Are we really saved?
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2010 · 19 September 2010
“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have obtained a faith as precious as ours: 2 Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.”
You know, any good teacher knows one thing about his pupils. They forget what you teach them. You know why a teacher knows that? Because he himself forgets things. Once in a while I have to look at old sermons to see the interpretation on a certain passage. And so any teacher knows that you have to teach by repetition.
But a teacher also knows not only do his pupils forget, but he knows that they can become so familiar with spiritual things that their hearts don't hear them. And the things that you hear don’t sink in and don’t cause you to change.
In other words, if we teach the same truth in the same words, they think they know it and they don't really hear it. So we have to teach the same truth in other terms. And that's the way the reminders come. So, we have to keep saying to you the things that are in the Word of God in a fresh and exciting and vital way.
Now, as we examine this first chapter of 2 Peter, I want you to get the focus, because you need to remember. Now let me expand that for a minute just in concept. We function on the basis of our brains. God has given us a body and we function based on that.
In some of us our brain is less amazing than in others, but nonetheless, all of us possess it. The brain is a gift from God. It grants to us a very important spiritual capacity. Everything you hear, see, or experience in your lifetime is stored in the cells of your brain.
Now God therefore has given you the capacity to live out spiritual truth because you can't say, "Hey, I tried to learn that stuff, but all my brain cells are filled up...I don't have any empty cells left." You have the capacity to receive it all and it is all stored there.
I learned that though everything in the brain is stored, when you recall it and when you relearn it and when you apply it, you expand that information storage capacity. And so the more you use something and the more you hear it and the more you apply it, the greater part of your thinking process it occupies.
And so as you hear and you respond to the Word of God, it begins to take over a larger and larger portion of your brain and of your thinking process. And all of us have that capacity. In fact, some say that we only use one tenth of one percent of our brain.
I've often pray to the Lord, "Lord, please teach to help me use more of my brain." Because sometimes I feel that I have used up all that there is. But I know that there's a sense in which we don't even use all that God has given us up there.
And so, God has designed our physical capacity to accommodate the spiritual need. We must be told to remember and God has given us the capacity to deal with that. We all have a marvelous memory capacity. However, over and over in the Scriptures God's prophets were called to teach His people to remember.
We as people need to be prodded, to sort of jog you, to make you remember. And if I can serve no other purpose than to make you remember, I feel I’m serving the highest purpose that God has intended for me.
First, God wants me to confirm the present truth, and to let you know these things and then to constantly jog your memory so that you never forget them. And the more you do that, the more they come to the front of your mind and you find as you grow toward spiritual maturity that the right spiritual responses are almost involuntary.
What are we to remember, Peter? First of all, let's just look at number one, the reality of our salvation, which we find in verses 1 and 2. "Simon Peter a servant and an Apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness in God and our Savior Jesus Christ, grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord."
Now those two verses teach us regarding our salvation. You notice terms like "faith, righteousness, Savior, grace, peace, knowledge of God," all of those are salvation terms. Peter is referring to our redemption. And he calls upon us, among other things, to remember the reality of our salvation.
It's so easy to forget that when we are preoccupied with daily stuff. You say, "Oh, I'd never forget that I was saved." Well, I'm not talking about the technical idea of remembering you're saved, I'm talking about remembering all that such a salvation should mean to you.
Christians can become so picky, so minuscule, so critical sometimes so they can just find all the little things they don't like about other people that they forget the greatness of their redemption and they get all bent out of shape on little things.
And thinking about our little church, I couldn't really see the problems...the little things, the picky things, the disagreements, or whatever. I mean, I didn't want to even see those or think of those.
I could only sense the glory and the joy of the fullness of the fellowship here. I think sometimes we lose our perspective in salvation. I think sometimes we lose sight of the forest and just the tree. And so Peter says I want to remind you that you have obtained a precious faith.
Now what does he mean by that? Let's take a look at the terms. The word "obtain," really the concept of that verb is to receive by allotment. It's not so much that you took it as that it was given to you. He says I'm writing to you who have obtained faith as a divine gift. Now that's a tremendous concept.
You know, you have a basic human faith. I mean, you have the faith it takes to turn your ignition on and know that in your car runs but it is not going to blow you up. You have the faith to eat in a restaurant while you do not know the cook and you've never been in the kitchen. You have the faith to do a lot of things in life. You have faith to put your money in a bank. And all this is human natural faith.
But that kind of faith isn't going to redeem anybody. The faith that saves is a gift from God by divine allotment. The faith of which he speaks in verse 1 is redeeming faith, saving faith. And we have received that kind of saving faith from God.
I hope you haven't forgotten that God didn't have to give that to you but that in His marvelous mysterious sovereignty, He did it. I look here and I say, "God, how can I ever find words enough to say thank You for your gift of saving faith given to me and these people?"
You see, it says in Ephesians 2:8, "For by grace are you saved through faith but that not of yourselves." What's not of ourselves? Faith, God had to give you this saving faith and according to Romans 10:17, "Faith comes by hearing a speech about Jesus Christ." Faith is a gift of God that is given in responding to the gospel of Christ.
In Christ we all stand equal, don't we? No matter who you are, no matter how intelligent or how unintelligent, no matter how physically gifted or physically seemingly non gifted, no matter how educated or ignorant, it doesn't matter how rich or poor, all of us have received a saving faith that is equal in its value and gives us equal standing before God.
