God Given Chances (Part A)

So, again, he pauses here to point to God's patience.

He says, yeah, everything I've been saying about these false teachers, I mean every bit of it as firm as I said it and a little bit more. But God is patient. God is long suffering. God is kind and blameless. There is still hope. But there's no tolerance of evil in the midst of that.

Hope. And so any of you here that think, well, you know, you shouldn't chase them away with the truth. You are wrong. You are wrong.

You are wrong. You are pure minds by way of reminder that you may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets and of the commandment of us, the apostles of the Lord and Savior, knowing this first that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts and saying, where is the promise of his coming? All things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. For this they willfully forget that by the word of God, the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of water in the water, by which the world that then existed perished being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth, which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise as some count slackness, but as long suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

God-given chances, that's the direction I hope to go in this morning. I prefer preaching on character studies. I prefer what the Bible has to say about certain people in the Bible, but duty requires that I go through the scriptures and cover more than just those things that I find most pleasant to me personally. This section's a little different from what we've been considering in 2 Peter in that he gets a little personal or is a gentler side that flashes out for a moment.

Not that it should have been there earlier. He is perfectly correct in his dealing with false teachings. But now he has this flash of grace to the believers in the midst of these things, telling them that God gives us chances and that the guilty bring it upon themselves. As I stand here and preach to you, there are in other churches those who preach to those before them, some good, some not good. They get to preach whatever they want to, and in many cases, without resistance. I get to preach what I want to, with or without resistance. So long as the Holy Spirit is not resisting me, I'm good with all that.

And these personal touches of the preacher are necessary, as I am doing at the moment for me, Peter is doing for them in this letter. God suffers fools. That expression comes from the Apostle Paul.

You know, we say that of someone who's very impatient with someone who's very foolish. We say of them, they don't suffer fools. If you stand before them and you repeat yourself too many times, they're going to call you out on it. If you say something that's dumb and out of line, they're not going to tolerate it.

I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just pointing out, we have an expression in our own language that a person can be known for not suffering fools. Well, it comes from Paul, 2 Corinthians, reading from the old King James, for ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise.

That phrase coined by Paul was not a compliment. He was saying to the Corinthians, you put up with things that you should never put up with. And unfortunately, there's no shortage of Christians to this day, oftentimes well-meaning, loving the Lord, but they put up with things they should never put up with. They are happy to harbor, even embrace, foolish things, dangerous things, destructive things in the interest of some misguided understanding of grace and love. Peter knew that some of these well-meaning believers were in his audience that he's writing to. He knew that many lacked a sermon. I mentioned a few weeks ago that some of you can't handle the pastor saying there are people that come and visit that a church, this or another, is better off without. Somehow that's become an anathema. What is meant by that is they don't agree, and they're only going to cause strife and trouble.

So the Lord adds to the church such as a being saved. That's his responsibility. Our responsibility is to be blameless, to be loving, but to adhere to truth first. And so again, Peter knows that he has in his audience some that lack discernment. So he's been hitting these false teachers, and he knows some are going to say, that's a little harsh, Peter. Peter knows better. He knows better because it's about who's going to hell and who's not. It doesn't get any more serious than this for the human being.

Where are you going to go when you die? What happens to you then? Some like to dismiss it and say, well, that's it.

You just annihilated. That's all. Yeah, well, you can have whatever wrong thoughts you have. We go by, of course, what God says. So again, he pauses here to point to God's patience.

He says, yeah, everything I've been saying about these false teachers, I mean every bit of it as firm as I said it and a little bit more. But God is patient. God is long suffering. God is kind and blameless. There is still hope, but there's no tolerance of evil in the midst of that hope. And so any of you here that think, well, you know, you shouldn't chase them away with the truth. You are wrong. If the truth offends them, let them be offended.

We don't back up. Oh, that hurt their feelings. They did that with Jesus. You know, master, you offend them. And Jesus loaded up even more on them after that.

When will the church understand that heresy destroys souls? It's not just, you know, we're just gathered here because that's what we do as Christians. We do a little Bible verse. We sing some songs and then we have coffee.

It's much more serious than that. Psalm 46 verse 10, God says, be still through the man of God and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations.

I will be exalted in the earth. I am God. I'm not asking to be God. I'm telling you I'm God.

You take it or leave it. No child who loves Jesus Christ according to the word ever near need fear that God is somehow going to become so disgusted with them that he boots them out. There's no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. David, King David, the beloved psalmist, the one that Jesus has no shame attaching his name to. David broke five of Ten Commandments in one event, a single event in his life. He broke five of the Ten Commandments.

He coveted. He committed adultery. He murdered. He stole.

He lied. God forgave him. Not just because God didn't say, well, you know, I like David. Again, because David repented.

