After more than a year and forty-one sermons, Pastor Jim Osman closes out the book of 2 Peter with the two exhortations that summarize everything Peter wanted his readers to hear.

In this final message on 2 Peter 3:17-18, Osman shows that if believers are to remain stable in the gospel, they must diligently heed two closing commands. Guard against error. Grow in truth. Osman opens with a sobering, real-world example of how easily false teaching slips into a church under the banner of spiritual formation, a reminder that Peter's warnings are just as urgent now as in the first century.

Osman then works through both commands. To guard means standing watch the way a shepherd watches his flock, alert to wolves who would carry believers away from their steadfastness. To grow means pursuing the grace and knowledge of Christ as an ongoing responsibility, not a plateau reached and left behind. False teachers cannot take away a believer's salvation, Osman notes, but they can rob believers of fruitfulness, stability, and reward.

This final sermon brings the epistle full circle, back to Peter's promise that believers already have everything they need for life and godliness, and closes the series with a clear charge: guard, and grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ.

Scripture is the anchor. Everything else is drift.

In this exposition of 2 Peter 3:15-16, Pastor Jim Osman shows that Peter points his readers back to the Word of God as the foundation of their spiritual stability, even as he closes his letter with a warning about those who distort it.

Osman traces Peter's affectionate reference to the apostle Paul and unpacks what it reveals about how the apostles viewed their own writings. Peter treats Paul's letters as Scripture itself, on par with the Old Testament prophets, offering a striking answer to modern claims that the canon of Scripture was invented centuries after the apostles died.

Osman then turns to the false teachers Peter describes as untaught and unstable, men who take up teaching before they have ever been taught, and who twist the hard sayings of Scripture to their own destruction. Osman traces this same pattern into the present day, showing how quickly untested voices are handed platforms and influence in the modern church.

This sermon is a sober call to root your life in the Word of God rather than the shifting winds of religious fads and untested teachers. Your stability, your fruitfulness, and your faithfulness all rise or fall with what you do with Scripture.

Christ could return at any moment. So how should that truth shape the way you live today?

In this exposition of 2 Peter 3:14-15, Pastor Jim Osman shows that Peter calls believers to two things as they wait for the Lord's coming: live blamelessly and think evangelistically.

Osman traces Peter's repeated call to diligence, first raised in chapter 1 and now returning in these closing verses. Holiness does not happen by accident. It requires effort, pursued through the Spirit's power, not apart from it. When Christ returns, everything will be exposed. The fakes and frauds will be revealed, but so will the quiet, faithful saints whose lives have been marked by genuine spotlessness and blamelessness rather than the stains and blemishes that marked the false teachers in chapter 2.

Osman then turns to verse 15, where Peter tells us to regard the Lord's patience as salvation. That patience is not slowness or delay. It is an open door, a call to repentance for the unbeliever and an opportunity for the Christian to proclaim the Gospel while there is still time.

This sermon is a sober and hope filled reminder that waiting for Christ's return is never passive. It is a call to holy living and faithful witness, lived out with confidence in the God who keeps every promise.

Will there be pets in heaven? Will people recognize each other? A recent Q&A with fifth and sixth graders raised these very questions, and Pastor Jim Osman uses them as the doorway into one of Scripture's richest promises: the new heavens and the new earth.

Continuing the exposition of 2 Peter 3:13, Osman traces this promise back to its source in Isaiah 65 and 66, then unpacks a question every believer eventually asks. What is the relationship between this present creation and the one to come? Will God erase this world entirely, or will He renew it?

Using the analogy of Noah's flood, the caterpillar's transformation into a butterfly, and the connection Paul draws between our bodily resurrection and creation's own longing in Romans 8, Osman shows that the new earth will be this earth, resurrected, redeemed, and freed from every trace of sin. Every good gift we treasure now will remain, purified of sin's corruption, while a serious gospel appeal is offered for anyone who does not yet possess the righteousness required to enter that place.

This episode gives listeners a clear, biblically grounded picture of their eternal home and why that hope should shape how they live today.

The coming destruction of the present creation is not just a doctrine to believe—it's a call to live differently. In this expository sermon from 2 Peter 3:11–12, Pastor Jim Osman draws out the practical weight of Peter's eschatological teaching and presses it into the conscience of every believer.

Peter's concluding exhortations are clear: those who genuinely believe Christ will return are marked by it. First, they are a holy people—set apart in conduct and godliness, fitted for a new creation in which only righteousness dwells. Osman unpacks what that means practically, showing that holiness is not merely a positional reality but a moral pursuit, one that grace both demands and provides.

Second, they are a hastening people—those who long for and actively work toward the coming of the day of God. Osman addresses the apparent tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility head-on. The day is fixed on God's calendar; yet Scripture calls believers to hasten it through holy living, faithful gospel proclamation, and earnest prayer. These are not contradictions—they are the two sides of the same sovereign purpose.

If Christ is returning, and Peter insists He is, the only question left is: what kind of people ought we to be?

Two thousand years feels like a long time to wait. Jim Osman says that's exactly the point.

Continuing through 2 Peter 3, Osman tackles the mockers' challenge in verse 4: where is the promise of His coming? Peter's answer comes in two parts, and this sermon focuses on the second: God's patience. Osman walks through what that patience actually means, tracing it back through Exodus, Isaiah, and the Psalms to show that the Old Testament's "slow to anger" God and the New Testament's patient Father are the same God, not two different ones.

