Bryan Craddock - Power to Overcome

At 29,029 feet above sea level, the summit of Mount Everest sitting on the border between China and Nepal is the highest point on earth. To date less than 3,000 people are known to have reached that summit. Those who attempt the climb face several barriers. The air is so thin at that altitude that most people have to carry oxygen tanks. The weather is icy with extremely low wind chill. Most climbers sustain some degree of frostbite. Even if you were willing to face those obstacles, there is the barrier of time. Several weeks are required to adjust to the altitude. Then there is the cost. Aside from paying for transportation, supplies, and guides, each climber also has to obtain a permit from the government of Nepal that costs around $25,000. Finally, there is a psychological barrier. Two-hundred ten people have died trying to make the climb.

Most of us wouldn’t dream of climbing a mountain, much less Mount Everest. Nevertheless, we face challenges in our own lives that seem just as intimidating as trying to reach the summit of Everest. I am thinking of challenges like resisting lust, escaping from guilt over your past, controlling your anger, granting forgiveness to those who have harmed you, handling conflict, working through grief, battling depression, and putting aside fear and worry. These are lofty mountains to climb. They can be so intimidating that we don’t even dream of overcoming them. We just learn to live in their shadow. God doesn’t want us to live that way.

Over the course of the summer we will explore what the Bible has to say about overcoming each of those challenges. But as we begin this series today, we need to understand one fundamental reality. God can give you the power to overcome.

One of the passages that communicates this truth is 2 Peter 1:2-4. There Peter says, “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.”

There are three truths from this passage that I would like for us to think about this morning- a truth about life, a truth about knowledge, and a truth about grace. Together these truths serve as a foundation for building a godly life.

ABOUT LIFE

Peter speaks of “everything pertaining to life and godliness.” So what does that include? Everything. Really? Honestly, I think we struggle (and maybe even resist?) the idea that everything pertaining to life and godliness has simply been granted to us. That would mean that I don’t have any excuse.

Whether or not we consciously look for an excuse, we live in a world that tries to minimize God’s role in life. One of the ways this happens is through breaking life down into separate compartments.

We approach life like an assembly line. In an assembly line, one person sprays paints. One person puts on tires. One person tightens lug nuts. Everybody specializes in one tiny piece.

The same thing happens in life. Your dietician tells you how to eat. Your cardiologist deals with your heart. Your neurologist deals with your nerves and back pain. Your psychiatrist deals with the balance of chemicals in your brain. Your psychologist deals with your anxiety. And what about God, what compartment does He fit into? He fits into an hour or two on Sunday.

What about Satan? Do you have any place in your understanding of life for Satan? The book of Job tells us that after Satan had orchestrated the death of Job’s children and the theft or destruction of all his property, Satan smote Job’s entire body with painful boils. If Job were alive today, we would tell him to get a referral to a good dermatologist.

When we face some challenge or difficulty in life, we start trying to determine which box the problem fits into, which specialist I should see. Has it ever occurred to you that life doesn’t divide up into nice neat segments each treatable by a different specialist?

Instead, life is more like a bowl of soup. It’s all one. There are lots of different ingredients, but they all blend together and flavor each other. In life, your physical health, and your emotional state, and your relationship with God are all wound together. When something happens in one area it affects all the others.

Let me give you an example. Most of you probably remember that a year and a half ago I fractured one of my vertebrae while sledding with my kids. I was dealing with a straightforward physical problem with a simple solution—to wear a brace and try to stay off my feet until I healed.

Now I’m sure that a lot of people prayed for my physical healing (and I appreciate that). But I wonder how many people thought beyond the physical? I needed a lot more than physical healing in those days. I had to deal with the emotional toll of being restricted to bed rest. I had to deal with my own impatience and frustration that sometimes boiled over in angry words toward my family. I could say more, but my point is that the physical healing was the easy part. I needed more prayer for the spiritual battle than the physical healing. Isn’t that the case when you deal with some physical problem?

“Everything pertaining to life and godliness” really does encompass everything because everything is spiritual. Now I’m not saying that you should avoid doctors and different specialists. That’s not my point. My point is that we need to recognize that Jesus Christ relates to everything in your life. Don’t shut Him out.

When we find ourselves disobeying some area of biblical teaching we can’t just excuse it because of a physical or emotional problem. There may be physical and emotional factors that make it extremely difficult to obey God. But that doesn’t negate the spiritual issue.

When I acted sinfully during the process of recovering from my back injury, I don’t think God simply excused it because I was coping with pain. Even though the physical problem was healed, the sin problem didn’t disappear. It was still there. It always was. The physical issue just highlighted it.

So when you think of life, don’t think of it as separate compartments. Remember that all of life is spiritual – your health, your work, your entertainment, everything. And God has provided everything you need in order to go through all of life in a godly way.

That leads us to the second truth we need to understand from 2 Peter 1:2-4…

ABOUT KNOWLEDGE

Peter mentions knowledge twice here, once in verse 2 and again in verse 3. The Greek word for knowledge is gnosis. The word from which we get English words like agnostic – not knowing.

Early on in the history of the church, a form of false teaching came along that we call Gnosticism which was very mystical and secretive. The basic idea behind Gnosticism is that to grow spiritually you must be enlightened with new special knowledge. Many Bible scholars believe that this basic mindset was already seeping into churches when Peter wrote this letter.

In these verses we’re considering, Peter adds a prefix onto the word for knowledge that in some way intensifies it. That’s why the NASB says “true knowledge” in verse 3. So when Peter says in verses 2 and 3, “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence,” he seems to be making the point that you don’t have to find any other hidden or secret knowledge. You have everything you need in the person of Jesus Christ. Peter was correcting a false way of thinking about knowledge—a way of thinking that’s still around today.

