Knowing God(8May2011)Mothers' Day
2 Peter 1 M2 11 05 8 (Mothers’ Day)
Title: Knowing God
Text: 2 Peter 1:1-8
BIG IDEA: By adding “heart and head knowledge of God” to our faith we can grow more like Jesus Christ.
Props—tin soldier, 2 Maps, compass
INTRODUCTION
Rory was a pediatrician. He led the hospital’s intensive care unit for babies. He was also a workaholic who was hardly ever at home – he typically slept at the hospital on average 20 nights a month. He didn't know the names of his children's friends or even the name of the family dog. When someone asked him where the back door to the house was, he turned to ask his wife, Lisa.
When Rory and Lisa went to see Dr. John Gottman, a highly respected marriage therapist, for counsel – Dr. Gottman encouraged Rory to create what Gottman calls a “love map.”
A love map is Gottman's term for the part of our brain that stores all the relevant information about our spouse’s (or partner’s or friend’s) life. A love map contains information about your partner's life history, daily routines, likes, and dislikes, hopes and dreams.
For example, if a couple hopes to meet up for dinner at a restaurant and he's running behind, if your love map is well-developed, she'll know what kind of salad dressing he would like. Or if he's on his way home and decides to swing by Blockbusters, he'll know what kind of DVD she wants to watch. If his love map is well developed and they are about to participate in a family reunion together, he will know what relative she feels closest to and the ones she feels most uncomfortable around. She'll know what his hopes and dreams are.
According to Gottman’s extensive research, if we have a detailed love map into our partner (or friend’s) lives, we will have a happier relationship and will be able to weather difficult life passages such as having a baby or losing a parent. The knowledge a person has about their partner (or friend) makes a huge difference – it acts as a powerful predictor as to whether the relationship would thrive or fail.
And so it is in our relationship with God – a powerful factor that will help us determine the quality of our relationship with God is our love map or personal knowledge of God –and we will unpack more of what knowledge of God means in this sermon.
If you have your Bibles please turn to Second Peter, Chapter 1:
2 Peter 1
1 Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,
To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours:
2 Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
Confirming One’s Calling and Election
3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
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. 8 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.
In verse 1 Peter says: “To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours…”
This is a remarkable statement. Here in verse 1 Peter is saying that we can have an experience with God as life-changing as Peter did—extraordinary. As Mardi noted last week, Peter was one of Jesus’ closest disciples, along with James and John. He had seen Jesus in the flesh. He had heard his voice. He had touched him with his hands. He had seen Jesus raise a man named Lazarus to life after he had been dead four days.
On the night that Jesus was betrayed by Judas, it was clear that Jesus’ life was in grave danger. Peter followed him. But then when he was approached by three different people who asked “Are you one of Jesus’ followers?” Peter denied three times that he knew Jesus and wept bitterly as a result. And yet after Jesus rose from the dead, he experienced Jesus’ forgiveness.
And then on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was released on the earth, Peter was filled with the Spirit and preached a bold, impromptu sermon about Jesus Christ. 3000 people gave their lives to Jesus Christ. 3000. And a church of about 150 at the time grew to more than 3000.
Peter is saying in verse 1, “You can have a faith just as life-changing as mine through the work of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.” Peter clearly affirms here, by the way, that Jesus Christ is God. Then he says, “Grace and peace to you to many times over through the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ.” In verse 2 the way that Peter is using the word “knowledge” is not just head knowledge, but it implies personal knowledge, experience with Jesus Christ. Sometimes the Scriptures use the word “knowledge” in a kind of an intellectual, cognitive knowledge. (We will talk more about that later.) The Bible also uses the term “knowledge” to mean to “know intimately and personally. And that is the way Peter is using the word “knowledge” here. He is saying, “Grace and peace to you many times over as you deepen your personal knowledge and experience with Jesus Christ.”
Having affirmed the role of God's grace in their lives, he now calls on them to respond to God's grace. He says: “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.” Peter then writes, “My brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election” (1:5-7).
On our own, we cannot come into a deep personal knowledge of Christ, but God has invited us to play a role in our spiritual progress.
On our own, we cannot manufacture a relationship with another human being. But as Gary Chapman has pointed out in his popular book, The Five Languages of Love, there are certain practices that we can engage in that can help us foster a deeper connection with someone: we spend quality time with the person; we can offer them words of affirmation, appropriate touch, gifts, and acts of service.
