Please note that Peter did not refer to God as the God of all fairness or the God of all justice, though he absolutely is that.
But Peter did not refer to him as that, nor did he call him the God of all truth, the God of all correctness, though he is certainly that. One thing he wanted to leave his audience with is that the character of their God, he is the God of all grace. God's love and grace can heal a broken heart and repair a broken life. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip shares encouraging truth to help you continue running the race of faith in the face of trials. But first, Skip wants to share about another great way you can hear his uplifting teachings. I want to invite you to follow my podcast so you can get even more inspiring teachings. Just search Skip Heitzig, that's Skip, H-E-I-T-Z-I-G on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to your podcasts. And don't forget to follow the podcast so you know when a new teaching is available.
Thanks, Skip. Now, we're in 1 Peter 5 as we dive into the teaching with Skip Heitzig. And as Peter comes to his finish line and he raises up the eyes of his readers to consider their finish line, this is what he says. Verse 10, but may the God of all grace who called us to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you. To him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen. By Silvanus, our faithful brother, as I consider him, I have written to you briefly. I know some of you are going, briefly? We've been in it all year.
That's me, not him. Exhorting and testifying that this is the true grace of God in which you stand, she who is in Babylon, elect together with you, greet you, and so does Mark, my son. Greet one another with a kiss of love, peace to you all who are in Christ Jesus.
Amen. As Peter closes his letter, he sums up what we have spent months looking at. He sums up in kernel nugget form all of the great truths that he has talked about. He calls it, this is the true grace of God.
I've told you about God saving grace, his sanctifying grace, grace to keep you secure till you get to heaven, grace to endure pain and hardship and trial. And that's verse 10 and 11. That's just sort of a summary statement. Then, in verse 12, 13, and 14 is his own personal note. It is here where I believe Peter picks up the pen and finishes the letter. Up till now, like in most ancient letters, he has dictated what he wanted to say to a guy named Silvanus. His name is mentioned. That's the formal name of Silas. We know about Silas. He was one of Paul's companions.
And so, Peter is dictating the letter to this scribe, a secretary, formally called an amanuensis. And then at the end, he picks up the pen and he writes the last three lines. There are six things I want to show you, six things you and I need to know as we approach the finish line. I was reading this week about a Kenyan runner. It's one of the most amazing things. If you've watched people from Kenya, it's almost like the whole country has produced great runners.
And at one of the Olympics, someone asked one of these Kenyan long distance runners, he goes, Why is it that your country has produced so many great athletes? And he smiled and he said, I think it must be the road signs. They say beware of lions. And we have seen that in our book, have we not? Where Peter says, your adversary, the devil roams around like a roaring lion. That'll keep you going.
But there's more than that. So allow me to unpack verse 10 and verse 11 and give you six things you and I as Christian athletes on this track of life need to know. To make it to the finish line, number one, you need to know God's character. Please notice verse 10. But may the God of all grace, stop right there. One of the great titles of God is this. Peter calls him the God of all comfort. Peter calls him the God of all grace. That's how God introduces himself to Moses back in Exodus 34. He says, I am the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious. Please note that Peter did not refer to God as the God of all fairness or the God of all justice, though he absolutely is that. But Peter did not refer to him as that, nor did he call him the God of all truth, the God of all correctness, though he is certainly that. One thing he wanted to leave his audience with is that the character of their God, he is the God of all grace. How many of you know people who have forgotten that he's the God of all grace? I run into Christians all the time. I know they're Christians because they've received Christ, but I know they have forgotten that he's a God of grace.
It's just difficult to be around their judgmental attitudes. He's the God of all grace. David in Psalm 86 said, You, O Lord, are a God full of compassion and gracious. Now, that's a great word, but when we come to the New Testament, that word takes on a whole new complexion because it's the very covenant that we relate to God with. It's a covenant of unmerited favor, grace. John chapter 1, the law came by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. So, under the law, God demands righteousness from man. Under grace, God gives righteousness to man. Under the law, righteousness is based on our good works. Under grace, it's based on his good work, his finished work on the cross.
