Listen to audio above while following along in transcript beldow (also available for download in Word at www.biblestudyministriesinc.com)
As we gather to look again in the precious word of the Lord, the reminder that we need the Holy Spirit to show us the Lord Jesus. There’s no way by our own intellect we can ever understand the Bible. We’re thankful for that indwelling Holy Spirit. Mark 8:24&25, that miracle where Jesus healed the man and then asked him if he could see, “I see men, for I see them like trees walking around.” You remember that miracle, but it’s this next phrase that touched my heart, “Then, again, He laid His hands on his eyes.” That little expression, “Then, again, He laid His hands on his eyes,” I’m so thankful for the second touch, and the third touch, and the tenth touch. We think we see, and then we find out it’s just men like trees walking, but then He touches our eyes again, and He keeps doing it, and that will be the process until we get to heaven, that He’ll keep touching our eyes, and all through eternity.
With that in mind, let’s just ask the Lord to touch our eyes again. Heavenly Father, thank You for Your precious word. Thank You for the Holy Spirit who lives in our hearts and who always takes the Living Word and makes Him visible to our hearts. Thank You for the written word, but now, Lord, show us Christ, and then grace us with the faith to appropriate Him. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We welcome all of you. We’re in 2 Peter, but we’re not really anxious to study the book, as much as we are to see the Lord. We gather to see the Lord, and it’s my prayer that when we’re finished, that you’ll know a little bit more about 2 Peter than when we began, but it’s all about seeing the Lord. I think it would be profitable in every lesson, this is a short book, only three chapters, and we’re in lesson 4, to review the theme and to review the distinctive revelation of Christ.
The theme is stated in the last verses of the book, 2 Peter 3:17&18, “You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard, so that you aren’t carried away by the error of unprincipled men, and fall from your own steadfastness, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.” And from those two verses, we have summarized the theme in these two words, grow and beware. Both are true. We’re to grow, and we’re to beware. The fact is that our safeguard against all false teaching is growing; “Grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
I remind you of 2 Peter 1:14 where Peter says, “Knowing that the laying aside of my earthly dwelling is imminent, so also our Lord Jesus has made clear to me.” Peter had been told by the Lord that he would die soon. I think it was the last lesson or a lesson before that I made a comment that he writes this from his deathbed. Lillian said, “Don’t’ say that anymore, because he was very much alive. He was not laying on a bed ready to succumb.” She doesn’t like the expression, “deathbed.” So, he had one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel. He knew that he was ready to die, and this is the passion of a man who is ready to die, “Before I die, what do I want to share?” 2 Peter is the great burden, the discovery that Peter made and said, “I need to communicate that before I die.” The Holy Spirit then inspired this wonderful book.
We say that we need to grow by grace in the knowledge of Christ, and I like the expression, “heart knowledge of Christ.” So, I need to begin this lesson with an important correction from last week. Last week I misquoted Kenneth Wuest, and I not only misquoted him, but I actually printed the verse, and I made the same mistake when I wrote the verse. I told you that my expression is heart knowledge. Once again, I put his quote on the page with the correct spelling, “Be constantly growing in the experiential knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” Last week I said, “experimental knowledge,” instead of experiential, and I actually wrote it down. Janet caught that mistake and brought it to my attention. It’s an important correction, because the Christian life is not an experiment. It’s an experience, and I know that it was an experiment for me for some time. I tried this and I tried that, and I failed. I thought, “Well, I’ll try surrender, and I’ll try prayer and I’ll try fasting, and I’ll try seeking a different kind of blessing, and I’ll try self-denial, I’ll try more study. It’s not an experiment. It’s an experience, a heart knowledge of Christ. So, that’s the theme of 2 Peter, to grow experientially in your life, in your experience, a heart knowledge of Christ. All you’ll ever need for this moment and for all the ages of eternity is to grow in grace and in a heart knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The revelation of Christ is a little different than the message. The message is “grow”, and the revelation of Christ tells us how we grow. 2 Peter 1:19, “We have the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to pay attention, as a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts.” The revelation of Christ in 2 Peter is the morning star, the day star. The Bible is presented as a prophetic word, as a lamp shining in a dark place, but the prophetic word, which is true, must be the prophetic word made more sure. How is it made more sure, and the answer is that it’s by a revelation of Christ. So, we pay attention to the written word until the day star rises in our heart. That figure of speech, the day star, that morning star, that’s the transition between darkness and light, between night and day. It’s the last star at night, and it promises a new day. Every time I see Christ in this word by the Holy Spirit’s revelation, it’s goodbye night and hello day. It’s goodbye to the darkness and it’s a welcoming of a brand-new day of new life.
