Once you come to Christ, you have the seed of the divine nature. But like any seed, it will only flourish with proper care and attention. If you are a casual Christian, you will have stunted growth. This is the alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, author, speaker, and founding pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas.
Sometimes it's hard to see a little seedling in a pot and envision the full-grown tree it's intended to become. But today, we'll look at why we need to keep that target in mind as we nurture and protect the seed of faith God has planted inside us. Let's join Dr. Evans as he tells us more. God has placed us on a journey. From the moment of conversion, you began a trip, ultimately to glory, but in history it is to maturity. From being a newborn baby Christian to being an adult responsible saint. That's a journey.
A baby doesn't become an adult overnight. They're on a journey. God has every Christian on this journey to maturation, where it becomes normal for them to look at life, live life, and evaluate life from a spiritual, heavenly perspective, not an earthly, secular one. Your maturity, your growth in the faith, is to be manifested and expressed through the process of growth, through the utilization of a spiritual perspective to evaluate and live life.
Peter, in these first 11 verses, gives us guidance for this journey. Just as no mother is satisfied for her baby once born to stay a baby, God is not satisfied when Christians are born again to stay babies. He wants his babies to become adults.
He wants us to grow up to be mature Christians. But while it is guaranteed, it is not automatic. It doesn't just happen. A baby doesn't become an adult because it just happens.
A series of things takes place for maturation to occur. He says, I want grace and peace to be multiplied, not added. I want it to be multiplied. I don't just want you with an additional growth. I want you with a multiplication growth. In other words, I want this growth to speed up. I want your distance to mature.
We know people mature at different levels, but I want your maturity to be multiplied. That is your experience of God. Notice he uses the word knowledge, the knowledge of God in verse 2. In verse 3, the true knowledge.
In using this word knowledge in the Greek text, she's referring to growing in your experiential knowledge of God. You can have a still photograph, and you can say it's beautiful. You can have a motion picture. That's photographs in movement. You can have IMAX.
That's a whole different experience on the screen. Still photograph, one level. Motion picture, another level. IMAX, another level.
And don't add Dolby sound. Now you had a whole different level. He says, I want you to experience this growing level of experiencing God. And he says, to do that, to move from still photograph to motion picture to IMAX to this level of experiencing God's reality, he says that you need to understand certain things, and you need to understand that through his divine power, he has granted us everything pertaining to life and godliness, verse 3. Let me put it another way. Everything you need to become all God wants you to be, you already have.
You say it again. Everything you need to become all God wants you to be, you already have. He says he has given us everything. Everything a baby needs to become an adult, it already has. Everything a caterpillar needs to become a butterfly, it already has. In other words, it's all built in to the creation. Once you accept Jesus Christ as your personal substitute, God places in you everything you need to move from babyhood to spiritual adulthood.
It's already in there. Now what religion does is it comes along and says you got to go get it yourself. It's like telling a baby go find a foot or telling a butterfly go find a wing. That's what religion does. What religion does is it keeps adding things you must do to substitute for what God has already done. That is the word grace. Grace is all that God has done for us independent of us. Grace can't be bought, earned, worked for, or deserved.
Grace is unmerited favor. It is the goodness of God that he gives. It's like oxygen. You don't earn oxygen. It's something provided.
You utilize oxygen. So what God has done in the new birth—we'll explain this a little bit more in a moment—he has provided everything necessary for a baby Christian to become an adult Christian, and you already have it. What religion does is it comes along and it offers a substitute. Religion comes along and gives you the impression of life when there is no life. It's like looking pregnant when there is no baby. You can give the impression, but the reality of life is not being manifested. Religion is your attempt to make yourself acceptable to God.
Grace is God's provision to make you acceptable to God. When I was a boy growing up in Baltimore, we didn't have microwaves, but I don't like hard ice cream. I like my ice cream soft. So the way I would do that is I'd get the bowl of ice cream and I'd take a spoon and mash it. So I'm mashing it and mashing it and mashing it until I got my soft ice cream. And then comes microwaves. I don't have to mash no more.
Every other day, I put it in the microwave. In other words, I let the environment do the work. Before, I had to do the work to try to make it happen, but if I get it in the right environment, the right environment will make it happen for me.
I just got to make sure it's in the right environment. Grace provides the environment. A weight room is an environment for building muscles. A hospital is an environment for getting healthy. Those are environments that when taken advantage of, produce the transformation if you take advantage of the environment. Grace is an environment, is a sphere. It's a realm in which God operates with divine favor. You can't earn it, you can't buy it, you can't work for it, but you can see it developed.
And so he says, I want you to experience the life and the God-likeness that the new nature has been placed in you to express as it expands. I want that to be your portion, and it is so comprehensive it has everything you need. How many of you folks shop at Walmart?
