The Book We Live In 2 Peter 1:3-7

The Sufficiency of Scripture and the Call to Live It

This is a question that Christians ask all the time. What is God's will for my life? What people typically mean by this is, where is He going to send me? What college am I going to go to? What career am I going to pursue?

Who am I going to marry? How many kids am I going to have? Where are we going to live? These are good questions to ask. And there is biblical instruction that helps us answer these big questions in our lives.

But most of the focus of Scripture is not on this. We are not to spend most of our time seeking to answer the question, where am I to go next? Or what am I going to do in the future? But rather, the Lord wants us to know what He has already revealed to us in Scripture.

What I mentioned before is His will of direction. What I am mentioning now is known as His revealed will. He wants us to know what He has said so that we will live it. One thing I have thought much about lately is that intellectual knowledge concerning the things of God revealed in Scripture doesn't equal spiritual maturity.

You have met people like this, and I have met people like this, where a man or a woman knows a lot about the Bible. They would be a master at trivial pursuit.

When it comes to Scripture.

But this person is unpleasant to be around. These people know the Bible intellectually, but it doesn't penetrate to their hearts in order to transform them. James 1, verses 22 -24 warns against this. Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.

So the Lord wants us to know the word, yes. But much more, He wants what we read in the pages of Scripture to transform our hearts so that we live lives that are glorifying to Him. This needs to be our focus.

We learn the word in order to live the word. Now this morning we are going to jump into the body of 2 Peter, I should say, Peter's second letter, where Peter explains to us the source of our faith and how we are to approach each day as we live on the earth.

So this time I encourage you to turn in a Bible with me there. And if you don't have a Bible, we do have the red Bibles. This sermon is titled, The Book We Live In. And we're going to begin by reading the text.

2 Peter 1, verses 3 -7. 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, by which He has granted to us His precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.

For this very reason make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love.

We'll stop right there.

God's Divine Power, Spiritual Life, and the Sufficiency of Scripture

Here's our big idea,.

What this text and what this sermon is calling you to do. Pursue God's holy will for your life. We're going to see three practices how in this text. But before we jump in and take a close look at this, let me tell you where we have been.

One week ago, we introduced the letter of 2 Peter. And what I explained is that the apostle Peter is the author of this letter and he wrote to Christians broadly. It is believed that he wrote this letter not long before his death, as church history records, that Peter was martyred at the hands of Nero in about 67 or 68 A .D.

Like all New Testament books, he had the return of Christ in mind, but he also understood that there would be a delay to Christ's return. And in his delay, false teachers would rise up, desiring to lead people away from Christ.

So what Peter does in this letter is he warns believers about these people and this is not his only focus. But he also covers much more as we will see over the next few months. Now we've already read the text and introduced it, but now we're going to zero in on it.

I'm going to begin by zeroing in on verse 3 and the beginning of verse 4 where Peter once again says, 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, by which He has granted to us His precious and very great promises.

What we see at the beginning of verse 3 is that Peter describes the power of God. Through God's infinite power, He has accomplished much on our behalf. It is through God the Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, that true power comes.

His divine power enables us to have two wonderful gifts, as Peter mentions in verse 3. Life and godliness. Now at this time, there are about 8 billion people who live on planet Earth, who have blood flowing through their veins, to their cells, who take in oxygen.

So in other words, they're alive. We call this life. This planet is full of life. Humans, animals, plants, even things we don't like, like bacteria and viruses. But there is a different life that people have all over the Earth right now, and it is a minority of people.

And that is spiritual life. This is what Peter is talking about here. Through God's power, accomplished in Jesus Christ, we have spiritual life. This is what Peter is talking about here. This is the spiritual life that Jesus described to Nicodemus in John 3, when he told Nicodemus, you must be what?

Born again. We come into this life dead in our sins, estranged from God, and deserving of punishment. Apart from Christ, we don't have eternal life, but we have the opposite, eternal death. But it is God who gives life.

