2 Peter 1:1 Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those equal to us in the faith they have received in the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ: 2 Grace and peace be yours in abundance through knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
3 his divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and excellence.
Introduction
What the Readers Already Knew
So far in 2 Peter we’ve learned that knowing God is the key to getting divine power, the key to getting more and more grace, the key to having peace in your life, and the key to godliness. In fact, it’s the key to everything—everything we need for life and godliness comes through knowledge of God. Peter has said all that and we’re only in v.3. And the theme of knowing God continues all through the book, and it’s the last thing Peter says at the end of the book—grow in knowledge of God.
So if we’re going to understand 2 Peter, it’s crucial we get a really good handle on what Peter means by “knowing God.” And remember, Peter is writing to them about things they already knew. 2 Peter 1:12 I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them. So what had Peter’s readers already heard about knowing God? To answer that, we have to look at the rest of Scripture so we know what Peter’s readers knew when he said, “You already know this.”
A Matter of Eternal Life or Death
No doubt they remembered what Jesus said about Judgment Day. If you don’t know God, then on Judgment Day Jesus will say, “Depart from me, I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23). Whether or not you know God determines whether you go to heaven or hell.
Deepening Knowledge
So the first question is, “Do you know God?” and the next question is, “How well do you know him?” because healthy relationships grow. That’s why Peter ends his book by saying
2 Peter 3:18 Grow … in knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
It’s great that you know God as well as you do right now, but I hope your relationship isn’t still at that level a year from now. The whole purpose of 2 Peter is to help you get to know God much better than you already do. Just like Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians.
Ephesians 1:17 I keep asking that … the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.
Paul prayed that because the whole measure of your life is determined by how well you know God. Your knowledge of God is what gives meaning to everything else you do in life—your job, your family, your ministry—everything.
Your Only Boast
One of the most famous OT passages about knowing God is in Jeremiah 9. It’s famous enough that Paul quoted it twice in his writings.
Jeremiah 9:23 This is what the LORD says: "Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, 24 but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me.”
So one thing Peter’s readers already understood about knowing God is that it’s the only legitimate boast in life. The biblical term “boast” does not mean “brag.” It refers to whatever you hold as a measure of success.
Everyone has a boast. We all have something in life that is our measure of success. We might not admit to it, but most of us have something that, if we fail at that, we feel like a failure. For a woman with kids, it’s usually being a good mom. That’s the one thing she has to succeed at. Other things—if it turns out she’s a lousy artist, oh well. She’s not so great at sports—she can live with that. But if something happens that seems to indicate she’s failed as a mom, it feels like someone rammed a knife right into her stomach. Your boast is that area in your life where you must succeed or life loses its meaning.
For a man, maybe it’s his career. Your area of expertise, that you’ve devoted your life to. You have to be a success in that. If you find out you’re not as good a singer as you thought you were—oh well. Maybe you’re terrible at math. Fine. But you fail in the area of your boast, and you go into depression. And you think, “What am even doing in life? What’s the point of even being here—I’m worthless.”
Everyone has at least one boast—that’s how God designed us. We all have something that we lean on to justify our existence. And Jeremiah gives examples of some common boasts and warns us not to have those as a boast. The first one is wisdom.
Jeremiah 9:23 Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom.
Even if God made you really, really smart. That’s your wheelhouse, your gift, your strength—do not let it become that thing that gives meaning to life for you.
Making wisdom your boast is a temptation for smart people and not-so-smart people. Someone has no education, he isn’t very sharp, he feels like a dunce half the time, and it gets him discouraged and depressed because, he’s made it a boast, so it’s the standard he uses to measure his life and his value, and he comes up short.
The second example Jeremiah gives is strength.
Jeremiah 9:23 … [Let not] the strong man boast of his strength
Many people put a huge amount of their self-worth in their body image. And again, it’s a temptation for people who have a great body and it’s a temptation for people who wish they had a great body. Athletes and models make their body their boast, but so do anorexics, overweight people, and unattractive people (my body isn’t what I wish it were, so I feel like a failure in life).
Then one more common one.
Jeremiah 9:23 … [Let not] the rich man boast of his riches.
