Join Pastor Tim as we explore Peter’s loving guidance at the end of his life to believers on how we grow and experience God’s grace. Tonight we consider who is “worth” growing.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I’m so glad to have you joining me tonight as we turn to a brand new series entitled Growing. We’re going to the second letter from the Apostle Peter. We often don’t spend a lot of time in that letter, and it’s unfortunate because there is so much encouragement in it. And I really hope that this series encourages you as much as it has been an encouragement to me as I’ve been preparing for it. Let’s go ahead and come before our God in prayer as we begin, and then we’ll dig right in.
Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your Word, including this letter that we get to read and be encouraged by. Lord, thank you for your goodness and your love. And as we study your Word, would you encourage us in the love that you have for us, that you’ve given this Word to us, that we might grow in the ways that you would have us grow, that we can have your joy. We pray these things in the precious name of our Savior, Jesus. Amen.
Well, as we began tonight, you saw a video with lots of footage from farm fields. And if you’ve been driving around at all over the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen the crop starting to grow taller. The corn around here is actually getting quite tall. It’s summer, right? And we look at that and it’s wonderful. But while we are just starting to notice it, unless you’re a farmer, if you were a farmer, you would have been thinking about it months ago as you planted those seeds and then have tended to them over time. Also that those plants can grow and become what they’re meant to be. But what would happen if instead of tending to them, you just planted some seeds, you went through all the work, you spent hours planting all those seeds, and then you just walked away and thought a year or two later, oh, maybe I’ll go and check on my seeds.
Well, you might end up with something like this: a farm that looks abandoned, the buildings falling down, the weeds are growing. The original plants that were planted there are long forgotten. And if you think about our lives, we often see in Scripture metaphors of growth. Jesus used the parable of the sower, talking about different seeds. And when we think about those seeds, the seed that Jesus places in our hearts as he calls us to be his, there’s a call to tend to that, to embrace God’s Word, to explore it, to come to a better knowledge of Him, that those seeds can grow and not be like that field there that’s just abandoned, but to be a beautiful growing field like the ones we saw when we started.
And the second letter to Peter is encouraging the church to be a kind of church that is tending to that field of faith, to see the fruit come out of it that God intends for them. Peter says in some later verses we’ll get to in a few weeks that he’s writing these things because he knows that his time left on earth is short, that his life is coming to an end. And as his life comes to an end, he wants to encourage them in the things that are truly important. And he begins that tonight at the very beginning, verses 1 and 2 of 2 Peter chapter 1. Let’s go ahead and turn there.
“Simeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours, by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ, may grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of our God and of Jesus our Lord.”
Peter is writing to believers. He’s writing to the church. He’s clearly ministered to the people that he’s addressing in this letter, and he addresses them as such. He’s writing to those who have received the grace that comes from Jesus. And so as we read these things, he’s not writing to people urging them to believe. He’s assuming that they already believe. But that’s a really crucial basis. He’s assuming they believe. It’s so important before he goes into the things he’s going to go into that they understand the basics, that they are recipients of God’s grace. You can tend to the field all you want. You can put all the fertilizer you want down. But if there isn’t belief, if the seed hasn’t been planted, you still have a dirt field. Dirt doesn’t really need fertilizer. Plants do.
And so what Peter is saying here when he’s writing this is that, okay, now that you believe, now that you’ve received God’s grace, let me remind you before I go what’s really important about how you grow in that faith, that you don’t just leave it there to be infested with weeds and not to ever really get to be what it was meant to be.
And one of the things that he wants to start out with that we can pass up because it’s in the greeting and we think, oh, this is a greeting, okay, I’ll just set that aside like I ignore the return address on an envelope once I know who it’s from—he’s saying, well, pause here for a moment and notice exactly who you are. You’re a believer. You have that faith in Jesus. But it’s more than that. And we see that at the end of verse one. Look again there for a moment. Peter writes, “…to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.”
He says that they have an equal standing to him, he himself, an apostle. Not just an apostle. He wasn’t just one of the twelve. Peter was one of the inner three, the apostles that were closest to Jesus. And he says to these people that he’s been ministering to, I’m writing to people with an equal standing before our Lord. I’m writing to my brothers and sisters in Christ.
It’s no mistake that the early church, including in Scripture, that the way that they addressed each other were as brother and sister because they were all of the family of God. And that starts with where salvation comes from. Notice what Peter says here in this first verse. He says that salvation comes from Jesus, our God and Savior. Let’s sink in for a moment.
Yes, we confess if we’re going through theological statements. We say, yes, Jesus is God. We talk of the Trinity and there’s God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. But then we just read the word Jesus and we think, Jesus, that’s wonderful. But pause for a moment there when we think about the wonder that we’re saved by God himself, that Jesus as God gave himself for us. And it’s because of that that Peter then can speak of the value of those that he’s ministering to.