In the same way we cannot manufacture a deeper relationship with God, but there are certain things we can do to encourage a deepening relationship with him.
This is why Peter, after he talks about the grace of God flowing freely into our lives, encourages us to make every effort to do what we can to build on the grace that God has given us.
Peter is saying we have received grace, an unmerited gift from Jesus Christ that can and will change our life, so now build on what we have been given, complementing our relationship with him, our trust in him by becoming a good person – not just a person who does good things, but a person who is good – Mardi talked about that last Sunday.
“Grace,” as Dallas Willard observes, “is not opposed to effort, but earning.”
We will focus in on the word “knowledge” today.
The word “knowledge” shows more than once in our passage. Let's look at the way the word “knowledge” is used in verse 2.
If we go back to verse 2, we see the word “knowledge.” Peter speaks of the knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord. Here, the way Peter is using the word “knowledge,” as we alluded to a few minutes ago, refers not only to intellectual knowledge, but to an intimate relationship with God which is a result of being transformed through a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.
It is a knowledge that enables us, as Peter says in verse 4, to participate in Jesus’ divine nature. This means, that while we do not become God as Mardi clarified last Sunday, but, in a mysterious way, as our lives are joined to Jesus Christ's we are filled with his Holy Spirit and begin to take on some of the essential qualities of God. Participating in Jesus’ divine nature means that we actually become like him.
In Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis writes, “God doesn't want to make us ‘nice people’ but ‘new people.’”
Did you ever think, when you were a child, what fun it would be if your toys could come to life—sort of like in Toy Story?
Lewis says take a tin soldier and turn it into a real in-the-flesh human being (use prop).
I can become nicer if I'm making an effort, studying etiquette and manners. When Robert was a trader at Goldman Sachs, he was told by a superior that he was very talented and had great potential to advance in the firm but that he was seen as a jerk. He was impatient, abrupt, and rude. So he worked on being nicer and as a result he was promoted and eventually became a senior executive in the company. But Robert became nicer out of self-interest and as a result of self-effort.
But God's intention isn't to make you a nicer person, but a new person – a new person you can become through a relationship with him. In Peter's words a new person because you are a "participant in the divine nature."
Let me now give a couple of examples of what becoming a new person looks like:
John Wesley, the famous preacher and founder of the Methodist Church, was in many ways a very devout undergraduate student at Oxford. He connected with a number of his fellow students who wanted to seek God and organized them into a group called The Holy Club. No joke…The Holy Club. Not the most marketable name today. The name of the club suggested that they wanted to live lives of disciplined purity before God. They regularly prayed. They studied the Scriptures. They regularly took Holy Communion. They went to the local prisons to visit the prisoners. They prayed with people who were dying from tuberculosis, which was a deadly disease in their day.
After John Wesley graduated from Oxford, he went on a mission to the mission field of Georgia which was at the time a relatively newly inhabited colony. He was preaching to the First Nations People, but on his trip back to England on the ship he wrote in his journal: “I went to America to convert the Indians, but, oh, who will convert me?” Back in England he was sitting in a small group and someone was reading Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans, which was actually so boring, but God used the reading of those words to open up Wesley’s heart, and allowed him to sense God ‘s forgiveness of his sin. He wrote in his journal: “My heart was strangely warmed.”
His conversion was summarized well in his brother Charles’s famous hymn, And Can It Be. Verse 4 begins
Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
The knowledge of God that Peter speaks about refers to an intimate and personal knowledge of God so that we become a new person, a participant in God's very nature.
Let me give an example that is a bit more contemporary.
My friend, Joanna Mockler, shared with me about her own conversion to Christ. Joanna had attended an elite women’s college on the East coast. She was very sophisticated and skeptical about religion. She married a man named Coleman who went on to become the Chief Executive Officer of the Gillette Corporation.
While Joanna was in her 30s, a mother of young children and a full-time homemaker, she told me she was a little bit bored. So when someone in her neighbourhood invited her to participate in a small group Bible study, Joanna thought, “I am too smart and sophisticated to believe in this stuff, but this would be a good way to have some adult conversation.” So she joined. They began studying the gospels and Joanna told me that she, for some reason, believed in the resurrection and Jesus, but could not believe in the miracles. But she was deeply impressed by Jesus.
One day she was in her kitchen and she just started to weep. She said to Jesus, “I believe in you, but I don’t love you.” In that moment her heart was opened and changed. Now she is person who deeply loves Jesus and makes a profound difference in the world with the lives of underprivileged children. She serves as an active trustee for World Vision International.