I’m not going to try to prove it again, but I’ll simply state it. I do suggest that if you missed those early lessons, we have the CD’s available, and you might just want to understand what it means that He’s the day star and how He rises in our heart, because we want the prophetic word made more sure by that present revelation. The Bible, by itself, is light. It’s a lamp and gives light. Once you see Christ, it’s life. That’s different that light. Every division the church has ever known in church history has been over light. People argue, “I see it this way, and I see it that way,” and then they divide and split, and so on, but when you have life, you can an awful lot of disagreement, and we can have sweet fellowship in the Lord. That’s what He wants. We keep, not make, the unity of the Spirit, until we all come to the unity of the faith.”
When we left off, I had quoted verse 20&21, “Know this first of all, that no prophesy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation. No prophesy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” That’s the illustration. He’s not changing the subject. He’s not saying, “Now, a word about inspiration.” He’s using inspiration as an illustration. And just like the inspired authors of the Bible did not decide one day what they would write, no author decided. As I said last time, Isaiah didn’t say, “I think I’ll write today about the virgin birth,” and Micah didn’t say, “I think I’ll prophesy where Jesus will be born, Messiah.” God told them, and they wrote that, and then they studied their own writings, according to 1 Peter.
Just so, just like no gospel writer and no Bible writer could decide, “Today I think I’ll write something about the second coming,” they didn’t decide that. You pay attention to this book, but don’t dictate to God what revelation you’re going to see. That’s not up to you. You just pay attention to the Bible. He knows what you need. He’ll show you. I used to take a concordance and look up advocate, following it all through the Bible, and then I would say, “Now I know Him as my advocate.” No, I don’t know Him as my advocate until the Holy Spirit reveals Him as my advocate. Tracing the word, “rock,” through a concordance, tracing the word “shepherd” through a concordance will not reveal Christ as the rock or the shepherd. Only the Holy Spirit can show you He’s your rock. So, pay attention to the word. You might be surprised, and you might do what my wife and I did, and we used to pray specific revelation. We had financial needs, so, “Lord, show Yourself today as a Provider. We need to see You as a Provider.” Then we look up verses on how faithful God is to provide, as if that showed us.
But one day God caught us dead in our tracks, “Lord, we need to see You as a Provider,” and He led us to 1 Peter 1:6, “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary,” KJV says, “If need be, you’ve been distressed by various trials.” See, we were praying, “Meet my needs,” and He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what your needs are. You need trials, and you need affliction.” He was faithful, but He revealed Himself as a faithful Provider, not the way we were looking for Him. I was looking for a mailbox miracle, but He had other ideas. So, we look in a Bible, and God knows your heart, your need, your capacity, and whatever you need. You might think you need comfort. He might think you need conviction. He’ll give you what He knows you need, but He will always reveal Christ. Study the Bible to see Him, not to know the Bible, but to see the Lord Jesus.
Some people have this idea, “Discover your problem, and then bring it to Jesus.” The reality is that I have no more ability to discover my problem than I have to bring it to the Lord. He must discover it, and He must then solve it, and He will always, when I pay attention to the written word, He will always arise as the morning star and address whatever darkness I happen to be facing at the time. That’s enough for the theme and the revelation. The theme, grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ. The revelation of Christ, grow by having a present foretaste of Jesus. He will be revealed and pay attention until you see the Lord, until the day star rises in your heart.
So, where do we go from here? I know you have your sheet, but I hope you have your Bibles. If you only have the sheet, you’ll be able to follow my thinking. If you have your Bibles, I want you to glance at 2 Peter 1, and you’ll notice there are twenty-one verses in that first chapter. I think you know that the chapter and verse divisions are not part of the inspiration of the Bible. It may have come from the Lord as He guided, but that’s not part of the inspiration. They are man-made. We’ve had chapters since about 1200 AD. Verses didn’t come in for another couple of hundred years, about the 1500’s. A man named Lankton is the one that introduces chapters, and then later on Cardinal Hugo and then some other people, Stephanus and all, gave us the verses. Sometimes chapter and verses are helpful, and I think the chapter divisions in 2 Peter are very helpful, because each chapter has a different focus.
