Alston Road Church of Christ Podcast

Series: 2 Peter (Hastening the Day of God)

Service: Sun AM

Type: Sermon

Speaker: Scott Kercheville

People in the world and even at church will sometimes question why we pursue godly living so intently. Many become consumed by this idea that Christian standards have become overbearing. Peter knew that as the time passed from Jesus’ first coming and as a second coming appeared to be delayed that people would rise up within the church with all sorts of unhealthy thinking, teaching, and living. Peter said some would question the authenticity of the testimony about Jesus: “These claims about Jesus have been twisted and inflated since the early days.” They would cast doubt on the certainty of a future judgment day: “Where is the promise of his coming?” They would promote cheap grace: “Ease up a bit — God has bigger fish to fry than worrying about whether or not you’re doing that!”

In the first four verses, Peter reassures us. We have a faith of equal standing with those early generations. We can indeed know our God and Savior Jesus Christ. He has granted us everything we need to live godly lives. In fact, he promises that we can share in his divine nature ourselves. The Divine One took on flesh eternally that flesh might escape corruption and partake in his eternal, divine nature. God doesn’t have much bigger concerns than our behavior — he’s quite invested.

What should we do with the fact that in Christ God has granted us very great promises and given us everything we need to partake in his divine nature? Peter says we are to make every effort to grow in Christian fruit.

He speaks of faith — our foundational belief, trust in, loyalty, and allegiance to King Jesus. Virtue is moral excellence and integrity. Knowledge is our ability to take what we know about God, what he’s done, what he promises to do, what we should do about, and put all that together in a meaningful and coherent way. Self-control refers to the ability to exercise restraint, discipline, and not be subject to sinful desires. Steadfastness is endurance in the face of suffering or evil — not because we are inherently brave or because we are Stoically detached, but because we trust and hope in God. Godliness refers to a general respect for and alignment to God’s will, and maybe even a life that is like God. Brotherly affection refers to the devotion, kindness, warmth, and family-like closeness that we should have for one another. And love sums all of these up — it is patient and kind, it does not envy or boast. We’ll come back to love shortly.

This text offers a great opportunity to help us plan to grow in the New Year. Let’s consider three things from this text that we can learn about Christian growth.

1. Christian growth is holistic (or, growth is an inseparable, interconnected web). Translating this list is challenging in English, and some translations might give us the wrong sense like we are just adding or piling up a bunch of qualities into a big disconnected basket. However, the idea is that each quality springs from the previous one: faith is the means by which we grow in virtue, and virtue is the means by which we grow in knowledge, and so forth.

Now, lists like these are common in ancient Greek, Jewish, and Christian literature; and while they tend to begin and end very intentionally, most interpreters discourage trying to explain an exact reason for the specific ordering of each quality. The specific order of these middle qualities is not the secret psychological recipe for Christian growth. For example, he says in verse 6 that by means of our knowledge we grow in self-control — the point is not to obsess over how knowledge and knowledge alone helps us grow in self-control. The point is to instruct us to grow in these qualities in a holistic way. We cannot pick our favorite qualities and just pursue those. Each quality is interconnected. They support each other.

Healthy living works like this. As we have been on this journey to eat more healthily over the last three years, we have experimented with a couple of extremely restrictive diets that focus on one or two parts of your body — like healing our gut. But the challenge with just thinking about one or two parts of our bodies, is our gut, brain, thyroid, metabolic health, and various systems are all carefully woven together. For example, our guts have over 500 million neurons talking to our brains. But, if we only try to work on our mental health by healing our gut, we may become very imbalanced and harm our thyroid or metabolic health in the long run, which may come back to hurt our guts and brains in the end.

Just as it’s not wise to “improve” one part of our bodies to the exclusion of the others, the same is true with these qualities. We pursue them holistically, all together. Growth in self-control will help us be more steadfast; a deficit of knowledge could ruin our ability to love; moral excellence will help us grow in brotherly affection, and so on. Now, individually and even as families or groups, we can tend to zoom in on a couple qualities. Maybe knowledge comes really easily to me, but not self-control. Well, that knowledge just isn’t going to do any good without self-control. Or we could be in a church culture that’s really good at brotherly affection — we’re always passing out holy kisses — but we aren’t very godly. That’s no good. And neither is virtue fruitful if it is devoid of brotherly affection. Growth is holistic.

