2 Peter 1:5-10
Please turn in your copy of the
scripture to 2 Peter. Our reading is 2 Peter 1, verses
5 through 10. My wife asked me this morning
how I was gonna handle the locals riding by with their loud mufflers
and music. And I think the worst of my problems
is not that, it’s the wind. So we’ll see what happens here.
second Peter chapter one. Obviously, this is Peter’s second
letter. I told myself today. I can’t
say Paul says this is Peter most of the time in the New Testament.
We say Paul says Paul says this is Peter. so if I say Paul said
just know that it’s Peter. Translate there you go. You laugh
at my jokes and translate when I say something wrong, so there
you go. This is obviously the second letter Peter writes. Peter’s
an old man, an old apostle, and he writes to Christians who are
scattered around Asia Minor. They’re scattered because persecution
has sent them running, so to speak. So these are Christians
under duress. And one of the things Peter does
is he addresses New Testament Christians with Old Testament
language. He refers to them as strangers,
exiles, sojourners. He refers to them in the way
that the Old Testament. And so there’s an interesting
use of language when you read through 1 and 2 Peter. God has one people and Peter
is affirming that you who are Gentiles, you have been grafted
in are the same people as the people of God under the old covenant. Hear God’s word with me. I’m
going to back up to verse three of second Peter chapter one.
It 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 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. And then here’s our passage for
today. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement
your faith with virtue. virtue with knowledge and knowledge
with self-control and self-control with steadfastness, with godliness
and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection
with love. For if these qualities are yours
and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective and
unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever
lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten
that he was cleansed from his former sins. Therefore, brothers,
be all the more diligent to make your calling and election sure.
For if you practice these qualities, you will never fall. For in this
way, there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the
eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Let us
pray together. Lord, let your word dwell among
us richly today. What a privilege it is to be
able to read and preach your word and what a privilege it
is to be in your house again with your people, where we renew
covenant with you and with one another. Speak, O Lord, your
servants are listening and help us in the name of Jesus through
your Holy Spirit. We pray in his name. Amen. Well, normally one puts in a
garden before a freeze. Here we are May 10th and we had
a freeze last night, but ordinarily one puts in a garden around Easter
time, right? That’s down in this area when
you put a garden in because freezes are over, frosts are over, and
it’s safe to plant. Well, let’s say you’re going
to plant a garden and you’re going to pick eight plants that
when they yield their harvest will allow you to eat well and
therefore be healthy and strong. You know how it is, you plow
your garden, you make your rows, you put your plants in, you get
a little stick, you put it in the ground and you put on that
stick the sign. These are carrots. These are
cucumbers. These are radishes. We all know
the tomato vine and what they look like. The squash, the fill
in the blank, but you’ve got a garden with eight plants and
these eight plants, uh, if you grow them and have a wonderful
harvest, if you’re diligent and, and tend the garden, keeping
the weeds in the water, uh, in and out as required, you’ll have
a great harvest and you will eat healthy and you’ll be nice
and strong. Uh, you invest in this garden,
it produces for you and you have a good, healthy life. And then,
uh, you, show up to church or go out in the community and people
say, look at you. You’re healthy and strong. Whatever
you’re eating, that’s what I want. Kids know the drill. What is
it carrots do for you? Help you see what does broccoli
do for you? Absolutely nothing, that’s right.
Even President Bush said broccoli’s no good for you. We eat it once
a week at our house. It’s good on the grill. But you
know vegetables, they do different things for you. And if they don’t
do something, mama makes it up, because that’s what moms do to
make you eat it. But you have a good life because
you’ve made an effort to grow this garden, reap its produce,
and eat well at your table so that you have a healthy life.
What if you’re a lazy gardener? What if your garden is idle?
What if it’s full of weeds? Well, you’re going to be unhealthy
and no one is going to come around to you at church or in the marketplace
and say, look at you. What have you been eating? I
want whatever you’ve got because they can tell your garden is
not growing so well and you’re not so healthy. Well, I want
to say to you today from this passage from Peter that the spiritual
life is a lot like this garden that we have described. This
passage tells us to be all the more eager to make your calling
and election sure. There’s eight virtues in this
passage that Peter says, if we cultivate them in our lives,
we will be effective. We will be productive Christians. And there are two wonderful benefits
from this. Number one is you will not be
unmoved. You’ll be steadfast, standing
firm if you cultivate these eight virtues. But also you will receive
a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.
