It might be defined as the maturing of one's experience with God, which is evidenced by the manner in which one responds to trials. Growth is maturing. It is maturing in our experience with God. Growth is not merely learning theological facts or quoting Bible verses as helpful as those things might be in themselves. But real growth is maturing in our experience with God. And it's evidenced by the way that we respond to the trials of life.
Warren Wiersbe said spiritual growth is not by addition, but by nutrition. Spiritual growth is not like adding blocks to a wall. It's more like a tree. As we saw last week, there is a root to spiritual growth, and that root is genuine salvation. And we saw in verses 1 through 3 that this root of genuine salvation involves a faith which God gives to us. It involves a knowledge of God, an experiential knowledge of God. It involves a call from God, for God called us by His own glory and excellence.
And this genuine salvation, this root of growth, involves a grant, for God has granted or freely given to us everything pertaining to life and godliness. Where there is no growth over the long term, one must seriously question whether there is the root to begin with. Because Christian growth takes place. There is a root, and that root goes down and the fruit goes up.
And though there may be periods of stagnation, though growth may occur at a different pace for different people, just as plants mature at a different rate, nonetheless there will eventually, inevitably be growth where there is a root of genuine salvation. That growth is not only the expectation of God, but it is also the provision of God. Growth is not something that we have to work at in the sense that we have to create it. We certainly have to be disciplined and diligent on our part to grow.
But what I'm trying to say is that growth is not something that we create from the inside. It's God's work. God is the one who provides for us to grow. Have you ever gone out to an apple orchard this time of year when those apples are beginning to swell and hear the apple trees going grunting and groaning and trying? No, of course not, because those apples just come naturally. That's the nature of an apple tree, and so it is with the Christian life. Growth occurs.
We certainly have a responsibility, and we're going to get to that particularly next week as we think about the pattern that we're to follow. But growth is something that God has provided for. God's provision for our growth is in His promises.
Notice what it says in verse 4, for by these, His glory and excellence, He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, in order that by them you might become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust. God's provision for our growth is found in His promises. These promises are public announcements that God has made.
God has not made His promises in some little corner of the universe, so that if somehow they don't come about, not too many people are going to know, God has publicly declared His promises. They are commitments that He has made before the whole universe, in His eternal Word. These promises provide for our growth. They rest upon the trustworthiness of the One who is making them, and that is of course God.
It seems to me that these promises mentioned in verse 4 are really the heart or the core or the focus of the all things or everything back in verse 3. When it says He's granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, the everything there really focuses on, it brings its weight to bear upon the promises in verse 4. That's where it rests. I'd like for you to think with me about the character of these promises that God has given to us that we might grow.
In the first place, they are freely given to us. You'll notice that He uses the word grant again in verse 4, just as He did in verse 3. The same word. It means to be freely given as a gift. No strings attached to this. By these, He has freely given to us His promises. So God's promises are granted to us freely. They are not associated with any merit on our part, or they are not given because God is responding to something of our effort toward Him.
These promises are given to us by grace, freely, unchangeably granted that we might enjoy them. Secondly, I want you to notice that these promises He talks about rest upon the person of Jesus Christ. That person of Christ is mentioned in verse 3 where He talks about His own glory and excellence by these. The glory and the excellence of Christ He has granted to us these promises. These promises rest upon who Jesus Christ is and what He can do. They rest upon His glory.
His glory might point toward His greatness or His majesty. His glory is what He is able to do. His glory was manifested in the miracles that He did. That first miracle, what was the first miracle that Jesus performed? Does anybody remember? Changing the water to wine at the wedding feast of Canaan in Galilee. It says that by doing that miracle He began to show forth or to manifest His glory. You see, His glory is what He can do.
As Peter writes these words, he may have had in mind that event that occurred on the Mount of Transfiguration when he, along with James and John, were with Jesus and the majesty of Jesus became visibly apparent in His body. The glory that was intrinsic, the majesty that was veiled by His humanity, including His flesh, came through His skin and it was made visible for them to see. He says the promises that God has given to us rest upon what Jesus Christ is able to do, His glory.