2. Christian growth starts with faith and its goal is love. While it isn’t helpful to attach specific significance to how the middle is ordered in lists of virtues like these, they do begin and end intentionally. For example, Stoics tended to begin or end their lists with knowledge. In that thinking, knowing stuff was the beginning to getting anywhere and it is the goal at the end of the road. But knowledge, a vital quality we must grow in, is not the real beginning for us. We don’t start walking with Christ when we know everything — “hold up, Jesus, you’re going to need to explain a whole lot more before I’ll walk with you.” We start walking with Christ by faith, trust, and loyalty to him. And self-control is a vital quality we grow in, but it isn’t the supreme goal of walking with Christ — love is. And love is the goal of self-control, etc.

Christian growth starts with faith and its goal is love. All these qualities are built on faith and are perfected by love — as Paul says in Colossians 3:14, love binds all Christian qualities together in perfect harmony. So, if we look at our lives and see we aren’t very stable right now, or we are pretty disoriented, we need to come back to faith and love to get regrounded and reoriented.

Do we feel like we’re not sure what is up or down, what we can hold onto for stability? Not sure where to start? That can happen when our trust and loyalty are compromised. Who have we given our trust and loyalty to? Friends or family? A political party? A substance? A device? Ourselves? Faith, trust, and loyalty towards Jesus is the foundation on which we build our lives. There’s not only a temptation to put our trust in something else, but also to replace faith with another quality. So, if we feel like we just don’t even know what is true any more — we may be tempted to seek knowledge and to build our lives on whatever knowledge we find. That may seem like a good foundation, but whatever we discover is often limited, biased, and our foundation will constantly shift as our body of knowledge changes. Or if we are in a bad place because of our own sin, we may be tempted to build our lives on our personal virtue. But what happens to our foundation when we inevitably slip? But if we trust in and give loyalty to Jesus — we hold onto him and build everything on him — we’ll find that this sends out strong roots that can withstand all winds.

Do we feel like we don’t where we are going, or what we are even supposed to be living for? Love for God and for our neighbor to the glory of God. Love must be why we wake up in the morning. Love is the aim of our faith, pursuit of virtue, or knowledge, self control, steadfastness, godliness, or brotherly affection. If I have prophetic powers, understand all mysteries, and give away all I have, but have not love, I am nothing.

3. Christian growth requires making every effort. Peter tells us to make every effort to increase our virtue by means of faith, and so on. Every effort. Elsewhere Paul talks about the Christian life as a race that we train for. Watching the Olympics is always so impressive. There was a show we watched a little bit of year or two ago that explored all the planning, effort, and training that went into being a gymnast. The families of these young women on the documentary spared no expense or effort to help them become the best gymnasts possible. They moved states, ended friendships, changed coaches, rearranged school, woke up early, went to bed late, changed their diet. They make every effort to gain a perishable crown — will we do that for an imperishable one?

The point of Peter saying this is not to say that we should stop sleeping and becoming imbalanced — growth is holistic, remember. The point is to say that growth in these qualities requires hard intentional work. In some spheres people call “making every effort” pharisaical legalism. Of course someone could be like the Pharisees, but that’s through pride and hypocrisy — not the intention to make every effort.

To make every effort in the coming year, we need to…

First, identify weaknesses and imbalances. Have we neglected part of the Christian life? Self-control? Brotherly affection? Moral excellence? Knowledge? Love? Making every effort means we are going to be honest and specific about what our weaknesses are. Let’s identify that today before we go to sleep.

Second, we need to make holistic plans — how are we going to address our weaknesses? If we just have a general plan to “grow in brotherly love” or “grow in self-control,” we’re not going to make it very far. Making every effort means making a specific plan about how we’re going to do that. But specific does not mean narrow-minded. If we consider these qualities in isolation, that will be less effective — we may seek to grow in steadfastness, but not understand the how or the why. So maybe we want to grow in brotherly affection and we’re going to start growing in that by having people in our home once per month, but maybe we need steadfastness to do that well in tough times. Or maybe we’re going to be accountable to a brother or sister so we can become more virtuous people, but we’re going to need to grow in brotherly affection to feel comfortable doing that. Or maybe we’re going to read this and pray in this way at this time to grow in knowledge, but that will require self-control, and we need to remember we’re doing this with love as the aim. Set specific goals. Write this out.

Third, we need to work hard and not quit when we fall short. Good intentions can make us feel good, but we have to follow through to become fruitful. Fruit isn’t born over night, but it’s done with patience. But, remember when you fall short that the foundation of our walk is faith in him, not in ourselves, our virtue, or our godliness. Falling short can be an opportunity to remember this and to recommit to growing, using all the resources he’s given us — his mercy, his word, his church.