David wrote two psalms for sure about that event, what he was going through. And those beautiful words created me a clean heart. Oh, God cast me not away from your spirit. Take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of your salvation, because sin takes from us the joy of our salvation to go to church and then to have an impure thought right out of this just before you've even gotten out of the building. It's not a delight for the born again believer. That is an anathema thought, not the soul of the one who has it. But we hate that kind of stuff.

That's where the battlefield is. There is not a person in this room who is not greatly loved by God. Yet the language of the scripture indicates that there are those that God loves a little bit more. And I'm going to brag that out in a minute, because some of you recoil at that. No. Come on, I'm right. You know I'm right.

I'm going to prove it. That's how we do it. Even though we are imperfect, we are cherished. The believers are cherished. Unbelievers are loved. God so loved the world. He gave us only begotten.

So not for the elected ones, for all of them. Whether they come and get it or not is another story. Luke 23, 43, Jesus said to him, Assuredly I say to you today you will be with me in paradise. In spite of your shortcoming, in spite of that long period of your life, the longer period of your life that you messed up, you still get to heaven because you accepted what I said about me.

You did not call me a liar, God says. So while God loves the people in the world, only those who receive him are awarded this phrase, this title, this word, Beloved. God loves, but this love is elevated and it is reserved for the beloved. So Peter starts verse 1, verse 1 now, 2 Peter chapter 3, Beloved, I now write to you this second epistle in both of which I stir up your pure minds by way of reminder. So we hear the love of God coming through this apostle as he's dealing with an unpleasant issue. Like Jude, you know, they would rather have given character studies.

You know, remember this, you know, Ezra, how he did this, how he loved the Lord, he was a man of the world. That's a character study, but he's got to deal with what Satan is doing. And that's not always pleasant. Do you think a pastor that preaches on these things just skips on home like it's no big deal? The foolish to find love by whether or not they can get whatever they want from the one who says they love him.

This is what a spoiled brat does, it's the behavior of a brat. We don't want to be that way with God. The righteous to find love by what God says about who he is, about what he is doing, true love. Love is to be our motive if we sincerely love Jesus, we will love. Verse 1 and 2 of this third chapter, because five times in this chapter he uses that phrase, Beloved, toward the righteous.

He never uses it towards the apostates, neither does anybody else. In verses 1 and 2 he says, Beloved, and then he goes on in verse 2 to say, Be mindful. In verse 8 he says, Beloved, do not forget. In verse 14 he says, Beloved, be diligent. In verse 15 he says, Beloved brother Paul, our beloved brother Paul. And then in verse 17 he says, Beloved, beware. You see, again, he's preaching these hard things and he slows up a little bit because he gets the Spirit says, You know, Peter, there are going to be those who don't like what you preach.

They love me, they want me, but they're just not there. And when Peter flashes across his mind the way I see it, he softens up for the righteous and he puts these things down on parchment. And we look at this and we say, Yeah, man, that's it.

Love. He says this is his second epistle, his second letter. I want you to translate this and call it a letter. I mean, we don't say, go to the post office and say, Is there an epistle here for me? Are you handling epistles today?

Don't throw the epistles, they're like missiles. Okay. No more humor. That's it.

Or tempts that. This is the second letter, the first one we just covered. We know it is First Peter.

It is to the same people. Of course, he dealt with those Christians that were being persecuted in First Peter. Now he's from outside the church.

Now he's dealing with the persecution from within, false teachers. He says, In both of which I stir up your pure minds by way of reminder. I should also say, I don't know how far we're going to get this morning. I plan to get to verse 8. But I thought I was going to breeze through this until we got to long suffering and spend my time there.

But opening it up, I said, But this is too good to just bypass with a good conscience. But anyway, he says, In both of which I stir up your pure minds by way of reminder. Peter wanted results. That's why I'm stirring you up for a reason. I'm telling you these things for a reason. I'm making my points. I'm emphasizing my points for a reason.

I want results. I want you to be armed and ready. And not one of those, you know, starry-eyed believers that thinks everything is okay. Because everything is not okay, and the cross of Christ demands that believers not lose sight of that. If everything were okay, I would not have been treated this way, Christ says.

Get a little fired up here. A stirred mind leads to a still heart. That's what the Bible teaches us.

Isaiah 26, verse 3, the prophet says towards God, You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts you. Now, I know we face things in life where you have a hard time finding that trust zone. Especially you with teens or had teens. Not all of them. Some of them breeze right through. But they can present challenges that are unique to a parent that has not yet had teens before. You thought that cute little one was going to continue to be that cute little one. And you were surprised, shocked, disappointed, and put on full alert when you discovered that they have a flesh and carnal nature just like you.

They got it from your spouse, of course. So he stirs them up. The only other place, this Greek word for pure, when he says pure minds, the only other place that shows up in the Greek is in Philippians 1-10. There Paul writes that you may approve the things that are excellent. How many of you approve things that are less than excellent when it comes to the scripture, to Christian behavior, you see junk out there and you dismiss it because you want everybody to hold hands and sing Kumbaya or whatever it is.

