2 Peter 1:8 For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.
Introduction
If you could change one thing about your character, what would it be? Whatever just came to mind, the next question is, why haven’t you changed it? Your answer is probably, “I’ve tried! And I’ve made temporary changes, but it never lasts.” I heard a talk show host say the other day, “One thing you need to learn in life—people don’t change.” And boy, that sure seems true sometimes, doesn’t it? A wife gets frustrated with her husband: “He’ll never change!” Then she falls off her diet or some other goal and thinks, “Ahh! I’ll never change.”
Real, significant, lasting change for the good is so hard and so rare, but that talk show guy isn’t quite right. You can’t say “never.” Sometimes people do change—in dramatic, wonderful ways. So what’s the secret? In an area where you can’t seem to make any progress no matter how hard you try, what’s the trick to finally making a real, lasting change?
Peter’s answer to that in 2 Peter is a little disappointing if you’re an impatient person. It’s the word “growth.” That’s how he sums up his message in the very last verse of the book.
2 Peter 3:18 Grow in grace and in knowledge of our Lord.
We like overnight, quick fixes, but God’s design for change is the slow, steady process of growing and maturing. Peter sums up his whole message at the end of the book with the words, “Grow in grace.” And he begins the book with a whole section on how that growth process works, and that’s what we’ve been studying in vv.1-8 so far. It starts with faith, and you use the virtues you have to build the virtues you don’t have. You use character to build character, and it all happens by trusting God’s promises. That’s how you grow. That takes us through v.7.
But now Peter deals with the question we all have at some point: “What if it’s not working? I’ve tried to grow and change. I’ve tried to improve in self-control and perseverance and love and all the rest, but I’m not getting anywhere.” Every one of us has those areas in our character where year after year we just can’t seem to get any traction toward progress. So how do you figure out what’s stunting your spiritual growth?”
That’s a really important question because we found out last time in v.7 that if you stop growing… , your life becomes unfruitful, unproductive, and pointless—you’ll waste your life. So it’s essential that we figure out what’s keeping us from growing.
If you went to your pastor or a Christian counselor and said, “I haven’t been growing spiritually. I’ve stalled out in my spiritual progress”—what do you think he would say? Most likely, he’d give you some combination of Scripture, prayer, and fellowship. More Bible, more prayer, more church, relationships, accountability, etc. If you’ve ever asked me that question, I probably told you the solution is more satisfying fellowship with God. How is that done? Scripture, prayer, and fellowship. That’s the answer we always give.
But what’s Peter’s answer? Instead of just saying, “More Bible, more prayer, more fellowship,” Peter points us to two things I never would have thought of.
Imagine you’re in the delivery room, it’s your first child, the doctor hands you your baby and he looks perfect. Ten fingers, ten toes, nothing wrong. But after a few months, you’re starting to worry because he’s not growing. He’s not maturing like a normal child.
So you take him in, the doctor examines him and says, “I found two causes. Fix those, and he’ll start growing again. But if you don’t fix these two things, he’ll die.
“What are the two problems?”
“Well, the first one is his eyesight. He needs glasses.”
Would that answer surprise you? It should, because I don’t think there are any babies who aren’t growing because of a vision problem. That’s not really a thing when it comes to physical growth, however it is very much a thing with spiritual growth. Listen to how Dr. Peter diagnoses our spiritual growth problems.
2 Peter 1:9 But if anyone does not have them (the virtues in vv.5-8 that we’re supposed to be growing in, here’s why—), he is nearsighted and blind.
If you’re not growing, it’s because you have a vision problem. You might have other problems too (in fact, Peter will point us to one of them in the second half of the verse)… , but the first thing he wants us to know is that if there is some area in your Christian life where you just struggle and struggle and struggle… , you definitely have something wrong with your spiritual eyesight. Peter says you’re blind.
Growth Comes from Seeing God
And that really shouldn’t come as any surprise to us, because this isn’t the only place in the Bible that ties character transformation to spiritual vision. That’s how our final, total transformation will happen at the Second Coming.