Okay? The beauty of Walmart is that you don't have to go from store to store to store to store to store. See, before that, they came, I mean, you went to one store for hardware, one store for food, one store for clothes. Walmart says we have everything you need to go to get whatever you need. You need food? We got it here. You need clothes? We got it here. Need toys? We have it here. You need plants? Well, we have it here.
We are a one-stop shop for comprehensive provision for all you need. Before then, you ran over here for this, you ran over this, for this, ran over here for this, and that's what a lot of Christians do. They run over here for this, and they run over here for this, and they run over here for this, and they run to this conference for that, and they run to this.
They be going all over the place, and God says, I have provided everything you need to become all that I want you to be. The provision has already been made in the new nature that I have provided you. He says, but I want it to be multiplied. It's sort of like playing Scrabble. You got 26 letters. You get over a million words. You get a million words out of 26 letters without adding letters because you multiply the use of them. And when you multiply the use of them, 26 is all you need for the totality of the English alphabet.
It's how you arrange things that expands it to do more than just looking at 26 letters you thought could ever do, because all you need for the English alphabet is 26 letters, and it covers everything else that is a word or a word to be. So it is, he says, God has provided in you, me, and us, all who have come to Christ, a Walmart reality that is designed to produce spiritual adulthood, which he calls, or which the Bible calls, maturity. That is, to consistently live life from a spiritual rather than a secular perspective so that we get the true knowledge, that is, the experiential reality of God's work in and through our lives. How does he do this? He does this by making us, verse 4, partakers of the divine nature.
That's how he does it. He has given every believer a new nature, new disposition internally. According to 1 Peter chapter 1, this new disposition comes to us in seed form. Verse 23 of 1 Peter 1, For you have been born again not of seed, which is perishable, but imperishable. In other words, you get a new nature embedded inside of your soul. So 1 Thessalonians 5 23 says, You are spirit, soul, and body. We have an old nature before our conversion, a contaminated part of our being that sins.
God then places inside of you, when you come to Christ, the divine nature, the God-disposition. That God-disposition comes to you in seed form. Whoever thought a fertilized egg could produce a life that becomes an adult? Whoever thought an acorn could produce a tree that becomes an oak?
Whoever thought a watermelon seed could produce a watermelon this big? Because it's already in there. It's all there. It's just there in seed form.
But what it can be is already built in to what the seed offers. We'll continue unpacking this concept in just a moment. First though, today's message is part of a short three-part sermon series called Pressing on to Maturity. This collection is an insightful, concise look at the need for believers to keep moving forward in their spiritual growth, to actively take steps to nurture the divine seed that God has placed inside them. If you'd like to get a copy of all three messages to review on your own or to share with a friend, they're available on CD or digital download to anyone who will come alongside the alternative and make a donation. And as an added bonus, but only for the next few days, we'll include a book that goes hand-in-hand with this series called Kingdom Living the Essentials of Spiritual Growth. You'll get the book and the audio collection along with our thanks when you request them and make a donation online at tonyevans.org or let one of our resource team members help you by calling 1-800-800-3222 any time of the day or night.
That's 1-800-800-3222. Well let's return to today's message. Once you come to Christ, you have the seed of the divine nature, but like any seed, it must grow. He says, I have given you everything you need so that as it grows you become a partaker that is a beneficiary of the growth of the seed in the soil of the soul so that is manifested in the life of the person. So the manifestation, your body, comes from inside your soul because there's an expansion inside your soul of a seed that is expanding if it's properly planted and watered.
You don't put anything in the seed, you just expand it. So what God has done is He's provided the seed, once you come to Christ, in every believer that once expands, God expands inside of you and is manifested in you, to you, and through you as you partake of the divine nature. And part of that partaking of divine nature, He says in verse 4, is having escaped the corruption of the world. You see, the world system, that system headed by Satan that leaves God out, that world system wants to keep the seed from manifesting itself and growing.
It wants to give you bad weather. The world is referring to a system that doesn't want God part of your life's equation. And the moment it can be dismissed God as part of your life's equation, the seed gets stifled. And when the seed gets stifled, growth does not occur. So He says that must be overcome, that must be overridden by the expansion of the seed that's in the soil, which He calls the divine nature or the disposition. This seed that every believer has must be fed. If the seed is not fed, the seed doesn't expand, doesn't open up, and doesn't express itself. And so the victory that we want, the power that we need, is not being showing up, because the seed is not expanding.
It's lying dormant. So He says He does this by providing the divine nature. And this divine nature is comprehensive. It's designed to fully express the spiritual in the physical. So the question is, okay, I want to grow my seed. If I accept the Christ, I have the divine nature. I have the seed of God operating in my soul, but I'm not maturing, so that means the seed is not expanding. So what do I need to do to expand the seed in the soul so that the soul experiences the influence of the seed so that the life is transformed by the changed soul because of the growing seed?