That yes, he’s an apostle. He has that title. He has the experience with Jesus. But every single person who’s going to read this letter who has believed in the gospel has been given that same gift that he has been given. That Jesus died for Peter, yes, but Jesus died for them. He paid that price for each of them. And he wants them to know how valuable they are so that as they are called to tend to the field, to see themselves grow in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, that they wouldn’t just think of that as something for the really important people or they wouldn’t think that it isn’t nearly as interesting or meaningful to God in them because they’re lesser, but he wants them to know that they are of value to God.
We look in a field that was like that abandoned field. There’s all kinds of seeds in it. Some of them are of great value. Some of them are of lesser value. What Peter wants to say to every single believer is that you are of equal value before God because you were made in his image and you were redeemed at great cost, the ultimate cost of Jesus burying our sins on the cross. Every Christian is of equal value to God because he’s given that cost, that price for you and for me.
I love what Edwin Blum says in reflecting on this passage. He says every Christian has the same heavenly Father and the same prospect of glory. If you think of what Jesus came to achieve, all of us as we trust in Jesus, and if you haven’t, if you simply trust in him, have that same prospect of glory. Peter doesn’t have a greater prospect of glory than we do. Believers that have been believers all of their lives do not have a greater prospect of glory than you if you believe tonight. Everyone who trusts in Jesus has the same prospect of glory, and that’s what Peter is referring to here.
I think even if maybe you’re hearing that you say, well yeah, I guess that sounds right. I think functionally oftentimes we don’t think that way, and sometimes we start to think of ourselves as less valuable, and in doing so then that starts to chip away at the importance of tending to that seed of faith that we’ve been given.
You think about Peter’s readiness as an apostle, and we don’t have the 12 apostles here today, but we still have people that we think of as really important. We think of someone like, say, a Billy Graham, and we think, well, Billy Graham, when he believed and then he went and grew in faith and went and preached and did these huge gatherings of people proclaiming the gospel, now that was someone who was important to God. That was someone who had a prospect of glory. Me? What have I done? How am I important to God?
But Peter says, no, no. Jesus paid that price just as much for you as he paid it for the apostles, just as much as he paid it for Billy Graham or whomever you can think of in your life, some pastor that’s really influential and accomplished, no matter who you can think of. Maybe it’s someone who just is a prayer warrior who’s constantly praying. You think, now that’s someone God cares about, and what Peter wants to say is that’s true. That God, the same God, cares about them as who cares about you just as much, because you are of value to him.
If we turn to Galatians 3, 27 to 29, Paul writes these words: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.”
If you think about what God’s doing in your life, God has taken an interest in you, and even as you’re here tonight and you’re hearing these words, this is an affirmation of God’s love for you, and in that is a remarkable exclamation of just how valuable you are to God.
We need to fight the worldly classifications we buy into of some people being more important and other people being less important. So often, I think in the Christian world, it is a sort of a clergy versus laity thing, where we think of, well, these people are really holy because they’re clergy, or they’re really important clergy, they’re at an important church, or they’ve done this or that in ministry. And I’ll hear people say, well, but I haven’t done any of those things. I’ve just done some secular job. I’m not really all that important.
And what Peter says here is, no, you are important. God has called you, he’s called each of us. We’re all of equal worth to him. And that’s not how we think in the world. I got a package unexpectedly a few months ago. I wasn’t sure what it was. I hadn’t ordered anything. And when I opened it up, it was this really nice box, all nice and silvery. And I opened it up and it was congratulating me on achieving premium status with my gas station rewards card. I don’t really even know how I achieved it, but apparently they thought that I was worth sending a really nice travel mug to.
And it was really neat. And I like things like that. It makes you feel kind of special. Well, now I’m a premium member as I go and fill up my tank of gas. And indeed, I get double points now. This is wonderful. And that’s how we think in the world. Everything is about rankings. We rank everything. We rank athletes. We rank people at work. We rank the people around us. And we start thinking, well, is this person as important to me as that person?
That’s not what Jesus does. Jesus paid the ultimate price for each and every person who believes. You are worth that to him. And so is every other person who has been restored in the grace of this gospel. Every person on this earth has been made in his image. And as he restores people, he pays that price for each and every person. He did it just as much for you as for whomever you can imagine who would seem most important.
The opposite danger is that we would place ourselves in a role like Peter could have and think of ourselves as more important. Peter could think back to his time when Jesus was still on earth. And the apostles, he was right there as they’re arguing over who is most important. Who is going to have the seat of priority next to Jesus? But here at the end of his life, he can look back and say that was foolishness. What’s really important is that I’m in Christ and you’re in Christ.
