1. The way you teach people to recognize a counterfeit bill is to train them in the characteristics of real currency – not to show them counterfeits. There are too many different ways to make counterfeits. In the same way this morning, I would rather focus on what is true instead of what is false for a couple of reasons. First, what is false is constantly changing. Granted, there are some consistent characteristics but there is so much variety of false teaching as we discovered when we looked at the various religions several months ago. Second, concentrating on false teachings and false teachers has a tendency to make us see…

2 Peter 1:5-21 September 5, 2016 1. The tension between participating in the divine nature and living in the corruption caused by evil desires. Desire is a never ending battle, isn’t it? There will never be an Armistice Day or Veteran’s Day in our struggle with desire. The war will never be over. We will win some battles but the war will last our whole life. We are all veterans of the war struggling with sin. We live in a constant tension between the new life that is growing and the old life that hangs on and never quite lets go. And desire is such a graphic word in Scripture.…

1. There is some literature we assign to younger people that is good for them to read but impossible for them to understand. I think many of Shakespeare’s plays fit this category as well as the book of Ecclesiastes. I might even put Peter’s letters in that category. His letters to the young church are written from the perspective of an older and wiser man who has experienced a great deal of suffering before he wrote. Peter could not have written these letters as a young man. 2. There are times I struggle with why people who are so obviously crooked or corrupt seem to get through life so easily.…

After a few weeks in the book of 1 Peter we should have noticed that those to whom this letter was written were in far different circumstances than we are this morning. There are several ways we can read these passages about suffering, persecution and the end of the world. We can read this as history that describes a particular time and place that was real but is no longer the case. It’s a picture of the pioneer days of the faith. These are our roots and our ancestors. We can read it as we would a memorial to our founders and as a tribute to them as we might…

1. The early Christians saw themselves as living in the days of Noah. The culture was coarse, corrupt and full of violence. “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain…The earth was corrupt and full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.” The same could be said about our culture. We live in a coarse and corrosive culture…

1. In the final chapter of John, Jesus tells Peter how he is to die – upside down. In a sense he also lived upside down from what he had been as a young man. The Apostle writing these letters is not the impulsive and proud person we meet in the Gospels. Instead, we see a man seasoned by age, circumstances and the Holy Spirit. Time and again, including the passage this morning, he talks about the virtue of submission and the power of endurance in the face of persecution. 2. My mental picture of Peter giving advice to women about beauty just confirms his living upside down. This is…

This morning we are going to look at the passage from the perspective of Paul in Romans 13 as well as Peter. It’s important to realize that the earliest Church fathers were in agreement about the relationship between the church and the government. The early church was not a revolutionary movement. It was not a conservative movement. It was a fellowship of foreigners and exiles living temporarily in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. If you look at the several passages in 1 Timothy, 1 Peter and Titus there is a consistent theme. “Pray and be grateful for those in authority that we may live peaceful and quiet…

In 2 Chronicles we read the stories of two kings: Josiah and Jehoiakim. They are father and son but they could not be more different in every way. Josiah became king at eight years old. When he was sixteen he “began to seek the God of his father David” and at twenty he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of high places, carved idols and cast images. When he was twenty-six he began to repair the Temple and it was in that process that a great discovery was made: the Book of the Law that the Lord had given to Moses. At the news, Josiah tore his robes and said,…

This morning we are looking at the second half of the first chapter and I want to mention five or six things here. First, Peter is encouraging the early and scattered church to prepare their minds for action. Literally, he is saying stand “on the balls of your feet” and be ready to move. Don’t be flat-footed in the faith. It’s not enough to know more if we have lost the ability to do something with what we know. It’s not enough to be reflective if we have become exclusively reflective and thoughtful and full of interesting questions that we have lost the desire to accomplish something. We need prepared…

You may be old enough to remember the song “We May Never Pass This Way Again” by Seals and Crofts. While it was not about Sunday School or the Bible it’s an accurate description of what I am thinking as I teach this passage. The last time I taught Micah was 22 years ago – so do the math. While some of the fundamental values of the Christian life are in this text we rarely get around to looking at them. Our focus is on other things – good things – but I’ve always thought this is a place I should have visited more than I have. Like James 1:27…