Again, rich people do this; poor people do it. Rich people are confident they are doing okay because of their net worth. Poor people feel like failures because they don’t have any money. In both cases, money is their boast. It’s their measure of success in life.
Those are 3 common boasts, but there are a thousand others he could have mentioned. Everyone has a boast, that’s part of the human condition. But there’s only one that’s valid.
Jeremiah 9:24 let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me.
That’s the only thing that gives your life meaning if you have it and that makes your life worthless if you don’t.
Maybe you are a lousy mom or you are a failure in your career or in finances or relationships or your looks. That’s a bummer, but it’s not the end of the world. It doesn’t define success or failure in life, and it’s not what determines whether you’re a worthwhile person.
Maybe you’re the world’s greatest mom—your kids are all perfectly behaved, everyone who meets them is amazed… , they’re geniuses who all go to college at age 12. You’re amazing at your job—no one else comes anywhere near your level of performance. That’s nice, but it doesn’t make you a success. Knowing God does. Nothing else.
Or to put it another way, if you’re a mom who knows God, you’re a good mom, no matter how many parenting mistakes you make. If you’re a mom who doesn’t know God, you’re a bad mom. Knowing God is everything.
Paul had numerous boasts in his life before he came to Christ, and here’s what he said about all of them:
Philippians 3:8 … I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
So knowing God is everything. It’s the meaning of life, it’s the difference between the saved and the lost, once you know God, your success in life is determined only by how well you know him, and growing deeper in that knowledge is the solution to every spiritual problem.
What Is Knowledge of God?
But what does it mean, exactly, to know someone you can’t see or feel or hear or touch? In practical, everyday terms, what does knowing God look like? I think we can summarize the OT teaching by saying there are at least 4 components to knowledge of God.
Personal/Relational
First of all, knowledge of God is personal. Knowing God is far more than just having information about God. I know a lot about Donald Trump—I don’t know him personally at all. When the Bible talks about knowing God, it means knowing him personally. When Jesus tells the people, “Depart from me, I never knew you,” it doesn’t mean he’s ignorant about them. Obviously he knows enough about them to pass judgment on them, which means he knows everything about them. “I never knew you” means those people and Jesus didn’t know each other personally—there was no relationship.
So that’s the first aspect—personal. Second, knowledge of God is experiential.
Experiential
Many times, the word “know” means “to experience.” 2 Corinthians 5:21 says Jesus “knew no sin.” That doesn’t mean he was ignorant about evil—he had plenty of information in his head about sin. It means he never personally went through the experience of sinning.
In 2 Corinthians 11:7 Paul said, “I have often known hunger and thirst.” It means he experienced hunger and thirst.
If you decide, “I want to get to know that couple at church better,” what are you going to do? Research them? No, you would spend time with them, talk to them, listen to them, experience what they’re like in various contexts.
There are many aspects of knowledge that only come through experience. No matter how much you study, you can never know the taste of great food except by eating it. You can’t really know the glory of great music without hearing it… , or the magnificence of a sunset except by seeing it. You can’t know a person without experiencing firsthand what that person is like.
Think of a friend you dearly love. What is it about that person that you love? Maybe it’s their kindness. Okay, you love them because of their kindness—but what if I tell you about Joe Shmo, whom you’ve never met, and I give you proof that he’s also very kind. Do you love him? No. The reason you love your friend’s kindness is because you’ve experienced it.
Noticing God
Knowing comes from experiencing the person’s characteristics, but that’s tricky when the person is God because God’s invisible. It doesn’t do anything for your relationship if you experience someone’s kindness but you don’t know it came from that person.
So often we enjoy God’s gifts like a kid tearing into a bunch of Christmas presents without looking at the cards, so they don’t know who they’re from. God’s actions and expressions of love won’t increase your knowledge of God unless you read the card. The same goes for his wisdom, his guidance, his mercy, his forgiveness, patience, protection, enlightenment, grace, peace, generosity… —you can thoroughly enjoy all those and it won’t do anything to increase your knowledge of God unless…. you are paying attention to the fact that they are coming from God.
But if you do read the cards, there’s no limit to how many experiences of God you can have in a day. And every time you have a memorable encounter with one of God’s attributes, that deepens your knowledge of God.
