And our reading today is from 2 Peter 3. Please give your careful attention as this is God's word. Peter says, this is now the second letter that I am writing to you, beloved. In both of them, I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder that you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandments of the Lord and Savior through your apostles. Knowing this, first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. And they will say, where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation. For they deliberately overlook this fact that the heavens existed long ago. and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these, the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word, the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the final day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as 1,000 years, and 1,000 years is as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient towards you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on the earth will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming day of God? because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved in the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn. But according to his promise, we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish and at peace. and count the patience of our Lord as salvation. Just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do with the other scriptures. But you therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, Take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory, both now and until the day of eternity in all of God's people said, amen. Let's ask God's blessing as we come to his word. Father, we thank you for passages like these that clearly lay out for us your plan, and not just what you are doing, but also to an extent why you are doing it in a certain way. Father, you don't always reveal that to us. As Deuteronomy 29, 29 says, the secret things belong to you. The things that you reveal belong to us and to our children that we may do your word. So Father, pray that as we come to your word, we would be doers and not hearers only. That you would encourage us, that you would stir us up, that you would give us a sense of zeal and a sense of urgency, a sense of calling, vocation, that is higher than anything we do in this world. that defines who we are as your people, as your church, as your bride, that gets to the core of why you have left us here in this world. As Jesus prays in John 17, He did not pray that we would be taken from the world, but only that we would be kept from the evil one. And so we are here for a reason, and I pray that you would Allow us to see that and own that reason this morning. Father, bless us, we pray, as we come to your word. Send your spirit that we may hear it rightly. Shut my mouth, speak through me, and then may the meditations of our hearts together be pleasing before you, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. So, for this morning, on the heels of our Advent and Christmas meditations in Zechariah, and as we begin a new year, I want to focus this morning on the end of the story that we have been considering. Right? We've looked at Genesis 3 through the lens of Zechariah, all the way up through the piercing of our Lord, our Shepherd King, and then his resurrection, his ascension, and what he is doing currently in this great era of renewal. But for this morning, I want to focus on the last chapter in this world's narrative, because there is one. There is a final page of the story, a day and an hour that no one but the Father knows when faith shall be sight, when the clouds will be rolled back like a scroll, the trump shall resound, the Lord shall descend, and it will be well with our souls. On that day will come what theologians have called the great consummation. And by that is meant both the general meaning regarding the completion of some project, but then also the meaning that is specific to weddings, to marriage. It is that first sense that Paul is talking about when he says in Philippians 1.6, you know this verse, and I am sure of this, he says, that he who began a good work in you, he will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ, consummation. a finality, a completion. The work he is doing now, in other words, the work that the Spirit is accomplishing both in us and through us in this world will not be fully completed until the Lord comes again, until the second coming, until the day that Jesus descends from heaven. There is a great finalization that will happen, a consummation of all things when Jesus returns again. When we are raised from the dead in imperishable and glorified bodies and enter into that eternal state and then those who have rejected him will enter into the eternal state of judgment. Which means there is work that he is doing now, work that he will not stop doing until that final moment. God doesn't take a break, in other words. He's working. The transformation of lives, of families, the renewal that comes through the proclamation of the word, it will continue with success, because it is God's word going out, and his word does not go out in vain, up until that very last soul is saved. God knows who that child of His will be. He knows the story. He has it mapped out, orchestrated, knows exactly what He is going to do to bring this world to that final point in our history. But this coming consummation is more than simply a finish line. It is that, but it's also more. Revelation speaks of the great wedding feast of the Lamb, where the bride, that is the church, God's people throughout history, and the groom, which is Jesus, are literally united forever in holy matrimony, there being no till-death-do-us-part to ever worry about again. John sees this great marital union pictured in chapter 19 of the book of Revelation. You just hear these words. Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters, and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, hallelujah, for the Lord our God, the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exalt and give him the glory for, "'The marriage of the lamb has come, "'and his bride has made herself ready. "'It was granted her to clothe herself "'with fine linen, bright and pure, "'for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.' "'And the angel said to me, "'Write this, blessed are those who are invited "'to the marriage supper of the lamb.'" Consummation, union, this is us, right? This is this bride, this bride dressed in righteousness, the righteousness that comes from Christ and is worked out in our own lives. This is God's people that John sees. brought before the wedding altar, dressed in the snow white righteousness of our bridegroom. And it is a wedding that all of creation is looking forward to. Remember in Romans 8, Paul says that creation itself is groaning, longing for this day and anticipating when the sons of God will be revealed for that moment of final resurrection to come to pass for the marriage supper of the Lamb. And when it comes, it will mean perfect union with the Lord. No more death, no more pain, no more tears, no more deception, no more wickedness, no more sin, no more darkness. Only light, only righteousness, only joy forever and ever and ever, world without end. And all of God's people say, amen. Come Lord Jesus. And this is the advent that we are still longing for, right? We are still in an advent season. straining our necks forward to see this moment. This is our advent hope that is strengthened when we enter into the advent hope of the Old Testament during the month of December and we see their longing for Christ. They were longing for their Messiah. We look back and we see who that Messiah is. We see him named, born and named Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. And they were longing for him and that advent came. And we are still waiting for him again, to come again. And so when we do that, we have not only the celebration of Christmas, but we have the added benefit of our own faith being strengthened as we long for him to return. Our own eyes fixed on Christ and his second coming. Longing for the return of our king. And that's what I want to focus on this morning, that stage in our history. We have creation, you have fall, you have redemption in Christ, and you have the consummation of all things in the second coming, and that entrance into the glorious state of eternity. In 2 Corinthians 10.5, Paul tells us that one of the Christian's responsibilities in this life is to destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised up against the knowledge of God. We have been given divine power the divine power of the truth in God's word for a reason, and that reason is to destroy the strongholds of deception that still exist in this world around us. One of the chief strongholds, one of the chief arguments of our age that we need to take the battle acts of the word to daily, raised specifically against the knowledge of God, one that is central to almost every other godless and God-hating ideology and philosophy, At the center of that rests this theory, the theory of atheistic uniformitarianism. That's a $5 word. Atheistic uniformitarianism. I can't even say it. Uniformitarianism. This theory says that the world and all that we see has come about through slow, incremental, and natural processes, through consistent and uniform motion. and is therefore necessarily how life will continue always from this point forward. It's always been that slow incremental procession of time and chance acting on matter, and it will always continue to be time and chance acting on matter. And the atheistic element, which is a really, it's an anti-theist, an anti-Christ element, means that within those long years of uniform slow motion, nothing cataclysmic, at least on a global scale, and definitely nothing supernatural has ever happened. No creation out of nothing. No global flood. Certainly no virgin birth or resurrection from the dead, because according to this theory, and according to those who hold to this theory, there is no such thing as God. Nature is all there is. This world is the whole show, as C.S. Lewis puts it. Natural processes are the only ones that exist. There is nothing outside to enter in and do something miraculous. And so to explain how the diversity of life came to exist within this model, Charles Darwin, you remember back in the 1800s, rehabilitated and popularized the idea of gradual evolution at the macro level, right? Where one species can change into another species, which is where you have the idea of apes turning into people, slowly and gradually over time, through uniform motion. Everything, apes, people alike, come from a single original cell through billions of years of mutation and death and uselessness. And thus, what we have in this model, in this theory, what we have is the great gradual movement from chaos and disorder to order and beauty. Right, we have beauty around us today, but we can't ascribe it to the creative power of God. We have to ascribe it to natural means, which means that it came out of something less ordered. That's a whole nother talk right there, how you can get order out of disorder, or even something out of nothing. But we'll leave that aside for the moment. They believe that all mankind, with enough social engineering, is perfectible. Right, we're going from a state of disorder to a state of order, and that means that we can perfect ourselves, that we must evolve into higher and better forms of intelligence and morality. And this particular ideology of unconquerable progress has our country by the throat. And it is because, this is why, they don't want to acknowledge the truth of Scripture that is present, that presents a very different picture, right? If God made the world out of nothing, which God says, Genesis 1.1, if God made the world out of nothing, it is His to govern, right? His to do