Why and how so? Remember verse 1, "Through the righteousness in God and our Savior Jesus Christ." And so much of its interpretation is dependent upon the context. Paul uses it in a more forensic way to speak of total righteousness, the nature of God. Peter uses it to speak specifically of God's fairness in justice. And that's exactly what it means here.
Remember this, the reason we've all received a faith of equal value and the reason we've all received a standing of equal honor is because we have a God who is fair and does not make distinctions. With God, says the Bible, there is no respect of persons. People say, "Well, I wish I was a Christian like the Apostle Paul." I've got news for you, you are. "Me?" That's right, we all are.
Look back at verse 1, "Those who have obtained a faith as precious as ours." Who is the "ours?" Peter and the Apostles. You are just as honored in your saving faith, just as exalted in your standing, just as much a recipient of the justice of God as an Apostle. You have a faith as precious as ours
We're all sinners any way. So God doesn't distinguish between us a whole lot. He gives us equally His mercy and His grace. Every time I see a believer moping around, "Oh, I'm just don't know if I've got the resources," I just want to remind them you've got everything the Apostle Paul had, enjoy it. You are as much value to God as anybody who ever entered His kingdom.
Then verse 2, "Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord." Now listen, salvation, this equal standing before God, given to us by divine allotment, is to multiply unto us grace upon grace and peace upon peace. But, that only happens through the knowledge of God.
In other words, if verse 1 is God's verse, verse 2 is our side. God does His part and we have to respond with our part, we have to have knowledge. We have to really know Christ. Not knowing just His name, the word knowledge here means a deep, full, rich, genuine knowledge.
You know what that does? That eliminates just superficial knowledge, doesn't it? That gets rid of the Jesus as just being a good teacher, the cheap grace, the easy believism. Do you remember last Sunday in Matthew 7:23 how many will say, "Lord, Lord," and He'll say, "Depart from Me, I never knew you."
There's a lot of superficiality. But he is saying when the deep knowledge is there, then the real faith is there. And that's just our part of it. What is the deep full rich knowledge of God? Well, verse 1 says, "Our Savior Jesus Christ," and in verse 2 it says "Jesus, our Lord."
Peter was writing to people who claimed to know Christ, claimed to have a knowledge of Christ, but were continuing in immoral behavior. And he is, in effect, probably using the word knowledge because they used it. And he is putting authentic Christian content into it and saying you better have a genuine knowledge.
So what a person believes affects the way they behave. The moral implications of error are as frightening as the error itself. Do you understand what I'm driving at? The error is one thing, but the moral implications of that error just compounds the problem. Some of the most widely heard false teachers are guilty of the most scandalous conduct...including immorality and unabashed materialism.
The Christian must realize that some of the Charismatic media preachers and teachers have an erroneous belief system that cannot restrain sin and the flesh and rather tends to feed pride, materialism and spiritual shallowness that all begins with their basic standard.
I heard a song the other night on television and the song had a lot of different lyrics but the one line that summed it up is, "When there are no answers there is Jesus." In other words, when you've gone the rational route and you can't get any rational answers, then leap into Jesus. Which is some kind of subjective mystical emotional experience.
And the people who take this subjective approach to Scripture where they interpret it on the basis of their feelings and their emotions and their self‐authenticating experiences think they're spiritual. They think they have ascended to the comprehension of the truth of God. But they are not because they do not understand the Word of God.
In place of study, careful precise interpretation of Scripture based on the historical grammatical method, they approach Scripture with an inward subjective non‐rational intuitional sort of impressionistic approach. In fact, very often they will deny any intellectual approach as being stiff and unspiritual.
Now many of these media preachers with millions of followers also skew the doctrine of salvation. For example, Kenneth Copeland writing in the Word of Truth magazine says, quote: "Every man who has been born again is an incarnation. The believer is as much an incarnation as was Jesus of Nazareth," end quote. Where in the world did that ever come from? You mean there is no difference between the incarnate God in Christ and us?
They have gotten so carried away with this mystical union that when the believer comes into union with Christ, he becomes God in their system. The Bible, however, never blurs the line between the nature of man and the nature of God. But to these teachers and their followers, the separation is abolished through mystical experience: your spirit touches God's Spirit, you get sucked into the Spirit, your spirit‐man touches His Spirit, and now you are made in His image of His Spirit body. None of this is in the Bible.
They are guilty in some cases of reducing Jesus to a born again man and elevating man to an incarnate God. Their view of sin is also metaphysical. It is dualistic. The sin belongs to the bad god, Satan. And righteousness belongs to the good god, God. And our flesh sin nature is totally ignored.
Well the sum of all of this is to let you see that there is a new wave of error and it's being pumped out in the name of Christianity. It is foreign to the Bible and it is mystical. It comes from subjective intuition and fantasy and imagination. And it touches every area of their theology.
2 Peter chapter 1 says, "Examine your own spiritual condition." Chapter 3 says, "Make sure your spiritual progress is moving in the right direction in the light of the coming of the day of the Lord."
If you understand the beginning, your salvation, and you understand the end, the coming of Christ, you can deal with what's going on now. We all need to learn more how to act according to what God want, that is forgiving and loving.
We must trust God, despite our often lackluster faithfulness, that He is moving us to the full realization of all the good that He has promised even when it seems He is taking the long way around, Amen?