Fatih Alone?

If you would turn with me in your Bibles to the second letter of Peter, 2 Peter.

We'll be looking tonight at verses 5 through 9, but I want to read at the beginning of the chapter, we'll see this in context. Peter writes, Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ. May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence by which he has granted to us his precious promises and very great promises so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For whoever lacks these qualities is so near-sighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. Pray with me. Heavenly Father, by your grace we have obtained the precious faith received and proclaimed by the apostles. We stand forgiven and made holy by the righteousness of Jesus Christ. By your divine power we've been granted precious promises that we might become partakers of your divine nature. This you've done for us and to us, but you command us to work out our salvation because you work in us to will and to do your good pleasure. Open our ears to hear your word. Open our minds to know your ways. Open our hearts to obey because we love you. Come Holy Spirit even now and empower the preaching and hearing and responding to your word. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

You may be seated. Several weeks ago we looked at the first four verses of this letter, the second letter of Peter. We're reminded that God has graciously given us salvation in Jesus Christ, that we have come to faith in him by God's grace, that we have been granted exceedingly great and precious promises, and that by these we might become partakers of the divine nature. In fact, Peter says that God's divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who has called us to his own glory and excellence.

So as we come to verse five, the text says, For this very reason, do this. Add these things to your faith. Furnish your faith with these. Supply or supplement your faith in this way. This morning the title of my sermon was announced as Faith Alone. We say that phrase so often we just always say it like that, and it made it sound like I would be affirming one of the reformer's solas, and I do affirm that.

But my title actually ends with a question mark. Faith alone? James has warned us that faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

We do not add anything to our salvation. We are justified by faith alone and Christ alone, by God's grace alone, and yet in this process of sanctification, we work, we strive, we seek, and we are called to work toward that holiness which is ours in Christ. We are called in this text tonight to work at adding to our faith these virtues that Peter lists for us, to furnish or supply our faith with these virtues that should be a part of the Christian life. Peter says, For this very reason, add to your faith. What is this reason that he's pointing to here? It is, of course, what he's already spoken of in the first four verses, in the first part of verse five. We are to add to our faith because we have received this like precious faith, as the scripture puts it.

Peter's writing to believers, to those who have received the gift of faith, the faith, the faith that the apostles have received in which they proclaim. This passage presents us with some dangers. There are a couple of dangers. We often hear about the two ditches that we have to avoid.

There are a couple of ditches here. First of all, there is the idea that we can somehow, by working up these virtues in our lives, we can make ourselves Christian. We can't do that.

Some people have the idea that the teachings of the New Testament, things like the Sermon on the Mount, these are just great moral teaching. Anybody can strive toward these things and work these things up in our lives. Reality is that nobody can live like this in their own power.

This is not something we can do. This is something that only can be accomplished in the life of a believer. The other side of the coin is this idea that because salvation is by faith alone, it's all of grace that we can be passive.

We don't have to work at it. We just let go and let God. But Peter has said that even though God has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness and that He's granted us these great promises, we have to do something to add to this life that we are living before Him. He has given us these great promises by which we can become partakers of the divine nature. These are great promises because they're made by a great God, a God whose word never fails.

They are great promises because through them we can become partakers of the divine nature. There are aspects of God's nature that He has made, as the theologian said, communicable. He can implant them in us and cause us to live in that way. There are things about God, of course, that He cannot communicate to us. We never become immutable.

We never reach a point where we don't change. That is only true of God. But we can become a partaker in the divine nature. If these things are granted to us in salvation, why is it that Peter admonishes us to add to our faith?

What more can be done? So consider with me then, first of all tonight, the scope of this task as we look at verses 5 through 7. What does it mean to add to or to supplement our faith? Is it salvation, all of grace, from first to last? It's true that Christ is the author and the finisher, the beginner, the perfecter of our faith, and yet we are to add to our faith these things that Peter speaks of here in this text. Without Christ is true, we can do nothing, and yet we are commanded to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling because it is God who really is at work in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. We are to strive, to manifest, to live out this new life that is ours in observable ways. What God has done in us, we are to live out and work out through the power that he has given to us. We're to make every effort to supplement the faith. Verse 5 says, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith. The King James uses the phrase, giving all diligence add to your faith. The idea of this word is one of eagerness and haste and energy. In our modern lingo, we might say something like, get with the program.

