2 Peter 1:3 By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life.
In case you haven’t noticed, the “Verses” category at this blog simply points out a scripture that I believe is meaningful and important. It may be a passage, or as we have today, just part of a single verse.
Sometimes the simplicity of the message scripture is obscured in all the opinionating and shouting that goes on among Bible students.
So here’s one for you: God has already given us everything we need for living a godly life.
Now….there may be things God still needs to give us in future situations. There is certainly nothing wrong with asking for God to intervene in an illness or a crisis. We ought to pray for what people need and don’t have.
But when it comes to what we need for living the Christian life- what Peter called “godliness”- we already have it. We have it all and we’ve had it all as long as we’ve known God through faith in Jesus.
Here’s a slightly longer excerpt.
2 Peter 1:3 By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life. We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence. 4 And because of his glory and excellence, he has given us great and precious promises. These are the promises that enable you to share his divine nature and escape the world’s corruption caused by human desires.5 In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises…
We were totally resourced for living as disciples when we came to know “him.” “Received” is past tense.
Does this do away with living by faith? No, because what God has given us are his very own promises. These promises, which center around the Gospel and all Jesus has done and will do- are the energizers of God’s power in our lives, just as they have always been in the lives of people like Abraham and David.
I bring up this passage because a conversation today reminded me that vast numbers of Christians are living as if God has not given them everything they need to live the life, and is in fact being very tricky and gamey, making his power only available to those who jump through the proper hoops, wind up at the right church, pray the right prayer or get kicked by the right evangelist.
Whole segments of evangelicalism and Christianity in general promise to get God to finally come through if we will just do our part in the game. God is dangling the “real” Christian life in front of us. Will we have the whatever it takes to grab it? Will we play the game so we can get what we need?
This is very, very far away from 2 Peter 1:3 or the many statements of Jesus that tell us our heavenly Father knows what we need and will provide it. In the area of living the life, we have EVERYTHING we need, and we’ve had it from the moment we belonged to Jesus. In him, all the promises are yes. In him, the fullness of the Godhead dwells incarnationally. In him, we are complete. In him the shadows have become the reality. In Jesus, God has reconciled, poured out, acted, raised and saved.
It’s sad to see Christians acting as if God must be made to notice us; that he must be somehow motivated to give us all that help that we actually don’t have, and won’t have if we don’t find out the secret principles or the official secrets or the mysterious outpourings.
He has given us everything we need for life and godliness. Now, look around you at the Christians you know. Listen to the sermons you hear. Get the feel of the kind of God and message that are coming into your life from the Christians around here.
Do they believe and practice a kind of Christianity that says “We aren’t trying to get God to give us what we need to live the life. We have what we need. Now it’s time to LIVE THE LIFE?”
Maybe this verse can help us see why the early Christians really were able to do so much more than we seem to be able to do. They knew Jesus had done everything and given them everything they needed for the mission. Now it was time for the mission, not for playing games with God.
Meanwhile, today’s Christian is trying to get the secret, have the experience, receive the blessing and so on.
A great verse: We have everything we need for living a godly life. We should believe what God has promised and live out those promises, celebrating our all sufficient, all wise and generously loving God.
Strong words, sorely needed. Tonight I taught my summer Bible study from the Psalms, open to all adults during the summer months. Sunday morning we had about 400 worshipers. Tonight we had four adults for Bible Study. Maybe the problem isn’t the resources needed for godliness. Maybe it’s the desire. If a person is content to “play games with God”, where is the desire to learn, to grow in the image of Christ? Sometimes it seems that godliness doesn’t even make the top five priorities of my people. Only a handful really want to LIVE THE LIFE. I can’t tell you how deeply disturbing and frustrating that is to me. I’ve been their pastor for ten years.
I remember so many annoying discussions with folks who were convinced that total depravity meant the godly life was not only impossible, but attempting to live in it actually denied Jesus’s saving work. I don’t know who out there is teaching this (other than the devil), but they’re totally not helping.
[...] Read a much better post on the subject here. [...]
Another great post!
Maybe continuing education in the ways of Jesus and Bible study are to get ME closer God, not so much of …God more near to me.