with as He desires. His to redeem. His to judge. But that strikes a death blow to our pride, right? We don't want to be submissive to anything outside of ourselves. It cuts our self-importance down at the knees. In our rebellion, we come up with this ridiculous notion of common descent and gradualism in order to convince ourselves that we alone have the authority to impose meaning on what would otherwise be a meaningless world. Meaning can't come from outside because that means that someone else would be determining what is meaningful, what things mean. We have to determine what things mean in order to maintain this facade of autonomy, self-governance. And so the modern man, the modern mind sees itself at the center. Otherwise, it would be subject to judgment from outside. And so it places a truly blind faith in the notion that everything is actually getting better, that the theory of evolution holds the key to real progress. And so they deny, this is where all this is going, they deny the second coming of Jesus. just like they deny his resurrection, just like they deny his sovereign lordship and their own obligations to bow before their king. Because to their thinking, they don't need Jesus to redeem man. Evolution will perfect them just fine, thank you very much. Progress will bring them salvation. And it will do so without the uncomfortable ideas of personal sin and repentance and obedience to someone, something outside of this universe. All they need is a powerful enough state with a large enough army, and they can achieve their utopia, right? And content in these empty illusions, they mock Christians who keep preaching Jesus, keep preaching the need of salvation, their need for grace. They deny Christ's return and strike out on their own in the vain hope that they can save themselves. But it won't work. Because this is God's world, whatever they may say, right? Jesus sits on the throne no matter how much they may fuss about it. Sin and the death that is its wage is all too real. And there's no escaping it. And so we take our chief weapon, which is the declaration of God's truth, and we tear down those idols for the sake of calling unbelievers to repentance. We expose them as the lies that they are so that they might turn from those lies and see the truth of the gospel through the regeneration of the spirit and the washing of the word. That is what these weapons are for, right? We do not fight against flesh and blood. We break chains through the power of the Spirit, chains that bind lost sinners to their own deceptions. And I bring all of this up here because there is no new lie under the sun. Peter was dealing with the exact same issues, the exact same scoffs, if I can use that word, the exact same deceptions, the exact same attacks 2,000 years ago. Scoffers and mockers back then, as they are today, were saying, verse four here in 2 Peter chapter three, where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation. Gradual, uniform motion. No supernatural, cataclysmic interventions of any kind. Scoffers and believers have been saying things like this since the moment Christ ascended into heaven. Satan's been saying it since the garden. Did God really say? The unbelieving heart has a vested interest in not believing because to accept the authority of Jesus means a radical change of life. It means mortifying the flesh, denying passions and lusts and sinful pleasures. It means striving after holiness and obedience and purity and faith. It means letting go of your own self-centered, self-circumferenced ideas and desires and seeking instead the kingdom of Christ and his righteousness. It means living by faith and not by sight. And so they will do anything possible to deny the second coming, because they will do anything possible to deny the reality of the judgment of God that is coming. Peter wants us to know where this impulse comes from. Verse three, scoffers will come in these last days. And again, the last days are the days that we are living in, the days that began with the ascension of Christ and will end with the return of Christ. These are the last days. They will come in these last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. Their scoffing, their mockery, their refusal to believe, in other words, has nothing, and this is really important, their scoffing has nothing to do with the validity or the soundness of your arguments or your faith. Nor does it have anything to do with their own arguments. This is not an intellectual debate. Rather, it has everything to do with their own sinful self-interest, their own sinful desire to escape judgment, to escape bowing their knee to Christ, to feel free to pursue whatever twisted perversions that have darkened their hearts. They have to be right regardless of the complete lack of logical, rational arguments supporting their claims. You've seen these types of arguments before, and you're just, are you kidding? You believe that? You believe that something came out of nothing? You believe that apes turned into humans just given enough chance? You're like, what are you thinking? Well, they're not, and that's the point. It's not about rational arguments. It's about denying Christ and doing whatever they need to do to deny Christ. Because if they actually expose their own lack of logical, rational arguments, they would have to admit that their whole way of life is a sham. You, on the other hand, Peter is saying, verse one and two, you, Christian, must ignore their scoffing and keep your mind fixed on the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through what God himself has revealed to you through your apostles. Jesus has already told us what he will do, that he will return, and Jesus does not lie. The prophets throughout the Old Testament spoke of the reality of this day repeatedly, and they did not lie. Paul and Peter and the other apostles testify to this day, and they do not lie. And so we can stand with confidence against the hot air of the