Your Superpower - 2 Peter 1:3 Series

Look at the first three words of 2 Peter 1:3 "His divine power …."

That’s an awesome set of words—His divine power. They’re awesome words and their intriguing words, because so much of the frustration of life comes from not having the power we need. Wherever there’s failure in your life, that’s a lack of power. We know God makes his power available to us, and yet we seem to have so little of it.

But how can that be, given what Peter says here?

2 Peter 1:3 His divine power has given us everything we need ….

The word “everything” is emphatic in the Greek—absolutely everything we need. If I have the same, precious, grade-A, 24 karat faith that the Apostles had and I’ve been given absolutely everything I need, why do I seem to have so little power in my life? Why so much failure?

Faith Is the Starting Place

And for that matter, why does Peter even keep writing after v.3? If I have faith and everything I need, what else is there? The answer is this—you have everything you need to reach the goal, but that doesn’t mean you’ve reached it.

2 Peter 1:3 His divine power has given us everything[1] we need[2] for (literally toward] …. then he tells you what the goal is.

The word “toward” makes it clear that having everything you need isn’t the end point. It just means you have the tools necessary to reach that end point.

The faith you’ve been given is the starting point. It’s the raw material. That’s the way the book of 2 Peter talks about faith. In v.1 he tells us we’ve been given this gift of faith, then in v.5 he says, “Therefore, make every effort to add to your faith …” and that’s the last time he mentions faith in the book. He doesn’t mention it again because 2 Peter is not a book about the starting point; it’s about the goal.

So let’s talk about that goal.

We’ll talk about three things tonight:

The Purpose of the Power

The Need for the Power

The Access to the Power—how do you get it?

The Purpose of the Power: Life & Godliness

First, the purpose of the power—what’s the goal? A fun question people like to ask is, “If you could have any superpower, which one would you pick?” But a lot more important question is, “What would you do with it?” We’ve been given superpower—more than that, divine power! The question is, what is it for? What was God’s purpose in giving us that power? What does he want us to accomplish with it?

And the answer is in the rest of the sentence.

2 Peter 1:3 His divine power has given us everything[3] we need[4] toward (here comes the goal) life and godliness.

The Goal

That’s the big goal, that’s the reason God made all this divine power available—to give us everything we need to reach the goal of life and godliness.

At least, that’s one way of describing the goal. It’s so important that we understand what the goal is that Peter describes a different aspect of that goal in each one of these opening verses. He describes it one way in v.1, another way here in v.3, another way in v.4, and another in vv.5-7. And each description gives us a deeper, fuller insight. He wants to show it to us from every angle to give us a complete, full-orbed understanding of exactly what it is we’re trying to accomplish.

The way he describes it in v.2 is a whole lot of grace and peace. Grace and peace in abundance. We covered that last time.

The way he describes it in v.4 is escaping the corruption in the world and sharing in the divine nature.

In vv.5-8 the goal is to grow in that whole list of virtues that we add to our faith—goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, kindness, and love. All these various ways of describing the goal of living a life that is in line with the nature of God. And he says it differently in each verse—the way he says it here in v.3 is, “life and godliness.”

Godliness

Let’s start with godliness. The Greek word behind “godliness” is a hard word to translate because we don’t have an equivalent English word. In fact, not only do we not have an equivalent word, but we don’t even have an equivalent idea in our culture. The concept behind this word was very common back then—everyone in that culture understood it. But it’s so completely foreign to our culture that no one even thinks along these lines.

In fact, when I studied it and finally got a sense of what this word means, I realized I didn’t really have a category like this in my mind. It’s kind of a new way of thinking for me, but it’s such a beautiful concept. I’ve just found this so helpful. This is probably my #1 takeaway for what I’ve learned in this study.