1 John 3:2 … when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
Transformation comes from seeing. And that same phenomenon is happening in a gradual, progressive way now in this life.
2 Corinthians 3:18 And we, who … behold the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory.
Life and growth come from seeing God’s glory. It’s because God is so marvelous and so full of life that just seeing his glory imparts life to you and transforms you. So the reason you’re not making progress in that area you’re struggling with is you’re blind to some aspect of God’s glory.
Remember back in verse 3 where Peter told us that God’s divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him? And I told you, every time you struggle, just ask, “What is it about God that I’m not getting?” Now he’s telling us the same thing with a little different metaphor: What is it about God I’m not seeing?
What Are Spiritual Eyes?
But what does that mean—to see God? There are no actual organs called spiritual eyes, so it’s a metaphor. When we sing that song, “Open the Eyes of My Heart,” what is it that we’re asking him to do exactly?
Understanding, Perception and Awareness
The most basic meaning of “seeing” as a metaphor is understanding. We talk that way—“Oh, I see. I get what you’re saying.” It means to understand. Jesus connected spiritual blindness with lack of understanding in Mark 8.
Mark 8:17 … Do you still not see or understand? … 18 Do you have eyes but fail to see?
So it’s about understanding, and it happens mainly through the Bible. God reveals himself most clearly and most directly through his Word. So I would define seeing God this way—it’s understanding something in God’s Word in a way that enables you to have an encounter with God.
That’s why unbelievers can’t really understand the Bible. They can read, but they can’t see. They can make out the grammar and syntax and context and history and all that. They’re fully capable of reading comprehension. But it’s outside of natural human ability to understand the Bible in a way that enables them to have an encounter with God, which means they are blind.
The Bible is a window to God’s glory. If the only purpose of a window is to show you the sun, and you look out that window and can’t see the sun, you’re blind. And Peter is saying here that if you’re not growing in the virtues, you most definitely have a vision problem.
Nearsightedness: When You Can Only Focus on This World, Like Unbelievers
And it’s not a small vision problem. He says you’re blind. You say, “Blind? Isn’t that a little strong? That’s how the Bible describes unbelievers.
2 Corinthians 4:3 The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers.
Ephesians 4:17 … you must no longer live as the Gentiles do … 18 They are darkened in their understanding.
Is Peter saying that if you’re not growing it’s because you’re not really saved—not a true Christian? Christians often think that way. You have some area that you’ve struggled with for so many years… , you haven’t made any progress, and you question whether you’re even saved.
Is Peter saying if you’re not growing, you’re a fake Christian? No. We know for sure he’s not saying that because in the second half of the verse he says these people have been cleansed of their past sins. And in the next verse he calls them brothers. And the solution he gives them is spiritual growth—that is not the solution to being a fake Christian. The solution to being a fake Christian is to be born again.
So no, he’s not saying if your spiritual growth has stalled out that you’re lost. He describes us with similar language used to describe unbelievers to make the point that we are masquerading as unbelievers. But it’s not the same kind of blindness as unbelievers have.
And you can see that if you read the whole phrase. Literally, what the Greek says is, “he is blind, being nearsighted.” The second phrase explains the first. He’s blinded by nearsightedness. It’s not like the world’s spiritual blindness. Unbelievers are completely blind because they don’t have eyes—no capacity for spiritual understanding. But when we become blind, we still have spiritual eyes, but really poor eyesight. The Christian who stops growing has eyes, but he has effectively blinded himself to spiritual things because of nearsightedness.
And that’s why you’re still struggling in that area you’ve struggled with for so many years. You’re not growing in that area because of some spiritual reality that you don’t understand… , you’ve lost sight of, or you haven’t given enough of your attention. That spiritual insight would give you a view of God’s glory that would change your character if you really saw it. But until you apprehend it, you’ll never grow in that area. Blindness is always a factor when your spiritual growth is stunted.
