Power Revealed

2 Peter 3
 
Welcome! Today we are going to talk about all kinds of interesting things: mortality and immortality, nuclear particles and forces, the nature of time… like I said, all kinds of interesting things! To start, I would like to ask you to raise your hand if you know you are going to die. Well, this is kind of a trick question, because it tests what you really believe about the return of the Lord Jesus Christ. If your first response was to automatically raise your hand and think, "Of course I am going to die!" then this reveals that the second coming of Christ is either something you don’t truly believe or it is something you think will happen in some far away future. Well, if this describes you, I hope that today’s message from 2 Peter 3 will give you the biblical way to think about these things.

We simply don’t know when Jesus will return. It may well happen before we die, in which case we will avoid death. But there is one person who absolutely knew he would die before Jesus’ return. Do you know who this is? It is Peter! During Jesus’ meeting with Peter after the resurrection, the meeting in which Jesus restored Peter and called on him to take care of Jesus’ sheep, to feed Jesus’ lambs, Jesus told Peter this:

Power Corrupted

2 Peter 2

Welcome! Last week and the week before we looked at II Peter Chapter 1 which exhorted us to take radical steps in growing our character. Two weeks ago, we learned that God has equipped us with everything we need to live for Him, and we learned that living for Him means, in part, being like a choir-master, actively striving to assemble a choir of “heroic” goodness, knowledge applied to life, Olympic athlete-like self-control, Winston Churchill-like perseverance, godliness based on the continual worship of God, brotherly kindness based on deep caring for one another, and agape, love that delights to sacrifice self for the sake of others.

The Power of Grace

Welcome! Today we will have a shorter message followed by a time of remembering the Lord with the bread and cup, and then a sharing time. Last week we began to explore the book of II Peter and went in detail into Chapter 1. The chapter exhorts us to take radical steps in growing our character. Today I want to talk about God’s grace and how grace is related to the ideas of this chapter. I will start by rereading the first part of II Peter 1 and summarizing the ideas we talked about last time.

Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours: Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness. Through these He has given us His very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. – II Peter 1:1-4

Divine Power

 2 Peter 1

Welcome! I encourage you to continue praying the secret prayer. Today we begin a journey into the book of II Peter. The message this week is entitled Divine Power. In my opinion, power is a unifying sort of theme throughout the book of II Peter, and we will touch on this as we go through the series.

This series was prayerfully planned several months ago, and it was then that I first saw this theme of power running through II Peter. As you all know, the world has been witness to a different kind of power in the last week and a half. I looked up information on the Richter scale to see just how powerful a 9 point earthquake really is, to get some kind of equivalent measure that I could compare it to. I found that a 9.0 earthquake has the energy release equivalent to 476 megatons of TNT. By comparison, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 had an energy release equivalent to about 15 kilotons of TNT. In other words, the recent earthquake in Japan had the energy release of more than 30,000 nuclear bombs of the type that destroyed Hiroshima.