Conclusion

You’ll wonder on January 2nd, why all this work and effort? We’ll talk more about that on January 1st. But for now, we must not forget that corruption is in the world because of sinful desire. The sickness, disability, and death of someone we fiercely love is because of sinful desires. And sin only opens the door for more confusion, shame, sickness, pain, death, blood, sweat, and tears. We make every effort because sinful desires take over our lives when these qualities are not our focused aim.

We have all been ensnared by sin and have all contributed to the corruption in the world. We may look at our hands and lives and wonder if it is beyond repair, hopeless. And suddenly, the false gospel of freedom from a future day of judgment can be very tempting to us. “Maybe we don’t have to feel guilt or shame, maybe this is just me not being merciful — wasn’t Christ merciful? Maybe sin’s not so bad.” But Satan’s trying to lure us in and take us captive. Sin is so serious it killed the Author of Life.

But God has granted us the promises that come with the true Gospel of King Jesus. He has promised that we can escape the corruption in the world. He promises to give us everything we need to lead godly lives. In short, he promises none of this — us making every effort — is in vain. He’s not asking us to prove we are perfectly virtuous or that we know everything. He’s asking that we make every effort. We can’t do this by looking inside ourselves and drawing from our own strength. We’re just going to get tired and fall on our faces if we do that. Unless the Lord builds the house it’s all vain. We can only persevere in making every effort when we do it by the strength Jesus supplies — and that strength is supplied by drawing near to him, listening to him, praying to him, worshipping him, receiving his body and blood in the supper, receiving his cleansing, his presence, and abiding in him. When we walk with him and his people, we come to know him more and he makes us better and better.

The question is simply not whether God cares about our growth in these qualities or whether we can or whether we have it in ourselves — we don’t! The question is whether we want to the freedom of being like Jesus more than we want the false freedom the world promises. The question is whether we’ll draw near to Jesus and make every effort.

Series: N/A

Service: Sun AM

Type: Sermon

Speaker: John Kilgore

Series: 2 Peter (Hastening the Day of God)

Service: Sun AM

Type: Sermon

Speaker: Scott Kercheville

In high school and college I worked at Sonic and later at Applebee’s. Everyone always found out that I was the kind of Christian that did not sleep around. And though some people admired that, it was more common for people to joke about it. “Do you really think God would send you to hell for that?” And I explained that God is merciful towards those who repent, but that I would indeed face hell if I went on practicing sin all the while presuming God would forgive me. In fact, Paul warns us in Ephesians 5 that some will try to deceive us about this, but we should be certain that the sexually immoral and the greedy have no inheritance in God’s kingdom. Somehow, this rarely made sense to others.

Why? Many in our world believe in a distorted version of God and Jesus - even in Christian spheres. He is powerful, he is never angry, he only has positive feelings, he is never jealous, he has bigger concerns than who we sleep with, he chuckles if he notices us going astray, and he’s all too ready to forgive even deliberate wickedness. He is all love. Certainly, in some circles, God is impersonal, petty, and merciless, which is absolutely wrong; but you can’t love, respect, or even fear a god with no backbone.

But this God and this Jesus isn’t coming to judge the world — in fact, there’s often no God-ordained end to history. The end is always and only personalized — everyone except Hitler will die and go to heaven to be with our loved ones. And because of that people become very permissive about sin — and whether we’re living in the first century or the 21st, sexual sin is specifically what people want to loosen the reigns on. In theory everyone agrees that the powerful shouldn’t hurt the weak, that substance abuse is harmful, that stealing and killing is wrong — but sensuality is innocent as long as its consensual. And because of this, impurity runs rampant. And similar mindsets have been creeping into   churches, making us wonder if maybe they are right. “You know, I think we have space to loosen up a bit on these standards for sexuality, divorce, and remarriage. Perfect purity isn’t possible. We’ve been so quick to cast stones, but who among us is without sin? In the end, God will be merciful to us. This obsessive vigilance is not the rest God’s trying to give us in Jesus.” In this environment we can genuinely wonder whether we can remain pure or whether God really cares that much about godliness in the end. “After all, the world has been spinning for a long time — I think if he was going to stop it for someone having a little fun or following their heart, he would have done it by now.”

