Spring time is here! Spring time is a wonderful season. It is a season newness and freshness. People have a desire to start new things. My wife and I are already looking at beginning a new project in our home. It is an opportunity for us to start fresh in every area of our life. Spring time is also a season of growth.
One of the things that I personally have been wanting to grow in is my health. And I have learned that just because I look healthy on the outside doesn’t mean that I’m healthy on the inside. I know that I can’t fix everything at once. So I decided to start taking daily vitamins and supplements. My goal is to grow in my health throughout the year.
Whether it be vitamins, minerals, herbs, etc, supplements are so important. They help maintain or even increase your overall nutrition in areas you might be lacking. You still must maintain a healthy diet and not eat junk food everyday. That is our responsibility. However, supplements are something we doin addition to help boost our overall health.
Not only is our physical health important, but so is our spiritual health. Like daily vitamins, there are spiritual supplements that we can take everyday to help boost our faith, spiritual walk. As we pay attention to our bodily health, we should also pay attention to spiritual health as well.
Every one of us want to get closer to God. Every one of us want to grow in our faith. We all want to be spiritually healthy. Just was their are supplements we can take for our bodily health, there are supplements we can take for our spiritual health. Today we are going to take a look at what those are.
They are found in 2 Peter chapter 1. Before we get to these faith supplements, Peter is going to reveal to us how we can draw closer to Jesus. It is our responsibility to maintain our relationship with God.
We all have that internal struggle of wanting to do what is right versus doing what we know to be wrong. We all have a desire to draw closer to God as well. So how? How do we draw closer to Him? Today we are going to go to the source, that is the Word of God, the Bible. We are going to read about what we we can do to draw closer to God for our life and take advantage of this new season we are in.
2 Peter 1:3-7
“3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life”
His divine power!
This is the same power that created the heavens and the earth.
This is the same power that sustains the planets in our solar system and the countless galaxies in our universe.
This is the same power that put breath in your lungs to make you a living, breathing being.
This is the same power that rose Jesus Christ from the dead.
This is the same power that saved your soul.
It is a power that belongs to God alone.
According to His great plan, through His power alone, He has given us everything we need for a godly life.
Godly Life = To be pleased with God and to be pleasing to God
It is a desire and contentment to be pleased with God, along with internal drive to be pleasing to God.
He has given us, not “some things,” not “most things,” but EVERYTHING we need to live a godly life. Not only do we have a desire to grow closer to God (Philippians 2:13), we also have all that we need to do so.
Philippians 2:13 - “For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.”
God gives us both the desire and the ability to do what pleasing Him; to draw closer to Him!
He gives us all that we need! So where is it? Where do we find access to these things that He has given us?
V3 - “through our knowledge of him”
That is, through our our knowledge of Jesus Christ. This is not just a “head knowledge” about Jesus. A lot of people know about Jesus. However, it is not the same thing as “knowing” Jesus. This is a head knowledge; an experiential knowledge.
Everything we need to grow closer to God is found in our relationship with Jesus Christ. It is found in knowing Him. How do we know Jesus more? Through His Word.
It is though the Bible, the Word of God, that we find all that we need to draw closer to Him. That is our desire! So, if we want to draw closer to God, we have to be in His word. It is there that we find, not some things, not most things, but EVERYTHING we need to get closer to God.
“who called us by his own glory and goodness.”
We are born again because He called out to us and we responded to Him. No one finds God on their own. We have no ability to do so. Instead, He called us! He is still calling people today to be born again! That can be you today.
For us as believers, He is calling us to Himself. We have a desire to draw closer to Him because He is calling us, beckoning us, wooing us to come closer to Him through His Holy Spirit. That is the spiritual tug that we feel.
V4 - “Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises”
In His Word, He has given us everything we need to get closer to Him. It is there that we will find what Peter describes as His “great and precious promises.” These are not the promises you and I make to one another, that can be broken at times. These are great and precious promises because that are based on God’s glory and goodness. They are promises downloaded by the God of the universe into the Word of God. His promises are declarations of certainty; His promises are eternal currency.
Because they are based on God, they are reliable. These are promises that we can trust in. Just as we can rely on the sun to rise tomorrow morning, God is just as reliable. We can trust in Him! We can trust in His great promises!!
They are precious; meaning they are meant to be held onto dearly.
Psalm 119:11 - “I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.”
His Word is precious and has the power to release our God-hidden potential. What is our God-hidden potential? It is found in the next part of this verse.
“so that through them you may participate in the divine nature”
His promises give us access to participate in the divine nature. What is that? Divine nature is God-like nature. Meaning, the ability to become more like Him.
We first see that when we become born again. We go from darkness to light, from death to life. He puts His divine spirit on the inside of us and we become new creatures in Christ, where the old is gone and the new has come.
So we experience that when we are born again, but it does not stop there. There is a spiritual transformation that continues to takes place as we continue to engage the Word of God. That transformation is us growing in the divine nature that God has given us access to participate in. That is the new man spoken about in Ephesians 4:20-23. It is not our workmanship, but God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works. (Ephesians 2:10)
Check this out, by walking in this divine nature, it allows us to
“having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”
By walking in this divine nature, it allows us to escape the evil desires that we so eagerly want to stay away from. It is only by God’s power that we can be free from the power of sin and the lull of devil.
The devil is your enemy and he is trying to cause you to sin. Why, because he wants to catch you in a trap. Once you fall in, he ensnares you and tries to keep you from getting closer to God. His goal is to draw you away from God. It begins with a little bit of temptation. These evil desires are corrupt and are meant to keep you from pleasing God.
However, by walking in the divine nature that is accessed through God’s promises found in His Word, we are able to live free from the trap of sin and free to to please God.
This is what we want! That is what a faith walk looks like.
We are beginning a new series on Faith Supplements for a Godly Life. We are going to highlight 7 things the Bible says we should add to our faith walk. They are found in the following verses.
“5 For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love.”
They are like daily vitamins that we can add to our faith walk in order to have a healthy spiritual walk. So that we can be pleased with God and be pleasing to God.
V8 - “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.”
The worst thing that can happen for us as believers on this side of heaven is to be “ineffective and unproductive” in our relationship with God. We all want to hear “well done my good and faithful servant” when we faced before God.
Adding these supplements will allow us to be effective and productive for Jesus. That is what matters. That is what God us about. That is what our church is about.
V9 - “But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.”
Let us not become nearsighted and blind. Let us not become ineffective for Jesus. Let us be healthy Christians in our life. We can do this by adding daily spiritual supplements to our life. Next week we will begin with the first spiritual supplement, virtue.
Until then, let us continue our daily consumption of the Word of God. Doing so gives us access to participate in God’s divine nature through His precious promises. This alone will keep us from falling into the traps of sin.
Takeaways:
1. We have everything we need to live a
godly life
2. Everything we need is found in God’s
Word
3. It is our responsibility to maintain our
relationship with God