Under the law, it only takes one sin to make you a sinner. Under grace, it only takes one savior to fix it all. So, to put it in its simple form, grace is how God deals with you. It's not based on what you deserve, it's based on what Jesus did. Or even more simply, take the word grace, G-R-A-C-E, and make it an acronym.
I know you've heard this. Grace is God's riches at Christ's expense. God can deal with you and I based on what Jesus did so he can treat you differently. 2 Corinthians 5.21, God made him, Jesus, who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
In other words, God treated Jesus Christ like you deserve to be treated so he can treat you like Jesus deserves to be treated. That's the covenant of grace. You need to know God's grace to make it to the finish line. You're saved by it, you're secured by it. And we sing about it every time we sing the song Amazing Grace.
Remember that stanza? "'Twas grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home." So no matter what you're experiencing today in your life, God isn't looking at you like this. That's not grace. I know some people may be, but not your God. He's a God of grace.
That's his character. The second thing you need to know is his calling, God's calling. May the God of all grace who called us to his eternal glory.
Let's stop right there. This tells me that God's purpose for my life goes beyond grace-filled life, and it includes eternal life, the glories of heaven. Do you remember that the Lord Jesus Christ prayed that private prayer to his Father in John 17? And he said, Father, I want all those that you have given me to be with me where I am, that they may see my glory.
Remember that? The Father will answer that prayer one day, and take you with Jesus to his glory. Now this second truth in this verse is based on the first truth in this verse. Because God covers us in his grace, he can call you to his glory.
The second is based on the first. Why is this important? What this does to his audience, and hopefully to you and I, is it raises our horizon. It lets us see beyond the pain of the race, beyond the pain of this life, to something that is beyond this life. Paul said it this way in 1 Corinthians 15. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most pitiable. Life can hurt. It can hurt a lot.
But beyond the hurt, there is heaven. And honestly, we often forget this. We often forget this.
Until we're reminded of it, we forget it. I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine about a year, year and a half ago. And we were, he was a pastor, and we were talking about heaven. Now just a disclaimer, pastors aren't always doing this. They're not always talking about heaven when they're with each other.
It's not like that. So sometimes we're talking about motorcycles. But we were talking about heaven this day. Actually, heaven and motorcycles may have a lot in common, but that's another story. Anyway, we were talking about heaven, and I think we were talking about the millennial kingdom of Christ, and then the eternal state, and all the different aspects.
And my friend paused in the middle of this conversation, and he looked at me and he said, we're going to see that. It's as if, here we are, we've studied it, we've taught it, we know it, but it dawned on us suddenly, this is real. We're actually going to experience all of these things that does something to you when you live that way.
2 Corinthians 4, the Apostle Paul says, Therefore we do not lose heart, even though we are wasting away outwardly, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. And so we fix our eyes. There's the horizon. We fix our eyes, not on what is seen but what is unseen, for what is seen is temporal. What is unseen is eternal.
Live looking forward to what's beyond life. A couple of years back I was at a local baseball game, and I love baseball and I love local baseball. And I'm watching the game, it was a warm summer evening. Afterwards there would be fireworks, and there were. But in front of me were a couple of gentlemen who were friends, and they were enjoying the game, and they had a beer, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then several more. And by the end of the game, by the time of the fireworks, they were well saturated in their drink. And as the fireworks went off, one guy holding a beer turned to his buddy. It was like a bad Budweiser commercial.
Trust me on this. He turned to his friend in a slurred speech. He goes, it doesn't get any better than this. And I think, oh, goodness gracious, really?
You know, a couple beers at a junior baseball team game with a few fireworks, and that does it for you, huh? And I'm thinking, it's going to get a lot better than this. There's grace to make it through this life, and there's glory that we're called to afterwards. It's going to get a lot better.
C.S. Lewis said, Christians who do the most for this present world are those who think most of the next. Aim at heaven and you'll get earth thrown in.
Aim at earth and you'll get neither. So God's character, he's a God of all grace. God's calling, he's called us to eternal glory. But there's something attached to it. I don't want you to miss this.