There’s nothing new about these questions. As the time of Peter’s death drew near, this was precisely the environment he warned the churches would soon come. In light of this environment, we’re going to look at 2 Peter today and in the coming months as Peter reassures us that what the Lord, the prophets, and the apostles first testified is true.

First, consider in this age of doubt and mocking that … We have obtained a faith of equal standing. Have you ever played the game “Telephone”? When I was younger I played it with other teens at our church. Someone would coin some strange sentence and whisper it in the ear of the person next to them, who would then tell the next person, until everyone in the room had whispered what they think they have heard. By the time 15 people have had the responsibility of relaying it, this vital information has been mangled and is often almost unrecognizable.

Whether we are removed from Jesus’ life by thirty years or two thousand, it is easy at times to feel like we’re frauds, like Peter, Paul, and Jesus would not know us, like we are at the end of a long game of telephone and we have missed something big. And I’ll tell you, it’s possible for that to happen. That’s why it is important to keep reading the Scriptures, staying connected to the faithful church, and comparing the central tenants of our faith to the early Christians.

I’ll share with you that this telephone thing is something I fear a lot, especially over the past year. But I’ll also tell you that as I have reflected on this question, I am convinced of two things. (1) There are massive cultural differences between the world Abraham, David, and Peter lived in compared to ours — some of those are to be celebrated, and some of those are to be lamented. There’s no doubt there are a lot of differences between the church today and the church then. (2) But I am equally convinced that if we were to compare the spirit and faith behind the forms and practices of the early church with our church today, I truly believe we find a faith of equal standing. Our central beliefs in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and in the core truths of Jesus’ incarnation, life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, and our anticipation of the kingdom to come are what animated the apostles, the early church, and they animate us today.

Whether we’re talking about the quality of our faith or the quality of our core beliefs, we have obtained a faith of equal standing with Peter’s, with Paul’s, with the early Jerusalem church, with the churches of the dispersion, with the church of the early centuries, and with fathers of our faith a thousand years ago. And if that seems impossible to you, consider that those to whom Peter wrote had a faith of equal standing because of (vs. 1) “the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.” The game of telephone depends only on the ability of humans to pass on information, and earnest people will mess it up. But our “game of telephone” has been presided over by our righteous God and Savior Jesus Christ. Typically the Scriptures only wink and nod at who Jesus is through images and metaphors, but do you see the jarring way Peter refers to Jesus? He’s our God. Do we take Jesus Christ that seriously? We need to see him as our righteous God who will indeed ensure that the Church — though often afflicted with trials and heresies — really passes along the original faith.

We have obtained a faith of equal standing with Peter, the apostles, and the early church; so let’s dig deep roots in this faith. No matter what our doubts or trials are, the message and reality of our God and Savior Jesus Christ is what and who will keep us grounded.

Second, consider that in this age of doubt and mocking… We know God and Jesus our Lord (vs. 2, 3). For some reason, I have also lately been troubled by the fact that I have never spoken with our Lord Jesus face to face. I have not walked with him. Maybe you feel that way too at times. And we can start to think, “I don’t know him. I don’t know him at all.” Peter says later in chapter 1 that he knows he’ll die soon, and in that light he wants to make every effort to remind the church of things they must always remember. And here in verse 2 he prays that “grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.” And again in verse 3 he celebrates that “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence…” In this letter he will refer two more times to the ability to know our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

This may not be very big for you this morning, but for me it is right now. We have not yet seen God or Jesus our Lord, but we can know him, and one day we will see him. I’d like to read a substantial portion of John 17, right now, but simply consider verse 20, “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word.” In Peter’s final hours he was thinking about writing a final testimony to the truth, and in Jesus’ final hours before the cross, he was praying about you and me and how we’d come to believe in and know him through the testimony of the apostles. One day we’ll see Jesus’ glory, but we don’t yet, and that’s okay because the faith and knowledge God wants of us right now does not come by sight. And we have to trust him in that. And we need to get over this angst of not knowing him but not yet seeing him, because according to this passage, our knowledge of him means a lot. Notice three things that come from our knowledge of God and Jesus.

(vs. 1) Grace and peace are multiplied to us in the knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord. When we come to know God and as we come to know him more — with the kind of knowledge that is indeed possible without seeing him — the gift of his favor and peace come to us.

