
So, let us pray.
Lord, how we thank You so much that You love us enough to create us for purpose, to make good works for us to walk in.
You love us enough not only to die for us, not only to save us, but to bring us into an abundant life—a godly life with You.
And it is all You. You have done it all. You have given us the faith to believe, and we have chosen to believe. That is all we had to do: choose to believe and walk with You in this life that You have called us to.
Lord, may You get all the glory, all the honor, that Your bride would be made ready by the life that lives within us—our Lord Jesus. Amen.