Whenever Paul or Richard goes to the doctor’s office the nurse measures them. She’ll have them get on a scale to see how much they weigh and find out how tall they are. Then they compare them with a chart of other healthy children to see how they fare. If they are not making consistent progress they look for something wrong. Growth, steady and sure, is a key indicator of maturing life.
If we discovered from their doctor visit there was something that Paul or Richard were lacking we would immediately provide it. As proper parents, we wouldn’t withhold any good thing from them that would stunt their growth. This is what Peter describes for us today.
The key idea of this passage is that God has provided what we need to grow spiritually. There is nothing lacking in God’s provision for our spiritual growth. It is this wonderful truth to which we can cling as we seek to overcome sin in our lives. If there is no growth in our lives spiritually the problem is not with God but with us. Peter notes three aspects of this spiritual growth from God in which every believer should partake.
I. The Sufficiency of Christ’s Power
The first aspect of this spiritual growth of which every believer should partake is the sufficiency of Christ’s power. Peter notes this in verse 3. There he says, “Seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.” In this verse we notice three wonderful characteristics of the sufficiency of Christ’s power.
A. The size of His power
The first wonderful characteristic of the sufficiency of Christ’s power that we see is the size of His power. What is the size of Christ’s power? Peter says that Christ has given to us EVERYTHING. There is nothing of all we need that Christ withholds from us in regard to our spiritual growth. Peter even emphasizes this fact by putting the word “Everything” at the very beginning of the sentence. We do not need to seek anything else but God through His Word to overcome sin in our lives. It is the lie of the devil to cause us to believe there is something else we need in our spiritual life. Satan’s purpose is to lure us away from our full source of power available in Jesus Christ. He is always attempting to do this. Satan tried to convince Adam and Eve that they would be more like God if they disobeyed Him when the truth was that they were never more like God until the time they chose to disobey Him.
It is the same today. Satan wants you to think that the Word of God and the Son of God are not sufficient to give you victory over your sin. You can hear his voice in the words of the professionals. “You have a disorder. You can’t be healed from it but if take these drugs you can cope with it.” “You need to overcome this habit, so try hypnotism or this brand new patch.” “What you need is self-esteem. Love yourself because you can’t love others until you love yourself.” Why does Satan do this? Why does he seek to cause us to fall for nonsense like this? Because in circumventing God’s power to overcome sin in your life something other than God gets the glory for delivering us from our sin. You see it is when we finally come to the end of ourselves and all attempts in our strength to overcome our sin that Christ gets all the honor and praise. And when we recognize that we are helpless and God has given us everything necessary He is exalted.
B. The scope of His power
The second wonderful characteristic of the sufficiency of Christ’s power that we note is the scope of His power. What is the scope of Christ’s power? Or we could ask it this way; to what does Christ’s power extent is it found in our lives? It extends to life and godliness. Everything we need to live and to be godly has been given to us through Christ’s power. When we look into the Word of God, Christ’s wisdom is revealed as to how to live life.
Many make excuses that their particular circumstances are just too hard to deal with. They need some kind of escape route or relief valve in order not to do what God has told them. Yet Christ’s power finds its way into the realm of our entire life in regard to living godly. Think with me for a moment. If God has given us everything pertaining to life and godliness what lies outside of this circle? Absolutely nothing. So when we come to a particularly difficult situation in which God’s Word lays out for us what it is that we should be doing the only difficulty is not to rely on God’s power so that we can accomplish what He has told us to do.
There is no difficulty in understanding God’s commands to us. The difficulty comes when we rely on our power instead of Christ’s. Psalm 33 says, “No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. A horse is a vain hope for deliverance; despite all its great strength it cannot save.” As long as we think we have the strength to overcome our sin on our own, we will continue to fail. It will not be until we fall down before God, utterly devoid of our pride, that God will lift us up and show us His power. “God gives grace to the humble but He hardens the proud.”
I can remember many times in my early life as a Christian where I fell on my face weeping before God to remove the sin that had been part of my life for too long. It was in those times of humbling myself before God that He lifted me up to walk in godliness. But this should be our normal mode of operation. If God says He gives grace to the humble then we ought always to be humbling ourselves before God so that we will have His power to obey Him.
C. The source of His power
The third wonderful characteristic of the sufficiency of Christ’s power that Peter shares with us in verse 3 is the source of His power. In other words, “How do we receive this power to live godly lives?” Peter tells us that the answer is “Conversion.” Peter says that this power comes “through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.”