Joanna experienced a personal, intimate knowledge of God, which enabled her to become a participant in God's nature, a knowledge that made her new.
Jonathan Edwards, the great preacher and theologian in New England in the 18th century, wrote in his book, Religious Affections, that it is possible to have a deep respect for the power of God, and yet not know him personally. The only way you can truly love God’s holiness is if you know him personally.
So the question I want raise gently is not “Do you respect for God’s power?” It is possible to have respect for God’s power and to not know him personally. But do you truly love him and his holy purity in a personal intimate relationship with him? Is he precious to you?
When the apostle Peter talks about knowledge in vs. 2, he is talking about this personal, intimate, life-changing knowledge that springs out of a relationship. Here in verse 5 this personal intimate knowledge of God is assumed by Peter. Then he says, “…add to your faith goodness, and to your goodness knowledge.”
The Greek word Peter uses for knowledge here in vs. 5 is a general one. Knowledge can apply to almost any area of life. A person can be knowledgeable about history, cars, or snowboarding. Here, he is not talking about just knowledge in general, and not even the intimate knowledge of God he speaks about in verse 2.
Here, the best commentators point out he is likely referring to the ability to discern God’s will and to align one’s life in accordance with God’s will. Knowing and doing God's will is part of what enables us to grow deeper in our relationship with God. In John 14 Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments and I will love you and show myself to you.”
The path to knowing God personally comes primarily through prayer…surrendering our self to him…over and over… attuning ourselves to his voice.
But because our capacity to discern God's voice through our intuition is limited, if we rely only on prayer to know God, we may find ourselves spiritually drifting into a kind of amorphous spirituality.
While personal knowledge of God does come primarily through prayer, our knowledge of what God's will is comes primarily through the Word.
We need both. We need the heart knowledge of God that comes through vital prayer life, but we also need what we might call an intellectual knowledge of God's will which comes primarily through the word of God.
To put it in simplistic terms, there's a danger in being all heart – a danger of drifting into a vague subjective spirituality... There's also a danger in being all head… Having a perfect theology, but a frozen heart. So we need both: prayer, but also the Word. We need prayer to warm our hearts and we need the Word to ground and guide us.
I am just a beginner sailor, but I remember being out on the water with my instructor Bob – who is truly a master sailor – and asking him if it would be possible – way down the road – if he could teach me how to navigate by the stars.
I remember him saying, "I know it sounds great to be able to navigate by the stars, but it's not a good way to find your direction. Depending on the time of year, where you are in the world, the stars slightly may appear different to you.” You are better off with a compass and map." (use prop) "What about a GPS?" I asked. "GPS is good– but sometimes a satellite is down or your battery may die or lightning may harm your GPS—so you're actually better off mastering the old way – use the compass and map to locate yourself.”
So it is for us. It may sound romantic and cool to navigate our life "by the stars" – I don't mean in a New Agey kind of way, but by using our powers of observation and intuition to make our way through life. But as is true of the sailor, sometimes our observations and intuition are skewed by our life circumstances so we make a poor judgment, a judgment not based on reality, but on our perception of reality.
So we need a compass, we need a map to guide us.
And the Scriptures are a God-given time-tested life map for us.
Now I'm aware that certain people have a knee-jerk reaction against the Bible. They find that it is filled with all kinds of offensive things. A couple weeks ago, for example, I heard someone object to the Bible because of the story about a man named Jephthah in the book of Judges who asked God to help him in a battle against the Ammonites and then promised to offer the first thing he will see him when he returned home from battle as a sacrifice to God. The first thing Jephthah sees when he comes back home from his victorious battle is his daughter—who walks out the door to meet him. He ends up sacrificing her to God (which was a fairly common practice among the people who practiced pagan religions in his day).
The person who was offended by this story assumed that it was God's will for Jephthah to sacrifice his daughter. But, as Dan Matheson pointed out last summer in his sermon on Jephthah, Jephthah was not following God's will in sacrificing his daughter, he was in fact clearly contradicting God's word in Deuteronomy 12 to not sacrifice your children. The story of Jephthah is not the kind of story where God says follow the example of Jephthah, go and do likewise. No, it is a tale of warning of what not to do. Or what can happen when we don’t know the Word, but only the practices of our culture.
If we are new to the Scriptures, we need to be careful not to judge Scripture too quickly. Scriptures do have stories of atrocity, examples of people who are full of contradiction – but the Bible is not necessarily endorsing these things or people—someone is just describing them.