And he accomplished this through Christ when he went to the cross, died for our sins, and was gloriously raised from the dead. Anyone who believes in Jesus has one's sins forgiven, and you receive the Holy Spirit.

Another way to say this is, you have spiritual life. John says this, the Apostle John, in the Gospel of John, he doesn't describe life as just some future thing,.

Like, yeah, we're going to go to heaven.

In the future. Well, that's true. It's now. John 17, 3. And this is eternal life, that you know the only true God in Jesus Christ, whom he has sent. You have eternal life now if you have Christ. You have a relationship with the one who created you.

Think about how sad it is to think that many people don't have a relationship with their Creator. To not have a relationship with the Creator is a miserable experience. In Him, you are joyful, secure, and fulfilled.

Without Him, you are sad, insecure, and unfulfilled. When Peter says in verse 3, the word granted, this spiritual life that comes from God's power, is a gift given to those who believe. As Peter says in the second half of verse 3, this gift of life and godliness happens through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence.

When you come to faith in Christ, you are being called to His own glory and excellence. This is how one author explains this. Believers are called to live in harmony with God's own moral character. The word excellence in Greek was used by Greek writers to describe the sum of all desirable qualities.

When you come to God through Christ, you're not throwing your life away. You're actually gaining life. You truly experience excellence. The world will say this is too rigid. But it is only through God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ that true excellence can be achieved.

We have the Olympics coming up this summer. It's this monumental gathering of all these athletes, the best athletes in the world, all coming to one place, to Paris, to compete.

It takes excellence.

To reach that level. But the greatest excellence there is in this world is do you know Christ? Are you being transformed by Him? That's the excellence that matters. In fact, we have a former professional athlete coming to our church on May 4th, David Wheaton.

At one time, David Wheaton was ranked number 13th in the world in tennis, as a tennis player. He actually beat Andre Agassiz to make it to the semifinals in Wimbledon. He knows what excellence is like to reach those heights.

But he's a follower of Christ and he would be the first to tell you the greatest excellence there is is not being a world champion tennis player. It's being a follower of Jesus Christ. It's being transformed by Him.

That's what matters. The Lord has called us to glory and excellence. He has given us life and godliness through His precious and very great promises. We know how to have a relationship with God and how to live a godly life through what?

This book.

God's Holy Word. Or as Peter calls it, His precious and very great promises. The Bible tells us everything we need to know in order to live the life of faith. This is called the sufficiency of Scripture.

There's a reason we only preach this book. Every Sunday I've been up here, there's only one book that we ever preach from. Or we ever will preach from. It's this book. This book alone is the Word of God.

No other book God has written. In order to follow the Lord, this is the book we need to know. Think about someone who's going to be a physician. That person is going to read lots of books on anatomy, diseases, medicine, and general wellness for the human body.

They're going to read books about how to perform surgeries. Think about someone who's going to be a lawyer. They're going to read books on what the law says since they need to know the law. They also need to be trained in how to present a case in order to prosecute or defend.

Think about a modern day politician. They have to read a book on how to be corrupt.

No, I'm kidding.

It's almost like there's a school in this. They're actually very good at it too. While the Bible does talk much about justice, and we know the standard of justice through the Bible, to know the ins and outs of the law of the land and the laws in different states, lawyers need to go beyond what the Bible says to know these things.

Think about someone who works in finance. They need to be a good math student. The Bible isn't a math textbook. The person in finance will have to read other books. Let me ask you this question. Do we need to read other books to know how to live the life of faith?

The answer is no. Now you may be wondering, aren't there Christian books? Yes. Don't we have books in our library downstairs? Yes. But those books are only as good if they point us to this book. The only good books, Christian books, are the ones that actually help us understand the Bible better.

So yeah, there are good books that help us understand.

The Bible better,.

But we only need the Word of God to know how to live the life of faith. And that's my job as a pastor. It isn't to tell you something that the Bible doesn't say. It is to bring out what the Bible says.

