Join Pastor Tim tonight as we continue to explore what it looks like to grow as a Christian from 2 Peter 1:5-8 — and how (not) to do it.
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.
Good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be with you again tonight as we continue our series Growing, and we dig into what Peter says we need for a quote-unquote successful or good life. We like to toss around those terms. We’ll talk about that more in a moment, but before we do, let’s go ahead and come before our God in prayer. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for your word that tells us what a truly joy-filled and purposeful life looks like. Lord, would you help us to turn all the more towards you to see those places where we try to do things by our own power instead, and as we turn to you, Lord, would you use us to show your love to the world. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
We love as a society to talk about self-help books, and we’re going to read these next few verses from 2nd Peter where we’ve been digging in the last few weeks, and Peter’s going to list out what we need—seven things, actually—that we need in a Christian life. Let’s go ahead and read those and then think about what Peter has in mind and if it fits into that mold that we so often have about such things. Let’s go ahead and turn to 2nd Peter, chapter 1, verses 5 to 8. Peter writes:
“For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and 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 or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Well, we do love our books that tell us how to improve our lives—the so-called self-help books. I actually have a bunch of them pictured right behind me here. These are apparently the most popular ones of our present year, and if you go into a bookstore—or you remember the days when you did go into bookstores—you think about the rack right when you first walk in, and there’s usually a bunch of self-help books featured there, the top sellers of the moment. And you go back, and there’s another whole section. You go into the section for Christianity, and what do you find? More essentially self-help books that are quote-unquote Christian living.
We love these books because they say, well, if you just follow these seven steps or do these eight things, you’ll be happy, you’ll be wealthy, you’ll be successful. If you just read these seven scripture verses, all will go well in your life—in the Christian versions. But all these books, whether they’re Christian or secular, contend that you just do a certain number of very simple things. You go through a checklist, and life will be good or you’ll be successful. You’ll achieve your dreams. You’ll realize you’re important.
And the problem, maybe you’ve had this experience too—I’ll read some of those books and I get done, and I’m really not sure it’s done that much for me. It feels kind of good to be reading it at the moment, and it makes you feel important or good or fulfilled, but then you look back and you think, what was it really saying? And I’m convinced one of the reasons we sell so many self-help books is we get that initial rush of, “Oh, this is helping me,” but then after that, we realize our lives haven’t really changed.
And the temptation might be Peter has this list here and we think, “Oh, well, Peter has now given us the real seven ways to a successful life list.” And in a sense he’s saying, yes, Christian life should have these things, but he’s not talking in that mold that we so often think about. What he says, and we see this in verse 8, is that we grow by knowing Jesus. We can cut right to that. We don’t need six other things first.
Here’s what we see in verse 8: “For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Notice he assumes we already know Jesus. And in fact, if we go back to verse 5, he’s talking about supplementing our faith—our personal relationship with Jesus—with these things. He’s not talking about gaining a relationship with Jesus through these things, or somehow achieving salvation through these things. He’s saying, you know Jesus. Now here’s how we look at the Christian life and we grow as Christians so that our lives can truly fulfill what God has intended for us.
We’re talking about knowledge of somebody, Jesus, not just knowledge of some things like all those self-help books tend to say they’re going to provide. Knowledge of things is great, and in fact, Scripture describes all kinds of things we can know, but what’s so important is that we actually know the God of the universe. That’s our starting point.
And Peter has already expressed in the earlier part of this chapter how it is that we start from that basis and then grow as Christians, that we know Jesus, and then through that, we come to this point now. We say, well, what does the Christian life for someone who already knows Jesus look like? But we start there. We can’t get through a checklist of things and somehow find ourselves fulfilled. It’ll always come up empty. It’s that basis of faith in Jesus.
When he talks about supplementing, then, what does he mean? If he’s not talking about somehow making our faith work well or somehow provide enough rewards or something like that, but he’s saying we’re already forgiven, we’re already Jesus—God already loves us. He’s been saying those things for weeks. What’s he talking about here? Well, if you joined me last week or you go back and look at that, you’ll notice that we ended looking at verse 4, where Peter talks about escaping the corruption in the world.