scoffers who willfully deny and mock the Lord who is coming again. Peter wants us to understand that their denials are in fact calculated and intentional and not due to simple ignorance. Verses five and six. For they deliberately, and that's a really important word, they deliberately overlook this fact that the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. They have to believe in gradualism, in the slow movement of matter through time, uninterfered with by any supernatural agent. Because if they admitted to the facts of creation, and specific to Peter's argument here, if they admitted to the fact of the worldwide flood, things that necessitate divine activity from the outside, which Peter says they deliberately overlook. If they admitted any of that, they would be forced to acknowledge the superior authority of the will of God. But again, this denial is on purpose and not due to a simple difference in interpretation. Peter goes on in verse seven, by the same word, the word that created the heavens and the earth in the beginning and the word that judged the whole world in the flood, by the same word, the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. And this is why they deny both creation and the flood. If God made the world, it is his place to make the rules. And if we break the rules, like we did in the garden, and haven't stopped doing since, then it is his place to bring about the consequences of those actions. In the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. He ate of it, we die. It is his place to judge the world by the flood. It is his place to judge the world by fire. And for the unbeliever, that is absolutely unacceptable. But instead of repenting and turning to Christ in faith and humility, they double down in their denials that any such thing could ever happen. Because if there is a final judgment, if Christ is coming again to judge the living and the dead, if there is such a thing as judgment at all, it necessarily means that some actions are wrong. Some thoughts are wrong. Some feelings and beliefs are wrong, which you are not allowed to say in this culture, right? Unless, of course, you're talking about Christians, Christian thoughts. Because in a culture that says anything goes, anything is lawful, anything is permissible, the one thing that is outlawed, the one thing that must not be tolerated at any cost, the one thing that must be denied is the objective and absolute truth of God's word. And so they mock and scoff, where is he? Where is your king? Where is the promise of his coming? And they mock because if they can get us to doubt that truth, right, if they pester us enough with their mocking and their scoffing, if they get us to doubt the truth, to doubt what we know God's word clearly says, if they can get us to seriously consider the question, did God really say? If they get us to capitulate, then they don't have to hear us preach it. They don't have to see us live it. In other words, if they can get us to doubt God's word or even just to downplay the reality of judgment a little bit, which doesn't happen at all in our country, of course, if they can convince us that it is not polite or loving to talk about Christ coming again to judge the living and the dead, then they are off the hook for believing it themselves and can go on living out their perversions. Or so they think. So Peter's encouragement here is simple. Expect scoffers to scoff. Be ready for it. Expect unbelievers to not believe. Expect haters of God to hate God and to hate God's people. Expect it. Be prepared for it. Keep your eyes fixed on the truth. Devour the truth as if every morning you woke up starving and the only food that was available to you was God's word. Keep your mind fixed on the promises of God because the world is going to taunt you. The world is going to ridicule you. They're going to mock you for believing what they insist is ridiculous. But you know the truth. The spirit of the living God has revealed it to you. He has opened his word to you and has testified to it every day of your life through the experiences that he's given to you. Through the answered prayers that you have seen. through his testimony to your own spirit. Romans talks about his spirit testifying to our spirit of the truth of these things. So do not be daunted by the world. The world is going to be the world. And Christians need to be Christians. Part of what it means to be a Christian is to recognize God's revealed purpose in all of this. to be able to step back and see the bigger picture. It doesn't take very much time in our culture to see all the hideous, destructive, and disgusting ways that people reject the truth, that they reject Christ. The world delights in wickedness and in immorality. And so why doesn't God just deal with all of this? Why doesn't he just deal with all the disgusting distortions of his beautiful creation? Just look at the abortion mills. Just look at the pride parades. Just look at the trans activism that is destroying families and children. Just look at the feminism that endangers and degrades women far more than it is able to liberate. Why is God taking so dang long? Our hearts cry out. which is why Peter goes on in verses eight and nine. Unbelievers deliberately overlook the reality of judgment. Christians must not overlook the reality of God's patience. But do not overlook this one fact, beloved. that with the Lord one day is as 1,000 years and 1,000 years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise, his promise of coming, the promise of his appearing, the promise of second judgment, the promise of the consummation of all things. He's not slow to fulfill his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. A couple of years ago, you may remember we looked at the fruit of the Spirit listed in Galatians 5. And you might remember that there are two Greek words that get translated as patience in the New Testament, two Greek words. One meaning what we typically think