Part of what it will mean for us to grow in the knowledge of God is to not too hastily dismiss Scripture because of things that appear on the surface to be problematic.
Tim Keller, one of my teachers and someone who served as an important mentor to me particularly when I was a new pastor here has said:
“Many years ago, when I first started reading the Book of Genesis, it was very upsetting to me. Here are all these spiritual heroes—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph—and look at how they treat women. They engage in polygamy, and they buy and sell their wives. It was awful to read their stories at times. But then I read Robert Alter's \The Art of Biblical Narrative. Alter is a Jewish scholar at Berkeley whose expertise is ancient Jewish literature. In his book he says there are two institutions present in the Book of Genesis that were universal in ancient cultures: polygamy and primogeniture. Polygamy said a husband could have multiple wives, and primogeniture said the oldest son got everything—all the power, all the money. In other words, the oldest son basically ruled over everyone else in the family. Alter points out that when you read the Book of Genesis, you'll see two things. First of all, in every generation polygamy wreaks havoc. Having multiple wives is an absolute disaster—socially, culturally, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, and relationally. Second, when it comes to primogeniture, in every generation God favors the younger son over the older. He favors Abel, not Cain; Isaac, not Ishmael; Jacob, not Esau. Alter says that you begin to realize what the Book of Genesis is doing—it is subverting, not supporting, those ancient institutions at every turn.
When I read Alter's book, I then reread the Book of Genesis and loved it. And then it hit me: What if when I was younger, I had abandoned my trust in the Bible because of these accounts in Genesis? What if I had drop-kicked the Bible and the Christian faith, missing out on a personal relationship with Christ—all because I couldn't understand the behaviour of the patriarchs? The lesson is simple: Be patient with the text. Consider the possibility that it might not be teaching what you think it's teaching.”
Because the Bible was written in a time in cultures that were very different from our own, there are certain passages that are very difficult for us to understand. It can be helpful to take time to study some of the historical background and context and the author’s original intent in writing a particular book in Scripture.
But there are parts of the Scriptures that are really clear to understand and bother us. It was Mark Twain who said,
“It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
Part of what it means to allow the Scriptures to lead us into the knowledge of God and into the knowledge of his will for us is to allow it to challenge us at some point.
Before I speak or write something that will be circulated in public, I always vet my material past at least one other person – and it's usually a small group of people.
I tell them while I appreciate your affirmation, what is really most helpful is if you would challenge me on my thinking. I will not be able to grow or learn if you don't feel comfortable disagreeing with me and even challenging me.
Many of us here have the same attitude. Whether it's something we've written, whether it's our form as we do Pilates or yoga – we want people to give us their honest feedback and even challenge is so we can improve.
How much more should we allow the God to do that through the Scriptures for us!
If we don't trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct our thinking, how could we ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you. For example, to borrow an illustration from my teacher Tim, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won't have an intimate relationship. Remember the movie The Stepford Wives? (show jacket)
The husbands decide to have their wives turned into robots who never cross the wills of their husbands. A Stepford wife was wonderfully compliant and beautiful, but no one would describe such a marriage as intimate or personal.
Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You'll have a Stepford God! A God, essentially of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.
The Book of Isaiah reminds us:
8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the LORD.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
The purpose of our knowledge of God is not knowledge for the sake of knowledge—that according to the Bible simply "puffs us up” (1 Cor. 8:1), but knowledge for the purpose of knowing God and his son Jesus Christ more deeply and becoming like him.
Peter says:
3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness… so that through them we may participate in his divine nature…( 2 Peter 1:3)
Peter was one of the disciples that was closest to Jesus... He walked on water. He was used by Jesus to draw many people into our friendship with Jesus... Peter is calling us into a relationship with Jesus that was as intimate as his…
We can have this by having a heart knowledge of God through prayer and by having a head knowledge of God through his Word….
Do you want a relationship with God as close as Peter’s?
If so, are have you become a new person—someone who participates in the divine nature?
How’s your love map with God? Are you growing in your knowledge of God? Do you know Jesus’ likes, dislikes, what concerns him, what his hopes and dreams are for you, for the world?
Are you growing in your love map of Jesus, your knowledge of him through both prayer and the word?
Let’s pray:
I am offering you a prayer from Peter’s friend and fellow apostle Paul:
Paul in Colossians a writes:
9 For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives,10 so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God (Colossians 1:9-10).