Why do we do that? So we can reflect God’s love. We can show it to others. We can truly feel his joy. And that’s where he’s building from here. What does it look like if we’re going to say, “I’m not going to follow what the world says is good, but I’m going to follow what God says is good.” And there were lots of teachers during Peter’s day that would go around talking about, well, if you just have enough of the right knowledge, life will be great. Not really that different from today.
But Peter says you can know all kinds of things, but if you’re not following Jesus and your life isn’t, therefore, becoming shaped more and more like Jesus, you’re not going to experience the fullness of the joy that God has for you. And so when he talks about this idea here of “to make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue,” what he’s talking about—the word he chooses—is a word for essentially a patron of the arts. And it refers specifically to the ancient Greek choruses.
So you’d have plays. Many of the famous playwrights would write these plays that would have these giant choruses of people that would chime in and offer chants that provided context to the story and pulled it together. And it was very costly to bring these choruses together. And so not unlike if you were to go to the Muni today—or well, not today, but if you go next year or you go to the Fox Theater or any other performing arts venue—you’ll often look in the information about the play and you’ll see the different sponsors, corporate sponsors, individual sponsors, people who helped to make it possible.
And if you think about the wonder of going there and then you see this beautiful display out on a nice summer evening at the Muni and all the lighting and the music and the talented people on stage and how that all comes together into this wonderful performance, these people who would supplement the plays in the ancient world were doing something similar. They were essentially enabling, as it were, the lights to be turned on the stage.
What Peter is saying here is God has already provided the actors, he’s already brought you back to life; now here’s what you can do to flip the light switch so that people can see what God’s doing in your life. Not to earn God’s involvement in your life, but to allow it to come to life, to set that stage alive with the beauty of the drama of God’s love in our lives.
We need to supplement not salvation but rather to build on what God has done in our lives through the power of the Holy Spirit so that we can enjoy and rejoice and watch God use us as he continues to work in our lives. And Peter says one of the most important things that we do in order to do that is to have self-control.
If you think about his list here in verse 5, he talks about faith that’s supplemented with virtue—virtue being doing good, godly things. And of course, I think most of us, at least early on, if we believe in Jesus, we want to do what’s pleasing to him. And so the idea of trying to be virtuous makes sense.
But where it becomes really challenging, and it’s so important that we grow, is that self-control, that discipline, that we continue to become more like Jesus and we resist that continued drive, that pull from the world to do what’s contrary to God’s will. Many of the false teachers that Peter confronts were going around actually arguing the opposite, because they wanted to do whatever they wanted. And so they would argue that the genuinely knowledgeable life, the life that truly understood how things were, could just do whatever he or she wanted.
Peter says, no. If you have genuine knowledge, if you really know what’s important, if you know God, then you know what he’s done for you. And you desire to become more disciplined so that you are training, that you are doing the things necessary to fulfill God’s purpose for your life.
The Apostle Paul talks in very similar language, using that same word of self-control, in 1st Corinthians chapter 9. And if we take a look there, here’s what he says. He says, “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So do not run aimlessly. I do not box as one beating the air, but I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”
Paul isn’t saying, “I need to train so that Jesus loves me, so that I can be saved.” He’s saying, “I’ve gone around, I proclaim Jesus to people all over the place, and why do I need self-control? So that nothing will come up that would cause others to be able to dismiss the goodness of what God has done.” And that’s exactly what Peter is talking about here, what we’re called to do.
As people hear about God working in our lives, as we confess Jesus and people know that we seek to follow Jesus, it’s human nature in this fallen world to look for, “Well, where’s the catch? Where is it that you’re not really doing this?” And when we’re not disciplined and we stray from what God’s called us to do, people see that as an excuse to ignore what God has done in our lives.