Anyway, having said that, in our discussion, strangely enough, we have already looked at the second half of chapter one. We didn’t begin with the first half. We looked at the second half. In verses 11-15 we went through, when we were talking about Peter’s imminent demise, I showed you the three pictures he gives of death, and it’s in verses 11-15. “It’s a glorious and abundant entrance into the kingdom of the Lord Jesus.” It’s laying aside this old tabernacle, it’s pulling up tent pegs, and finally, it’s an exodus. And then we looked at verses 16-21, all about the morning star, the transfiguration, how the prophetic word became the prophetic word made more sure. So, we’ve looked at the second half. Now, we come to the first half, chapter 2:1-10, and we’ll not finish that this morning. I just want to give you a taste of this, but I wanted to bring you to where we are in our study. We’re looking now at the first half of chapter one. I wanted to do it that way because I want to show you how the first half ties into the theme “grow”, and ties into the distinctive revelation of Christ, “morning star.” By looking at that first, I think it gives a lot of understanding to the first part.
The second part that we’ve already looked at presents a full Christ in the Bible. We’ve studied that, in the prophetic word, Christ in the Scriptures, Christ in the lamp, a full Christ in the Bible. I’ll just quote the verse again, 2 Peter 1:19, “We have the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to pay attention, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart.” Every possible way for a redeemed sinner to know the Lord Jesus Christ on this side of heaven is in this book. It’s all in the Bible. This is all about the revelation of Christ. The written word contains the living word. In fact, when we talk about heart knowledge and experiential, there’s no way outside of this book that we can know Him that way.
1 Peter 1 at the beginning does not begin with Christ in the Bible. The beginning of chapter 1 begins with Christ in your heart, Christ in your life, and not Christ in the Bible. 2 Peter 1:4, “By these He has granted to us precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.” You have become partakers of the divine nature. In other words, Christ in your heart, and not Christ in the Bible, Christ in your life, Christ coming into my heart and your heart. There’s a relationship between the Christ in the Bible and the Bible in your heart, the Christ in the Bible and the Christ in my heart. We’re going to try to show you that relationship this morning. We’ll just look at the big truth for now.
Christ is in the Bible, but He’s also in my heart. I’ve become a partaker of His nature. We’re only two verses deep and He begins to state and looks back and remembers when Christ first came into his life. 2 Peter 1:1, “Simon Peter, a bond servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have received a faith of the same kind as ours, by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” So, we’re only one verse deep and he reminds us that that there was a day we had to receive the gift of faith, and there was a day that we had to learn that it was His righteousness and not our righteousness. That’s all in the first verse. You remember in your life, when God opened your heart eyes and you saw that your righteousness was like filthy rags, but He had offered you His righteousness, a perfect record, and we needed to have that. So, by the faith that we got as a gift and by the righteousness we saw by that faith, we received it and became a partaker of the life of Christ, the nature of God Himself.
Verse 2, “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus, our Lord, seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and Godliness through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.” It’s hard to believe this is a fisherman, the old fisherman. Look at how every phrase is so pregnant. Now he says, “Remember the day He gave you faith. Remember the day you saw His righteousness, and in that day, you became a partaker of the divine nature. What you have received is all you’ll ever need for life and Godliness.” Just think about that! You’ll never need anything besides what you already received.
When you got saved, you received God’s self. He has nothing else to give you, that’s it, except one thing, the eyes to see it. That’s why we started with that verse, “Touch my eyes again.” I’m not going to ask for anything else. I don’t need anything else. I have been given everything I need for life and Godliness, to live my life and to be like Him. I have everything I need in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Before I focus on, that’s Christ in my heart and Christ in the Bible, I want to say something about verse 4, “By these He’s granted to us precious and magnificent promises. By them you’ve become partakers of the divine nature.” He said that by precious and magnificent promises we have become partakers of the divine nature. This book is full of precious and magnificent promises. When I was first saved as a teen, 16 years old, I was involved in a group called Youth for Christ. It was a wonderful provision of the Lord in my day. Back in the fifties we used to sing a little chorus called, “Every Promise in the Book is Mine”. Every promise in the book is mine, every chapter, every verse, every line, every promise of His grace divine, every promise in the book is mine. We used to love to sing that.