How does that little poem go? Mary, Mary, quite contrary. How
does your garden grow? That’s the question for us today.
Christian, Christian. Some of us a little contrary.
How does your spiritual garden grow? Well, let’s look today. and see just exactly how it is
our garden should grow. And I want to point out before
we dig into these eight virtues and the benefits and blessings
to us that this is how a Christian ought to live every day. This
description that we’re going to hear today is how Christians
ought to live whether there’s COVID-19, Whether we are disabled
or ill for quite a long time, whether we’re unemployed for
a protracted period, whether we’re undergoing all sorts of
rough circumstances in life, the job of the Christian is to
continue to cultivate these eight virtues—faith, knowledge, self-control,
perseverance, Godliness, brotherly kindness, love, all of these
wonderful virtues that are listed here by the Apostle Peter, we’re
to cultivate these all the time so that in the middle of coronavirus,
people see our confidence, our godliness. in the middle of maybe
a stretch of cancer, or in the middle of a stretch of unemployment,
or maybe wartime in the land or the world. Whatever may be
our circumstances, our godliness ought to be an ongoing garden
that we cultivate so that we reap the benefits. I wanna speak
first from this passage about cultivating these eight virtues. The apostle Peter says, make
every effort to cultivate your faith, your goodness, your knowledge,
self-control, perseverance, godliness. There’s the worst of your problems,
your sermon blows away. We’ll have to end, I guess. Sing
the doxology. Our self-control, perseverance,
godliness, brotherly kindness, and love. Just as you would a
garden, Our job is to make every effort to cultivate these virtues
in our lives. It’s through our daily devotions.
It’s through our sitting in worship. It’s through Sunday school. It’s
through a good podcast, sermons, CDs, the Table Talk magazines
we provide for you. All the wonderful ways you hear
God’s Word, apply it to your life. and stretch yourself to
live faithfully. These are the ways we cultivate
these virtues. Well, what are those eight virtues?
If we were to walk through our spiritual garden and look on
the little sign that’s on the stick at the beginning of each
row, we would see these eight virtues, the first being faith.
Faith being the wonderful gift of God that lets us receive Jesus
as he’s offered in the gospel, as the one who has paid for our
sins. And we not only receive him,
but we rest in him alone for our salvation. Our hope is built
on nothing less. than the blood of Jesus and his
righteousness. And added to faith, there’s goodness,
or what we might call moral excellence. No child of God, no child of
the king should be a rotten child, right? We should be cultivating
the fruit of the spirit in our lives, goodness. And then there’s
knowledge, the third virtue. We ought to know the word of
God, hide it in our hearts, and practice it in our lives. Knowing
truth is one thing, applying it wisely to life is another. But we cultivate faith and goodness
and knowledge. We also cultivate self-control,
the ability to reign our own bodies, our own actions, our
own behaviors in. If you have missed horse racing
lately, ESPN is showing movies like Secretariat and you watch
shows like that and you see these powerful horses, these 1500 pound
beast. And what does it take to control
one? A rein, a bit and a bridle. And that’s what God is speaking
to us in his word today, the spiritual discipline of self-control
reigning in our lives, holding oneself to a strict discipline,
one of self-control. Then there’s perseverance. This
is a virtue that we’ve all had to work at lately. How many of
you are tired of coronavirus? Go ahead and raise your hand.
Yep, everybody. There you go. Amen. No rhetorical question
there. But we’ve had to persevere. We’ve had to get through this
time. It’s been hard on our emotions. It’s been hard on our social
lives. It’s been hard on, I think about our family. We eat three
meals a day at home. That’s a lot of work. It means
bigger Mother’s Day flowers, right? When you’re home more,
you gotta clean more. You gotta get to the grocery
at 6 AM if you’re a senior. You’ve gotta go to the drive-thru
in the bank, no personal service. There have been all these little
and big hardships. And we’ve had to persevere through
them, even though they have worn us down. But perseverance, remaining
under trial, because it’s the right thing to do. And it’s not
just remaining under trial like a good stoic, I’m tough and I’m
going to get through this. It’s having an eye on the horizon.