What Peter’s saying here is, use the sort of discipline an athlete would use so that you are well prepared, and that the stuff that God has—the wonderful stuff that God has already done in your life—people can’t discount.
If you think about it, it’s one thing to be going in as a hobby—you run around your neighborhood—but imagine you’re training for the Olympics. How much more important is it, as you’re doing so, to make sure that you’re actually disciplined, that you go train every day, that you don’t say, “Well, I trained for a month, I don’t need to train anymore,” because what’s going to happen? Well, that training is going to fade away.
We need to constantly be in God’s Word, digging into it, being strengthened by it, coming to God in prayer—in other words, using the disciplines of the Christian life—so that God uses those tools in our lives to make us show his love to the world.
If you imagine for a moment, I think we probably all have a junk drawer in our house, or two, or three—places where we toss everything—and there’s lots of wonderful things in there. We already have them. They belong to us. But if they get lost in that drawer, they don’t do us any good. In fact, this presenter remote here that I use for Steadfast, it took me about four years to locate. I put it in one of those drawers, and I couldn’t find it. And it didn’t do me any good. In fact, I replaced it before I found it.
And how often is it that in the Christian life we basically do the same thing? We take our lives and God restores us. He gives us eternal life. We see the Spirit working in our lives, and yet because we aren’t disciplined, we allow all the junk of life just to accumulate and to turn our lives into one of those messy drawers. And soon you can’t even find the things that God’s doing in your life. Not because he’s no longer giving us his love, but because it’s lost in that chaos.
And so you start to clean up that drawer, and you start to pull things out. And I suspect all of us have done this, too. There’ll be times I’ll go into one of those drawers, and I see some things, and I pick out a few things and try to organize the front part of it. And then you look and you think, “Boy, the rest of that drawer is just a mess.” And then you come to that critical moment: Am I going to pull everything out and really get it clean, or am I going to clean the front and just eventually let everything settle back together into a mess?
And what we’re called to do as Christians is to allow God to do that organizing work in our lives, and through the means that he gives us—such as his Word—to allow that to filter through and help us to start taking out those old wrappers and expired batteries and pulling all that kind of stuff out so we can see, find our scissors, and the good batteries and the various other things, the birthday candles and whatever else we might have in there.
We need to be disciplined. We need to be training for the race that God set before us. And so our first question that I hope that you’ll consider this week is, how’s that training going? How is that doing for you? And I think all of us are going to have times where we’re going to say, “It’s going great. I’ve been reading God’s Word every day. I’ve been praying to him. I’ve been trying to show his love to others.” And there are going to be times that we say, “I know I read his Word at some point in the last few weeks, and it’s just gotten so busy. My life just seems like a junk drawer right now.”
We’re going to go back and forth, but this letter is calling us here. Peter is calling us to think, maybe it’s time to reorganize that drawer again. What are we consuming into our lives? What are we doing with our lives? And is it organizing that drawer and allowing it to be more functional so we can be using all the gifts that God has given us? Or is it just a chaotic mess at the moment?
And here’s the thing that’s so different from a self-help book and what Peter is calling us to do here. You know, there are self-help books that talk about organizing, but they’re all about making me feel better or feel affirmed. One famously in recent years that started a big stir talked about that you look at things and you decide to keep them whether they spark joy in your life. And it’s really about what makes me feel happy.
But what Peter is saying is something so much more important. Why do we do this? We do this so that others can know who God is. Others can receive his love that we already have. Every person that’s trusted in Jesus has God’s love. What do we need to do? We need to make sure that our lives aren’t such a junk drawer that people can’t even see what God’s doing.
Now, sometimes we need motivation to do that, because you look at that drawer and you say, “This is chaotic and I don’t even know what I’m trying to accomplish.” And sometimes you put that drawer back and say, “I don’t think it’s going to… my life isn’t gonna be any better by organizing that.”
And so it’s really important that we know where we’re headed. Where is this taking us? And the end of that chain of virtues or that chain of things that should be growing in our lives as Christians really helps us to understand that. And we see that in verse 7. Peter ends that whole list with these three. He says that you should be supplementing the others with godliness, and supplement that godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.