We need to live in the Bible because our very life depends on it. The Bible tells us how to be saved and the Bible tells us how to be victorious in the life of faith. Nineteenth century Baptist pastor Charles Spurgeon, he's the most famous Baptist pastor there's ever been.

He said this,.

Visit many books, but live in the Bible. Visit many books, but live in the Bible. This is very important for us to understand. Spurgeon also said, by the way, that if you see a Bible that's torn, it means the life of the person is not torn.

Very true. This is very important for us to understand. The Bible is fully sufficient for the life of faith. But let me tell you this about much of American evangelicalism. Do they believe what I just said?

They will say yes, but their actions show otherwise. Why do Christians borrow so much from secular psychology? As if we have to go to the secular world to learn about the human heart and the solutions to the problems of the human heart.

Sigmund Freud is not going to help us understand the problems of the human heart and the solutions to it. We also saw the low view of the Bible over the past few years in America. Evangelicalism with the woke movement.

We heard so-called Christian leaders say we are learning things, studying critical race theory. They didn't study critical race theory to refute critical race theory. They studied critical race theory to learn things about race.

But critical race theory is itself inherently racist because it puts people in categories just because of your skin color. We can't learn from Karl Marx how to address the issues of partiality, which is the biblical term, in our society.

We go to the Bible.

To learn these things because the Bible addresses it sufficiently, fully. We don't learn from evil people how to understand the Bible better and how to live the life of faith. If you think about Karl Marx,.

By the way,.

He made such a great impact on people's lives that nine people came to his funeral.

Think about that.

Nine.

He couldn't even hit double figures. Nine people came to his funeral. But you know who liked him a lot? Satan did. And he took his work and he spread it wherever he went. And if you want to understand American society, understand Karl Marx because that's what we live in.

And the church loves him too. They'll never say that, but they do. So the Bible tells us everything we need to know to live the life of faith. Think about your life. You face problems on a weekly basis.

Where do you go to? If you're sick, you go to the doctor. But if your heart is sick, you go to the Bible. If you know someone whose heart is sick, you send them to the Bible. It tells us what we need to know because in it, and in it alone, we are given life and godliness, as Peter says here.

Through his great promises, his precious promises, we are given life and godliness. So pursue God's holy will for your life. And the first practice, how? Is by knowing that God's word is sufficient. The second practice, how?

You are to pursue God's holy will for your life is by reflecting God's character as you live his word.

Partaking of the Divine Nature by Reflecting God's Character

And we'll see this.

In the second half of verse 4 where Peter writes,. So that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.

So what Peter writes here is that through this, through what? We're going to answer that here. You become partakers of the divine nature. So through them, what is the them? The them is his precious and very great promises that we just read about.

This is the word of God. The Bible from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation. Now when Peter says that we can participate in the divine nature, some have taken this in a strange direction.

In early church history, some using this verse have said that we can become little gods. In fact, the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Teaches this,.

That we as humans can become like deity. Certainly not at the level of God, but a lower deity. This kind of talk is frightening.

It's heretical.

None of us should ever be called little gods. We are humans created in the image of God, and there is only one who we call God. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So when Peter says we can become partakers of the divine nature, we need to understand.

He's not saying this heretical statement that we can become little gods where some misunderstand this and run with it. What Peter says here is not rocket science. He is saying that through understanding, through meditating on the promises of God, we can become partakers of the divine nature.

What this means.

Is that as we read.

The Word of God, and it takes hold deep in our hearts, we begin to reflect God's nature. We become like the Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Listen to what Jesus said in John 14 .23.

If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. I'm sure you've read that before, but isn't that amazing? He makes a home with us when we come to faith in Him.

When we learn the Word of God, letting it transform us, which means that we love the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And we're able to obey through the power of the Spirit. What happens is that we share a home with the Trinity.