But also, they rest upon His virtue or His excellence. That means His credibility, His trustworthiness, the high moral quality that is in Christ, unsurpassed moral quality. It refers to the fact that He will do what He says. The promises of God rest upon the person of Jesus Christ, what He is able to do, and the fact that He will do what He says He will do.
When he speaks about the excellence of Christ, remember, here is a man who walked with Christ for about three years, who saw Him in every conceivable circumstance, and who at the end of that time says regarding Him, He was a virtuous man. He was excellent. There was no flaw found in Him. Peter says, if you want to talk about the promises of God, remember that they rest upon what this one can do and the fact that He will do what He says, for He is excellent.
As we think about the character of the promises, we not only want to think about the fact that they are freely given to us by the grace of God, the fact that they rest upon the person of Christ, but thirdly, that they are without equal. Notice how He defines them. His precious and magnificent promises. Precious means that they are valuable. There is no way to calculate the worth of these promises. Peter likes this word. He speaks, for example, in 1 Peter 2, 7, of precious faith.
In fact, he says the same thing back here in verse 1 in some translations. In the NASV it says, a faith of the same kind as ours. The idea is that it is precious. It is valuable. He also speaks in 1 Peter 1, 19 of precious blood. We are redeemed not by the blood of animals, but by the precious blood of Christ. It is without price. There is no way to value something like this.
I read in the paper today that someone in Oklahoma City had come across a medallion from the 1886 Winter Carnival in St. Paul. Did you read about that? A little tiny medallion that is smaller than a dime and it is corroded so much that it is hardly visible to read. But tests have proven that it is one of the original medallions, as far as they know, one of only three that exist. And when asked what the price of it would be, they said there is no way to tell what the price would be.
There are collectors who would die for it. Well, for a little piece of metal. I suppose I am not putting collectors down. If you are a collector, I do collect things, but it is much more valuable than that. And if you want to come to my basement sometime, I will show it to you. You can go through the boxes and see it. I don't go for these little things. I got to get going here. Valuable. I will just tell you this.
When we moved, I packed up my, my wife calls it junk, but my collectibles from my past life, put it in boxes and to market, we chose the words, I think she joined me in choosing the words, we chose the words on the outside of the box, precious and historical items. Isn't that wonderful? Precious and historical items. You can come to my basement, you will see the boxes still there. Precious and historical items. They are not worth anything to anybody else. But I wouldn't trade them.
I wouldn't trade them. I did throw away my old work shoes though. The work shoes I wore on the farm in Kansas. I hadn't worn them in 20 years and the leather had become almost crusty. I did throw those away, but not the precious stuff. Precious. It's stuff you wouldn't part with. It's just invaluable to you. And what's precious to you might not be precious to somebody else. But Peter points out something here that is very precious. You can't get along without this.
You just can't make it in the world and certainly into a heavenly eternity without this. The promise of God. He says these are precious. Not only that, he says they are magnificent. The word he writes here is the word megastas. Megastas. You see mega? Mega? What it means is it's very great. These promises are very great. There's hardly any way to calculate the greatness of these promises. Right now people are waiting for an explosion of a volcano in the Philippines.
Seems to be simmering down now, but still tens of thousands of people are trying to get away from the thing. They are expecting a mega explosion of this mountaintop. Getting bigger apparently than the Mount St. Helens 10 years ago. Mega. Difficult to even put a tape measure around this. You can't put a scale under it. Mega. He says the promises of God are megastas. They are magnificent and invaluable. That's what they're like. They're without equal.
Job recognized this thousands of years before Peter. He said, I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my necessary food. That's how he put it. Somebody says, wait a minute. You're telling me that God's provided us promises. What good are promises? Do you realize how much we live on promises right now? Have you ever thought about that? You write a check for something that you buy. What good is that piece of paper to the store owner?
It's absolutely no good except that by that piece of paper you are promising that there's money in the bank. And if there's not, it'll be 15 bucks extra when the check's returned, right? We live on promises. You sign your name on the credit card. You are promising that you're going to pay out of your account for what you have just purchased. The utility pipes electricity into your home and gas into your home. And you use that day after day after day. You're living on promises.