Title: Knowing God
Text: 2 Peter 1:1-8
BIG IDEA: By adding “heart and head knowledge of God” to our faith we can grow more like Jesus Christ.
Props—tin soldier, 2 Maps, compass
INTRODUCTION
Rory was a pediatrician. He led the hospital’s intensive care unit for babies. He was also a workaholic who was hardly ever at home – he typically slept at the hospital on average 20 nights a month. He didn't know the names of his children's friends or even the name of the family dog. When someone asked him where the back door to the house was, he turned to ask his wife, Lisa.
When Rory and Lisa went to see Dr. John Gottman, a highly respected marriage therapist, for counsel – Dr. Gottman encouraged Rory to create what Gottman calls a “love map.”
A love map is Gottman's term for the part of our brain that stores all the relevant information about our spouse’s (or partner’s or friend’s) life. A love map contains information about your partner's life history, daily routines, likes, and dislikes, hopes and dreams.
For example, if a couple hopes to meet up for dinner at a restaurant and he's running behind, if your love map is well-developed, she'll know what kind of salad dressing he would like. Or if he's on his way home and decides to swing by Blockbusters, he'll know what kind of DVD she wants to watch. If his love map is well developed and they are about to participate in a family reunion together, he will know what relative she feels closest to and the ones she feels most uncomfortable around. She'll know what his hopes and dreams are.
According to Gottman’s extensive research, if we have a detailed love map into our partner (or friend’s) lives, we will have a happier relationship and will be able to weather difficult life passages such as having a baby or losing a parent. The knowledge a person has about their partner (or friend) makes a huge difference – it acts as a powerful predictor as to whether the relationship would thrive or fail.
And so it is in our relationship with God – a powerful factor that will help us determine the quality of our relationship with God is our love map or personal knowledge of God –and we will unpack more of what knowledge of God means in this sermon.
If you have your Bibles please turn to Second Peter, Chapter 1:
2 Peter 1
1 Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,
To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours:
2 Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
Confirming One’s Calling and Election
3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
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. 8 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.
In verse 1 Peter says: “To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours…”
This is a remarkable statement. Here in verse 1 Peter is saying that we can have an experience with God as life-changing as Peter did—extraordinary. As Mardi noted last week, Peter was one of Jesus’ closest disciples, along with James and John. He had seen Jesus in the flesh. He had heard his voice. He had touched him with his hands. He had seen Jesus raise a man named Lazarus to life after he had been dead four days.
On the night that Jesus was betrayed by Judas, it was clear that Jesus’ life was in grave danger. Peter followed him. But then when he was approached by three different people who asked “Are you one of Jesus’ followers?” Peter denied three times that he knew Jesus and wept bitterly as a result. And yet after Jesus rose from the dead, he experienced Jesus’ forgiveness.
And then on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was released on the earth, Peter was filled with the Spirit and preached a bold, impromptu sermon about Jesus Christ. 3000 people gave their lives to Jesus Christ. 3000. And a church of about 150 at the time grew to more than 3000.
Peter is saying in verse 1, “You can have a faith just as life-changing as mine through the work of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.” Peter clearly affirms here, by the way, that Jesus Christ is God. Then he says, “Grace and peace to you to many times over through the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ.” In verse 2 the way that Peter is using the word “knowledge” is not just head knowledge, but it implies personal knowledge, experience with Jesus Christ. Sometimes the Scriptures use the word “knowledge” in a kind of an intellectual, cognitive knowledge. (We will talk more about that later.) The Bible also uses the term “knowledge” to mean to “know intimately and personally. And that is the way Peter is using the word “knowledge” here. He is saying, “Grace and peace to you many times over as you deepen your personal knowledge and experience with Jesus Christ.”
Having affirmed the role of God's grace in their lives, he now calls on them to respond to God's grace. He says: “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.” Peter then writes, “My brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election” (1:5-7).
On our own, we cannot come into a deep personal knowledge of Christ, but God has invited us to play a role in our spiritual progress.
On our own, we cannot manufacture a relationship with another human being. But as Gary Chapman has pointed out in his popular book, The Five Languages of Love, there are certain practices that we can engage in that can help us foster a deeper connection with someone: we spend quality time with the person; we can offer them words of affirmation, appropriate touch, gifts, and acts of service.
In the same way we cannot manufacture a deeper relationship with God, but there are certain things we can do to encourage a deepening relationship with him.