We share in this sweet fellowship. A fellowship the world knows nothing of. This is what Peter is saying at the end of verse 4. He writes that we share in this fellowship with God, and as we do this, we escape from the corruption that is in the world caused by sinful desire.

When you look at the world,.

There's all these problems.

All over the world.

It's almost too hard to explain. I mean, it's so complex. There's so much sin out there. And people always talk about all the problems on the outside. But all the problems on the outside come from the inside.

It comes from a sinful human heart. And as sinners are unleashed on this world, look at all the problems they cause. People say, why is there more crime in this city than in the country? Well, there's more sinners there.

You put lots of sinners in one place, bad things are going to happen. Look at what happened with the Tower of Babel. And God spread them all over the earth. So we just need to spread people out because there's so much sin.

All over the world.

But this is what we experience. The world is corrupt because of sinful desire. It's because of sinful human hearts. What sin does is it leads people away from participating in the divine nature. You can see this in the Garden of Eden.

Before Adam and Eve sinned, they enjoyed sweet fellowship with God. They had no needs. They were satisfied. After they sinned, their relationship with God was broken and they were ejected out of the Garden.

It is only through Christ that this relationship between God and humans can be restored. As we meditate on the Word of God, as we live out its instruction, we participate in the divine nature, which means that we enjoy fellowship with God and we reflect His holy character.

But the problem happens when we don't live out our faith. In one sense, you always share in the fellowship if you have a relationship with Christ. In another sense, when we sin, our relationship with God is somewhat fractured.

This is why we need to be confessing our sins regularly to the Lord and growing. 1 John 1 .9 says, If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

That verse isn't about conversion. That verse is written to Christians that we have that pattern of life of confession. As we pursue God, we need to acknowledge our sins before Him. The Lord appreciates this honesty.

One important aspect of our growth in reflecting God's character is confessing our sins and pursuing His holy will. Instead of pursuing the corruption in the world caused by sinful desires, as Peter writes in verse 4, we pursue holiness.

We become partakers in the divine nature as we learn and live out His very great and precious promises. This is His calling on our lives. He calls us to reflect Him more and more. This must be the main focus of our lives, to reflect Him.

We are here to think, talk, and act like Jesus. And this only comes through being hearers of the Word and doers of the Word. So pursue God's holy will for your life. And the second practice how is by reflecting God's character as you live His Word.

Increasing in Godliness by Discipline and Christian Virtue

And here's the third and final practice how you are to pursue God's holy will for your life. And that is through increasing in godliness day by day through discipline. Increasing in godliness day by day through discipline.

We get to the portion where Peter gets practical in verses 5 -7 where he once again writes, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love.

In the previous point, Peter made the call for us to become partakers of the divine nature. First and foremost, we become partakers of the divine nature by believing in Jesus Christ as our Lord, Savior, and treasure.

Once you come to faith in Christ, then you have a relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit that can never be severed. We demonstrate our participation in the divine nature by reflecting His holy will.

But what we must understand, as Peter makes clear here, is that this doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't just happen. It comes through effort. Peter says, make every effort in the beginning of verse 5.

What Peter means by this is a life of full devotion to Christ. While it is important to emphasize that our standing with Christ happens in a moment, that's what we call justification, you believe in Christ, His righteousness becomes your righteousness as He took your sins upon Him when He died on the cross.

That's a one-time event when you believe. What we must understand is that God's plan for us is our sanctification. So there's justification, which is a one-time event, and then there's sanctification, which is a process, a lifelong process.

His will for us is that over time we become more like Him day by day. To become more like Him day by day takes effort. It is a team effort between you and the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

There are several verses in the New Testament that describe this effort between you and the Holy Spirit. One of them is 1 Corinthians 15 .10. The Apostle Paul wrote, By the grace of God, I am what I am.

And His grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them. Though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Did you hear that? I worked harder than any of them.

But it wasn't me. It was God working through me. Colossians 1, verses 20 -29 Paul wrote, Him we proclaim, warning everyone, and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

Well, how is this going to happen? For this I toil, struggling with all His energy that He powerfully works within me. Romans 8 .13 I quote this one I think every Sunday, but here we go again. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body,.