Your Knowledge of God Is Unique
This is why everyone’s knowledge of God is unique, because we’ve all had different experiences with Christ. Some of you know Christ very deeply and intimately as your provider… , but you haven’t yet experienced him much as, say, the God of all comfort. You’ve read about his comfort, but you don’t have much experience of what it feels like to be racked with physical or emotional pain… and then receive calming, strengthening, soothing comfort from him even while the pain is as severe as ever. You’ve just never really gone through that.
Or maybe you have gone through that and you know him intimately as a comforter… , but you have only a superficial knowledge of him as the awesome judge. You’ve never really trembled before him.
Some of you know him as one who can redeem anything… —make something beautiful out of the most horrific mess—you’ve experienced that side of him. But you don’t know him all that well as the source of light… , because whenever you get a new insight from a sermon or from your own reading… , you don’t connect the dots back to the Holy Spirit, so that enlightenment comes to you as an anonymous gift.
I’ve heard about God being a father to the orphan, but I’ve never really experienced much of that side of him because I wasn’t orphaned. Some Christians had a terrible earthly father, but they have experienced God as …. a caretaker and protector and a guide a disciplinarian a provider—whatever area their earthly father fell short.
Some have known him as a husband to the widow. Maybe you’ve known him as the Prodigal’s father … , who ran to you and embraced you when you returned to him after a time of rebellion that you thought was unrecoverable and unforgiveable. Others haven’t really known much of that side of him because you never had a period of extreme rebellion.
Knowing God is both personal and experiential, so each person’s knowledge of God is unique because we’ve all had different experiences with him.
Favorable
Enjoyment/Love
Now, let me add another layer, because experiencing a person doesn’t automatically deepen your knowledge of the person unless that experience is favorable. So that’s the third aspect. Knowledge of God is personal, experiential, and favorable.
A lot of times you hear people say, “If you want to get to know God better, spend more time alone with him.” But spending time doesn’t automatically make you closer. You might have a coworker you spend all kinds of time with, you’ve had tons of experiences of that person… , but you’re not especially close and the relationship isn’t getting any deeper. What’s the difference between relationships that keep progressing and relationships that stall out? Love.
When you experience what that other person is like, and you don’t like it, the relationship stalls. If you want to get to know that couple at church better, so you have them over for dinner, and the experience is favorable… —you all just have a great time, laughing the whole time, just really enjoying one another—those are the relationships that tend to grow. Why? Because you like them.
Love is what propels a relationship forward. If you love what you’ve experienced of that person so far, you’ll want more. That’s why loving God and knowing God are bound together.
1 John 4:7 … Everyone who loves … knows God.
1 Corinthians 8:3 The man who loves God is known by God.
Your knowledge of someone can’t go any deeper than your love for that person.
If the relationship is like a plant, time spent together is like sunlight, and love is like water. If all you get is sunlight—lots of time together, but there’s no water of enjoyment, the plant dries up and dies.
So how do you come to know God more deeply? It happens when you
1) experience his attributes,
2) you connect the dots so you realize what you’re experiencing are his attributes and works, and
3) you like it so much that you want more.
Trust
From that point, there’s another level—another ingredient to a favorable relationship. And this is where intimacy comes in. Suppose you’re getting to know that couple at church. If you just have a lot of fun and a lot of laughs, that, by itself, can take a relationship just so far. There are people you can laugh and have a great time with, but you don’t really know them intimately. They don’t know the secrets of your heart; they don’t have access to your private world. To really go deep to where you open up to each other so you know each other’s hopes and dreams and values and fears… —intimate kinds of knowledge—that doesn’t happen until there is trust. Love is the water that keeps the relationship growing; trust is the key that unlocks the door to the inner sanctum of your heart. You don’t open your heart up to someone unless you really trust that person.
And where there is a lack of trust, that stops the progression of the relationship in its tracks. No relationship can grow where there is a lack of trust. Your knowledge of God goes no deeper than your trust in him.
Psalm 9:10 Those who know your name trust in you.
And it’s an upward spiral. The more you trust him, the more deeply you’ll know him, and the more you know him, the more you’ll trust him.