It's not reality. And you should be encouraged by that, not insulted. That you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere. That is the same Greek word. Here it's translated pure by the translators in the New King James in Philippians it's translated sincere.

I'm going to open that up in a minute. He says, without offense till the day of Christ. The excellent things without offense.

Let's not be abrasive Christians, unnecessarily brutal on those who don't agree with us. So the Greek meaning for this word translated pure here, sincere in Philippians, means judged by the heat. The sunlight has that in mind, the heat of the sun. That's what that Greek word means. It's a very rich language.

It speaks in a lot of word pictures. So what does it mean to be judged by the sun, S-U-N, the solar, that star in our solar system? Well, sincere in our English language comes from the Latin. And there it means without wax.

But there's a connection. There's a correlation between this Greek word for tested by the heat of the sun and this Latin word meaning without wax. So if you were a dealer in pottery or statues and someone came into your shop and wanted to purchase a statue but you knew there was a crack in that statue and so you plugged the crack with wax and did a pretty good job so that someone could come into your shop and they could look at this vase or this statue that had maybe a nose chipped off and you put it back on with this wax to hold it and they can't even tell. They take it home, if you were a dishonest dealer of course, and you put it in the garden of your villa and out in the sun it sits and that sun begins to beat on that vase or that statue and that wax melts and then you realize you've been had, you've been took. And so that became part of the language so that when the honest dealers would sell a statue they would say, it's without wax, it's sincere, it's pure, there's nothing corrupted here.

So the Greek and the Latin come together because those thoughts are what influence the language of the ancients when they put their language into action. And so the correlation is this when Peter says, in both of which I stir up your genuine mind, your pure thoughts, that side of you that is influenced by God and not by self or the world or Satan. God wants his people to have honest minds, not self-deceptive minds attempting to hide sin or be more merciful than God and that's not uncommon with people. That Old Testament stuff about thou shalt not lie and all, that's too hard.

I'm going to soften it some. I got to speak a little while ago to some first graders outside the church and I started off by saying the apostle Paul suffered for the gospel. One of the little girls who incidentally must have had a boot on one of her legs, must have had some injury of course, she says, what does suffer mean? Now you know when you deal with kids like that in a group you never know what's coming and I was ready for not knowing what was coming so I was ready to run out the room at any moment.

I don't know the answer by. So how do I answer the little girl without terrorizing all of them? Suffering my dear, you're going to find out because for the rest of your life you're going to feel pain.

When you don't see it coming it's going to be physical, emotional. What do you say to them? You can't corrupt their innocent minds and you let somebody else do it. But you still have to answer without lying, without taking them in the wrong direction. They've got to get a dose of the truth. So I told them, go ask your mother when you get home. I gave a short quick answer but I was saying to myself I got a lot more to say about this little girl.

Stick around, when I'm in my 90s come see me, you and I can swap notes. Well verse 2 we go on. He says that you may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets and of the commandment of us, the apostles of the Lord and Savior. He says here that you may be mindful of the words which were spoken by the holy prophets. That's Old Testament scripture.

That's the messianic prophecies. The prophets didn't see the church. God didn't need to show them that so he didn't show it to them. But he did show them the Christ who bought the church with his blood. He showed them the Jesus whom we love.

And Peter points this out here. He gives the writings of the apostles equal ground with the writings of the prophets. In other words he says that what we write to you is scripture. It is the word of God. It is every bit equal to what Isaiah wrote and Jeremiah wrote and all the rest of them.

And that we better not lose sight of. Peter will get this again in verse 16. There he will say Paul's writings is equal with the prophets. It is scripture.

There's no way around that. Honestly. In verse 3 he says knowing this verse, the scoffers will come in the last days walking according to their own lusts. And it's okay to beat them up.

No. We laugh at that but you know the false church has done just that. In Christ's name they have committed so much debauchery. Well this knowing this verse that scoffers will come.

He's saying Peter's saying come on grow up guys in case you're not there. You're going to incur these things. Those of you that have doctrinal differences grow up. As long as they're not essential points. The deity of Christ for instance. You don't have to agree with every single thing. I used to believe when I first became a Christian I believed everything I was told by people that I trusted. And then in time I began to say question some of those things and I don't agree with that. But I didn't stop loving the others.

They weren't heretics or anything like that. We just differed on application sometimes, interpretation. But we were always together on the essentials. That's all we have time for on today's edition of Cross Reference Radio. You've been listening to Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia as he teaches through the book of 2 Peter. If you'd like to listen to more messages from this series or if you'd like more information about this program please visit our website crossreferenceradio.com We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never have to miss a program. Just search for Cross Reference Radio in iTunes, Google Play Music or your favorite podcast app. What a great way to keep God's Word with you wherever you go. We hope you'll tune in again next time as Pastor Rick continues studying through the scriptures right here on Cross Reference Radio.