There's a condition to that. God's condition. It says, by Christ Jesus. May the God of all grace who called us to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus.
Let's tell you what this tells me. You will not automatically enjoy God's grace in life and automatically enjoy God's glory in heaven. They only come by Christ Jesus. So the first two now are dependent upon the third. The grace and the glory depend upon, do you know Christ Jesus? Are you having a relationship with God through his son?
It's not automatic. You don't enjoy these things just because you're alive. I've been to a lot of funerals.
I've done a lot and I've been to a lot. And some that I have been to, if I were just to walk in and listen to eulogies and listen to some preachers, I could assume by what I hear at some funerals that the only condition there is for you to get to heaven is just to be born. That's all you got to do. Be born. Live any way you want.
Make any choice you want. But at the end, we'll find some preacher who will push you into heaven and say nice things about how wonderful you were. I heard about a scoundrel. It was his funeral. I mean, this guy hated God, never wanted to go to church, never wanted God mentioned in his house, and everybody knew him. When he died, he had a funeral and some preacher who didn't know him gave the eulogy and gave the sermon and talked about how wonderful he was and went on for like 10 minutes of praise and accolades and everybody in the audience is looking like, what? And finally, the wife of the poor deceased man nudges her son and said, go up there and look in that casket and make sure that's your dad.
She thought I may be at the wrong place. Listen, you don't get to heaven by just being born. You get to heaven by being born again. And Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Heaven is exclusive.
The grace to live this way and the glory that is promised are to those who relate to God through Christ Jesus. It's sort of like my iPhone case. I brought my iPhone case here. It's wood-grained.
It's very thin. And if I were to, come on up here, let me give you my iPhone case. I'm going to give you my case. What do you get when I give you my case? Your phone.
Yeah, okay, thank you. Give me my phone back. You get my phone. My phone's attached to my case. So if you get my case, you get my phone. If you go to the store to buy a case, here's how it works. They will sell you a case and they always have a picture of the case holding a phone but on the front of the case it says, does not include phone. They don't want you to think for 20 bucks you're going to get a brand new phone. But if I give you my case today, you would get my phone.
Comes with it. That's why I'm not going to give you my case. However, that's how it works with Christ. When you take Jesus Christ, what comes with him is the whole package of the grace to live through all the tough stuff and the glory that will follow in the end. But you must take the Savior to get the glory.
It's all part of the package. One of the biggest surprises in heaven will be who's not there. And one of the other big surprises in heaven is who's there.
And we might just look at each other and go, Skip, you're here? By God's grace. The fourth thing to notice is God's curriculum. Again, he's summing up his whole letter. God's curriculum. Notice what he says.
May the God of all grace who called you to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus after you have suffered a while. Why did he write this? Here's why.
It's obvious. Because suffering is a part of life. Everyone's life. Everybody goes through suffering.
But it's also a part of God's curriculum to mature us. Pain happens to every person. But purposeful pain happens only to the child of God. Everybody goes through pain and they look back and they wonder and they go, I don't get this.
I don't understand. That's just a bad thing that happened. But not for a believer. A believer knows the truth of Romans 8.28, that all things work together for good to those who are called to God by God according to his purpose. Everything works together.
Purposeful pain is what children of God get. In chemistry, you can take two substances that by themselves would be dangerous for you to ingest. Sodium is an alkali metal. If you were to take it in its pure form, it's not good for you. Enough could do damage to you. Chlorine could be a poison to you. But if you combine those two things and make sodium chloride, that's just table salt, it could be actually beneficial. So it's the combination of things. God can cause all things bad, worse, good, and combine them and make something beneficial.
The right combination of even harmful things can actually be beneficial. A great example is the Apostle Paul. He spoke about a thorn in the flesh. Some of you will remember the passage I'm referring to. 2 Corinthians 12. He basically said, I saw so many wonderful, cool things and visions that God gave me. It was given to me, a thorn in the flesh.
A messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. I thought about that passage yesterday because I was weeding my yard. And I had gloves on. But there are some weeds. Do you know this about some weeds that they're sort of impervious to gloves? They've got thorns in them.