This is why Peter, after he talks about the grace of God flowing freely into our lives, encourages us to make every effort to do what we can to build on the grace that God has given us.
Peter is saying we have received grace, an unmerited gift from Jesus Christ that can and will change our life, so now build on what we have been given, complementing our relationship with him, our trust in him by becoming a good person – not just a person who does good things, but a person who is good – Mardi talked about that last Sunday.
“Grace,” as Dallas Willard observes, “is not opposed to effort, but earning.”
We will focus in on the word “knowledge” today.
The word “knowledge” shows more than once in our passage. Let's look at the way the word “knowledge” is used in verse 2.
If we go back to verse 2, we see the word “knowledge.” Peter speaks of the knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord. Here, the way Peter is using the word “knowledge,” as we alluded to a few minutes ago, refers not only to intellectual knowledge, but to an intimate relationship with God which is a result of being transformed through a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.
It is a knowledge that enables us, as Peter says in verse 4, to participate in Jesus’ divine nature. This means, that while we do not become God as Mardi clarified last Sunday, but, in a mysterious way, as our lives are joined to Jesus Christ's we are filled with his Holy Spirit and begin to take on some of the essential qualities of God. Participating in Jesus’ divine nature means that we actually become like him.
In Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis writes, “God doesn't want to make us ‘nice people’ but ‘new people.’”
Did you ever think, when you were a child, what fun it would be if your toys could come to life—sort of like in Toy Story?
Lewis says take a tin soldier and turn it into a real in-the-flesh human being (use prop).
I can become nicer if I'm making an effort, studying etiquette and manners. When Robert was a trader at Goldman Sachs, he was told by a superior that he was very talented and had great potential to advance in the firm but that he was seen as a jerk. He was impatient, abrupt, and rude. So he worked on being nicer and as a result he was promoted and eventually became a senior executive in the company. But Robert became nicer out of self-interest and as a result of self-effort.
But God's intention isn't to make you a nicer person, but a new person – a new person you can become through a relationship with him. In Peter's words a new person because you are a "participant in the divine nature."
Let me now give a couple of examples of what becoming a new person looks like:
John Wesley, the famous preacher and founder of the Methodist Church, was in many ways a very devout undergraduate student at Oxford. He connected with a number of his fellow students who wanted to seek God and organized them into a group called The Holy Club. No joke…The Holy Club. Not the most marketable name today. The name of the club suggested that they wanted to live lives of disciplined purity before God. They regularly prayed. They studied the Scriptures. They regularly took Holy Communion. They went to the local prisons to visit the prisoners. They prayed with people who were dying from tuberculosis, which was a deadly disease in their day.
After John Wesley graduated from Oxford, he went on a mission to the mission field of Georgia which was at the time a relatively newly inhabited colony. He was preaching to the First Nations People, but on his trip back to England on the ship he wrote in his journal: “I went to America to convert the Indians, but, oh, who will convert me?” Back in England he was sitting in a small group and someone was reading Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans, which was actually so boring, but God used the reading of those words to open up Wesley’s heart, and allowed him to sense God ‘s forgiveness of his sin. He wrote in his journal: “My heart was strangely warmed.”
His conversion was summarized well in his brother Charles’s famous hymn, And Can It Be. Verse 4 begins
Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
The knowledge of God that Peter speaks about refers to an intimate and personal knowledge of God so that we become a new person, a participant in God's very nature.
Let me give an example that is a bit more contemporary.
My friend, Joanna Mockler, shared with me about her own conversion to Christ. Joanna had attended an elite women’s college on the East coast. She was very sophisticated and skeptical about religion. She married a man named Coleman who went on to become the Chief Executive Officer of the Gillette Corporation.
While Joanna was in her 30s, a mother of young children and a full-time homemaker, she told me she was a little bit bored. So when someone in her neighbourhood invited her to participate in a small group Bible study, Joanna thought, “I am too smart and sophisticated to believe in this stuff, but this would be a good way to have some adult conversation.” So she joined. They began studying the gospels and Joanna told me that she, for some reason, believed in the resurrection and Jesus, but could not believe in the miracles. But she was deeply impressed by Jesus.
One day she was in her kitchen and she just started to weep. She said to Jesus, “I believe in you, but I don’t love you.” In that moment her heart was opened and changed. Now she is person who deeply loves Jesus and makes a profound difference in the world with the lives of underprivileged children. She serves as an active trustee for World Vision International.