This concept of being blinded by nearsightedness is something Peter can teach us because he learned it the hard way directly from Jesus. In Mark 8:18, when the disciples missed a spiritual point he was making because they were so focused on lunch, Jesus said, “Do you have eyes but fail to see?” They weren’t like the Pharisees, who didn’t even have spiritual eyes. They had eyes, but couldn’t see because they were nearsighted—focused on physical bread instead of understanding what Jesus meant by spiritual yeast.
Mark 8:15 "Be careful," Jesus warned them. "Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod." 16 They discussed this with one another and said, "It is because we have no bread." 17 Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them: "Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 18 Do you have eyes but fail to see?
Nearsightedness is when you can only focus on what’s right in front of you, you can’t see anything that’s far off. This physical world is right in front of your face. The spiritual realm is afar off. Your car, your job, your house, your health, people around you, the weather—you can’t miss all that stuff. It’s right there, screaming for your attention all the time. But spiritual realities aren’t so obvious. They’re out there beyond our natural field of vision.
Money—that’s right in front of you. You can easily see all the ways it can be a blessing to you. But what about the spiritual reality that it’s more blessed to give than to receive? That’s not so obvious. You have to squint a bit to see that truth because it’s way up there on a higher plane than we can naturally perceive.
And again, this is where seeing God comes in. You say, “Why is it that I know in my head that it’s more blessed to give than to receive—I understand that. But that principle doesn’t really govern my behavior or my emotions, my desires. My brain gets it, but the rest of me doesn’t seem to get it.”
Why does that happen? It happens when you grasp the principle, but you lose sight of the God who makes that principle a reality. If your eyes are on him, and you really know him to be ultra-generous to generous people, and you’ve experienced his constant faithfulness and his fatherly care and his rewarding heart and his effusive love and his follow through on all his amazing promises—when your eyes are wide open to his nature and you’re dialed in to what he’s like, that’s when you’ll not only know the principle but you’ll feel it—“Of course I’m going to be way better off being generous than being stingy or greedy.”
But that takes some clear spiritual vision, doesn’t it? Because it’s hard to override what you see all day every day with your physical eyes. The feelings of pleasure and satisfaction you can get from food and drink… , entertainment, sex… , recreation, or interesting, meaningful work… —that’s right in front of you, easy to see, super obvious. The reality that fellowship with God is more satisfying than any of that… —that truth is like something way off in the distance that you can barely make out. If you keep straining to see God, eventually your eyes will focus and that truth about him will become clear… , but you really have to exercise those eye muscles a lot to see clearly that far away. And if you don’t, you’ll quickly become so nearsighted, you’ll become effectively blind, spiritually.
Practical Examples of Spiritual Perception
We all have to spend time focusing on this physical world. You have to pay your bills, do the laundry, fill up your car with gas—all kinds of physical, earthly things. You can’t be obedient to Christ if you neglect all that. You have to do it, but too much time doing that without looking up often enough will damage your spiritual vision. You’ll lose your ability to understand and believe the realities that exist in the spiritual world.
What Is Nearsightedness?
All day long, you have to decide where to put your attention. There are spiritual truths that you do understand, but you become blind to them just because you don’t put your attention on them. They don’t govern your life like they should because they aren’t at the front of your thinking. If I’m walking in the woods and stumble over a log in the path… , it’s probably not because my eyes can’t see it. I could see the log if I looked that way, but I’m looking somewhere else so I’m just not aware of it.
There are facts about God that you understand just fine, you could ace a test about them… , but they just don’t come to mind in those moments you need them because you don’t think about them often enough. Or if they do come to mind, you don’t put them together with other truths in a way that gives you a clear picture. And that inevitably results in loss of your ability to understand spiritual truth.
Blindness Makes the Bible Boring
And that’s a big deal because lack of understanding will make the Bible boring. Nothing will train your soul to dislike the Bible more than reading something you don’t understand, then moving on to read something else you don’t understand. If you see the truths of God’s Word for what they really are, you could never be bored with them. The only way it can be boring is if you can’t see the meaning or significance for your life. Then the Bible becomes lifeless and boring, just like a print book is really boring to a blind person.
This is why I always say most people read the Bible way too fast. If you just keep reading without understanding, you’ll train your soul to dislike the Bible.