When Peter says, “We have been made partakers of the divine nature by exceeding great and precious promises,” did he have every promise in the book in mind, or did he have specific promises that is connected to making me a partaker of the divine nature? Obviously, I can’t read Peter’s mind. I don’t know if he had the whole book of promises or had one or two in mind, but just to drive it home I’m going to give you two specific promises that God gave that made you a partaker of the divine nature.
John 14:18, “I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” Isn’t that awesome? Verse 20, “In that day you’ll know that I’m in My Father and you are in Me, and I in you.” Verse 23, same chapter, Jesus answered and said, “If anyone loves me, he’ll keep my words and My Father will love him and we will come to Him and make our abode with Him.” You say that Jesus is in my heart. Yes, and so is God the Father. Yes, and so is God the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is in your heart. The promise that Jesus would come and live in you, and specifically John 14:16, “I’ll ask the Father, and He’ll give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever.” Then verse 7 chapter 16, “I tell you the truth. It’s to your advantage that I go away. If I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. If I go, I’ll send Him to you.” You know who that is. That’s the precious Holy Spirit of God. I know, I don’t know what Peter had in mind, but I know two exceeding great and precious, magnificent promises. Jesus said He would come and live in me. What a promise! And Jesus said He would send the Holy Spirit to come and live in me. I know by those two exceedingly precious promises I’ve become a partaker of the divine nature, and so have you.
Having said that, I’m going to ask you the same question that we dealt with when we looked at Christ in the Bible. I’ll review that. How much of Christ is in the Bible? The answer is all there is. Christ in His fullness is in the Bible. Everything we can ever know and will ever know is in here in the Bible. Now let me come to Christ in your heart. How much of Christ is in your heart? The answer is exactly the same. All of Christ lives in you, and all of Christ lives in me. That’s important to know because it caused me some trouble in my early Christian life. Since 100% all of Christ lives in me, why do I need Christ in the Bible? If I have all of Christ in me, shouldn’t that be enough? So, if I surrender to Him, then He lives inside of me. If I’m sick, I’ll surrender. If I’m sad or depressed, I’ll surrender to the Christ that lives inside. If I’m tempted to do some sin, why can’t I just surrender to the Christ who lives in my heart? If I have a need, why can’t I trust the Christ who lives in my heart.
I say that I got messed up a little bit because I got into the German mystics, and not only the German mystics, but other mystical writing, and they were stressing that if you have Christ in your heart and God shows you that, you’ve outgrown your need for the Bible, because you have Him in your heart. I began to read Hildegaard and John of the Cross and Nicholas of Cosa and Jacob Boheme and some of these mystics, and later Fenolon and Guyon and all, and they had this idea that it’s inside. So, I became very inward. It was inward prayer and inward visualization and inward meditation, and my life became legalistic on the inside. It was outward legalism where I’m doing a bunch of stuff, but I was doing a bunch of stuff, and because it was internal, I thought it was spiritual, but it was just works. It was another kind of works. My ascetism and, “If I take a cold shower, I’d really hit the flesh, so I’m going to take a cold shower, and deny myself this and deny myself that, so I can get closer to the Lord.”
When you got saved, you received all there is of Christ. He lives in your heart. You have Him. He’s never going to give you something called power, something called patience, and something called love, something called rest. You only have Christ. Having Him, you have power, you have patience, you have rest, and as you go on, you’re going to understand that. Those things are all yours in Christ Jesus. That’s why I began, “Touch my eyes, touch my eyes again.” I have it all in Christ, but how I need that second, that third, fourth, ten millionth touch.
Lets return to 2 Peter. Christ in me is the first part of chapter 1, and Christ in the Bible is the second part of chapter 1. How are they related? Ephesians 4:13, I’m going to give you Bible words to describe, they are amazing, but it’s also going to call on your spiritual controlled imagination. Ephesian 4:13, “Until we all attain to the unity of the faith, to the knowledge of the Son of God to a mature man,” see, that’s all about growing, maturity, “to the measure of the stature that belongs to the fullness of Christ.” The measure of the stature that belongs to the fullness of Christ.