Joanna experienced a personal, intimate knowledge of God, which enabled her to become a participant in God's nature, a knowledge that made her new.
Jonathan Edwards, the great preacher and theologian in New England in the 18th century, wrote in his book, Religious Affections, that it is possible to have a deep respect for the power of God, and yet not know him personally. The only way you can truly love God’s holiness is if you know him personally.
So the question I want raise gently is not “Do you respect for God’s power?” It is possible to have respect for God’s power and to not know him personally. But do you truly love him and his holy purity in a personal intimate relationship with him? Is he precious to you?
When the apostle Peter talks about knowledge in vs. 2, he is talking about this personal, intimate, life-changing knowledge that springs out of a relationship. Here in verse 5 this personal intimate knowledge of God is assumed by Peter. Then he says, “…add to your faith goodness, and to your goodness knowledge.”
The Greek word Peter uses for knowledge here in vs. 5 is a general one. Knowledge can apply to almost any area of life. A person can be knowledgeable about history, cars, or snowboarding. Here, he is not talking about just knowledge in general, and not even the intimate knowledge of God he speaks about in verse 2.
Here, the best commentators point out he is likely referring to the ability to discern God’s will and to align one’s life in accordance with God’s will. Knowing and doing God's will is part of what enables us to grow deeper in our relationship with God. In John 14 Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments and I will love you and show myself to you.”
The path to knowing God personally comes primarily through prayer…surrendering our self to him…over and over… attuning ourselves to his voice.
But because our capacity to discern God's voice through our intuition is limited, if we rely only on prayer to know God, we may find ourselves spiritually drifting into a kind of amorphous spirituality.
While personal knowledge of God does come primarily through prayer, our knowledge of what God's will is comes primarily through the Word.
We need both. We need the heart knowledge of God that comes through vital prayer life, but we also need what we might call an intellectual knowledge of God's will which comes primarily through the word of God.
To put it in simplistic terms, there's a danger in being all heart – a danger of drifting into a vague subjective spirituality... There's also a danger in being all head… Having a perfect theology, but a frozen heart. So we need both: prayer, but also the Word. We need prayer to warm our hearts and we need the Word to ground and guide us.
I am just a beginner sailor, but I remember being out on the water with my instructor Bob – who is truly a master sailor – and asking him if it would be possible – way down the road – if he could teach me how to navigate by the stars.
I remember him saying, "I know it sounds great to be able to navigate by the stars, but it's not a good way to find your direction. Depending on the time of year, where you are in the world, the stars slightly may appear different to you.” You are better off with a compass and map." (use prop) "What about a GPS?" I asked. "GPS is good– but sometimes a satellite is down or your battery may die or lightning may harm your GPS—so you're actually better off mastering the old way – use the compass and map to locate yourself.”
So it is for us. It may sound romantic and cool to navigate our life "by the stars" – I don't mean in a New Agey kind of way, but by using our powers of observation and intuition to make our way through life. But as is true of the sailor, sometimes our observations and intuition are skewed by our life circumstances so we make a poor judgment, a judgment not based on reality, but on our perception of reality.
So we need a compass, we need a map to guide us.
And the Scriptures are a God-given time-tested life map for us.
Now I'm aware that certain people have a knee-jerk reaction against the Bible. They find that it is filled with all kinds of offensive things. A couple weeks ago, for example, I heard someone object to the Bible because of the story about a man named Jephthah in the book of Judges who asked God to help him in a battle against the Ammonites and then promised to offer the first thing he will see him when he returned home from battle as a sacrifice to God. The first thing Jephthah sees when he comes back home from his victorious battle is his daughter—who walks out the door to meet him. He ends up sacrificing her to God (which was a fairly common practice among the people who practiced pagan religions in his day).
The person who was offended by this story assumed that it was God's will for Jephthah to sacrifice his daughter. But, as Dan Matheson pointed out last summer in his sermon on Jephthah, Jephthah was not following God's will in sacrificing his daughter, he was in fact clearly contradicting God's word in Deuteronomy 12 to not sacrifice your children. The story of Jephthah is not the kind of story where God says follow the example of Jephthah, go and do likewise. No, it is a tale of warning of what not to do. Or what can happen when we don’t know the Word, but only the practices of our culture.
If we are new to the Scriptures, we need to be careful not to judge Scripture too quickly. Scriptures do have stories of atrocity, examples of people who are full of contradiction – but the Bible is not necessarily endorsing these things or people—someone is just describing them.