And this happened to me. I pulled a weed out and I got a thorn in my flesh. And I had it most of the day until I said, that's what that thing is that's bothering me.
And I pulled it out with the tweezers. Thorn in the flesh. I thought about what Paul wrote. He said, I had a thorn in my flesh. The big difference between my little sticker and the thorn that Paul spoke about is he was referring to a sharp, impaling stick that killed people. A stake in the flesh. And most scholars believe he was referring to an eye disease that he lived with for years until the Lord took him home to glory. But the way he described it is what is most noteworthy.
Listen to what he says. Because of the revelations I saw, there was given unto me a thorn in the flesh. And the word, the way it's written, was given to me is an aorist passive indicative, which simply implies God gave it to me. It was God that gave me this thorn in the flesh. So listen to how this sounds. It sounds a little weird. Therefore, God gave me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me.
Buffet means punch. This is as if Paul is saying, so that I wouldn't get so prideful, God the Father, my God who loves me, allowed one of Satan's own demons to beat me up a little bit. And I prayed three times to be delivered from this, and God finally said, my grace is all you need. And therefore, Paul said, I rejoice in my affliction, and I embrace it. That's quite a statement. Why would God allow a choice servant like Paul to go through pain like that?
Here's the earth's shattering truth. It was good for him. It was good for him. It was helpful. It was beneficial. David said, it was good that I was afflicted. It was beneficial. Satan wanted to destroy him.
God used it to develop him. That's what Job said. Job, after all of his struggles and trials, you remember what he said to his wife? He said, shall we accept only good from God? Shall we not accept adversity? I mean, am I going to be so shallow a person that when I get some happy experience, I go, oh, that's from God. And pain comes in my life. That's not from God. It's from the devil. It might be, but God allowed it to strengthen you, to develop you.
That's part of God's curriculum. Something else. Please notice this. How long do you suffer? Look at what he says. After you've suffered what? A while. It's not long. It's a deliberate comparison to the word he used previously, eternal. Please notice he's called us to his eternal glory. Until then, we suffer a while.
You get it? We're suffering temporarily. We've got something eternal coming up. This is passing. That's permanent.
Just a while. That's Skip Heising with a message from the series Rock Song. Now we want to share about a special resource that will spark a deeper passion in you to live for Jesus. You know Proverbs 31, the go-to passage that describes the ideal Christian woman and wife. But let's be honest. That ideal can be as intimidating as it is inspiring.
Here's Skip Heising with more. Can I just tell you, it's exhausting to just read that, let alone how on earth women could you ever do that? Well, let me say, first of all, you can't do that in a day. He's not giving the 24-hour description of the virtuous wife. This is a woman over time. Get to know some of the most incredible women in the Bible and in history with two inspiring resources. A six-message CD collection from Pastor Skip on prominent women in Scripture, plus the book Seven Women by best-selling author Eric Metaxas. This bundle is our thanks when you give $35 or more to help expand the Bible teaching outreach of Skip Heizig. Charm is deceitful.
Beauty is passing. But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised. Call now to request these captivating resources as our thanks for your generous gift. 800-922-1888 or give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer. The Bible brings growth, direction, and joy to your life, equipping you to serve the Lord. And we want to bring the Word of God to more friends like you. You can help keep these teachings coming your way and make them available in more places around the world through your generous support today. So please call now to give and help keep this program going strong. Call 800-922-1888. That's 800-922-1888. Or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate.
That's connectwithskip.com slash donate. Thank you. Tune in tomorrow as Skip Heizig shares several important principles to help you build a mature faith that lasts. One will lead to the other. So if you have faith, that will produce a life of virtue. And if you have a moral excellent life that will lead to knowing God better. And when you know God better, you'll become more self-controlled. And when you're more self-controlled, you'll be able to persevere under the load better. And when you do that, you'll become more godly. And that leads to genuine care for people and sacrificial love.
That's growth. One leads to the other. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the crossing. Cast all burdens on His word. Make a connection, connection. Connect with Skip Heizig is a presentation of Connection Communications. Connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever-changing times.
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