Oneness
So, it starts with time spent together, you enjoy that time, that produces love, the relationship keeps growing until there is trust. Once there’s trust, the relationship goes much deeper because you open up to each other, and there’s intimacy. And that intimacy brings it to yet another level that goes even deeper than intimacy. I’ll call this oneness.
When you have a relationship of love and trust, over time, your lives begin to fold together into each other and you start rubbing off on each other. Your souls begin to meld together.
The more you love and trust someone, the more you start caring about what they care about. You take a second look at those things the person really loves with an eye to see what they see… , and very often, you see it and it affects your attitudes and will. Now you like that thing more than you did before.
I remember once our daughter Nikki made an off-handed comment about how she loved the line in the song “In Christ alone” that says… , “From life’s first cry to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny.” I had sung that song a million times, but I don’t think I had ever noticed that line. But after she mentioned how much she loved it, I looked at it with new eyes and I saw what she saw. Now it’s one of my favorite lines from any song.
This works the other way too. If someone you love really hates something, that tends to sour you on that thing. Maybe you didn’t see it before, but now you start to see the ugliness of that thing.
Your affections are morphing into the likeness of their affections. An intimate relationship draws the two parties together into a more and more profound oneness.
This is why the more you love God the more you obey him. It’s because his will has a gravitational pull on your will. Your attitudes and desires and affections morph into the likeness of his.
John 10:14 … my sheep know me … 27 they listen to my voice … and they follow me.
The more you come to know him, the more you listen and follow because you want to be where he wants to be. Your will attaches to his.
When Jesus tells those people “Depart from me I never knew you” on Judgment Day, who does he say that to? He says it to people who didn’t do his Father’s will.
Matthew 7:21 Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father.
People who don’t know God and people who don’t do his will are two ways of describing the same people, because the more you know God, the more you see what he loves and hates and desires and rejects, and you see all that as good, pleasing, and perfect, so now you feel the way he feels about all those things.
The Best Kind of Obedience
This is why knowing God always results in obeying God.
1 John 2:3 The one who says, "I have come to know him," without keeping his commands, is a liar.
You’ve heard the saying, “To know her is to love her.” If someone says that, what they mean is, she’s such a wonderful person that, once you get to know her, you can’t help but love her. What John is saying is, “To know Jesus is to obey him.” The more you get to know what he’s like, the more you can’t help but to do what he wants because his will is so wonderful.
And it’s the best kind of obedience. It’s so much more than just following a rule. You can follow a rule that you hate just because you don’t want punishment. But embracing the lawgiver’s will is different.
Imagine a kid who is out with some friends, and at one point he says, “Hold on guys, I don’t know about this.” “What? Why? Your dad never made a rule about this.”
“Yeah, I realize that, but I know my dad, and I know he wouldn’t like this. And so I don’t like it.”
The fact that his dad doesn’t like it makes it distasteful to him. It’s not just that he doesn’t want his dad to be unhappy with him. It’s that he admires his dad so much that his dad’s tastes and opinions and feelings about things are so good in the child’s eyes… that it has a gravitational pull on the child’s tastes and opinions.
That’s what it means to live for the will of God. It’s not, “Oh, God hates this, so I’m not allowed to do it.” It’s “God hates this so I hate it too--yuck.”
So that’s the progression of knowing God. Favorable experiences of God (experiences you enjoy that lead to love and trust)—those experiences deepen your intimacy. And the measure of how intimate your relationship with God is is how much your will is drawn into his will. That’s what I mean when I say knowledge of God is a personal, experiential, and favorable relationship. Now the fourth aspect: knowledge of God is also intellectual knowledge.
Intellectual
I started by saying knowledge of God is a whole lot more than just information about God, and that’s true. It is more, but it’s not less. The intellectual aspect is absolutely essential, because everything we’ve said so far depends on knowing information about God.
You Can’t Love a Stranger
You can’t interact with, experience, enjoy, love, trust, have intimacy with, or embrace the will of someone you know nothing about. You can’t be best friends with a stranger. If I tell you Bill Oleson is my best friend, but I couldn’t pick him out in a small group… , and I have no idea what his opinions are about biblical counseling or the Packers or musky fishing… , you’re going to wonder how close we really are.
