Series: A Complete Christian Message # 3
Once again this morning, I want to direct your attention to the opening lines of Peter’s second letter. It’s a hope-filled passage, one packed with promise. Lord, I could use some hope today? How about you?
Hasn’t life been something for us recently? I was home for lunch on Thursday and I heard noise in the kitchen. In came my boys. “What are you doing home from school?” I asked. They said that they were released early because of floods in Belvidere. So, now we add “flood days” to “snow days” here in these NE United States. I am sure some of you have flooded basements.
Floods, cancer, temptation, marriage woes, financial stress .... I’d like to invite you to give those things to the Lord as we invite the Spirit to make this passage alive and informative today.
PRAY
To Know – Key Factor of Maturity
Text: 2 Peter 1: 1-11
God has a grand vision for us that includes life, freedom from the corruption of sin, and fullness of the character of Jesus Christ. He’s looking for ordinary people who will participate with Him in a process that makes them into champions!
Remember some of the stories of ordinary people who became champions on 9/11, ten years ago?
I think of Todd Beamer, a sales rep, on another flight. He had no thought of becoming a hero, but the character he had cultivated over the years, emerged as he realized United flight #93 was about to become a weapon of destruction. He led several other young guys in a rush on the cockpit and died when the plane hit the ground. But his actions almost certainly saved many lives of some target in Washington, DC.
I believe that the Spirit’s challenge to us is to let God shape us into the kind of person who lives as an ordinary hero, finding ways to save a life here and there, to offer encouragement, to point the lost to Christ, to give love to the hopeless.
Last week I talked about the first challenge – Goodness. The text says, “Add to your faith, goodness.” After conversion, a priority must be to commit to developing a life of excellence in honor of our Lord, as an act of worship. This includes moral purity and a life devoted to God’s own holiness. Paul urges Believers to this in Romans 12 where we read: I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship
Today, we focus on: Knowledge.
Are you a learner? Is part of your prayer, “Lord, teach me?”
“To know....” is a blessing!
My passion to figure out why things work, what under the hood, so to speak. From the time that I was five years of age, I destroyed my toys, taking them apart to see what was inside, how the motor’s worked. I read voraciously to try understand life, people, and history.
I find the sheer volume of information available sometimes overwhelming.
We cannot possibly process, in any deep way at least, all of the data that flows into our brains on a daily basis. One writer observes that an average American processes more information in a day than an American living in the late 18th century processed in a year. Another said that a Sunday edition of the NY Times contains more words than Jonathan Edward’s entire library. I don’t know how true that is, but it seems reasonable.
That is one of the reasons we live in a society of specialists. We reply on experts to master narrow fields of knowledge and then to provide us with advice and guidance in everything from the maintenance of our machines to the care of our bodies.
Many Christians are intellectually lazy, preferring to let the Pastor handle ‘truth’ for them. They find doing the work of studying Scripture, of thinking through what God desires of them, of learning how to navigate the road through trials and temptations difficult. So they choose to lose themselves in trivia, wasting vast amounts of time on things of no consequences, surfing TV channels or the internet.
And, too, there are Christians who fear asking questions, as though asking why implies lack of faith!
But, the Word directs us in our quest to become complete Christians with this – “Add to your faith, Knowledge.”
God wants us to be committed to pursuing TRUTH. The truth cannot be established without gaining understanding, without a serious commitment to inquiry and a willingness to adjust our point of view and even our way of life as we gain more information. One of the saddest, indeed, pitiable persons in the world is the person who thinks that he or she has grasped all truth and the implications of that truth. I know you have met these fools. They are marked by their arrogance.
So, what is the way to ‘knowledge’ that would lead us to the completion God desires in us?
The first commitment to knowledge in our lives must be to FEAR GOD.
Proverbs 1:7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline. In The Message that verse reads like this: Start with God—the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning.
Genuine knowledge acknowledges the existence of greater minds and the existence of the Divine. David declared – The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
Second we commit to allowing the Spirit to teach us about OURSELVES.
In much the same way that a baby discovers his nose and his toes along the road to maturity, we can only grow spiritually only as we begin to allow the truth about ourselves to become part of our conscious understanding. It can be painful to see ourselves through God’s eyes!
The Holy Spirit speaks to us, the lives of Christians convict us, and the truth of the Bible confronts us with the realization of our sinfulness! What we once excused as ‘just my personality,’ or ‘my hang-up’ gains a new definition when we start to know ourselves truthfully.
The Apostle Paul was blunt in his self-description - Romans 7:18; “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” Please do not mis-read that as meaning you are worthless. Sinful, yes; worthless, no way.
This sense of sin is a gift, much as physical pain can be a gift in that it notifies our brain of injury or disease so that we can move to protect ourselves. The pain of a guilty conscience is acute, but it can lead us to seek relief and set us on a course of greater discovery.
∙ Do you KNOW that you are a sinner?
∙ Have you felt the pain of a guilty conscience and passed it off to the threatening of your mother, to the unreasonable demands of the church? Think again.