This must be done, and it must be done quickly. It has that sense of eagerness and haste. The word was used in relation to the Greek theater. Greek theater and drama always had a chorus associated with it, and the person who was responsible for furnishing the chorus, for filling out the chorus, this word was used to speak of that person's responsibility to furnish the chorus, to fill it up. So what are we to add to our faith? In what ways are we to supplement our faith? First of all, he says, we are to add virtue. This word literally means manliness, valor, strength. It's the same word that is used up in verse 3, where it says that God has granted to us the things that pertain to life and godliness, and that through his great promises, that he is the one who has called us to his own glory and to excellence. That word excellence here, it's the same word, the word virtue. But this is something that speaks of strength and valor and manliness. Lloyd-Jones uses the term moral power or moral energy. Our faith must be an active, vigorous, energetic faith.

Now, there's a danger here. Satan is always prowling around, trying to devour us and destroy us, and so whenever we move toward godly character, he tries to put a stop to it. He wants to move us in the opposite direction. But as we're in Christ, he has difficulty there.

He can't turn us around. He finds us in Christ and Christ in us, and so he tries to push us into extremes. With regard to this idea of strength and valor and eagerness in our faith, sometimes we enter into perversion of what God desires of us. Peter understands this. He uses this word, but Peter was a man of action. When we look back over the New Testament, we would never describe Peter as passive. Peter was always on the move.

He acted on impulse. He was impetuous, even violent at times, in his zeal to follow Christ. You remember his words on the Mount of Transfiguration when Christ was revealed to them in his glory, and Peter said, let's build tabernacles, and Mark tells us that he didn't know what to say, but he spoke anyway.

Peter was always involved and active. He vowed that he would never forsake Christ, and then he denied him three times. When they came to arrest Jesus in the garden, he lashed out with his sword, cut off a man's ear.

When the resurrected Lord appeared to the disciples on the Sea of Galilee, it was Peter who jumped into the water and swam to the shore. But now, some 30 years later, as he writes this letter, we hear this mature apostle speaking to us and pointing us to the need for our moral energy and our eagerness to be bridled with knowledge. That's the second thing that he says we're to add to our faith. He's not speaking here just of the elementary knowledge that leads us to salvation. One translation puts this absolute knowledge or full knowledge. What is needed is understanding and insight and enlightenment, discernment. Paul gives similar teaching in 1 Corinthians 14 where he says, brothers, do not be children in your thinking, but in your thinking be mature, or as the King James has it, don't be children in understanding, but in understanding be men. We have to have knowledge and mature understanding and insight. And of course, again, here, there's a danger lurking. We need to grow in knowledge, but there's a danger that knowledge will puff us up.

We'll become proud. Love, on the other hand, builds up and edifies. Our knowledge must be controlled by love. And that, of course, is where the climax of this list lands. And when we get to that last virtue we're to add to our faith, it is that of love.

Peter continues then in this list by speaking of restraint, of holding ourselves in check, the moral excellence, the knowledge and understanding that are required are necessary if we are to exercise self-control. You see how each of these virtues that he's teaching us about here are related to one another. They build on one another.

They overlap. They're dependent on each other. It's not just you get virtue and then you add knowledge and then you build it that way. But they're all connected.

They're all essential. We're to have all of these all the time and grow and mature in all of them. But when we first come to Christ, the exuberance of the newfound faith, the growing understanding of the riches of God's grace can sometimes lead us to rush ahead of God, to act presumptuously, to not have self-control, trying to help God out through our human methods and devices. You remember Abraham and Sarah, God had promised a son and they were impatient and attempted to accomplish God's promise and realize his promise of a son with their own plan and what a disaster that was.