And that’s a pretty serious matter, when you think about it, because the Bible is our connection to grace from God. If you want your life to flourish, you want spiritual health and power, you want fellowship with God—it all comes through his Word. But if it’s boring, you’ll never read it enough, and even if you do manage to discipline yourself to read it… , your soul won’t absorb the spiritual nutrients it needs because you don’t have enough eagerness and appetite for your soul to properly digest the spiritual food. So when his Word becomes boring to you, that’s a really big problem.
Solution: Think Hard
So what’s the solution to nearsightedness? Thinking deeply. If you want to grow in those areas where you’ve stalled out, you have to cure your vision problem… —perception, understanding, and awareness of spiritual truths that address that area where you’re not growing. And the way to increase your perception, understanding, and awareness of spiritual truths is to go beneath the surface and think more deeply about them than you normally would.
Make Every Effort
This requires effort, which is the overall, governing theme of this entire section—make every effort. I say it’s the governing theme because Peter brackets this entire section with that command to make every effort. That’s how he started the list in v.5 (Make every effort to add to your faith …), then skip ahead to his conclusion in v.10 where he repeats it (Therefore, make every effort …).
We preachers say all the time that you can’t get anywhere in the Christian life just by using the “try harder” method because the power for change doesn’t come from you. That’s true—the power comes from God. But there is a lot of effort involved in utilizing that power. It’s not your efforts that make you grow. Only food from God’s Word has the power to make you grow. But there’s a whole lot of effort involved in finding the food and eating it and digesting it.
When Peter and the other Bible writers keep saying, “Make every effort,” they’re warning us—“Don’t expect to grow if you give it some half-baked, halfhearted, low energy effort.” When your growth stalls out, there is no jumpstarting it again without work.
Effort toward godliness is one of the clearest indications of God’s grace in your life.
1 Corinthians 15:10 … his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them.
Results are tied to effort and hard work. It’s the human condition to sit around and complain about all the results we didn’t get from all the work we didn’t do. We say, “That principle didn’t work for me,” when if we’re honest, the principle didn’t work for us because we didn’t work the principle.
Look Hard
So all that to say, when I tell you, “Think deeply and think harder,” I mean really push yourself. When you read the Bible or hear a sermon or just process biblical truths you already know, don’t quit just because it feels like a dead end. I once saw a video of a mountain landscape, and the caption said to spot as many deer as you could. So I looked and looked until I finally saw a couple. Then there’s a gunshot and the one you can clearly see falls, but about a dozen others jump up and run away.
The point is, even with your physical eyes you can get to where you think you’ve seen all there is to see, but if you just look harder, there’s more. And that’s always the case with the Bible. We tend to quit way too soon. We see the same old things we’ve seen in that passage our whole lives, we think, “I got it,” and we move on.
When you do that, the Bible becomes boring, you stop learning, and you stop growing. You lose your appetite for the Word, so you go to the table less and less, you become malnourished, and stop making spiritual progress.
So Peter says, “Hey, if you’re not growing, it’s a vision problem.” If there is a virtue that’s stalled out in your life, find a passage that addresses that virtue, and look closely, think, think harder, keep digging, meditate, study, and keep looking. Keep looking beyond the point when you think you’ve seen everything in the text. Think of the significance of each word. For each one, ask, “Why is that there?” Think hard about the logic of the passage. Read commentaries or listen to sermons on it.
But don’t just do that to get an education. Remember the purpose: not mere information, but information that enables insight that leads to intimacy with God.
Solution #2: Soft Heart
That’s one solution to nearsightedness. Jesus pointed us to another one that may or may not apply for you at this time.
Mark 8:17 … Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 18 Do you have eyes but fail to see?
Sometimes our poor spiritual perception or lack of understanding can come from a heart that’s not soft enough to grow and change. It’s a stubborn attitude that isn’t really open to the idea that this thing I’ve believed all these years might not be quite right. Or maybe there’s some resistance because this new truth might require me to make some changes in my life I’m not ready to make. I don’t want to give up what I might have to give up, or I don’t want to do the hard work of reshaping a long-held perspective.