It’s a danger that we have to fight. And we have to do that because when we fail to do that, we start to denigrate what Jesus has done in us. And we again think, well, maybe it’s not so important that I grow because I’m never going to amount to what this other person has. It’s not even worth trying.
And Peter was bringing these things up to the people of this church because indeed there were people in their midst that were saying that they were more important, that they had the authority, and that they should look up to them as super Christians. And Peter wants them to know, you are worth it, and what matters is now you hold on to the teachings that you find in God’s Word and that you grow in grace, not that you chase after celebrity.
And we recognize the individual worth of every believer, including ourselves. We recognize that every person, ourselves and those around us, everyone that Jesus has saved is worth tending to and seeing grow the fruit that God has intended in their lives. And that’s what we see in verse 2. Peter writes, “May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.”
It sounds like just a nice blessing, just a way of opening the letter, but notice what he says there: “May grace and peace be multiplied to you.” True knowledge starts with faith, but we don’t stop at simply believing. We continue to grow in knowledge of who Jesus is because that knowledge multiplies grace and peace in our lives and in the lives of those around us.
Sometimes we forget that this has even been planted in us and we start to get distracted by all the other things that are calling at us in the world. And maybe we’re even thinking, well, I’m going to grow in my faith, but I’m going to worry about this cause or that cause. And oftentimes it’s a very worthy thing. But the most important thing that we can do is to turn to God’s Word and soak in the knowledge of God and of our Lord and Savior Jesus. As we do that, we see the fruit coming out, the growth of the plant of faith that God has placed in us and then His Spirit’s constantly, constant tending to us.
If you recall back to our series on Proverbs a few weeks ago, we looked at who the fool was in Scripture. And the fool is someone who says there is no God, someone who actively turns away from God, who isn’t just struggling with belief, who isn’t someone who isn’t sure what he or she believes, but someone who just wants to turn away from God and has no interest in Him. And the wise person is the one who believes in God, but then seeks after his Word, seeks after his light for our lives.
Peter, as I said, is writing this at the end of his life. And in some sense, this has been compared to Peter’s will. If you’ve gone to a lawyer and written out a will, you’re writing out the things that you want, how you want your estate to be handled, how you want the things that you have here on earth to be passed on to other people or to organizations. And here, Peter is doing the same thing.
Now maybe we think of a scene from some kind of comedic movie where everyone gathers around all the relatives that can’t stand each other. And unfortunately, this happens in real life too, right? Where everyone gathers together. They don’t normally like to be together, but they want to hear what’s in this will because they want to know what’s in it for them. And they’re incredibly disappointed when they realize they were bequeathed some ugly piece of furniture they wanted nothing to do with. They’re disappointed.
What is Peter giving as his last will and testament to the people whom he has ministered to, whom he has known for years of his life? What is he giving? He’s pointing them to how to grow in the joy and the grace of Jesus, how to experience more of God’s peace. He’s telling them there’s going to be all kinds of people who are going to come and they’re going to try to pull you away from what I’ve told you before, but here is what I want to leave for you because this is my hope and this is your hope and this is the hope of everyone who is going to come. It’s seated in the knowledge of the God who loves you. There’s no better gift he can leave them than that.
You see, if God has redeemed us and we find in Scripture an absolute affirmation, yes, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved. When God has redeemed us, that is the start but nowhere near the end of his work in us. So often we stop there and we think, wonderful, I’m saved and that’s great, and then we go through the rest of our lives sort of on cruise control. We’re not really enjoying the scenery. We’re not really growing. We’re just sort of stagnating.
And this isn’t about somehow doing something in order to hang on to salvation or to achieve God’s approval. This is about actually experiencing the fullness of the life that God has intended for you and for me. And over the next weeks as we go through the rest of this passage, we’re going to see more of that as we see the different ways that God calls us to follow him. But the starting point is simply to reflect on God’s promises and to believe. And that’s what we’ve been talking about tonight and we’ll talk more next week about. And in doing that, we start with but we don’t stop with. We continue to seek to know the testimony of His working in our lives and in the lives of others throughout history.
We look back to how God has actually acted in history and Peter testifies to that as part of this. And through that then we’re called to show the fruit of His Spirit. And as we hang on to how God has worked, we have the confidence to embrace what His Spirit is doing in our lives and to show that fruit to others. And then through that, finally at the end of the series, we’ll turn to the future hope that we have in the time to come when Christ returns—the hope that we have because we are called, we are loved by our God. These are all the things that happen as we’re growing in Christ.