Ignatius of Antioch once observed that faith is the beginning and love is the end. We start with faith. We have the Spirit working our lives and we believe in Jesus, and God starts chipping away at the things in our life. That’s the beginning. That’s the utterly necessary starting point—to know that God loves you, to say that Jesus is your Lord. These fundamental things of the Christian faith, that’s the starting point. And all this other stuff doesn’t work without it.
But where are we headed? We’re headed to showing the very love that we receive to others and to God. It’s so crucial to see these other points that we’re talking about, the ones in this passage, as a way to get there.
And thinking about that reminded me of years ago. There was a family function that was in Indiana, and my dad, who is much more familiar with various parts of Indiana, was already there getting some things set up. And my mom and I drove in a bit later. And as we’re driving in, we get to Indianapolis. We’re coming down Interstate 70. We arrive in Indianapolis, and there’s some road construction. We got diverted. And we knew where we were trying to go. We knew what the end was. But suddenly, we were on a road that we hadn’t been on before.
I was the one in charge of reading maps, and I’ve never been the best map reader in the world. And suddenly we’re driving and we get the suspicion that we’re going the wrong direction on the loop around the city. But we’re not quite sure because we don’t know the landmarks. We don’t know what the steps are from where we were at that moment to where we knew we needed to go.
And so often as Christians, we believe in Jesus. We know we’re supposed to love. And we jump to that and we forget this process that God trains us through, just like an athlete. And just like my mom and I were that time in Indianapolis, where we were going way out of our way, the wrong direction, because we didn’t quite know how to get from where we were to where we were going, so too we need to go through these steps. We need to follow the intermediate steps here so we can get to the point where we can show God’s love to others.
Peter says that we should show brotherly affection. That word—if you’ve been in church circles, you often hear about the four loves. There’s different words for love in Greek. This is one of them. We’re familiar with it in the United States because we named a whole city after it: Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love.
Brotherly affection is a very wonderful form of love. But it’s not where he stops. It’s where we care for others that we have a good relationship with. It’s a love that’s kind and compassionate. But he says that we go from that, then we go further. This is why we need these steps. We go all the way to what he just terms love.
This love is a self-giving love. It’s the very love that’s applied to God. And if you try to be completely self-giving as you love others, where it’s not about anything they can do for you or anything they do for you, it’s purely giving. I think anytime that we end up in those sorts of places at all, we start to feel like we’re just drying up. And it’s very hard to continue as a fallen human being in that state because we want people to do stuff for us as well.
But that’s where we’re headed, because as God works in our lives, he enables us to show more of the very love he’s given us—the love that when we had nothing to offer him, that we could give him nothing, he gave to us. But that love requires the steadfastness that Peter mentions here. And it’s interesting he chooses that word in this list, because who is the only one who’s truly steadfast? And we see this throughout the Old Testament: it’s God himself.
And as you start to think of each of these different attributes that Peter lists here, we realize that he’s really describing the very way that God relates to us. And that’s why it goes back to that faith and knowledge of who Jesus is, because what we’re being called to do in the Christian life is to actually be more like Jesus. We can’t be Jesus. We’ll never be able to save ourselves or save someone else. But we’re called to be more like him.
And this chain, this process of going from faith to virtue to godliness and so on, is a process of looking at different parts of who God is and reflecting them in our lives.
That’s our second question for us to consider this week: Where are you? Where am I at this point in that process? And again, much like the first question, we’re going to find times that we’re closer to self-giving love or at least brotherly affection. And there are going to be times that we’re just barely eking through with faith.
Are we self-controlled? Are we steadfast? Sometimes. Sometimes probably not. But we’re called to reflect on that. Because as we reflect on that, God convicts us and enables us to be more like him. As we spend time in his Word and we read about who God is and his character and his love for us, what does he do? He starts to shape us with that to show more of that to others.