of, the long-suffering, the endurance, the faithfully waiting. And certainly, God is patient in that sense. And then there is a second word, the word that is used both here in 2 Peter 3 and in Galatians 5.22, because it's something that unbelievers can't wrap their arms around. Unbelievers can endure trials. Unbelievers can wait patiently in that sense. They can't wait patiently in this sense. They can't be patient in the sense that God is patient here. This is the second word, the word makrothumio. which literally means it's a compound word, two words put together that literally means passion, or anger, or irritation, or frustration, removed at a far distance. Macrothumiopatience is the opposite of short-tempered impatience. It is the lack of irritability, the lack of frustration in the moment, the putting off of anger. And so Peter isn't so much talking about God's endurance, though that certainly is true as testified elsewhere in scripture. He's not so much talking about the endurance of God as he is talking about God's intentionally long fuse. His long temper instead of short temper, his long temper. There is a time when the just and holy wrath of God will fall upon all who refuse to bow the knee to Jesus. That time is coming. That day is coming. There is a time for the full and righteous anger of God to be expressed in final judgment. But it is not yet, Peter is saying. He is not slow to fulfill his promise to come in judgment. Rather, he is patient. He is gentle. He is deliberately holding his anger at a far distance so as to provide time for repentance. He is patient toward the unbeliever. He is patient toward the sinner. He is not gleefully delighting in or yearning for their destruction. Rather, he is holding his anger at bay so that they might repent. before it is too late, so that all who are his might come to a recognition of their sin and turn to Christ in faith. And Peter says that we must not overlook this fact. We must not overlook the patience of God, the reality that he sees all times as one, that 1,000 years is no different to him than one day, that he knows the whole story. front to back, and is actively at work in this world to accomplish his good work of redemption, salvation, and renewal. The lesson that Peter would have us take from this is simple. We need to be patient as well. We need to not fly off the handle. We need to not be surprised when the world acts like the world. We need to keep our anger at bay, especially as our anger is not perfectly righteous like God's. We cannot throw up our hands and, like the disciples, call down fire from heaven on those who reject us or our message of hope. Rather, we continue to pray. We continue to preach. We continue to plead with those God has put in our path to turn and to trust him before it is too late. I know there are loved ones in your life that do not trust God. dear friends and family members that you pray for regularly, and so I wanna make sure that you see the encouragement that Peter gives to you here. Consider the patience of God toward you. Consider what the long-fused kindness and grace of God has meant in your testimony, your own story of how you came to know him. Consider that, and then remember that you do not know the full story of any one individual living today. You don't know what their story holds for them. You don't know what God's going to do for them. You don't know where God's going to take them. You don't know what seeds you're planting right now and where that will lead. You do not know what God is doing in that person's life, what road he is causing that person to walk in order to know him, to come to grips in an ultimate way with their own sin, with their own rebellion. You don't know what more that person has to walk through before the spirit finally gives them an utter hatred of their sin. And as long as they draw breath in this world, there is hope. There is reason to pray. There is reason to trust to the patience and kindness of God, to the fact that he is deliberately withholding his final judgment so that all his children, especially those who do not yet know him, might turn and repent and exalt the name of Jesus. This is who our God is, right? This is his character. Like we saw last week, His purposes are not for condemnation, rather they are for renewal, for salvation. Not all will come to know Him, it is true, but we do not know who is in and who is out, and so we are told to preach in season and out of season, to share the gospel indiscriminately, to pray for those that we know, to imitate God in His patience, in His kindness, in His forbearance and His grace. And in doing so, we are wielding the weapons of our warfare, not against people, but against ideologies, against lies, against despair, so that by the power of the Spirit, the people trapped and imprisoned by those ideologies and lies might be set free. Part of Peter's point here is to communicate the urgency of this gospel message, our vocation as kingdom builders in this world. We do not have eons upon eons of time as the evolutionists would have us believe. That great day of the Lord, the day of consummation is coming, and it will come like a thief in the night. Verse 10, but the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. C.S. Lewis, who fought back hard against the doctrines of gradualism, naturalism, and atheistic uniformitarianism in his own day, said this in an essay called The World's Last Night. The doctrine of the second coming is deeply uncongenial to the whole evolutionary or developmental character of modern thought. We have been taught to think of the world as something that grows slowly towards perfection, something that progresses or evolves. Christian apocalyptic offers no such hope. It does not even foretell, which would be more tolerable to our habits of thought, a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end, imposed from without. An extinguisher popped onto the candle. A brick flung at the gramophone. A