They promise to send that to you. Do you think when you get up in the morning and before you turn the light switch on, I sure hope they keep their promise today. I sure hope the lights come on. No, of course not, because you're counting on it. You live on that promise. And for that matter, they're sending it out to you before you've paid for it. They're planning on you paying. They're counting on you to keep your promise. You go into a grocery store and you buy food.
And on this can, it says, this is green beans. You're counting on the fact that somebody back there at the factory put green beans in that can. It's a promise. Have you ever gotten anything else in a can besides what was labeled there? Yeah, I have. It doesn't happen very often. It's a collectible when that happens, see? That goes to the basement, no. You're counting on that label being correct.
You're promising that it's right and that it has been packaged properly and that it is good to eat and nutritious for you. We live on promises every day of our lives. So what is the big deal when we say that when we're going to grow as Christians, God gives us promises to live on. He's simply giving us what we live on already except that they're precious and magnificent and they don't rest upon some factory worker. They rest upon the glory and the excellence of Christ. God has given us promises.
That's the design of the promises. Just to put it quickly, the design of the promises of God are that we might grow. That's the purpose. That's the design behind them. He puts it two ways. One's kind of positive, we might say, and the other is a negative expression. He says on the one hand, he puts it this way.
He says, in order that by them these promises of God that are precious and magnificent that are rest upon Christ that are freely given to us, that by them you might become partakers of the divine nature. Positive. Partakers of the divine nature. That does not mean in the New Age sense that we are somehow deity or we're absorbed into deity but that we become sharers and partners in God's nature, God's holiness. We become sharers and partners in this. This comes by our union with Jesus Christ.
This morning the young man read from Romans chapter 6 about our union with Jesus Christ. By the promises of God, we become sharers in God's holiness so that we can live above the pull of sin. We can live above its defilement. By this union with Christ, we can share and do share in Christ's moral victory over sin, even as one day we shall share in his final victory over death and the grave. There are two ways that God makes this real to us.
We try to understand it but there are two ways that God grinds it right into our lives so that it becomes real. One of them is chastisement and the other is enlightenment. Turn over to Hebrews 12-10 for just a quick look. At the back a few pages. He's talking here about the discipline of our earthly fathers and comparing that to God's discipline of us. In Hebrews 12-10 he says, for they, our earthly fathers, disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them.
That's good for children to remember. Your parents are disciplining you boys and girls as seems best to them. They do make mistakes. They aren't perfect. There are times when they really don't understand but it seems best to them at that moment. That goes on to say here, he, God, disciplines us for our good that we may share his holiness.
God brings chastisement to our lives, instruction, difficult times, discipline, so that by going through that experience that's difficult, we might learn to partake of his holiness. It changes us. There's something about chastisement that changes us from the inside out. But the second thing that God does to grind this truth into our lives is to enlighten us by the Holy Spirit.
There's something about the promises themselves as we begin to meditate upon them and to believe them and to act upon them, to act them out in our lives that it changes us. They become real to us that way. Frankly, it's a whole lot better to learn this through enlightenment than it is chastisement, though we all experience both.
How much better that we spend time in the promises of God, the word of God, and we allow the Holy Spirit to enlighten us and to teach us and to put into practice in our lives so that we don't have to get over here in the woodshed side of things quite so often. The design of the promises is that we might be partakers of his divine nature. We become partakers of his divine nature as God chastens us as he teaches us from the promises. But he puts it negatively here at the end of the verse.
He says, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust. Now on the one hand, I think this is a very positive statement. But it's negative in the sense that we escape something here. He speaks about the world. Let's remind ourselves that the world, in the sense it's used here, is a system of disguised evil. Now I put it that way because the world system very often is not evil on its surface. In fact, it even glitters a little bit.
The devil, it's like a corpse that the devil just keeps making up. You know, puts fresh lipstick on it and all the powders and everything and perfume, and he keeps trying to make it acceptable. John says, however, the world system is decaying right before our eyes. It's just passing away. It's becoming putrid and rotten, really comparing it to a corpse. But it doesn't often seem that way. It seems alluring. It seems attractive. But it is a system of disguised evil. And it is headed by Satan.
