Growing in Christ
Our personal, experiential knowledge of Christ is the pathway to the amazing promise of becoming "partakers of the divine nature of Christ." Christ within us has become our limitless resource to live in spiritual abundance and godliness. God's divine life in its multi-faceted expressions becomes a transforming inner force of God's "exceeding great and precious promises."
These promises, when embraced by unflinching faith, ensure us a life that is able to grow from glory to glory as we are progressively transformed into the image of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18). To experience anything less reveals how little we understand who we really are in Christ. Peter tells us such a person is like someone who cannot remember what they look like after looking at themselves in a mirror (v. 5-9).
To strengthen our faith in the reliability of God's exceedingly great and precious promises, Peter points to two unshakable facts. First, he refers to the voice he and two other apostles literally heard from heaven that validated Jesus as the Son of God (v. 16-18). This audible voice heard from heaven's dimension by three witnesses affirmed Christ's deity in our three dimensional world. That gives us a factual basis for our faith in His complete ability to fulfill His promised provision for life now and for eternity. Peter points to the scriptures as a firm foundation for our faith. The objective proof of the scriptures and its promises can be tested. To do so, Peter points to scriptural prophecies that Jesus Christ fulfilled in ways that cannot be denied (v. 19-21).
God's exceeding and great promises demand that we respond with an active faith that is worthy of both God and His promises. If we are honest, we all struggle with the grip of our fallen nature, a fallen world, and Satan. We can achieve victory over these forces of darkness by being given over fully to confidence in God's empowering promise. This is what is at the core of what John the Apostle taught by saying, "whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the worldour faith" (1 John 5:4).
-Calvary Church Boise
Created 10 months ago
