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 Exceeding Great and Precious Promises

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  The Old Testament through the New Testament reveals the redemptive history God planned for mankind.  From creation to the fall, from choosing a person to bring forth a nation, through giving the law and prophets to guide a chosen people, through foretelling the coming of the Messiah, to Jesus arriving to redeem mankind; the overarching scope of God’s Word brings laser focus to the person of Jesus Christ and our relationship to him.

    

   Peter, an original disciple of the Lord, captured the essence of God’s purpose in Christ.  Peter’s pride and ego had been sifted by a trial when he denied even knowing Jesus.  Jesus restored Peter back to himself.  Peter had firsthand experience in the inner working of God in his life.  Notice what he writes in 2 Peter 1:2-4, “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, 3 as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, 4 by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”

    

   Let’s look at this phrase “by which we have been given exceeding great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature.”

    

   The large heart of God expressed through the ministry of the Holy Spirit to us takes the “exceeding great and precious promise” we need and impresses it into our hearts.  This is how God’s divine power makes its way into our character to cause us to be shaped and transformed into the image of Christ, especially when we have failed in our own strength.

    

   Our highest calling is to become like him.  A life-giving flourishing begins to flow up within us by means of these precious promises sown into our hearts.  Like a seed that breaks open a sidewalk to become a tree, so the power of these exceeding great and precious promises breakthrough the hardness of our hearts to reveal a beautiful work God purposed to reveal through us. His divine power begets his divine nature by means of his exceeding great and precious promises.

           

Flourishing, Pastor Roger