But if someone says, I not only know him, but I know him extremely well, what does that mean? What does it mean to know someone extremely well? At the very least it means you know a whole lot of information about the person. You know what he’s like. You know what he enjoys, what he hates, what he’s interested in… , his mannerisms, his tastes, what he would love to get for Christmas. You know his history, his characteristics. his thoughts and feelings, his hopes and dreams, attitudes, motives, inclinations, preferences, desires, aspirations, failures, successes, values, beliefs, the achievements he’s most proud of. You know how he acts in various contexts. That’s a ton of information.
So intellectual knowledge—learning information about the person, is a huge part of knowing that person. And when it comes to knowing God, the intellectual part plays an even greater role.
When it’s someone you can see and touch and hear, you learn about them by watching. You noticed his face get red once and you thought, “Wow, that really made him mad.” Or you saw tears in his eyes and thought, “Man, this was really important to him.” Or you heard his voice get shaky or get louder or get really soft and you learned more about his heart. But how do you get that kind of information about God, whom you can’t see? You can’t see his face or hear his tone of voice or watch his body language. So how do you gain all that kind of personal information about him? Only one way—from the Bible.
If someone says, “I don’t really get into doctrine or theology—I just want a relationship with Jesus”—that’s nonsense. If you don’t know any theology, you do not have a relationship with Jesus because you can’t be best friends with a stranger. How could you praise God if you didn’t know anything about him? What would you praise him for? Knowledge is essential, truth is essential, doctrine is essential.
Preachers often warn against a head knowledge that never touches the heart… , but we also need to beware of supposed heart knowledge that never touches the head. Lots of warm, fuzzy feelings that aren’t governed by truth will lead you astray in a hurry, and you’ll find yourself in love with a god who doesn’t exist.
Having minimal information about God will cause countless problems in your life. If you don’t understand doctrine, you’ll misinterpret God’s actions. You’ll misinterpret suffering, misinterpret blessings, you won’t know what’s pleasing to God in certain situations. You’ll do things God hates thinking that they are good things. You’ll try to worship him in ways he doesn’t accept.
Theology
And when I say “theology,” I don’t necessarily mean you have to be well-versed in systematic theology and all the seminary lingo. Theology is simply truth about God. Theology is knowing what God is like knowing his will what he enjoys what he dislikes how he reacts to various things what he is most interested in what he has done in the past This is why God gave us the Bible—to learn all that. So many Christians stall out in their intimacy with God because of lack of knowledge.
If someone asked you what your mom is like, how long could you talk? If someone asked you what God is like, how long could you talk? For a lot of Christians, it wouldn’t be much more than a minute. They could say, “God is …. Loving Omniscient Omnipresent Omnipotent Perfect … infinite …. And that’s about it. Your intimacy with God can never go one inch deeper than your understanding of the truth about God. If you don’t know the truth that God’s Word reveals about God, you cannot know God.
Knowledge for Power
So all that gives you some background on what the Bible says about knowing God means. Now, what about Peter’s point about the connection between knowing God and unleashing God’s power in your life? Does that come from the OT? Another very famous OT passage about knowing God is in Isaiah 11.
Isaiah 11:6 The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. 7 The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. 8 The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest. 9 They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain.
Wow, that’s amazing—everything that’s wrong with the world will be fixed. No violence, no danger. How’s that going to happen?
Isaiah 11:9 They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
The terms “wolf,” “lion,” and “bear” are almost never used literally in the OT. Most of the time, they are used to describe dangerous, hostile, human enemies. And, of course, ever since the Garden of Eden, the serpent has represented an evil spiritual being. So the point is, there will be no more violent people, no more crime, no war, and not even the evil spirits behind it all will be a threat. It will be perfectly safe. And what’s going to make all that evil and violence disappear? The knowledge of God will cover the earth like the waters cover the sea. A world where everyone has knowledge of God is a paradise.
But where people lack knowledge of God, you get the opposite.
Hosea 4:1-2 … There is … no knowledge of God in the land! 2 Cursing, lying, murder, stealing, and adultery are rampant.
So Peter’s not exactly out on a limb when he says knowing God is the source of power for living a godly life.