This life is not all there is. There’s a heavenly reward. and
one day I will make it there. We’re pilgrims, strangers making
our way. We’re persevering to the promised
land. And then there’s godliness. We
live a life of just out and out reverence to almighty God. We
know that he is, he sees, he hears. and he expects of us to
live well before this watching world according to his holy scriptures. And then there’s brotherly kindness.
You know, the city of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, the city of brotherly
love. That’s one of the three or four love words in the Bible,
but phallos is brotherly affection. We’re to have affection towards
the saints. Peter is not writing to everybody
in the world. He’s writing to God’s people
scattered in the world. And he’s saying we’ve got to
have affection towards one another. And we feel that, don’t we? As
we’ve made our phone calls during this time, this stretch, I’ve
been very impressed and encouraged when I talk to various people.
You’ll tell me who you’ve talked to, who you’ve reached out to. I found out things about some
of y’all and some of the difficult patches in your life over these
last weeks from somebody else saying, hey, I was talking to
so-and-so and this happened, that happened. And so I’m able
to call and hear that. But I hear all these stories
about you, the congregation, taking care of one another. A
lot of times we say, oh, that’s the pastor’s job. And it is,
right? but it’s also the one anothering
aspect of the church. Do you know how many times the
New Testament uses the phrase one another? Well, I don’t either,
but it’s a bunch. It’s a bunch. We one another.
We love one another. We serve one another. We encourage
one another. We warn one another. We serve
one another, and so brotherly kindness is one of those virtues
listed here by Peter. And then finally, love. It’s
that agape word, that special Christian love, where we love
one another sacrificially. If someone is in need, we meet
it. Someone loses their job, we all pitch in and help. And
on and on the list can go. We love one another. And so faith,
goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly
kindness and love. These are the virtues that ought
to be in our gardens, which we make every effort to tend and
cultivate. We weed out the opposites, we
weed out the sin in our lives, and we bear fruit because we
tend these gardens. And so that’s a word about cultivating
these eight virtues. Let me speak just a word a moment
about the fruit of the growth of these virtues in our lives.
If you take good care of your garden and it abounds into a
harvest, like we said earlier, when you have a good garden and
you eat well, you look good, right? Your skin looks great.
You’re healthy. Your body is fit and fed very well. Well, the apostle Peter says,
if you do this, you will be effective and productive. And then he gives
a contrast. If you don’t do these things,
you will be ineffective and unproductive. You will want to be an idle gardener. You’ll have a barren garden.
You ride through the neighborhood or through a farmland and you
can see who’s the good farmer, right? The good gardener. and
you can see who’s the lazy one. You’ll see the weeds and the
dirt and the patches and there’s no roadside stand selling the
overabundance of fruit, but you ride by the good farmer and their
roadside stand is full. They’re ready to feed and help
others. And that’s what the apostle Peter
is reminding us of in our passage today. You cultivate your garden,
these eight virtues, you’ll be effective and you’ll be productive. You don’t want to be a deficient
Christian. You don’t want to be a vitamin deficient Christian. And most of all, as he says in
our passage, you don’t want to be a forgetful Christian. For
he says you’ll be effective and productive in your knowledge
of the Lord Jesus Christ. We forget sometimes, don’t we,
that the Christian faith is a It’s a head faith, right? There are
things to know, things to think on, things to remember, things
to ponder. And so he says, you don’t want
to be unproductive or ineffective in your knowledge of the Lord
Jesus Christ. Well, so you ask, what does that mean, the knowledge
of the Lord Jesus Christ? We could make something up using
definitions we might know of knowledge and Lord Jesus Christ.
Well, the best way to find the answer is look in second Peter
around this passage. Well, we stretched our reading
a few moments ago to the verses before and the verses after.