But we do that so frequently. We think we know what God wants and when he wants it and we try to make it happen. This idea of restraint, to which Peter calls us, is a word that has to do with controlling our appetites. Paul uses the same word in regard to an athlete's training. In First Corinthians 9, he says, Every athlete exercises self-control in all things.

They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air, but I discipline my body and keep it under control lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. Paul is pointing us to a very important principle here regarding the restraint of our appetites and our desires. He speaks of disciplining his body.

The word literally refers to a slave driver. We must discipline our body. The concept of mortifying sin, putting to death the old man, the flesh, Paul writes to the Colossians in chapter 3, Put to death therefore what is earthly in you, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness, which is idolatry. You must put away anger, wrath, malice, slander, obscene talk from your mouth, do not lie to one another, seeing that you've put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Our faith is to be vigorous and energetic and growing in knowledge. That's good, but it must be disciplined.

It must be held in and wisely directed. It must be characterized next by steadfastness, steadfastness or perseverance is another way that word is translated. It's a word that means a patient endurance. It includes the idea of hope, waiting on what God has.

The word literally means to put yourself under and to remain under and someone has defined it as receiving difficult situations from God without giving him a time frame for getting rid of it. It's patient endurance. Living in that kind of patient endurance requires a stick-to-it-ness. When I think of stick-to-it-ness and I'm reminded of the conversation that was going on in the van on the way back from General Assembly this week, we had a couple of men whose sanity you question a little bit because they run marathons, 26.2 miles of running.

For what reason? Just to run, just to finish. That kind of stick-to-it-ness, that steady staying with it is like the old man who was asked about how he viewed his life and he said, I just want to keep on keeping on. As a boy, I had the privilege of handpicking cotton back in the day and I never was very good at it. I, on a few occasions, reached 100 pounds in a day, but there was a lady in my hometown that was famous for her cotton picking. That woman would take two sacks instead of one like most of us and she would have a sack on each side and she'd get a little bit in there and where she could sit and she was carrying two rows at the time, picking that cotton. Never fast, never pushing, never hasting, just steady from sun up to sun down. There were times when she would pick almost 300 pounds in a day.

They used to say she could pick a bale a week by herself. Just steady staying with it, persevering, and that's necessary if we're going to live this kind of life, just that biblical hope that is persevering because we're waiting, knowing that God will do what he has said and what he has said will come to pass. But if we're going to live with that kind of patient endurance, we have to have a mindset that is true of what he says in this next word. We're to add to our faith godliness, godliness. This word in the Greek language is a compound word, two words put together. The first part of the word means good or well. It's also the beginning of the word that we use, eucharist, for thanksgiving, an expression of gratitude. But here the word has to do with that idea of goodness or wellness. And then the second part of the word has to do with reverence, adoring and revering God.

Someone has translated it well-revering. Always conscious of the fact that we are in the presence of God. I had often heard, since I became aware of Reformed thinking and writing and so forth, I'd run into this phrase Coram Deo. Didn't know where that came from, but looking at this, I discovered that this was John Calvin's motto. Coram Deo, before God, in the presence of God, before the face of God, always living with a conscious awareness that we live before God. We're reminded this morning, Pastor Doug reminded us that God is always watching. His eye is everywhere.

There's nowhere to run. We are always in his presence, and we must live with that conscious awareness that we are living before God. That's what godliness really is. And then he turns to our relationship with others, and he speaks of brotherly kindness. The word is Philadelphia. Most of us know that that's a word that combines two Greek words, one that means love, and the other brother. It says, Philadelphia is a city of brotherly love. We are to have this sense of family affection for our brothers and sisters in Christ. It reflects the tender affection of God himself. God's love is a tender, affectionate love. You remember Jesus' words as he looked on Jerusalem before his crucifixion, how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers a brood under our wings. There's a tenderness to the affection that God has for us.

