Growing in Christ Part 6

First we were given all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, then the selfsame One who called us went on to give us exceedingly great and precious promises.

God is not stingy when it comes to what He gives His children, and when we realize the utter uselessness of material things when compared with the eternal things He has promised us, we come close to understanding just how charitable and giving God is.

It is because men who ought never to have been allowed behind a pulpit kept insisting that the way to gauge God’s blessing upon your life is to see how much money you had in your bank account that so many believers began feeling underwhelmed by all of God’s exceedingly great and precious promises.

‘Well, yeah, I feel the presence of God in my life, and I know what it is to know Jesus in the fullness of all that He is, but the guy on television says I need a yacht and a private jet in order to know the full measure of God’s blessing.’

Once again it comes down to whom we are going to believe, and seeing what we see either through eyes of flesh, or the eyes of the Spirit.

When we perceive the promises of God through the eyes of the Spirit we acknowledge offhand that these promises have nothing to do with the material.

Why would God make exceedingly great and precious promises for the material toward us, when the selfsame God said that the earth and everything in it would pass away?

Would God not rather promise something of the eternal variety? Would God not rather make exceedingly great and precious promises for those things that human ingenuity, human drive, or human intellect could never attain but could only be attained by being numbered among His children?

When we lower God to our level, when we demand He think the way we think and act the way we act, we are demeaning the eternal God of all creation, the One who spoke the universe into being, and the One who already forewarned us that His ways are not as our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts.

“that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”

It is here, in the tail end of verse four that we are told why we were given all things that pertain to life and godliness, as well as why exceedingly great and precious promises were given us. It was so through these things we might be partakers of the divine nature.

All of God’s exceedingly great and precious promises are encapsulated and likewise fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. Absent Christ, we could never have been partakers of the divine nature, absent Christ we would never have been reconciled unto the Father, and Peter knew this better than most men.

There is another truth the end of this verse reveals to us, and that is one cannot be a partaker of the divine nature, all the while practicing the corruption that is in the world through lust.

It is an either or proposition with God. Either we become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world, or we remain mired in the corruption that is in the world, never fully experiencing what it is to be a partaker of the divine nature.

Any man who tells you that it is possible to do both simultaneously, to be a partaker of the divine nature and still be shackled by the corruption of the world is lying to your face for no other reason than the money you will gladly be willing to part with because your conscience was soothed and appeased.

It is only when we have become partakers of the divine nature that we have been set free, and are become free indeed. Anything before that is just an illusion of freedom, something perhaps akin to the real thing but not the real thing itself.

Only Christ can set us free, only Christ can take off the shackles that bind us and bring us to that place wherein we have truly escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

Some may be reading this wondering what lust has to do with the corruption that is in the world, and the answer to that question is everything.

Although in our modern age we equate lust with a sexual desire of some sort, lust is defined as a craving, a longing, or a desire. One can lust after power, one can lust after prestige, one can lust after possessions, because what we desire, long for and crave is what we pursue.

Lust fuels men’s drive to sink deeper into the corruption that is in the world, thinking that by doing so they will achieve their heart’s desire, realizing belatedly that what they wanted wasn’t really what they wanted all along.

In their lust for the things of the world, in their desire and craving for something they do not possess, men neglect those things they do possess and often take for granted, and end up sacrificing them on the altar of the selfsame lust that is consuming them.

This is why so many marriages fail, this is why so many children refuse to speak to their parents, this is why so many people are downright miserable and the hopelessness they are feeling is etched upon their brow. Because they did not escape the corruption that is in the world through lust, and it consumed them.

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.