Part of what it will mean for us to grow in the knowledge of God is to not too hastily dismiss Scripture because of things that appear on the surface to be problematic.
Tim Keller, one of my teachers and someone who served as an important mentor to me particularly when I was a new pastor here has said:
“Many years ago, when I first started reading the Book of Genesis, it was very upsetting to me. Here are all these spiritual heroes—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph—and look at how they treat women. They engage in polygamy, and they buy and sell their wives. It was awful to read their stories at times. But then I read Robert Alter's \The Art of Biblical Narrative. Alter is a Jewish scholar at Berkeley whose expertise is ancient Jewish literature. In his book he says there are two institutions present in the Book of Genesis that were universal in ancient cultures: polygamy and primogeniture. Polygamy said a husband could have multiple wives, and primogeniture said the oldest son got everything—all the power, all the money. In other words, the oldest son basically ruled over everyone else in the family. Alter points out that when you read the Book of Genesis, you'll see two things. First of all, in every generation polygamy wreaks havoc. Having multiple wives is an absolute disaster—socially, culturally, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, and relationally. Second, when it comes to primogeniture, in every generation God favors the younger son over the older. He favors Abel, not Cain; Isaac, not Ishmael; Jacob, not Esau. Alter says that you begin to realize what the Book of Genesis is doing—it is subverting, not supporting, those ancient institutions at every turn.
When I read Alter's book, I then reread the Book of Genesis and loved it. And then it hit me: What if when I was younger, I had abandoned my trust in the Bible because of these accounts in Genesis? What if I had drop-kicked the Bible and the Christian faith, missing out on a personal relationship with Christ—all because I couldn't understand the behaviour of the patriarchs? The lesson is simple: Be patient with the text. Consider the possibility that it might not be teaching what you think it's teaching.”
Because the Bible was written in a time in cultures that were very different from our own, there are certain passages that are very difficult for us to understand. It can be helpful to take time to study some of the historical background and context and the author’s original intent in writing a particular book in Scripture.
But there are parts of the Scriptures that are really clear to understand and bother us. It was Mark Twain who said,
“It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
Part of what it means to allow the Scriptures to lead us into the knowledge of God and into the knowledge of his will for us is to allow it to challenge us at some point.
Before I speak or write something that will be circulated in public, I always vet my material past at least one other person – and it's usually a small group of people.
I tell them while I appreciate your affirmation, what is really most helpful is if you would challenge me on my thinking. I will not be able to grow or learn if you don't feel comfortable disagreeing with me and even challenging me.
Many of us here have the same attitude. Whether it's something we've written, whether it's our form as we do Pilates or yoga – we want people to give us their honest feedback and even challenge is so we can improve.
How much more should we allow the God to do that through the Scriptures for us!
If we don't trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct our thinking, how could we ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you. For example, to borrow an illustration from my teacher Tim, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won't have an intimate relationship. Remember the movie The Stepford Wives? (show jacket)
The husbands decide to have their wives turned into robots who never cross the wills of their husbands. A Stepford wife was wonderfully compliant and beautiful, but no one would describe such a marriage as intimate or personal.
Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You'll have a Stepford God! A God, essentially of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.
The Book of Isaiah reminds us:
8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the LORD.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
The purpose of our knowledge of God is not knowledge for the sake of knowledge—that according to the Bible simply "puffs us up” (1 Cor. 8:1), but knowledge for the purpose of knowing God and his son Jesus Christ more deeply and becoming like him.
Peter says:
3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness… so that through them we may participate in his divine nature…( 2 Peter 1:3)
Peter was one of the disciples that was closest to Jesus... He walked on water. He was used by Jesus to draw many people into our friendship with Jesus... Peter is calling us into a relationship with Jesus that was as intimate as his…
We can have this by having a heart knowledge of God through prayer and by having a head knowledge of God through his Word….
Do you want a relationship with God as close as Peter’s?
If so, are have you become a new person—someone who participates in the divine nature?
How’s your love map with God? Are you growing in your knowledge of God? Do you know Jesus’ likes, dislikes, what concerns him, what his hopes and dreams are for you, for the world?
Are you growing in your love map of Jesus, your knowledge of him through both prayer and the word?
Let’s pray:
I am offering you a prayer from Peter’s friend and fellow apostle Paul:
Paul in Colossians a writes:
9 For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives,10 so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God (Colossians 1:9-10).
posted by Shigematsu at 3:58 PM
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