The true knowledge of God is conversion. It is finding a relationship with the God of the universe through Jesus Christ. Jesus said in John 17, as He prayed to the Father, “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” There are many people who think that they are serving God in the name of religion. But all they know is ritual. They don’t have a relationship with God. They come to church and say this and kneel here but it is, as Jesus said, “They worship me in vain, their teachings are rules taught by men.” And as Jesus said in John 17 if they don’t know the Father and Jesus Christ they do not have eternal life.
So Peter says that the source of the power to live godly lives comes through conversion. Why are there people with no power to live righteously? Why can they never make consistent progress in their Christian life? How come it seems that unless someone is constantly beating them with a shovel they never move forward. They have never found that power in their lives because they have never found the source of that power. They have never been converted.
Salvation is in found in a person not in a church. One characteristic that all pseudo-Christian cults have is an exclusivity that there is salvation in their church alone. But the Scripture says that salvation is found in Jesus Christ and not in an institution. As soon as a group says that they are the only ones they have become an institution of the anti-Christ and not of God. In Acts 4:12, Peter said, “There is salvation in no other; for there is no other NAME under heaven (except Jesus), given among men whereby we must be saved.” And in John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through Me.”
This is why Peter describes this conversion as the true knowledge of the one calling you by His own glory and excellence.” There is a need for the true knowledge of God through Christ’s cross work on our behalf. A “Christ plus” Gospel is an abomination to God and does not result in conversion but deception. Until we lose all our self-righteousness and find our righteousness only in Christ we are lost. He converts us not by our own righteousness, but as Peter says, “by His own glory and excellence.”
God does not call us on the basis of some merit in us. He calls us through His own glory and excellence. It is Christ’s righteousness that merits our favor before God. Nothing else can do this. It is only because Christ has offered His righteousness to us that we can stand before God. This is what 2 Corinthians 5:21 says. “God made Christ who knew no sin to become sin for us so that in Christ we might become the righteousness of God.” We must trust in Him not in ourselves. We must recognize that our salvation is all of Christ and nothing of us.
And this brings us to the point of recognizing that if salvation is all of Christ then so is our spiritual growth. We cannot, now that we have been saved by Christ’s death and resurrection, go heading off in our strength. He who called us by His own glory and excellence now expects us to live by His own glory and excellence. When we find ourselves thinking that we can live by our own glory and excellence instead of His then we are setting ourselves up for a fall. This is why true biblical Christianity is a religion of humility and complete reliance upon the grace of God in Christ.
I can remember that the first year of my Christian life was filled with defeat. The reason for this defeat was that though I had been saved by grace I was now trying to live the Christian life in my own strength. I knew what God wanted me to put out of my life but I failed to see the need for Christ’s power in my spiritual growth. It wasn’t until about a year later that I grasped the concept of spiritual growth found in Galatians 2:20. “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me, and the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. I had to discover that it was Christ’s life inside me that allowed me to live for Him. And what a joy that discovery proved to be.
II. The Splendor of God’s Promises
The second aspect of this spiritual growth that every believer should experience is the splendor of God’s promises. Peter describes the splendor of God’s promises in verse 4. Here he says, “For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust. In this verse Peter answers two questions concerning these precious and magnificent promises.
A. What are they?
The first question that Peter answers concerning these promises is, “What are they?” There are references to several different promises from God in the New Testament. We see the promise of the Holy Spirit. There is the promise of adoption to God as His children. God also makes a promise to send a Savior. But all these promises relate to the main promise found in the New Testament. And this promise is eternal life. Why is this the all-important promise? All of us were spiritually dead. The wrath of God abided upon us. His judgment was ready to be poured out upon us because we have broken His law. And because God is just He must punish our sin by pouring His wrath upon us.
The promise of eternal life and all its related promises are great and precious promises because we deserved nothing but death but God poured out upon the objects of His mercy nothing but righteousness and eternal life. This is what makes these promises so precious. Let’s read a few verses that describe this promise of etenal life.
In Titus 1:1-2 Paul says, “the knowledge of the truth which is according to godliness, in the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago.” God has promised this eternal life. And we can believe His Word concerning it because, Paul says, God cannot lie!
Heb 9:15 says that we “who have been called may receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” In chapter 3 of this letter Peter says, “But according to His promise we are looking for a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” And James says, in his letter, that this promise is for those who love Him.
Peter’s language in this verse shows us that he is speaking of the promise of eternal life through being born again. He says that this is so that we may be partakers of the divine nature. We are born dead in our sins. That is we are separated from God because of our sin. But when we have been born again we become partakers of the divine nature. God’s Holy Spirit comes to live within us. He gives us His nature so that we may live righteously. This is the conversion that Peter mentioned in verse 3. And this leads us to the next question that Peter answers for us.