You will live.

How does this happen?

By the Spirit.

The Spirit does work.

You do work.

It's a team effort. As the Spirit lives in you, He is going to point you to follow His holy will. He knows the sin that is in you that needs to be removed, and the holiness that needs to take its place.

What Peter gives us here in verses 5 -7 is his own version of the fruit of the Spirit that we read this morning in Galatians 5, verses 22 -23. Some of the kids probably know this. The fruit of the Spirit is what?

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control. There's no law written against these. You do these things. It's a joy to do them. We do them and we're happy and the Lord is pleased.

But let's look at Peter's list. He lists faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, and love. He lists eight qualities that are to be found and increasing in believers in Christ.

The first one is faith. It isn't by accident that he lists this one first. We have faith in the Lord and then holiness flows from true faith. Mere intellectual knowledge isn't true faith. Satan believes there's one God.

Satan believes that Jesus is the only way. No, he's not going to tell people that, but he believes it. He knows it's true. He's not saved, though. Far from it. He's the most evil creature there is. Mere intellectual knowledge doesn't save anybody.

True faith always involves a transformed heart. Someone who believes it deep in their heart. And part of that is you love it. You love what Christ has done. You love who he is. True faith always involves holy action.

Hebrews 11 .6 says, without faith, it is impossible to please God. We must trust Him in order to please Him. We must put ourselves out there for Him, trusting that He is going to accomplish His purposes through us.

Faith is trusting that He is going to catch you when you go out on a limb. There are so many ways we can show faith in our lives. We are not to worry. We are to have courage. We are to trust that in His power, we can defeat sins in our lives that sometimes feel impossible to defeat.

Some of you have struggled with sins and you've experienced the deliverance from that. And you realize, He did that in me. And how amazing that is. We need to have faith that He will do it. That He will do great things in us and through us.

Then Peter lists virtue. What is virtue? It isn't one specific quality, but all the qualities of moral character put together. As one author writes, the word virtue was used by Greek writers to describe the sum of all desirable qualities.

A synonym for this Greek word is excellence. A virtuous person is one where people look at this person and admire him or her because all around this is a wonderful man or woman of God. But at the root of virtue is faith.

As we trust in the Lord and our salvation and in the details of our lives, what will also increase is our virtue. Then he writes that we are to supplement or add knowledge. This means that we need to continue to grow in our understanding of the Scriptures.

When the Scripture talks about knowledge, it always has in mind applying the truth of Scripture to our lives. The knowledge always involves action. It always involves transformation. As one of my pastor friends has said, the goal of information is transformation.

We don't measure our Christian maturity by showing how much of the Bible we know. But our Christian maturity is measured by how much we live out what we know. And let me say that again. Christian maturity is measured by how much we live out what we know.

At the final judgment, Jesus isn't going to say, man, you really know that Bible well. He's going to say, you lived it out. Well done, good and faithful servant. A servant is one who acts, one who does things.

I can't tell you how many theologians I know who I don't want to have lunch with because they're miserable people. You can parse a Greek word and you can parse a Hebrew word and you know the ins and outs of church history, but I don't see the Spirit flowing through you.

Sometimes they call seminaries cemeteries because it's like a dead place. It's a place where people go to die. And you have to survive, and thankfully I did. It wasn't all bad, but it's true. Mere intellectual knowledge is dangerous.

It's meant to transform us. I know people who don't really know the ins and outs of theology and they can never parse a Greek word if their life depended on it and they don't know Hebrew and they don't know church history very well.

And I'm not saying that, again, knowing those things is good, right? I'm not saying, please understand, I'm not saying don't ever know those things. But they do what the Lord says. They do know the Bible.

They do live it out. And they're doing great things for the Lord. And that's what matters. That's what matters. And that's what we need to hear. Then Peter writes that we are to supplement self-control.