It’s always hard work to do that because you have to be careful. You don’t want to get so open minded that all of your theology is up for reevaluation anytime anyone ever brings up any kind of challenge. That will also stunt your growth because you spend so much time rethinking the basic foundations that you can never move on to deeper things. So it can be a delicate balance between not being too quick to change a belief on the one hand but also avoiding having a hard heart that can’t ever be corrected or see new perspectives on the other hand. So it’s good to use other trusted people to help you think through new ideas and perspectives. But the bottom line is always the same—go to God’s Word with an honest, teachable heart, and don’t accept anything unless you can see it for yourself in Scripture. But once you see it, don’t cling to old beliefs that don’t line up with what you see in God’s Word. Be steadfast in the faith, but always remain teachable and changeable.
Three Questions for Bible Study
So give some thought to how you could improve your spiritual vision. And one thing that might help with that is to remember some basic questions. For every passage of Scripture you study, some questions that will help you look more deeply into the passage are these:
1) Are there any commands to obey?
Daydream about what your life would look like if you were living out the commands in the passage in greater ways.
2) Are there any attributes of God to admire (either stated directly or implied)?
An attribute is anything true about God. Most passages of Scripture, even if they don’t directly state, “God is like this …” will at least imply something true about God. Let’s try this. We’ll do a little workshop right now on this verse we’re looking at (2 Peter 1:9)? What attributes of God are stated or implied in this verse?
1. If nearsightedness stops your spiritual growth, that means God is so marvelous that if you just catch a glimpse of his glory, that will make you grow.
2. And if seeing God makes you grow, that means God is the source of life, so that’s a second attribute.
3. You’re supposed to remember your past cleansing—who did that cleansing? God.
What does that tell you about him?
4. It tells you he likes his people clean.
5. It tells you he’s willing to do the cleaning—he’s the only source of spiritual cleansing.
6. It tells you he’s on your side in this battle against sin.
That’s a half dozen attributes of God just from one sentence, and it’s a sentence that doesn’t even mention God.
So ask, “Are there any attributes to admire?” And not just to admire. Also to experience. What could I do today, over the next 24 hours, to have a greater experience of God’s life-giving properties? How could I have a greater experience today of his desire to cleanse his people? What would it look like for me to truly enjoy the fact that he’s on my side in the battle against sin today?
Okay, so—are there any commands to obey, are there any attributes to admire and experience, and then a third one:
3) Are there any promises to trust (again, either stated directly or implied)?
Any promises in this verse? If lack of growth is caused by not looking hard enough at God, doesn’t that imply the promise that when you do get glimpses of God, that will cause growth? What would it look like for the next 24 hours for you to really trust that promise?
If God cleansed you in the past, doesn’t that imply a promise that he’ll keep exerting that kind of influence on you? That he’ll keep working in you to will and to act to make you cleaner and cleaner? That’s a nice promise to lean on.
And remember—whenever you’re looking for promises, keep in mind the greatest promise in the whole Bible—“I will be your God.” That means whatever it is to be God, God promises to be that for you, for your benefit. Which means every attribute of God you found in the previous step is also a promise—God promises to be that way for you.
Commands to obey, attributes to admire and experience, promises to trust. Look for those in every passage, and you’ll see God in ways that will make you grow.
Conclusion
If you’re not growing, do all you can to improve your spiritual vision because Peter says anyone who isn’t growing in the virtues, is nearsighted and blind. But the vision problem only half his diagnosis. The other half is a memory problem.
2 Peter 1:9 if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.
How does remembering or forgetting your past cleansing affect the rate of your spiritual growth? Well, as you might imagine, remembering your past cleansing is not a simplistic solution. It is a profound solution—so profound that we’re going to have to devote a whole session to it. So that’s where we’ll pick it up next time. But for now, give some thought to the areas of the Christian life where you struggle the most and ask God to show you—what is it about his glory that you’re not really seeing and need to look into more deeply?