What comes to your mind when you hear the word, “stature?” The word just means height. How big is it? That’s what stature is, height. That’s all it is. What comes to your mind when I say, “measure?” When you measure, you are trying to determine how high it is. So, we have the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. I know it’s just a word picture, but it has meaning. So, may God help us! How tall is Christ? I’m not talking about when He walked on the earth, 5’8”, whatever it was. How big is stature? I want you to use that word and I want it in your mind, and if you had a canvas, I don’t even think Janet could paint that big, how big, how tall is Christ in His fullness? Measure that, because that’s the Christ that lives in your heart. It’s the Christ that lives in the Bible. That’s how tall He is.
Ephesians 4:10, “He who descended is Himself He who ascended far above all the heaven, so that He might fill all things. How tall? What is the stature of Christ who has ascended far above the heavens and fills all things? How big is He? That’s my point. Ephesians 1:22, “He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things, to the church, which is His body, the fulness of Him who fills all in all.” I am dealing with this one by one, individual Christians. Christ is in you. To have the fulness, it’s Christ is in us. That’s the fullness of Him that fills all in all. But we’re just looking at it individually. Ephesians 4:15, “Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up,” this is growth, this is 2 Peter, “in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ.” We are to grow until we fill His stature. Don’t answer, how is your growing coming along? How tall are you? What is your stature? Ephesians 4:13, “Until we all attain the unity of the faith, the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” We are to grow and grow and grow until we are the same size as the Christ that lives inside of us, until we fill the measure, the full stature of the fullness of Christ who ascends above the heavens and fills all in all.
Let me show you, then, the relationship between the Christ in the Bible and the Christ in our heart. 2 Peter 3:18, “Grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ; to Him be glory both now and to the day to eternity.” What does it mean to grow? I’m going to use another word picture. I’m so glad for word pictures. They are symbolic, but they have spiritual truth. Galatians 4:19, “My children, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you.” This is a different picture. This is Paul, and his burden is the same, “I want you to grow.” But he doesn’t tell you how tall Christ is. He tells you how small Christ is. He pictures Christ as a fetus in the womb, until Christ is formed in you. Paul’s burden is the same as Peter’s burden, “I want Christians to grow,” but he presents it a little differently.
Here is an important question, and I think it will save you a lot of bondage if God writes it in your heart. We talk about growing, “You gotta grow, grow in Christ.” That’s 2 Peter, but let me ask this, if I really understand what it means to grow in Christ, am I growing in Him, or is He growing in Me? Am I growing in Him, or is He growing in me, because until you can answer that question before the Lord, you are not going to understand how to grow. You are going to give yourself over to spiritual disciplines and say, “If I’m going to grow, I’ve got to get up early and I’ve got to pray and I’ve got to fast and I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to do that, and I’ve got to grow.” No, he’s going to tell us now how to grow.
Growth is not time logged in. Some people think that’s the idea, “I’ve been a Christian since 1958.” If my math is right, that’s 64 years ago. I wish I could tell you I’ve been growing in Christ sixty-four years, but I contest that’s not the fact. There’s a difference between growing and logging time in. In fact, the writer of Hebrews addresses that. Hebrews 5:12, “Though, by this time,” that’s time logged in, “you ought to be teachers, and you need for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God. You come to need milk and not solid food.” But he said, “By this time.” That means they’ve been in it for a while, but they hadn’t grown.
Growth is not expansion. We did this in another lesson, and I’m not going to do it now. It’s not accretion. An icicle gets bigger, but it’s not growing. It’s dead. A sand dune gets bigger, but it’s not growing. It’s dead. It’s getting larger and it’s expanding. A coral reef is just getting bigger because dead things are being attached to it. A lot of people think they’re growing, “Our church is becoming a megachurch. It’s growing.” That could be just expansion. It could be a bunch of dead things just being piled up. We’re not a bunch of bricks being piled up. We’re living stones, and the whole thing is organic. Just because a ministry increases, “and we’re into tapes and we’re into TV and we’re into radio and we’re into literature and we’ve got a camp and a little Bible school here and we’re going to a seminary and we’re really growing. We’ve got this many baptisms and this many catechisms and this many members have joined the church.” That could be just expansion.
Peter and Paul and the Holy Spirit are talking about growing, growing by grace, a heart knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let me just try to make it crystal clear. Although Christ in His tallest stature, in His fullness lives in your heart, your realization, your revelation of that is not as tall as He is. Now, your revelation of Christ in your heart depends on the Christ in the Bible. I see Him in the Bible, and I receive that day star in my heart, and now the Christ that I saw before has gotten a little larger.