2 Peter 1:3 his divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him.
That’s really a revolutionary idea. 99% of people, if you give them power, will not use it for godliness. If you ever talk to a Satanist or someone who is into the occult… , you’ll find the biggest thing that attracted them to that is the promise of supernatural power—power to control circumstances and power to control people. Power to avoid suffering and power to get what they want.
God offers us supernatural power, divine power, but he won’t give it to us until we understand what it’s for—godliness. Paul taught this same principle in Philippians 3, and he says something very few people would say.
Philippians 3:10 I want to know Christ in the power of his resurrection and in the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.
Instead of wanting power to end his suffering, Paul says, “I want the power it takes to suffer and die like Jesus.” And that power comes through knowing Christ more deeply.
Conclusion: What Am I not Getting?
And if you want to know how the knowledge of God gives you power to resist sin, just think of why we disobey. We disobey because we think the rewards of sin are better than the rewards of obedience. The only reason we would ever think that is if we don’t know God very well.
Imagine a teacher who always gives $1000 to every student who turns an assignment in on time. So there’s a new student in a class who tells his friend, “I know that assignment is due tomorrow, but I’m just going to blow it off.” And the friend says, “If you’re saying that, you don’t know this teacher.”
Imagine a doctor who has a 100% success rate in curing people with the problem you have… , and he writes you a prescription and gives you some exercises to do and you tell your friend, “I’m not going to do that.” And your friend says, “You don’t know this doctor.”
Every time we disobey God, it’s because we think we’d be happier with the sin than with God’s will. And every time, someone could say to us, “If you’re not interested in doing his will in this area right now, you don’t know this lawgiver.” You might know him well in other areas, but you do not understand what he’s like in this area or you couldn’t have that attitude.
If we really understood how generous Jesus is with reward… , and how kind and creative he is… , how powerful he is… , and how dangerous his displeasure is… , we would prefer doing what he wants over any other option. You can tell exactly how deeply you know him by how much you obey him.
What Am I not Getting About God?
Let’s close with this question: What do you say to yourself when you fail spiritually? You fall into sin, you give in to anger or fleshly impulses—maybe it’s already the 7th or 8th time this week (and it’s only Monday)… —what do you say to yourself? “I’m such an idiot!” I can promise you that’s not going to help. Nor is it from the Holy Spirit.
Or maybe something like, “Man, I have got to get a hold of myself.” Maybe you run through some ideas on how to do better, “I’ll try this next time.”
Or, maybe it’s words of discouragement. “I give up. I’ll never get a handle on this.”
Or maybe you go with excuses. If that wouldn’t have happened …. If she wouldn’t have provoked me …. If that tempting situation didn’t pop up right in my face …. If I weren’t so over-tired ….
None of those responses will help. Here’s the best question to ask yourself if you keep failing in some area: “What is it that I’m not getting about God?”
To know him is to obey him. If you were better acquainted with some aspect of his nature… , to where you understood it a lot better and your eyes were opened to see what’s so beautiful and desirable about it… , and you’ve had a lot of memorable experiences of that attribute … , that would drive your outlook, your attitudes, your desires, and your behavior.
“What am I not getting about God?” Can you see how much better that question is than those other responses?
For one thing, it’s not an excuse. If you don’t know God as well as you should, that’s on you. So it doesn’t excuse your failure, but at the same time, it’s not defeating.
When you say, “I’m such an idiot”—that’s only discouraging. Idiots don’t become wise men by just making a decision one day, “Oh, I’m going to stop being so idiotic.” So if it’s really true that you failed because you’re an idiot, then you’re hopeless. When you respond to failure by getting down on yourself, there’s nothing left for you except self-pity and never-ending failure.
But if you say, “What am I not getting about God’s nature?” the very question infuses hope. It points your soul to an available, attainable solution. You know it’s attainable because you already have some knowledge of God. All you need is some more of something you already have. And the reason you have the knowledge you have is that God called you… , so you know he’s going to be on your side in this effort to know him more.
Responding to failure in ways that point to yourself as the solution will only make things worse. Responding in ways that turn your attention to God as the solution will bring healing and progress… and unleash the power of God in your life to have everything you need for life and godliness.