curtain rung down on the play. Halt! Characteristic Lewis style there. The king will return, and it will be unexpected. like a thief in the night. Jesus will descend, and the space-time continuum of the world as we know it will come to a grinding halt. It may come today. It may come 10,000 years from now. It may come before I'm done preaching this sermon. We don't know. Jesus will return, and the dead shall be raised, and to those who have put their faith in him as their Lord and King, he will say, well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the rest of your master. And to those who refuse to submit to his authority, he will say, depart from me, for I never knew you. Are we ready? Are we living as though the bridegroom will return at any moment? Do we keep our lamps lit? Do we keep our oil ready? or will we be caught unprepared to meet our Lord, wasting our days in idleness and sloth? So what do we think about this? How do we think about these things? What lesson does Peter want us to draw from these truths? Why is he reminding us of these things? Verses 11 through 13, since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn. But according to his promise, we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Verse 13 resonates with us deeply, right? We long for the new heavens and the new earth in which righteousness dwells. But does that mean that we should simply kick back and twiddle our thumbs and wait for God to do his thing? Verse 13 has to be read in light of verse 11 and 12, where Peter tells us how we ought to think of all of this. Because this fallen, broken world is coming to an end and will one day die, we therefore ought to be living lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for, and get this, hastening the day of God. What in the world does Peter mean by hastening? First, he does not mean that we can change God's mind or change God's eternal purposes, such that, say, he decided to come from before eternity passed, he decided to come on a Thursday, and because we were all such good little boys and girls and quick about our business, he decided to come on Tuesday instead. That's not what Peter means. We are not changing the eternal decrees of God. But neither is that word hastening empty of meaning. What Peter is saying is that God has given his people a job to do and we play a role in bringing about the consummation of all things in Christ. As we go and build the kingdom, as we evangelize and disciple and baptize and teach the nations to obey Jesus. In other words, God's eternally decreed timeline for this world And the end of this world includes and takes into account all the good works prepared by him for us in Christ so that we might faithfully walk in them. And as we do, we are accomplishing God's purposes, becoming the active means by which he is saving the world, redeeming sinners from every tribe, people, tongue, and nation by the blood of Jesus and the washing of the Holy Spirit. in obediently fulfilling our role, we are, in that sense, hastening the coming of the Lord. We are accomplishing His purpose, which means His purpose will come to its consummation. So if you're ever tempted to think that you're just a third-rate Christian and have no value in the kingdom of God, then you need to get your head on straight and hear this. I don't care what you think about yourself. Each and every one of you has a role to play in the story of this world's redemption. And you are called on to play that role as long as there is oxygen in your lungs and blood pumping through your veins. Listen to what one commentator, this is great, listen to what one commentator said regarding this idea of Christians hastening on the day of God. It's gonna be two paragraphs, so just bear with it. Christians, he says, Christians are expected to look for the coming of the Lord. Had not Jesus himself told them to watch? But this does not mean pious inactivity. It means action. For wonderful as it may seem, we can actually hasten it on. What a wonderfully positive conception of the significance of our time on Earth. It is no barren waiting for the end to be written. It is intended to be a time of active cooperation with God in the redemption of society. Our era between the advents is the age of grace, the age of the spirit, the age of evangelism. He goes on just a little bit longer. Evangelism is one way in which we can be said to hasten the coming of the Lord. But we cannot confine our preparations to evangelism. We cannot exclude prayer. And it's specifically the prayer, thy kingdom come. nor Christian behavior, nor repentance and obedience. All these contribute towards the ultimate goal. And it is in this way, it is that Christian listlessness, disobedience, and lovelessness delay the coming of the day of God. In other words, the Christian walk does not consist of sitting on your couch and throwing angry fistfuls of popcorn at the TV screen on which wacky liberals are mouthing off. He calls us to go out and do something about it, not to complain about the wickedness. Just like he told Adam and Eve in the garden, take this blueprint for fruitfulness out into the wilderness beyond the gates and make it lovely. And so too he is telling us, you have been given grace and love and the good news of salvation. Now take that out into the world and plant seeds and water and trust God to be the one to bring fruit in his time. Don't like what unbelievers are saying? Don't like what the liberals are doing? Don't like what the schools are teaching your children? What are you gonna do about it? What does a life of proactive holiness and godliness based on the gospel of Jesus mean for your family, for your place of work, for your neighborhood? We are all in exile like the Jews in Babylon, right? Looking forward to our homeland, looking forward to the country of which we are citizens, the kingdom of Christ, which is the heavenly city of Jerusalem. We are in Babylon here and we are in exile longing to return and