You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. — 2 Peter 3:17

The depth/level of our conviction that Christ will return is inextricably and proportionately linked to the Spirit’s work of conforming our character and conduct to Christ's Kingdom ethic.

Nick Parsons helped us dive into 2 Peter 3:8-10 and reminds us that followers of Jesus are to (eagerly) wait for Jesus’s return. We should do so with obedience, humility, faith, and wisdom.

There will always be scoffers/mockers of God’s kingdom. Because of this, Peter implores us to heed the moral requirements of the gospel, or what Paul in Galatians calls the ‘Law of Christ.’

For this last week exploring False Teachers in 2 Peter 2, Mike Wilcox joined us to look at False Teachers’ Claims and how we go about discerning them in community.

We pushed deeper into Peter’s excursus on false teachers in 2 Peter 2:10b-17. We switched things up a bit this week and did a combo sermon with a follow-up Q&A. Give it a listen.

Peter enters into a harder topic for us. But understanding and refuting false teachers is as equally important in our modern context as it was in the 1st Century.

As Spurgeon aptly observed, “the most important daily habit we can possess is to remind ourselves of the Gospel.” And this is the work of the trustworthy and Spirit-inspired Word of God.

Because of our new birth and the precious promises and the divine power offered us in Christ we cannot sit back and rest content with ‘faith.’ Our discipleship takes work.

Many of our struggles lie not in a lack of doctrine but in a failure to believe the essence of the gospel that beckons us to replace inferior joys in inferior objects with superior joys in God himself.

To call Christ Lord and proclaim God to be King is to be humbled under God’s mighty display of eternal power rather than to cower before the pale might of any earthly ruler.

If we are going to get safely through the ‘fiery ordeal’ (cf. 1 Peter 4:12-19), we need to have gospel-centered elders who lead like Jesus and gospel-centered church members who submit to them.

Joy, even while in the throes of persecution, is a foretaste of the ecstasy that will accompany Christ’s return… Those who share in Christ’s sufferings will also share in his glorification (see 2 Tim 2:12).

“Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.”

Though 1 Peter 3:18-22 is radically complicated, it grounds our willingness to suffer unjustly for the sake of Jesus in the fact of Jesus’s willingness to suffer unjustly in order to bring us to God.

When we remember the Story of God and our place in it, 1 Peter 3:13-17 teaches us that we should fearlessly keep doing good, not be afraid, and honor Christ in everything we do. 

This Sunday looked a bit different as we took a pause and slowed down to engage in both an ancient and Biblical practice of reading the Scriptures aloud

Ultimately, Peter’s call [especially] for wives and husbands to behave like Jesus — even when life is supremely unfair — is something that every Christian should be able to identify with

1 Peter 2:18-25 is a tough text for a myriad of reasons. Chief of them, however, is that it seems to teach us that as Christians, suffering is not only inevitable, it seems to be necessary.

1 Peter 2:18-25 is a tough text for a myriad of reasons. Chief of them, however, is that it seems to teach us that as Christians, suffering is not only inevitable, it seems to be necessary.

We submit to authority to serve as a witness to the very reality of our new birth and status as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and as God’s special possession.

The church exists to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to the world’s own manner and which contradicts it in a way that is full of promise.

When we embrace who God is, what he has done, and who we are, we can truly live into our identity as his people who have received his mercy.

Once we have tasted the goodness of Christ and his gospel we can boldly and confidently work alongside Jesus as ‘royal priests.’

Once we have tasted the goodness of Christ and his gospel, we will long for more, and is this longing that fuels our continued growth.

Because we have been born again by the imperishable seed of our Heavenly Father, our character and our love increasingly reflects his.

Christians live in the [right] fear of God because he is our Heavenly Father who is altogether holy and just and is the one who judges fully and impartially.

We focused on the idea that our new status as God’s children (identity) both exhorts and empowers us to be holy like our Father in Heaven is holy (activity)

Grace is [the characteristic of God's work] that enables God to confront human indifference and rebellion with an inexhaustible capacity to forgive and to bless.

God’s chosen people will be alienated from the priorities and values of the culture around them. Though this will inevitably result in suffering, that suffering produces joy.