And in the verses before, it says something like this. God’s
divine power has granted all things necessary for life and
godliness. So you might say, how do I live
through the coronavirus? Read your Bible. For in your
Bible, God tells you everything you need to know to live life
and to be godly. That’s what the Bible is for.
Then it goes on to say, he has called us to his own glory and
excellence. We are called not to be pagans.
We’re called not to be like the rest of the world. We’re called
not to be like Here, there, and other nations, we are called
to be glorious children, royal children of God, and to live
excellent lives. And then it goes on in the early
part of this chapter, he is granted to us precious and great promises.
God has told us who he is, what he’s done, and what he will do,
all centered around the person and work of Jesus. And if these
things aren’t good enough, it goes on, he’s cleansed us from
our sins. We are partakers of the divine
nature. We have escaped corruption of this world because of the
sinful desire. And so if you want your garden
to grow, work at it, cultivate it, and these eight virtues will
help you live life in the knowledge of God for his glory and for
the good of our neighbor. There’s a third thing this passage
teaches us. We want to cultivate these eight
virtues. We want to see the benefit and
blessing of them. But the final thing it shows us is some assurance. And we find it in these latter
verses of our passage, be all the more eager to make your calling
and election sure. This is Peter being very practical,
very pastoral. You eat your carrots, you eat
your broccoli, you eat your potatoes, you eat your radishes, you eat
your What else grows in the garden? Tomatoes, cucumbers, whatever
it is you have in your garden. You cultivate that garden, you
harvest that garden, you eat that garden. You’re going to
have a very blessed life. So be all the more eager to cultivate
these things. because you’ll know that you’re
a child of God. Some people wonder when it says, how do I make my
calling and election sure? Isn’t God the one who way in
eternity past decreed, I will be your God and you will be my
people. Yes, that’s true. Can we change God’s decrees?
Can his word be turned around? No. So how do you make your calling
election sure if it’s been decreed and determined in eternity past?
Well, You read the word, you know the word, you understand
the word, and you look at who God is, what he’s done, and what
he’s promised to do in your life. You receive these promises, and
the Holy Spirit assures you that these things are so, and it’s
evidence of your calling. So you want to know if you’re
called, you want to know if you’re elected, you want to know if
you’re one of God’s children. Well, the way to find that out
is ask yourself this, am I showing evidence of these eight virtues? Am I godly? Do I show brotherly
love? Do I love others? Do I persevere
under trial? Do I have self-control? Do I
have these qualities and others that are listed not only in 2
Peter 1, but in other places as well? For if you do these
things, the apostle says to us, you will never fall, and you
will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord
Jesus Christ. What does it mean that you will
never fall? Some of you aren’t as sure-footed as others, so
you carry a stick, or maybe you buy special shoes that help you
have a more firm footing. You don’t walk on loose ground. You walk where there’s a rail.
And these virtues in our lives keep us from stumbling over foolishness,
over sin. We cultivate them. We put them
into practice. They are evidence of our royal calling as the children
of God, but they keep us firm-footed. They keep us standing on sure
ground, but they also ensure that we as children of God will
receive a rich entrance into the glorious and eternal kingdom
of our Lord Jesus Christ. So, instead of Mary, Mary, quite
contrary, how does your garden grow? Christian, Christian, how
does your garden grow? Let’s look to God in prayer.
Lord, we pray that you would help us to dig into your word
and to pray and to rely on your Holy Spirit to help us read and
mark and learn and inwardly digest all that your scripture teaches
us so that we can nurture these virtues in our lives, and they
might outwardly manifest that we are your royal children and
be a great witness to the world. And we do long for that day when
we will receive a rich and grand entrance into the glorious and
eternal kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. So help us be faithful
in making our calling and our election sure. We pray it in
Christ’s name. Amen. We want to sing is our
final hymn number 394. in your insert, eternal spirit,
God of truth. You’ll recognize the tune as
a little town of Bethlehem, but this is a wonderful prayer for
us as we march forward in the days ahead with whatever life
brings us in these strange times, that we march ahead with confidence
and with God’s help. So let’s stand and sing and make
this our prayer together.