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Peter concludes his message with a final word of encouragement: Jesus is coming back

There are a lot of spiritual options out there, but not all of them are for our good. In this passage Peter lays out several “warning signs” to help us identify dangerous teachings and false paths in a world of multitudinous options.

There has been a lot of debate about the Bible and its reliability over the past two hundred years, but what Peter makes clear is that everything we have heard about Jesus is trustworthy because it came from God through eyewitnesses.

How do we grow spiritually? That is a question that both Christians and non-Christians have asked themselves down through the centuries. Today’s bookstores are filled with self-help manuals and transformation books that promise to help us become more peaceful and purposeful than every before. But Peter offers us a better way. He says that if you want to grow spiritually, then it means being formed in a relationship with the God who loves you and invites you to become more like Him. By being with Him we become more like Him, with our virtues growing as the fruit of our faith. Peter’s invitation is to once more get to know Jesus who, by his divine power, “has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness”

The last conversation that we have between Jesus and Peter takes place shortly after the Resurrection. Jesus takes Peter aside and restores him to his calling by reminding him of what it truly means to love Him; it means serving and caring for His people. Our love for Jesus is meant to overflow into how we love and serve others. This is the mark of a truly Christian life; we love the way Christ first loved us.

Peter closes his letter with wise words for both leaders and followers. In a world where high-powered leaders and self-made influencers have taken center stage, Peter calls on leaders of the church to be humble and to serve their people the way that Christ has served them.

Too often we look for comfort in the physical pleasures and pursuits of this world, but Peter is pretty clear that this is a road to nowhere.

Suffering is one of those things that Christians not only will experience, but should come to expect. And for Peter’s audience, this was a very real thing as they were facing persecution at the hands of Rome. But what Peter calls them to is a hopeful witness in the face of suffering, using both their words and their deeds (vv.15-16) to point people to the hope that we have in Christ.

The church has always had a sticky relationship with politics. To those outside the church, it often appears like Christians are just the tools of a political party, adding holy sound bites to someone else’s political agenda. On the flip side, there are many inside the church who have taken an increasingly adversarial posture toward government and politics. So which is it?