IM, if I were at CS, Id get you to autograph my computer….
Drew, do not grow weary in doing good……..
grace and peace
I think people take this passage in one of two ways, 1) active and 2) passive. I don’t have the tools (or time as I’m in the middle of a busy medical-practice day) to look up the original languages and to attempt some sort of exegesis, but maybe someone else has a handle on that and Michael already has started this his posting above.
I was always (in my previous life) taught this passage in the “active” interpretation. What I mean by that is that, “God as given you the tools to be godly, now hop to it chap and get it done.”
This would be the same as me sitting in a vacant lot and three semis from “Extreme Home Make-over Home Edition” pull up with piles of lumber, doors and windows still in their cardboard boxes, shingles, nails, circular saws, hammers, levels, etc and someone says, “There you go Mike . . . you have everything YOU NEED to build a beautiful house . . . now get with it.”
I’m starting to realize, as Michael has suggested, that indeed, Jesus may have meant this in the “passive” interpretation. What I mean by that (and I will use another allegory) is the following:
You enter a homeless shelter where a very poor lady sits with three dirty, runny nose kids. They are eating crumbs that they found in a McDonald’s dumpster. You hand them a “Pre-loaded” credit card with 5 million dollars on it. Then you say, “You have all YOU NEED to leave poverty.”
Now, in that last case, the mother could chose not to believe you and continue feeding her kids the dried up, greasy, moldy French fries, but the money is on the card in her pocket and that does not change the fact that she is now rich (her name is on the card). So she doesn’t have to do any thing (like the former example) to go out and work her way out of debt . . . just accept what is already hers. She also doesn’t have to start some life-long journey to find the secret pin number on the card before she can use it.
[...] We Need Posted on July 3, 2008 by sheepfodder from Michael Spencer (emphases [...]
Ah, but if I can just get the magic formula, if I could just learn the proper sequence of words, if I can just do the right thing at the right time, THEN God will move on my behalf!
Of course, if this were true I’d be doomed to a life of works-righteousness, hoping to be good enough to get in.
Thank God He provided all we need to live a godly life in Christ Jesus! But it requires trusting, obeying and walking by faith, not works. This is not an easy task – otherwise more Christians would live this way.
As usual, a thought-provoking post. Thanks!
[...] Two new posts at the new blog: Got Everything? [...]
A lot of the problem in leading a godly life, I think, lies in our difficulty in separating want from need. If God doesn’t respond to our requests for what we want–money, status, stuff, whatever–we may never recognize that we have already been given what we need, and spend our spiritual lives trying to get God to give us the keys to the treasure chest we’re sure is there.
@ Drew Hill: “Only a handful really want to LIVE THE LIFE. I can’t tell you how deeply disturbing and frustrating that is to me. I’ve been their pastor for ten years.”
I have to say, of the many Christians I’ve known, it’s never failed to amaze me, just how much emphasis they really do place on “playing games with God” – over various crises big and small people would be content to “pray about it” and just sit on their behinds waiting for God to come down out of the Heavens and tell them the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything when the answers had been staring them in the face all along.
I wonder if the reason why people believe in jumping through hoops to gain the blessing is perhaps two fold: (1) It reinforces their innate desire to stay within their own spiritual and social comfort zone, and (2) it reaffirms their own neediness and spiritual hortcomings.
In the case of the former, it comforts them that it’s okay to stay within the stable sprirtual bounds of their church, family, or local community, when in fact they may be called to break out and grow and learn more by exploring the world outside of that. In the case of the latter, we see all around us people having to go through all kinds of hoops to appease others in our daily lives, so we end up remaking God in our own image.
Re: “the reason why people believe in jumping through hoops to gain the blessing” as mentioned by rampancy, I would add that it also gives us a sense of control, false though it may be, and perhaps keeps us busily distracted.
I’m also reminded of something written by Larry Crabb a while back about how we want God’s blessings more than God himself.
This was great. I have a friend who goes to a “Victory Pentecostal Church” (if you give alot of money God will make sure your business deals succeed, and yes it is that blatant) and I try to tell him the only victory he is going to get from being a Christian is a triumph over death and victory with Jesus. That’s not enough for some people though.