David sinned terribly against God, his friends, and his family. He deceived himself for a full year until God confronted him through the words of the prophet Nathan. As Nathan told the story of a man who stole his neighbor’s precious pet lamb, David’s rage rose. Then the prophet told the king, “you’re the man,” and David suddenly realized that for all his excuses, he was an adulterer, a murderer, and a liar!
His confession is gut-wrenching.
"For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge." (Psalm 51:3-4, NIV)
If you refuse to KNOW your sinfulness, you will slip into the same kind of denial and deception that David experienced. You will begin to blame others, to use others to kill the pain, to abuse yourself in a desperate attempt to create perfection that your soul yearns for, or even to anesthetize the pain with alcohol, pleasure, sex, or drugs. You may even be driven to breaks with reality by your attempts to avoid looking at or recognizing the sin in yourself and your world.
Scott Peck, a psychiatrist who came to Christian faith after he came to the realization that evil is real, writes this The Road Less Traveled and Beyond,
“We have a great proclivity for lying to ourselves.... we can deceive some of the people some of the time, but our capacity for self-deception is potentially unlimited as long as we are willing to pay the price of evil or insanity. And these are the costs.
Self-deception is not a matter of being kind or gentle with one’s self; on the contrary, it is as hateful as lying to others. It adds to the darkness and confusion of the self, augmenting the Shadow layer by layer. Conversely, the choice to be honest with oneself is the choice for pyscho-spiritual health and therefore, the single most loving choice we can make for ourselves.”
I tell you, my friend, looking at my sinfulness is the most difficult choice that I make. I want to be perfect. I want to be a wonderful husband, a great Dad, a caring friend, a wise Pastor, a holy person. But when I look into my heart, I see that I am not, by nature, those things! Instead, I see a selfish man who if left to himself will lie, cheat, hate, and be prideful.
BUT, our sinfulness is not the end of the story. We need not remain in despair, guilt, or even in shame!
The answer? In fact, as the Spirit shows us our sinfulness, it should drive us to the good news that is the core of Christianity!
Complete Christians KNOW Christ!
Romans 8:1-2 is our cry of victory: . . .there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, 2 because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.
Christians talk a lot about “knowing Jesus.” The language we use implies that knowing Him is like knowing a friend. One of our favorite phrases is that we have a “personal relationship” with the Lord. There is nothing wrong with this language, but to conceive of knowing Christ ONLY in terms of a personal relationship, will not lead us to greatness as a Christian.
Choosing to know God involves the willingness to make decisions of commitment. I am concerned that when most of us talk about knowing Christ we mean that we want a friendship, not that we want to be mastered by HIM! We want a buddy, not a boss. We want a lover, not a Lord.
Is this your desire?
"I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead." (Philippians 3:10-11, NIV)
Please note that there is no resurrection life without first dying. We love Easter Sunday, but must remember that Good Friday came first. Jesus Christ became the Savior of the World, achieved his God-given mission ONLY WHEN HE SUBMITTED HIMSELF to the Cross.
If you would KNOW God in a way that is true knowledge, it requires submission to His will. And that requires DEATH of self-will and DEATH of pride. Jesus said it like this:
Luke 9:23 “If anyone would come after me (enjoy a relationship with me), he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me (commit in covenant way to me).”
This means that when we discover our sinfulness, we carry it to the cross and allow God to put it to death. We cannot crucify ourselves! We cannot execute our own sin! Jesus could not crucify himself. He submitted to those who nailed him to the cross and to the will of God that put Him there.
In the same way, we present ourselves to the Lord, to the cross, and submit to His will. What will He use to put our sin to death? In Jesus’ life, he used Roman soldiers. In our lives God may use physical affliction, financial reverses, loneliness, ... Do you understand?
Frankly there are few great Christians because few of us are willing to come to the cross in this way.
We are unwilling to lie down before the executioners because we have no faith that assures us of the Resurrection life that follows Crucifixion.
Once again, this is not as grim as it seems. It is the path to COMPLETION, to what God has planned for us, for true beauty! Take God’s promise, look over the present pain of the death of self. By faith grab onto the promise of LIFE eternal. It will allow you to identify yourself with Christ in His death.
I do not have all the answers about these moments of suffering, but I know this:
If we allow ourselves to be broken and die to self in them, a beautiful fragrance of life is released in the process. It is what the Bible is talked about when we read the words of assurance found in Romans 8:28-39
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
31 What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33 Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
“I want to KNOW Christ... sharing in His death so that I might attain the resurrection power and new, eternal life!”
Do you want to be ALL that God plans for YOU to be?
Add to your faith, goodness, and knowledge.
∙ Choose first to acknowledge God as He reveals Himself in Creation, in His Word, and by His Spirit.
∙ Choose second to the truth about yourself as the Spirit brings you to a realization that you are a sinner.
∙ Choose then, to know Christ, not only as your Friend, which He is, but also as your Lord who calls you to self-denial and death, in order that you may live eternally.
Amen