Even in the Old Testament, which so many people look at as a god there being a god of wrath, even there, God's care for his people is compared to that of a mother for a child. Thus says the Lord, behold, I will extend peace to her like a river and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream and you shall nurse, you shall be carried upon her hip and bounced upon her knees as one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you. We need to develop a tender, brotherly affection for God's people. Our brothers and sisters in Christ, there needs to be a warmth and a tenderness. In fact, Paul uses that idea when he speaks to us in Ephesians and says that we're to be tender-hearted, kind, forgiving toward one another. And by the way, I was taught a few years back that kindness is not just the absence of meanness, it's an active, positive, tender treatment toward others.

We need to develop that kind of brotherly affection. And then he comes to the climax of the list with the final virtue that we are to add to our faith, love. We must come to love not only the brothers and sisters in Christ, but even our enemies, Christ says. We are to love with a self-sacrificing love, the kind of love that we've received in Jesus.

You remember how Jesus said that the whole law hangs on this idea? You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment, and a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. So Peter calls for brotherly affection toward God's people, and then he adds this agape, the God-like love for everyone. That's our debt to everyone. You remember what Paul says in Romans 13.8? Owe no man anything except to love one another.

Paul, you remember he wrote to Timothy in the first chapter of that first letter to Timothy, verse 5, that the aim, the goal of it all is an unfeigned love, a love out of a pure heart. That's the climax of what we're to add to our faith. So we've looked at the reason that we are to add these things to our faith. We've looked at the scope of it and tried to define it a little bit. So what is the outcome of that?

What is the fruit of this? Well, it's part of that already but not yet kind of thing. This is who we are. This is ours in Christ. In fact, as we read this in the ESV, Paul says in verse 8, if these qualities are yours and increasing, speaking as if it's almost one of those, since these are yours, they are ours in Christ.

And yet there's an if. Are we actually adding these things? Are we building this into our life?

Are we making this a part of who we are? If these things are in you and they're growing and increasing, then they will keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful, from being unproductive or useless is another translation of that. These things are what keep you from being a useless Christian, make us productive, make us fruitful. Peter goes on to say then in verse 9 that whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he's blind having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. It's interesting that he changes from saying you in verse 8 to the one who, anyone. He's not accusing them. He's just stating fact. If this is not true of you, then you're blind.

You've forgotten what God has done for you. He points us back again to the fact that it's because of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ that we're to live like this. We're to add these things. So in closing, may I in what I hope is a tender love pose some questions. Like Peter, I'm not trying to be judgmental or accusatory, but I want us to ask ourselves these questions and maybe they'll encourage us to growth and to improvement.

Where do we stand? Is our faith full of vigor and energy and moral excellence? On a scale of 1 to 10, how is your knowledge of Jesus Christ? Just starting kindergarten, you're a biblical scholar, somewhere in between. What are you doing about where you are to move further up the scale?

We're to add knowledge. How well are you doing at restraining fleshly desires? Do your flesh ever rise up in you? Do you exhibit attitudes, even say words, do things that do not express the love that Christ has shown us? Do you live each day in a conscious awareness that you're in the presence of God living before his face? Do my brothers and sisters sense in me an affection for them, a brotherly love?

Do they know that I love them? Brothers and sisters, we can do this. God has given us everything that is needed for life and godliness. He's called us to his own glory and excellence. And so for this very reason, we are to make every effort to supplement our faith with virtue, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, affection, and love. We're to God that our faith would not be without works a dead faith. We would diligently make every effort to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. By the way, that's a theme in 2 Peter.

He talks about it three or four times in the first chapter, and over in chapter 3, he gives it as a final kind of admonition, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. May it be true of us. Let's pray. Father, you have given us all the things that we need for life of godliness. You've given us your spirit to empower us, to inform us, to enlighten us. By your grace, you have saved us from the corruption that is in the world, and you have given us promises that make it possible for us to become partakers of your own nature. Father, may we be a body that exhibits this, and we grow and increase in this, that the world around us would see and know that we serve the one true living God. Thank you for your unfailing love, for your abundant grace, for your everlasting mercy. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.