Think about it. A lot of us go through life looking for some secret knowledge-a golden key. If you just attend the right seminar, it will unlock the career you’ve always dreamed of. If you just find the right diet plan, then you’ll finally lose weight. If you just find the right counselor, then your marriage will finally be fixed. If you just find the right parenting strategy, then your kids will turn out perfect. If you just find the right investor, then you’ll make millions. We’re always looking for some golden key that doesn’t exist.

We even carry that thinking into our spiritual lives. We look for the right Bible study or pastor or church that will really take us deeper. I think part of our problem is that we think of knowledge as a collection of facts, like an encyclopedia. We keep looking for some fact that we don’t know yet. Some of us evaluate sermons by whether or not the pastor managed to say something that we haven’t heard before. Do you ever do that? I catch myself doing it.

There’s a different between knowing facts and knowing a person. In some parts of the world, marriages are arranged by parents. My wife had an Indian friend in high school whose parents had arranged for her to marry a man from India. She had never personally met the man. She knew a lot of facts about him. She even had a picture of him. But she had never met him. She had no relationship with the man.

When Peter speaks here of knowing Jesus Christ, He’s not talking about knowing facts about Jesus. There are certainly facts that we need to know. We need to know that Jesus is God the Son. We need to know that He became a man so that he could live a perfect life and pay the price for our sins. We need to know that He is the promised Messiah who will return one day to rule the earth. But reciting those statements is not necessarily the same as having a relationship with Him.

You do not begin a relationship with Jesus Christ until you come to the point that you choose to personally rely upon Him to be your strength now and your hope for eternity.

From the first moment we place our faith in Him, we have full and complete access to Him. We keep looking for these golden keys to unlock life, and all the while Jesus is watching and waiting for us to wake up and realize that He is all that we need.

But what does knowing Jesus have to do with actually overcoming life’s challenges? That brings us to the third truth we need to understand…

ABOUT GRACE

Peter began this passage by saying “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.” In one sense, this is just a greeting. The word “grace” was used as a greeting in Greek. The word “peace” was used as a greeting in Hebrew. But Peter was expressing more than just a greeting. Throughout this passage we see how grace is multiplied to us through having a relationship with Jesus Christ.

First, we find grace in God’s power. Peter says in verse 3, “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness.” That power that we need to overcome is given to us as a gift. We don’t have to discover some special hidden knowledge. We don’t have to work up level by level to attain everything pertaining to life and godliness. God simply grants it to us through our relationship with Jesus Christ.

Next, grace is multiplied to us through God’s calling. At the end of verse 3 Peter says that God, “called us by His own glory and excellence.” Have you ever tried talking to someone and it’s like your words don’t seem to penetrate? Ladies, maybe you’ve had that experience when your husband is watching sports. They hear, but it just doesn’t penetrate. Before our salvation, we are that way spiritually. But when God chooses to move in your heart—when He calls, it penetrates. He is the glorious creator God who made all things. His call awakens us from spiritual death just like the time when Jesus called Lazarus forth from physical death. That powerful call of God is an expression of His grace. He intervenes even though we ignore Him. Apart from that call, we wouldn’t know Christ and wouldn’t have God’s power.

Grace is also multiplied to us through God’s promises. In verse 4 Peter says, “For by these (I think he means by God’s glory and excellence) He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises.” Some people try to turn God’s promises into something magical. They say that if you just find the right promise in the Bible and claim it in the right way, then you’ll receive it. People who speak this way tend to take specific promises made to specific people in the Scripture and try to claim it for themselves ignoring the context of the statement. I don’t think God ever intended for us to handle the Scripture this way. In fact, that way of thinking runs counter to the idea of grace.

Peter is speaking here of the promises of salvation that we find in the gospel. The point that he is making is that our salvation is not based upon our goodness or our behavior, but upon the glorious, excellent character of God. His promise to save whoever believes is an expression of His grace.

The next way grace is multiplied to us is through God’s nature. In verse 4 Peter says, “By them (God’s promises) you may become partakers of the divine nature.” What an incredible thought! When we begin to trust in Jesus Christ and His gospel promises, we become linked to God. His Holy Spirit begins to dwell in us and transform us. Partaking of the divine nature is another way of talking about receiving power to overcome. But again, it’s something we don’t deserve. It is a gift of God’s grace.

Finally, we see the result of this multiplication of grace: our escape. In verse 4 Peter says that we have, “… escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.” All of the challenges that we’ve talked about relate back to our lust. Lust is that powerful, sinful desire that flows from within our hearts, controlling our lives and corrupting our world. If we want to overcome the challenges in our lives, we must escape from lust and its corruption.

We tend to associate grace with our initial conversion, but I think we forget about grace when we think of our spiritual growth. We see our Christian life as a series of works that we have to do. We approach it in our own strength, and that makes it so overwhelming that we want to give up. But we have to see that through the multiplication of God’s grace in our lives we can overcome.

CONCLUSION

I don’t know what challenges and temptations overshadow your life today. Next week I am going to talk specifically about overcoming lust. Whatever your challenges are, I do know this. You cannot scale those mountains in your own strength. You need Jesus Christ.

Do you have a relationship with Him? Do you walk through life with Him—following His Word, relying upon Him?

Peter ended his letter by saying, “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Today, I am calling you to do just that. If you don’t know Christ, receive Him as your Lord and Savior. Begin the relationship. If you do know Christ, then recommit yourself to walk closely with Him.