And it is opposed to God. And it is that which controls all of those outside of Jesus Christ. That's the world system. Now he mentions here the corruption that is in the world. This word means a decay that is being produced by disillusion. It is a rottenness. It is a steady, inevitable process of just falling apart. And it says that it's in the world by lust. The strong desires which are potent and active in causing this corruption to take place.
Now I say this is a very positive statement in one way that you look at it, because by these promises of God that we learn to live by, we not only become partakers of the holiness of God, we learn to become like Jesus Christ in our thoughts and actions, but we also escape what is taking place in the world around us. This degeneration, this decay, this corruption that is taking place by reason of the lusts that control the people in the world system. That's the design of God's promises.
All of the resources of Jesus Christ are made available to the believer to enable him to arrive at his ultimate destiny, which is to be like Jesus Christ. Both as a Christian is a step by step process in this life toward that destiny. That's what it is. God's divine power enables us to be partakers of the divine nature. He has given us promises and we live on them. We learn to live on them. Are you living by promises? Or are you living by what you've got in your hand? Or what you can see?
Or are you allowing yourself to be enticed by a world system that is absolutely corrupt by its lusts? Beware of that. If there is any danger to us, especially in our day, it is this world that is so disguised, so cleverly disguised, and we just kind of follow it along and we're alert by it and we think it's wonderful and it glitters and it's popular and that's where the stars are. And the fact is it's corrupt. Through and through just corrupt. Partake of the promises.
God has given us what we need so that we can grow. Scott Simpson who is tied, I understand it, after 18 holes at the US Open today, tied for first place, gave four passes to the US Open to one of the members of our church, Jeff Hagen, who works with Scott in Athletes in Action. Scott Simpson is a very fine Christian, by the way. Took at a recent event for Athletes in Action here locally.
And Jeff Hagen, being the generous sort that he is, couldn't use those passes and so he gave them to one of our elders who invited his brother and a friend and because he couldn't get rid of the other one, invited me to come along. And so yesterday I got to go out to the US Open and watch Scott Simpson, Jack Nicholas and the others. We had to wear a pass that was given to us. It didn't cost me anything. I don't know what it was worth.
It's worth more than I was willing to pay for it, I'm quite sure. We had to show that pass everywhere we went. In fact we had two different kinds of passes. On two of them it said gallery. That's like peanut gallery, you know. But on the one that was handed to me it said clubhouse. Clubhouse. So we walked by the clubhouse and there it was and they were checking all the passes, people going in. We went out and walked our legs off trying to keep up with the golfers and the people watching them.
And just before it was time to go we thought, let's see if these things will get us into the clubhouse, see what it looks like. So turn it around and make sure clubhouse was showing. Walked up and the two people checking the passes looked and motioned me on through. No big deal to them. They've seen thousands of these things. Big deal to me. We walk into the clubhouse and here's a buffet laid out there. Unfortunately the price of the buffet was not included in the pass.
But up to that point everything was provided for us. It was wonderful to be able, I enjoyed that so much. Isn't it great to know that God has provided for us everything we need. He's given to us the promises and by those promises not only are we going to enter heaven, but everything we need in this world, everything pertaining to life and godliness is there. What we need to do is use the pass.
We need to use those promises, learn to live by them just like we live every day of our lives except we believe God's promises as well as some of those that mere men give to us. I'd like for you to take your hymnal and for us to sing something in closing. And it is 124 where we sing about the Bible, God's promises, God's magnificent and precious promises. Would you stand with me please as we sing 124. I want you to take it in both hands as we close our service in prayer.
Our loving Father, we thank you for this precious book of promises. Promises that are invaluable and incalculably great. Forgive us for living on the promises of men every day and failing to read and to meditate upon and to act upon the promises of this book. Oh Lord forgive us. And this week may the promises of the word become freshly precious to us.
We pray that you will teach us by enlightenment and by chastisement if necessary how to become partakers of the divine nature and to escape the corruption that is in the world around us by lust. Thank you again for these promises that we hold. In Jesus' name, Amen.