Are you with me on this? So He uses a phrase here. In verse 5, He says, Now for this reason apply all diligence. He says it again in verse 10, Therefore, brethren, be all the more diligent. He uses the word diligent. Don't be casual.
Don't be passive. Prioritize the development of the seed. If you are a casual Christian, you will have stunted growth. If feeding the seed is not important and therefore you're not diligent about it, you're not focused on it, it's not a priority, then don't expect to be zapped and all of a sudden wake up a spiritual adult.
Give all diligence. 1 Peter 2 says, The desire the sincere milk of the word that you may grow. You know, infants have a way of being diligent. They're saying, If you don't feed me, you ain't sleeping.
If you don't feed me, you're not sleeping cuz I'm gonna wake up this whole house until you pay me some attention. Says, Desire the sincere milk. Don't just desire cuz see you can have a desire without doing anything with it. So you can desire to build muscles while you eat ice cream and don't go to the gym.
You can desire to lose weight while you eat pizza and sweet Georgia Brown. You can you can desire and not do anything with the desire. Okay? So he says, Desire to the point of utilizing. Okay? So if the desire doesn't produce the utilization, it's just a feeling.
It's not a function. So he says, Give all diligence. In other words, prioritize. Pay attention to.
Focus on. So that the seed has something to grab hold of. The new nature has something to grab. So that the seed of the new nature is free to expand. So the issue is not earning it.
The issue is feeding it so that it can be what it was created to be. In every believer is a new you. In every believer, anybody who's come to Christ, is a new and improved you. Now the physical only gets improved when we go to glory. But the soul gets improved now. That's why the Bible says we are being saved, because it's a journey.
It's a process, and you determine by your diligence how fast you want the process to unfold. So what he's going to do is he's going to give you and me supplements. Now most people in here take supplements. Take vitamins. You take supplements, and what a supplement does is add to something you already have in order to expand it.
A supplement is designed to give you what is lacking in order for you to manifest your health. I was talking to Dr. Kenneth Cooper of the Aerobics Center, and we were having a discussion. He's 92 years old now and still works every day, still works out, you know, every day. And we were just talking about his life. He's, you know, a very strong Christian, and talking about medicine as his ministry, not merely as his job. And we wind up talking about supplements, and he says what a lot of people don't know is that many of these problems, and he said, is tied to inflammation. He says when there is inflammation, normal processes of the body get blocked. So that's why you have to have supplements to keep your inflammation down so that some of these other things don't happen. What Peter now is offering you, supplements. He says if you take these vitamins, if you take these supplements, the new nature like Pac-Man will feed on it. And when it feeds on the supplements, then the seed expands. It doesn't just expand without something to eat.
It's all there, but like a baby, it's got to have something to eat in order to expand. So if you want to expand the divine nature that every believer has that's in the soul so that the life of Christ is being magnified and the experience of God is being demonstrated, he says here are the supplements I want you to take. And I want you to take them diligently. Don't skip.
Don't skip. Take them diligently. Give all diligence, okay?
So let's look at the supplements. First of all, he says in verse 5, applying all diligence in your faith. So the first supplement he gives us is faith. The Bible says without faith it is impossible to please God. What is faith?
Let's repeat it again. Acting like God is telling the truth. Faith is acting like God is telling the truth. What does faith do?
It does not make God do anything. Let me clarify this, because a lot of people are told, well, you don't have enough faith. Jesus said if you got faith, the grain of a mustard seed, you can move mountains, okay? What he's saying is it's not the size of your faith, it's the content of it. When you act like God is telling the truth, you're demonstrating faith even if you don't feel it, because you're walking in faith.
So he says, act like I am telling the truth, and the new nature is going to grab that. Some important guidance today for those seeking spiritual growth. Now if you'd like to hear the full-length version of today's message, it comes as a part of the Alternatives Current Teaching series, Pressing on to Maturity. As I mentioned earlier, all three messages in this collection are our gift to you when you make a contribution to help us keep this outreach going. And for a limited time, we'll also include a copy of the powerful book that goes hand in hand with today's topic.
It's called Kingdom Living, the Essentials of Spiritual Growth. Just drop by tonyevans.org, where you can get all the details and make your donation online. Again, that's tonyevans.org, or you can call our 24-hour resource center at 1-800-800-3222, and let one of our team members help with your request. Once again, that number is 1-800-800-3222. Well on Monday, we'll have more as we continue this biblical look at the journey to maturity. I hope you'll join us for that. The alternative with Dr. Tony Evans is brought to you by The Urban Alternative, and it's made possible by the generous contributions of listeners like you.