the Lord is telling us the same thing that he told them, Jeremiah 29. Build houses, live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, do not decrease. but seek the welfare, the Hebrew there word is shalom, the peace, the wholeness of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, in its shalom, you will find your welfare, your shalom. If we want Christ to come, if we pray, come Lord Jesus quickly, as we ought to do, we cannot be idle while there is still work to be done. If we want the kingdom to come, we need to go seek it out. We need to go preach. We need to go disciple. We need to raise our kids in the fear and admonition of the Lord, training them to see and to know and to worship Christ and to shine as a light in the midst of the darkness. We need to build homes of light and fruitfulness, homes where the aroma of Christ is strong, flowing outward through the windows and the doors into the world around. This is how we flood the darkness with light, the light that is Jesus, the light that has overcome the darkness. We walk into a room, a dark room, and we flip on the switch. We don't bemoan how dark it is. We go over to the wall, find the switch, and flip it. Guess what? Here's the switch. Flip it, preach it, read it, know it, live it out. This is how we hasten the day of the Lord. So what does all this actually look like, practically speaking? What are the points of particular application for us? Of course, the specifics will look different for all of us as each of us are given different skills and experiences, different talents and different circumstances, but in verses 14 through 18, Peter draws attention to five different aspects of waiting and hastening, five different things that show us how to live faithfully in these last days. The first three come right there in verse 14. Peter says, be therefore beloved, since you are waiting for these, how do you act? How do you live? What's it mean to live in this world while we are waiting for these things to come? Since you are waiting for these things, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish and at peace. Therefore, because everything he said is true, because you are waiting for these things to happen, Be diligent, Peter says. You are not simply on the platform of a train station sitting on a bench waiting for the train to come. You are not just waiting around for God to do his thing. Waiting means diligent obedience to what you have been called to do while waiting. If I'm making dinner, I am necessarily waiting to eat dinner until that dinner is finished. But dinner doesn't make itself. I need to be busy in the kitchen making food. And in a similar way, God has designed the church, designed us as his people to be the means by which the spirit accomplishes the very thing that we are waiting for. And so we cannot simply sit back. We must be diligent, proactive, faithfully attentive to what each day holds, hastening the day so that we are not idle before the Lord. What are we to be diligent to do? We are to be diligent to pursue holiness. We are to be found by him, by Jesus, when he returns without spot or blemish. Now, to quickly qualify that, Peter does not mean that we actually can achieve sinless perfection in this life. But he does mean that we need to be diligent in our pursuit of it. assurance of our salvation, reliance on the forgiveness of Christ, trust in our justified state before God in no way allows for complacency or contentment when it comes to remaining sin. Our sin needs to drive us crazy with impatience to mortify it. to put it to death, to turn from it, to repent of it and grow in holiness. This is a lifelong pursuit, a diligent and continuous effort to deny the flesh, to keep in step with the spirit. Again, not that we're earning our salvation. Instead, we are living that salvation out in more and more potent ways and in a way that should be more and more obvious the older that we get. We are, one, to be diligent, two, diligent in the pursuit of holiness, and three, also at peace. This is just the kindness of God to include this at this moment in this chapter, to live in the peace of God. When we fail in our diligence, when we fail in our pursuit of holiness, as we will do, God reminds us here that we are still at peace with him. This is not a free pass to rest easy in our sin, but it is a reminder that our ultimate hope is not in the complete eradication of sin in this world, but rather in the perfect peace that Jesus has accomplished for us, the peace that Jesus is himself for us. The message is to run fast, to run hard, to never stop mortifying the sin that remains, but doing so knowing that God is your kind and faithful father and will never stop being your kind and faithful father. And he will never let go of you. That's the peace of God. That's Christ, that's the gospel. It's not a free pass to indolence and laziness, but it's the assurance that no matter how hard we run and how hard we fall, God is there. This reminds us, fourthly, to consistently rejoice in the patience of God. Verse 15, and count the patience of our Lord as salvation. Again, it's the same word as from up above. The macro thumio is our salvation. In Christ, he has placed his just and righteous anger with our sin as far as the east is from the west. He has poured the full measure of his anger onto Christ, leaving none left over for us. He therefore has nothing but patience for you, Christian. Nothing but kindness and grace and compassion as he guides you through this life, sanctifying you and using you for the building of his kingdom. Peter goes on to sympathize with his audience concerning the letters of Paul, which is slightly funny. which he agrees are sometimes difficult to understand. Verse 16, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do the other scriptures. That's a whole nother sermon right there where Peter lumps in the writings of Paul with the scriptures, identifying the authority that the writings of Paul had and