Christ is growing, and I say, “yes,” to that, I submit to that. “I saw Him before as Savior, and I said yes, and now I see Him as the end of the Law, to everyone that believes, and I say yes, and Christ, who is pictured as a fetus is growing, and growing. As I see Him in here, I need the word of God to have the revelation, the day star, and the day star rises in my heart, and Christ grows in my heart, and I’m conformed to that new vision, and I am now beginning to become like Jesus and fill the stature, and I’m going to grow. Do you see the relationship between the Christ in the Bible and the Christ in your heart? All of Christ is in your heart, but your revelation of Him may be very small, and you need a new revelation, and another, and another. The more you see of Christ, the more He grows in your heart. That’s what it means to experience, experiential knowledge of Christ in your heart.
Galatians 4:19, “My children, with whom I’m again in labor until Christ is formed in you.” Every rising of the day star in your heart, by your attention to this book, is a rising of Christ in your life. By revelation I’m seeing more and more of Him. So, a lot of Christians get all frustrated because they don’t know how to grow. I’ll tell you how to grow. Let Jesus grow. That’s how you grow. You grow by having Him grow, and He grows by revealing Himself to you in the word. The larger He gets in your vision, the larger He becomes in your heart.
Ephesians 4:15, “Speaking the truth in love, we’re to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ.” That’s what it means to be conformed to Christ; grow up into Him. That’s what we’re doing. We’re seeing Him and we’re growing into Him. As you see Him as Savior and King of kings and priest and smelter and vine and door, you keep embracing that, and you’ll be growing.
As we can see from Ephesians 4:14, “To the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ,” if He’s really that big, let me ask this question, “If you are going to grow up into a Christ that big, immeasurable, is there ever a time when you’ll arrive and stop growing?” You can never stop growing. The more you know Christ, the more you conform. Even in eternity, He’s infinite. You’re only eternal on one end. He’s infinite, and you’ll be growing into Him forever, as ages roll on ages, we’ll be seeing more and more of Him. In this connection I love Isaiah 9:7, “There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace.” What that means practically is this, “I’ve seen Christ as my King. I surrendered to Christ as my King. I’m totally surrendered to Christ as my King. I can be more surrendered tomorrow.” If you say that you’re totally surrendered today, how can you be more surrendered tomorrow? It’s because your capacity increases. As you grow in Christ, your capacity increases. There is no end to the increase of His government. There’s no end to the increase of peace. I can have perfect peace today, and more tomorrow. You can have perfect peace today, and more peace tomorrow. There’s no end to the increase of that.
You might say that seems to contradict this idea of growing, contradicts Colossians 2:9&10, “In Him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form.” That’s His stature. Wow! “And in Him you have been made complete. He’s the head of all rule and authority.” I don’t have to wait until I see Christ in full stature to be complete. I’m complete in Him now, and you’re complete in Him now. Some Christians get frustrated because this idea of growing in the Lord and maturing in the Lord, they feel like they are never going to do it. “It doesn’t work for me. I don’t know how to grow. I don’t know what to do.” At any moment in your life you are complete in Christ. At any moment in my life, I’m complete in Christ. I can be the Christian He wants me to be this very moment. I don’t have to wait until I grow a certain amount. This moment you have Christ, you’re in Christ, God sees you in Christ, and you are complete. In fact, if you’re open to Christ, I hope you are, I hope everybody in this room is opened to Christ. If you’re open to Christ, you’re opened to all of Christ, even the Christ you haven’t seen yet. In other words, there might be a book in the Bible, Obadiah, Zephaniah, 2 Chronicles… What is the revelation of Christ in Zephaniah? You say, “I don’t know.” But if you’re open to Christ, you’re already open to the revelation of Christ in Zephaniah, even if you don’t know what it is. You are open to all of Christ when you respond to the day star. Every time you respond to Christ, you’re open to all of Christ, and you’re complete in Christ.