He works carefully through the Greek behind "slow" in verse 9, distinguishing tardiness from sovereign timing, and uses Habakkuk's own wrestling with delay as a parallel. Then comes the heart of the message: who exactly is God being patient toward? Osman pushes back against a popular reading of "not willing for any to perish," arguing from context that Peter is addressing God's own people, the elect not yet gathered in, not the whole world indiscriminately.

The sermon closes with four practical encouragements, including a direct word to anyone listening who has yet to repent. This episode offers a clear, doctrinally grounded answer to anyone wondering why God seems to be taking so long.

The mockers had a question: Where is the promise of His coming? Time had passed. Apostles had died. Nothing had changed. Pastor Jim Osman addresses that question head-on as he works through 2 Peter 3:8 — and the answer is as pointed today as it was in the first century.

God does not experience time as we do. He is not encumbered by it, constrained by it, or running out of it. He meets no deadlines, feels no urgency, and is exhausted by no length of years. A literal thousand years is to Him what a single day is to us — not because time is vague or undefined, but because He is eternal and we are not. The delay in Christ's return is no evidence of a failed promise. It is simply a reflection of the unbridgeable difference between the eternal God and creatures made of dust.

Drawing from Psalm 90 and Peter's deliberate use of its language, Pastor Osman traces what God's relationship to time actually means for the church — and what it does not mean. He corrects three common misuses of this verse: as an argument for long creation days in Genesis 1, as a framework for end-times chronology, and as a basis for treating the thousand years of Revelation 20 as figurative.

The point stands: time has no bearing on the fulfillment of God's Word. His return remains imminent. The only question is whether we are found watching.

Climate alarmists have been predicting the end of the world for decades—and getting it entirely wrong. Pastor Jim Osman opens this exposition of 2 Peter 3:7 and 10 by showing why: they begin with the wrong assumptions. God has already revealed how this world ends, and it has nothing to do with carbon footprints or melting ice caps.

Peter's answer to the false teachers who denied the return of Christ rests on three characteristics of the coming Day of the Lord. It is certain—God's Word that created the world and judged it by water is the same Word that now reserves it for fire. The present creation stands only because God wills it to stand. When that will changes, it will be instant.

It is unexpected—arriving like a thief in the night. Just as the generation of Noah kept eating, drinking, and going about their lives right up until the flood came, unbelievers will be caught entirely off guard when the Son of Man returns. Believers, by contrast, are called to live in anticipation of that day, not dread of it.

And it will be thorough. The heavens will pass away with a roar—a Greek word Peter chose because it captures the sound of arrows, crackling flames, and rushing water all at once. The elements themselves will be consumed. Everything will be laid bare before God, with nowhere left to hide.

For the believer, this is not a day to fear. Christ has already absorbed the wrath. On the other side of judgment is a new creation—new heavens, new earth, and righteousness dwelling there forever.

The false teachers of Peter's day had a simple argument: things have always continued as they are, so there is no reason to expect a cataclysmic divine judgment in the future. Pastor Jim Osman works through 2 Peter 3:5-6 to show how Peter dismantles that argument—not by predicting the future, but by pointing to the past.

Peter's first move is to expose the nature of the false teachers' error. They are not simply uninformed. They willfully overlook what they already know. God displayed His power in creation, speaking the heavens and earth into existence by His Word alone. That same Word sustains all things in being—which means the stability of creation is not evidence that God cannot intervene, but that He has chosen not to yet.

Osman draws four lessons from the creation account: God created by divine fiat, God is entirely separate from and not subject to His creation, creation exists only by His will, and Christ Himself holds all things together by the word of His power. Remove His sustaining will and everything ceases to exist.

The flood then becomes the decisive counterexample. Peter points to a worldwide, catastrophic judgment that already happened—one that used the very same water present at creation. If God judged the ancient world by water, the present world is reserved for fire. The evidence of that past judgment is visible everywhere, Osman argues, for those willing to see it.

For believers, there is refuge from the coming wrath—in Christ alone, who bore it fully.

Peter warned the church that mockers would come. Pastor Jim Osman works through 2 Peter 3:1-4, examining the identity, motive, and arguments of those who deny the return of Christ—and why their denial is never as innocent as it appears.

Two thousand years have passed since the promise was made. That passage of time is precisely what the mockers weaponize. Their question—"Where is the promise of His coming?"—is not a sincere inquiry. It is a denial dressed up as a question, a pattern Osman traces through Jeremiah, the Psalms, and Malachi. When mockers ask "where is," they are not looking for an answer. They are dismissing the promise altogether.

Peter exposes their motive as well as their argument. These men follow after their own lusts, and the connection between their sensuality and their denial of Christ's return is deliberate. Deny the coming of Christ, and you deny the coming judgment. Deny the coming judgment, and there is nothing left to restrain the flesh. Osman draws out three strands of this connection: the removal of accountability, the loss of a purifying hope, and the implicit denial of bodily resurrection.

The mockers also argue from uniformitarianism—the assumption that because nothing has changed, nothing will. Osman dismantles this philosophy, shows its influence on secular science, and points to the flood as evidence that God has already intervened catastrophically once before.

False teachers are not a surprise. They are a sign. Their presence confirms that the last days are here—and that the Lord is still coming.