(vs. 2) Through the knowledge of him, his divine power grants us everything we need for godly living. Maybe the corruption of the world that has you discouraged. Maybe the way Satan has gotten ahold of many in the church has gotten you down. Maybe it’s both. And maybe your moral failures have discouraged you too. Don’t listen to Satan or the world or churches that are worldly. When we know God and our Lord Jesus, that allows us to access his divine power that grants us all things that pertain to life and godliness — everything we need to live godly lives. He’s cleansed us. He’s given us his Spirit. The Spirit that was at work in Jesus’ resurrection is at work in us. And his grace and peace are multiplied to us in the knowledge of him as we pursue that godly living. You know God and godly living is possible.

(vs. 4) By knowledge of God and Jesus, great promises are granted to us that we might partake in the divine nature and escape the world’s corruption. What is most troubling about this libertine attitude where God has bigger fish to fry than being concerned about our morality, where he isn’t going to judge the world, and where sin is not that big of a problem is it does not account for the weightiness of God’s purposes for our existence nor for the horrors of what sin has actually done to us and to the world.

Is there anyone dead right now that you miss? Is there anyone sick right now where it’s just breaking your heart? How’s your body doing? Is there decay in the world that’s troubling to you? Peter says corruption is in the world because of sinful desire. It’s easy to hear that and then move on and continue to separate those two things in our minds — sinful desire and the corruption of the world. Maybe we operate thinking “The world and our bodies are just falling apart because they wasn’t meant to last forever, it’s just the way the world is, everything gets old and dies.” But that’s not just the way the world is or the way our bodies are — it’s the way they have become because of sin. It has transformed the very physical, biological, and chemical processes by which our world works. And if we need to remember how different the world is supposed to be, remember when Jesus healed all manner of diseased people. In what sort of world does something clean touch something dirty and the cleanness, health, and perfection rubs off on those who are diseased and dirty? That’s what happens when God’s in the world, but corruption is what happens in a world with sinful desires that pushes God out.

And that very corruption touches us. Sin’s not a big deal? We’re broken and we’ll die because of sinful desire. But, what Peter says here is that through knowledge of God, he’s granted us precious and very great promises that through them we may become partakers of the divine nature — escaping the corruption in the world through sinful desire. God made us in his image and  that means a more than the simple fact of us having a conscience. It signals his intention to share his authority with us, to rule through us as his representatives, to share his own eternal life and perfect nature with us. Our image-bearing ability has been marred by sin, but he’s made very great and precious promises to restore that through our knowledge of him.

So, Genesis speaks of us as the image of God. Peter speaks of us sharing in the divine nature. Paul in Romans and Galatians speak of us becoming sons of God through the Spirit. He also speaks in 2 Corinthians of how, similar to how Moses’ face shone, we behold the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into his image. Jesus speaks in John of how we can abide in the Father and the Son and of how the Father, Son, and Spirit make their home in us. And I’d suggest that the goal of this could be summed up as God’s plan for us to share in the divine nature. Throughout Christian history various theologians have tried to sum this all up. Athenasius said, “God became man that man might become gods.” I don’t know that I’d say it quite like that, but I like how it catches our attention. C.S. Lewis said, “The Son of God became man that man might become sons of God.” God has “immutable” characteristics that make Yahweh uniquely God. We will never be all powerful and no one tries to suggest that we actually become God as he is God, but to emphasize that God is lifting us up to share in his perfect, holy nature so we can reign in him and with him eternally.

When we are living in the zone of “God has greater concerns than my behavior,” we are stripping the world and our existence of all weight and opting to mess around with behaviors that will enslave us and make act like irrational animals (2 Pet. 2). But the Divine One shared in our humanity that humanity might share in his divinity.

Conclusion

Are you wearied by sin? by mockers? Has it led you to doubt whether godliness is really possible? Whether God really cares? Or if he just has more important things to focus on than our godliness. May these verses be an emergency antidote to say, “by no means!” He cares so much about our ability to live godly lives that he has granted to us everything we need to do it — and at great cost to himself. Jesus shared in our humanity forever that we might share a portion of his divinity forever.

And this is all possible by knowing God and our Lord Jesus. Will we press this week into knowing him? And from discovering all the resources and power that comes from living life in him and from inviting him to live in us?

Series: Running With Giants

Service: Sun AM

Type: Sermon

Speaker: John Kilgore

Series: N/A

Service: Sun AM

Type: Sermon

Speaker: John Kilgore

Series: N/A

Service: Sun AM

Type: Sermon

Speaker: John Kilgore

Series: Running With Giants

Service: Sun AM

Type: Sermon

Speaker: John Kilgore