If you’re around someone who has a distinctive accent, you may have had the experience that you start to pick up a little bit of it. Maybe you’re someone with a bit of a twang and you pick up a twang, or you’re around someone with a British accent and, oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful to pick up a bit of that British accent? Or just a mannerism or a saying.
And what we’re called to do here, this list is basically calling us to reflect on who God is and to spend enough time knowing who Jesus is, that knowledge that Peter talks about, that we’re being shaped and we are reflecting Jesus.
If we’re going to get through that city we’re lost in, we need to learn landmarks. And if we’re going to get through life in a way that is truly fulfilling what God intends for us, if that drama is going to come alive in our lives, we need the landmarks of God’s character that we can look to and be refined by.
We don’t need a seven-step book on how to live a good life or a happy life or a wealthy life. We really only need one step—that’s knowing Jesus. As we know Jesus, he transforms us and shapes us. That’s what we really need.
The more we look at Jesus, the more we see everything that we need, everything that shapes us. Because what we’re called to do is to follow him. Jesus is the one who all those things that we are seeking after, all those things that we want in life, he’s the one that provides the more perfect fulfillment of those.
We want to be happy, but he offers us true and lasting eternal joy. We want to be healthy, but he offers us eternal life. We want to be perhaps wealthy or successful. And what does he offer? He offers the actual ability to come into his presence eternally in heaven.
We end up chasing these pale imitations. And as we know Jesus, as we are shaped by him, we recognize when we’re driving the wrong direction in the city and we can say, “Oh, I need to get off and do a U-turn because I’m going the wrong way and I’m never going to get where I want to go.”
We don’t need a bunch of steps. We just need to know Jesus. As we know Jesus, we can look to his transformation. He will continue to work in each of our lives throughout our lives.
And if you don’t yet know Jesus, tonight’s a perfect night to get to know him. It starts just by praying to him, just confessing your sins, knowing him as your Lord and Savior. And then for all of us as we continue that journey, as a process of constantly knowing him better, studying the map as it were, seeing how he’s ministered to his people all through the centuries, all the way up to now—and as we do, then he transforms us and enables us to show his love to others, to get closer to that end when he makes us truly glorious in his presence.
Would you join me in prayer? Father, we thank you for your goodness and your love. We thank you that you love us enough to send your Son to live, to suffer, to die, and to triumph over death for us. And in that process, to show us what it is that you’ve called us to be and to do, to actually fulfill perfectly the purpose of being a human being.
And as we look at your interaction with your people throughout all of history, Lord, would you shape us? Would you help us to see those spots that we’re missing the landmarks and need to turn around? Those places where we’ve lost discipline and our life has become a messy, disorganized, unusable drawer. And would you help us instead to turn and to see you and to show your love to a world so that when people see us, they don’t see us, they see you. They see your love and your hope.
We pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, we are going to continue next week at 7 p.m. once again on Monday night, Steadfast. And next week, we’re going to look at something that I think is really important. In these next verses that follow up, you may still be thinking, well, this is all really great, but how do I know this is what God’s doing? How do I have confidence?
And Peter takes us through confidence, both through the historical evidence that Jesus has done the things that we find in Scripture, and also the confidence of looking to what Jesus does in our lives. And I think that confidence is such an important next part for us to go into, because this is hard.
And as we look, we can become discouraged. We can say, well, I’m never going to live up to what God has called me to be. And yes, we know that Jesus has forgiven us, but we need to be constantly reminded of that.
So I hope that you’ll come back next week and hear more about that confidence. You can help us as we seek to share this hope from the gospel simply by sharing us on social media.
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If there’s any way I can be praying for you this week, you can shoot me an email. You can also leave a comment in the comment section below. And if you’d like others to be praying for you, if you shoot me an email, let me know, and I can keep it private or I can share it with the whole Little Hills team.
But whichever way you decide to do it, I would love to be able to pray for you with whatever you’re facing this week. And I hope that you will join me again next week. It’s been so great to be with you, and I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week. Thank you again.