And so for this week, what I really want us to stop and pause at is to simply think, where are we in this? Where are we in this journey? Because all those things we’re going to bounce around them in life. But as we’ve seen tonight, what Peter wants us to start with is that we’re worth it to God, that we’re worth worrying about because God has paid for us and redeemed us. And that because of that, there’s reason to take time to tend to these things and to see them growing in our lives.
I’m going to put these questions on screen and maybe we can wrestle, just pause throughout the week and wrestle with these things. And I think a good starting point is that question of where do I rank myself in relationship to others? Am I thinking of people, the apostles or the important people in my life? I’m saying they’re way above me and so I’m just going to—I can’t even begin to aspire to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus because I’m not one of them? Or am I looking down at others who I say don’t rank as highly as I do and so I’m using that not to tend to their lives?
Secondly, how do I adjust to God’s viewpoint? We’re probably at perhaps even different points in our life going to be either viewing ourselves too highly or not really highly enough—not appreciating how much God has paid for us. And so how do I at the point that I’m at this week adjust to God’s viewpoint and see the intrinsic worth that He has called each and every person to see in their lives?
And finally, how can I grow in knowledge of God over the next month? We’re going to be going through this series Growing, and as we do, let’s encourage each other in how we can grow. If you have an idea for a Bible reading plan or a special time of prayer that’s really meaningful, you feel free to share it in the comments, encourage others, and let’s encourage each other to be thinking actively about, as I’m reading through this passage, how do I actually embrace that journey of growing in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior? Because as we do, we experience more of His grace. It’s not about being able to legalistically check off another box and somehow think, okay, now God actually wants to save me. It’s about experiencing the joy of our God.
And that’s my prayer for you tonight and for me tonight, that we experience that joy as we go on this journey together. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your love. Thank you for not just saving us but working in our lives, for calling us to grow in the faith because you love us and not because somehow we’re going to finally get you to love us if we do that, but rather we do it because you do love us and that you want us to experience your joy and your peace. Lord, would you help us to see the places where we’re missing out on that right now? Would you help us to encourage each other, to encourage everyone around us to experience the joy not only of knowing you, not only the joy of being saved and redeemed, but the joy of continuing to grow in that knowledge of your grace, that every day of our life might be a greater joy because we know a little bit more of who you are and how you love us.
We pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We’re going to continue this series next week at 7 p.m. on Monday night, and I really hope that you’ll join me once again at that time because there is so much more in this passage, and I would really like to share it with you. It’s amazing. I think there’s so much packed into this one chapter that we’re going to be spending the next four weeks on. It’s a wonderful time to come before our God and think about what He’s done for us and the ways that He’s calling us to grow so we can have more joy in Him, that we can help others come into His kingdom, that we can look more excitedly toward His second coming.
And so I do hope that you’ll join me for that. If you have any questions about tonight’s passage, you’re encouraged to leave those in the comments, or I’ll share my email address in a few moments, and you can send that to me there as well.
Before I get into that, though, let me just mention we have Bible study on Thursday night once again at 7 p.m. We’ve had men coming from multiple different states, encouraging each other in studying God’s Word, encouraging each other in prayer as we’ve been facing different challenges in life. And if you’re looking for a way to grow some more and to get to know God’s Word more, get to know God more, I hope that you’ll come this Thursday night. It’s a wonderful time and I’d love to be able to share it with you. I know it’ll be even better for your presence there.
We’ll have more next week, and in the meantime, if this video has been an encouragement to you, if this live stream has, I hope that you would consider liking it, or retweeting it, or giving it a thumbs up on YouTube, wherever you happen to be watching. Help us to be able to get the Word out to more people. Consider hitting the share button and sharing it on social media. Consider sending a link to someone by email, or letting them know about this series, to encourage others to join in this journey to grow in the knowledge of God’s grace and love for us. You can help us as part of our team by simply doing that, because who knows whom you might be around who isn’t thinking that God really thinks that they’re worth anything, who doesn’t know that God actually cares about their growth and has plans to bring out fruit in their lives, and you can be the one that helps them to hear that. So I would really be grateful if you do that tonight.
You can follow us also on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and help stay in touch and get the Word out. You can also subscribe on our YouTube channel as well.
If there’s any way I can be praying for you tonight, or again, if you have one of those questions I mentioned, if something has come up tonight and you’re wondering about it, feel free to shoot me an email or go ahead and leave a comment. If you shoot me an email, you can let me know if you’re sending a private prayer request and you want me to just keep it confidential, or if I can share it with the whole Little Hills team and we can all be praying for you. I’m happy to do whatever would make you feel comfortable. I would just love to be praying for you this week as we grow together in faith.
I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week, and I can’t wait to see you again next week. Thank you again for joining me tonight.