Understanding the meaning of self-control is easy. It is to control oneself. Without the Holy Spirit in our lives, we have little to no self-control. Look at how the world lives. They say curse words in just about every sentence spoken.

They drink excessive alcohol. They do drugs. They overeat. They're lazy. They gossip and slander without even thinking about it. They have intimacy with someone, not one spouse. This is how the world lives.

Let's just do what we want, when we want. But Christians are not to live this way. As Peter writes back in verse 4, we are not to go after the corruption that is in the world that comes from sinful desire.

We are not to pursue sinful desires, but holy desires, which come from the prompting of the Holy Spirit living within you. Because the Holy Spirit is within you, you have the ability to say no to sin.

You have what Peter and other Biblical writers call self-control. Then Peter writes that you are to add steadfastness. Another word for steadfastness is perseverance. One amazing reality of Scripture is that once the Holy Spirit enters you, he will never leave you.

Philippians 1 .6 says that I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus. We saw Peter describe this in his first letter in 1 Peter 1 .5, that you are being guarded by God's power for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

So if you truly belong to Jesus, you will persevere. But this perseverance is shown in its full effect when you make the effort to grow in your walk with the Lord. And if we are honest, we as Christians can become complacent.

We can go through the motions. We can be content not growing in our walk with the Lord. Growth takes effort. It takes perseverance in fighting the fight of faith every single day. We need to persevere in our desire to grow, to resist sin, to do what we are supposed to do, understanding the great blessing that awaits the one who patiently grows over time.

Don't give up in your fight against sin, but rather keep fighting and you will see progress and you will experience the blessing of that progress. So Christians need to persevere day by day. Then Peter writes that believers need to add godliness.

What is godliness? Well, we've already seen this as Peter already mentioned this word in verse 3 of this chapter. Godliness is becoming more like God as we reflect His holy character. Similar to Peter's instruction earlier when he wrote that we need to grow in virtue, we also need to grow in godliness.

As we grow in our walk with the Lord, the full scope of morality will be shown in our lives. This is why when you look at some corrupt person, if they're really off in one area, they're probably off in every area.

If you're a holy person, right down the list you're going to have these virtues that describe you. The person is humble, the person is loving, the person is compassionate, the person is courageous. All these godly virtues will be shown in a person's life.

And then he talks about adding brotherly affection. This is where we get the city of Philadelphia. It's the city of brotherly love. Anybody who's been there knows that's not true, but that's what it's called.

What is a brotherly affection? It's an aspect of love. When the world talks about love, they pretty much focus exclusively on showing affection. To the world, love is just a feeling. But scripture describes love much more fully.

One aspect of love, as described here, is showing affection toward one another. As one author writes, in the New Testament, the love which Christians cherish for each other as brethren. One of the ways we grow in our love for the Lord is we grow in our appreciation for each other.

There is a deep bond that develops between brothers and sisters in Christ. It is the deepest bond there is. You experience this. Everyone in this room probably has some biological family that aren't true followers of Christ, and you have a stronger bond with non-biological family because you all belong to the family of God.

We see the world try to duplicate the bond that exists between brothers and sisters in Christ. Every other community in this world is a faint reflection of the strongest community. Think about all these clubs they have.

Surfing clubs, and bike clubs, and running clubs, and chess clubs, and music clubs, and art clubs,.

And all these clubs.

Everybody wants to get together, right? They're all about community, but they're all a faint reflection of the true community, which is the church. The church is the richest community there is. It's what every community points to, of what a community is supposed to be.

And what's supposed to be found in this community is brotherly affection. The last quality that Peter mentions is love. And I just mentioned brotherly affection is an aspect of love. But the highest love is the love of sacrifice.

This is agape love. There's two different Greek words here. One is, like I said, brotherly love Philadelphia. And one is agape. This is the love that Jesus demonstrated at the cross. John 15, 13 says, Greater love has no one than this.