You’ve probably experienced that. You’ve discovered Christ along the road in experience, and later you came to the Bible and said, “Oh, look, there it is.” You’ve experienced the Christ before He was revealed to you. So, be open to Christ, and pay attention to this word until the day star arises in your heart. When you’re open to Him, you’re open to everything. This idea of being complete and yet needing to grow, we’ve had the joy, even recently, and increasingly, of seeing our great grandchildren. I never thought Lillian would get that old, that we’d have great grandchildren! When little Leila was born, oh my, she sure needed maturing, that little baby. I speak as a fool, but when she was born, she didn’t have two toes on her left foot and two toes on her right foot, “I can’t wait for her to mature until she gets a third toe and a fourth, and finally five on each foot. She had all her fingers, she had all her toes, she had two eyes and not one, two ears and not one. She was perfect, and yet immature. I can be perfect at every stage, and yet needing to grow.
There’s a wonderful song written by Frances Havergal. I hope you like her poetry. She’s just very wonderful. “Like a River Glorious,” are you familiar with that? Listen to the words, just the first verse, “Like a river glorious is God’s perfect peace, perfect, over all victorious in its bright increase.” I thought it was perfect – in its bright increase. “Perfect, yet it floweth forward every day, perfect, yet it groweth deeper all the way.” That’s exactly the situation. Christ is in you, and you are complete in Christ at every stage, but He’s in you as an unformed substance, and He needs to grow in you. You grow in Christ by seeing Him in the word. He grows in you by becoming all that you discovered Him to be. As you surrender to that, you’re conformed to the image of Christ. The whole process of the Christian life is nothing more than seeing Him in the word, letting Him grow, and submitting to that, and at every moment you are complete in Him, and you’re growing and growing.
2 Peter 1:2, “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God.” Peter loves multiplication. You are to grow in Christ, not little by little, but by leaps and bounds. Multiplied grace, I’m glad he uses multiplied grace. If I add 14 and 14 I get 28, If I multiply 14 by 14 I get 196. Multiplied grace! Then later in verse 8, he says, “If these qualities are yours and increasing,” they’re always increasing. Scholars tell us that four times in 2 Peter he uses that Greek word which means “full knowledge,” gnosko is the word for knowledge, and epignosko is “full knowledge”. 2 Peter 1:3, “Seeing divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge,” epignosko.
Let me sort of summarize what we’ve looked at. We’re not done with this first section but as I see Christ in the pages of this book, the Holy Spirit reveals Him, and He rises, there’s change in my life, night passes away, a new day comes and Christ is formed in my heart, and He begins to grow, and He’s going to grow into the full stature, the fullness of Him that fills all in all. As I see Him here, He grows in me and I become like Him.
I want to give you two verses on growing, and then we’ll close until, Lord willing, next time. Matthew 6:28, “Why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow. They do not toil, and they do not spin.” I want to call attention to what Jesus said, “observe how the lilies grow,” and not, “that they grow,” but how do they grow? You see, they’re sort of stuck. Wherever they are is where they are. They can’t move. They just stand there. A lily grows by being a receiver. It receives the rain from heaven. It receives the sunshine. It receives nutrients from the soil. It draws, it drinks, it sucks and it just takes in.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, God wants you to grow like the lily grows. And then in 1 Peter we looked at this when we were in 1 Peter 2:2, “Like newborn babies long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation.” As a newborn infant, my little great grandchildren, they’ve never been to school, and they know how to grow. They just drink and they just receive, and they just draw from mother the nourishment they need. This is a book on how to grow. Christ lives in me, Christ is in the word. I can’t say that I don’t need the word, because all of Christ lives in me. He needs to be formed in me, and I get that from the word. Christ in the word, Christ in my heart, lily-life. I grow like a lily. It will never be harder than a little baby drawing milk from its mother’s breast. Christian life is not hard. It’s as simple as receiving. He’ll show you Christ, and you just say yes. May God help us!
Next time we’re going to look at the full development of the Christian character. He gives us His picture, this marvelous picture where you add to your faith, moral excellence and moral excellence, knowledge to knowledge, you add self-control and to self-control, and you are adding perseverance into perseverance, godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and brotherly kindness. We’re going to look at that because it’s a tremendous snapshot of what I will look like at every stage as I grow into the fullness of the stature of Christ.
Let’s pray. Father, thank You for Your word, not how we think we understand it, but how you inspired it. Oh Lord, thank You for revealing Christ in the Bible. Thank You for revealing Christ in my heart and I become a partaker of the divine nature. Thank You that I’m complete in Christ at every stage of maturity. Teach us how to grow by letting Christ grow. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.