B. How do we receive them? (Repentance)
Since no one will receive these precious and magnificent promises unless they are born again, unless they have experienced conversion, the question Peter answers is “how do we receive them?” Since no one will receive eternal life until they are born again, how can we be born again and receive the promise of eternal life? Peter answers it by saying that we receive eternal life because we have “escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.” What does Peter mean by this? We receive eternal life through repentance. We will be born again when we repent of our sin and trust Christ as our Savior. Faith and repentance are really two sides of the same coin. When we truly believe that Jesus Christ is our Savior and died to completely pay the penalty of our sin and put our trust in Him alone to save us from our sin we also will have a changed attitude toward our sin. We will see our sin for the corruption that it really is. We will not see it as something to revel in as we did before we found Christ. We will not see it as something to think or deal lightly with because we see it as God sees it, “corruption.”
It is at this point, the point when we come to faith and repentance, that God makes us partakers of the divine nature. It is at this point that He implants within us His desires. We become ashamed of the sin we once loved and love the things of God that we once hated. Martin Luther described the change in this way. He said that before his conversion he had hated the righteousness of God because he knew that God’s righteousness would be the very reason for his own condemnation. But once he was born again by the Spirit of God he loved that righteousness because he realized that it was the righteousness of God in Christ that brought to him eternal life.
Repentance, along with faith (trust), results in our receiving these wonderful promises of God for eternal life because repentance is our coming to the realization that God was right all along and we were wrong. We fully understand at that moment God was fully just in condemning us because we were nothing but sinners who deserved this death. And at the same time, in recognizing our just condemnation, we recognize and come to believe that Jesus paid all the debt for our sin. When we come to understand this and see both the full weight of our sin and the full payment of Christ’s death on the cross on our behalf we are born again. There is no other way but through repentance in faith. Unless the two work together you cannot be born again.
If you have repentance without faith, that is if you realize you are a lost sinner justly condemned by God without the realization that Christ has done everything to save you, you are simply under the conviction of sin that brings despair. People come under this conviction all the time without being saved because they don’t realize Christ paid the full penalty for their sin. They do wrong and feel the guilty weight of their conscience. So what do they do? They try to get rid of the guilt in some other way. They run away from people who tell them they are guilty. They compare themselves with others who aren’t as nice. They take prescription drugs to numb their conscience. They look to counselors to reprogram their conscience. But they don’t see a solution to their sin problem.
Someone I knew in college had an aunt who had lived very terribly as a youth. She was under extreme guilt. So extreme that she underwent shock therapy. She lost all memory of her awful behavior and felt great for about six months. After that the guilt returned. But now she couldn’t remember what the guilt was for. So repentance must be coupled with faith in Christ’s complete work on the cross for our sins to cause someone to be born again. What do I mean by Jesus’ complete work on the cross? Colossians 2:13-14 declare it plainly. “When you were dead in your transgressions . . . He made you alive together with Him having canceled out ALL our transgressions . . . He has taken it out of the way having nailed it to the cross.”
But similarly if faith in Christ’s work is not completed with repentance then it does not save either. Someone may have trust that Jesus died for them but if they have not recognized how wretched their sin is so as to cause them to repudiate it, it simply results in a false conversion that does not lead to a change of life. Without repentance a person still believes that they are a good person with only a little help needed by God instead of recognizing that they are a sinner without one bit of righteousness.
There are people today who have a knowledge of the Gospel but they have not been born again because they have never repented. They have never hated and been ashamed of their sin. They have never, in sincere remorse over the deeds that they have done, repudiated their sin. And out of this they have never clung to a real faith that saves.
They are like those that Peter describes at the end of chapter 2. They have a knowledge of the way of life but they, like pigs return to wallow in the mud, and like dogs go back and lick up their vomit. They have never had their nature changed, they have never become partakers of the divine nature and they should be children of God but instead are still pigs and dogs.
What has God said to us today? Everyone who is a believer has a great source of power through God’s grace to live the way He wants us to live. We need not make excuses but simply humble ourselves and cling to the precious and magnificent promises He has given us in providing eternal life. If you have been struggling to overcome sin in your life trust Him to do for you what He wants to do so that He will receive all the honor and glory. He has given us all things needed to live a life pleasing to Him. Don’t delay to trust Him now.
And if you have not repented and put your trust in Him let me encourage you to do so today. The Scripture says that today is the day of salvation, now is the accepted time. God gives us no promise of tomorrow. Come to Christ and allow Him to give you His righteous-ness and remove your sin from you as far as the east is from the west.