were recognized to have even back then as God's word. But this leads us to the fifth and final aspect of faithful living, verse 17. You, therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. This means discernment, the ability to discern truth from error, right from wrong, a good interpretation from a bad one, which means we need to know God's word, including the difficult parts in Paul. passages that some folks would twist for the sake of their own lawlessness. We see this happening all over the church today. We need to know all of what God has said. We need to submit to all of what God said. We need to commit to having no problem passages. The Christian doesn't get to say, well, I don't like that chapter in Romans. That doesn't sit well with me. I don't have a piece about it, and so I'm gonna disregard it. No Christian should ever say that. because you're putting yourself over God and putting your authority higher than God's word. We need to know all of what God has said so that we can guard against error and maintain our own stability in Christ. To do this, we need faithful preachers, faithfully opening the word of God, faithfully calling us all to repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. We need the gospel every day of our lives. Furthermore, we need to cultivate faithful listening, and faithful responses to the words proclaimed, faithfully working out what God is working in, being doers and not hearers only. Discernment means, verse 18, growing in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Christians are those who unceasingly pursue the knowledge of His will, His desires, His loves, and most of all, His call upon our lives. It looks like valuing Him as our Lord and Master, and living as if faithfulness to Him was our top priority, which it ought to be. It means building our lives on the firm foundation of His holy word, where we meet our Lord face to face, where we come to know God, not just about Him. It is in this thorough and yet ever-growing knowledge of God and his word that we find Isaiah 33 6 to be proved true, that the Lord will be the stability of your times. He will be to you an abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge. The fear of the Lord is the treasure of God's people. Do we treasure the fear of the Lord? This is what the second coming means for us today. As God has promised that he will come, and as he has called us to live in a particular way, waiting for that coming, we live knowing that there will be those who scoff at our message, who mock us for believing in such fairy tales, who will consistently seek to deflect away from the emptiness and guilt that they themselves feel, covering it by means of all manner of coping mechanisms. drugs, alcohol, sex, relationships, Netflix. By contrast, we are to imitate God, which means that we remain undaunted, we remain faithful, we remain patient, praying for their repentance, praying for the spirit to work in their lives, being faithful to plant seeds and water as we are given opportunity, knowing and trusting that it is God alone who has the power to bring forth fruit. And so we wait. hastening the day he comes again through diligently pursuing holiness, resting in the peace of Christ, and with these tools, diligent to pursue the kingdom in everything that we do, rejoicing in the patience of God, and growing in discernment and faith as we look to Christ. Put another way, back to the parable that Steve read for confession of sin, I want to be diligent to be found returning talents that I was given with increase to the master when he left. I do not want him to come finding that I have buried my talent in the ground, having done nothing with it. For he will come again. Christ will come again. May we be found faithfully at work in his fields when he does. May we be found growing in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory both now and to the day of that eternity, all of God's people said. Father, we thank you for your kindness to us in Christ, your kindness to us in your word, your kindness to us in revealing yourself to us and revealing your plans for the story of this world to us that we may have hope that we may know what you are about and see what you are doing and that we have been given the privilege to be the means by which you do it, the means by which your gospel goes forward. This is why you have not taken us out of the world yet. As long as we are here, as long as our feet stand on this earth, there is work for us to do, there is gospel for us to preach, to live, to share, to testify to, to point to with our lives and actions and attitudes. Father, it is incredible to think that you have done this for us and that you are doing this through us and that we have the opportunity, we have the privilege to take part in this great work. Father, we do pray for the coming of your Son. We pray for the consummation of all things. And we pray, Lord, that as the gospel goes forth, it would accomplish your good, good purposes, that every last one of your children, every last saint that you have written down in the book of life, every last name would come to know you and to raise their arms in praise, to glorify you and to exalt the name of Jesus. Father, use us for this great work, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen. Amen, let's stand in response. We're gonna sing a new set of words. This is a familiar tune. but a new set of words that go like this. Lo, he comes with clouds descending, once for favored sinners slain. Thousand, thousand saints attending swell the triumph of his train. Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. God appears on earth to reign. God appears on earth to reign. And it finishes with, yes, amen, let all adore thee. High on thy eternal throne, Savior, take the power and glory, claim the kingdom for thine own. Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. Everlasting God, come down. Everlasting God, come down. Let's pray and sing.