If you have your Bibles, please take them and turn to 2 Peter 1, and we're going to read just a few verses, verses 12 through 15 of chapter 1, 2 Peter. Please stand for the reading of God's Word. Let's give our attention to the reading of God's Word. The Apostle Peter has written, Therefore, I intend always to remind you of these qualities. Though you know them and are established in the truth that you have, I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up by way of reminder. But since I know that the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me, and I will make every effort so that, after my departure, you may be able at any time to recall these things. Let's pray. Blessed be you, our Lord and God. God who is the Father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who has poured out upon us your Spirit, we ask that you would fill us, as Paul writes to us in Ephesians, with your Spirit. We know, O Lord, that your Spirit is the Spirit who is the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation, the one who is holy. And so I ask, Lord, as we hear and attune ourselves to you and your word, we ask that you would give us wisdom and revelation and understanding so that we may be holy. And we commit ourselves to the hearing of your word, to receiving it with joy and gladness by faith, and to the doing of it unto your glory, we pray through Christ. Amen. You may be seated. Memory. is kind of a funny thing. Maybe as I've gotten older, memory has become even funnier. There are things that I, probably you, would have wished never to remember. And yet somehow at two o'clock in the morning, that's occupying our brains like nothing else. On the other hand, there are probably precious and sweet things that we want to remember, maybe other things, maybe scripture, I don't know. And yet we seem often not to be able to recall it. I'm sure that's partly due to our sinfulness, just being creatures that are corrupt and heading towards our last breath. But nonetheless, memory is funny in that way. But this passage, in its kind of brevity, is all about remembering. In fact, it begins with the word in verse 12, to remind you, and then he says that this is a reminder, and then he ends by saying that you would want to be able to recall these things. And so, he is urging us to remember. It's sort of the point of what we're getting at here. Each week we come to the table of the Lord. And among other things, we say what Jesus says, do this in remembrance of me. But remembering all throughout the Bible is more than simply a cognitive entity, a cognitive exercise. We tend to make it that, it's not that, not exactly, it is cognitive in some sense, but it is a moral, spiritual exercise. In other words, when we do this in remembrance of Christ, we're not simply recollecting some event that took place 2000 years ago. We are doing like the Israelites of old when they were told to celebrate the Passover and their children were to ask about why they were doing it. Moses was to tell the parents to tell the children that when you were delivered from the land of Egypt, The implication was that a hundred and five hundred and a thousand years later, when they were celebrating this, they were to have been reliving the event that Christ, I'm sorry, Christ delivered them from the land of Egypt. That was how they were to remember. And all that went with it was to shape them as to who they were. Remembering, not simply recollecting, but remembering towards living. And that's what we have here. So Peter wants to remind you, the readers, me, he wants to remind us particularly of the importance of godliness that therefore takes us back up to what we looked at last week, to godliness. And he ties it as a weighty appeal to his own death. I don't want you to forget I'm going to die soon and I want you to recall what I have written to you. And so I want us to remember that exhibiting godliness is your very reasonable service to God. Exhibiting godliness is your very reasonable service to God. I mean, if you will, think through how the Apostle Paul tells us that the renewing of our minds is this logical or reasonable or worshipful kind of thing, the service to the Lord. It's how we are to serve him. And that's what I want us to do, that exhibiting godliness is that reasonable service. Now, we're going to look at this in a couple of points. Three, I want to just start with the context. So the first point is rather dull, the context. But we need to understand what Peter is doing here. And unlike previously, he uses a very distinct literary style. And so we just need to grasp it a little bit. But secondly, I want to talk about, secondly, pursuing godliness as reasonable service. And the reason I want to do that is because I want us to then remember what did Peter write just previously. So I want to rehearse for you what we talked about last week. I know that most of you probably could recall it instantaneously and repeat it to me easily, but I fear that a couple of you can't. And so we'll rehearse that and remember that together. And then thirdly, we're going to put the emphasis a little bit more on the weight itself, but I want to talk about remembrance as part of our worship. And I'm going to title that third point, Remembrance, Worship, is the, the medium is the message. That's what I want us to say. Worship, the medium is the message. And so I want us to remember that way. All right. So the context. This is a transitional paragraph that's gonna take us into more of the introduction of the letter itself, where in the following verses, 16 through 21, Peter's gonna introduce more of the themes that he wants to talk about, what I'm gonna call the false influencers. I'm gonna use that word, influencer, rather than teacher. It's a commonly used word now, but I fear too much that we think of teachers as those who stand up here, and talk to you, and that may have been the case, but the Bible itself does not give witness to the fact that false teachers were simply the people standing in the front, but that they were people among the congregation, and they had false teaching, and they were influential in bringing this into the congregation. So you can see that. I've pointed it out a few times, but I want to call them that. So that's what he's going to talk about in the future. But as a transition, he goes from the greetings to the central purpose, which we looked at last week. He forms out what godliness looks like before introducing the false teacher, influencer people, and then begins to identify them for rebuke and to not follow them and those kind of things. But the paragraph itself, as well as the whole letter, but because of this paragraph, the literary style, which we'll define in a minute, is called a testamentum or a testament. Some of you have a last will and testament. It's a Latin word. And we're going to talk about that, that this thing serves as a testamentum or a testament for all time. but he links it up to his impending death, of which he seems to be aware that it's going to happen very, very shortly. And then also as part of the context as a transitional paragraph, the therefore, it's going to connect what takes place prior, verses 3 through 11, so having said all these things, therefore, and then he launches into this testamentum then he'll go off into the meat of the letter itself. So we want to keep in mind that he is still talking to us about godliness in light of the false teachers that he will talk about in a minute. But this literary device, this testamentum, this testament, is something that was very commonly used. Like I said, it still has the residual effects of, in our day, that we have last wills and testaments, usually we just call them wills at this point, but that idea was that upon a person's death, how is property distributed? That's the basic gist, that's how the word was used in the first century, and that was the meaning, and we still retain more or less that meaning, how our property is going to be disposed of or given away or whatever. In the intertestamental time, so from about 200 BC to about 100 AD, there was this the pseudepigraph was written and there were a lot of these testamentums written. And so this was falsely inscribed writings to famous people. So there's a testament of Job and the testament of Moses and on and on it goes. And they're collected in books. You can read them. They're interesting, if nothing else. But the idea is that these men didn't actually write them, but as testaments, they were giving last words. And if you want a real example of it, Jacob in Exodus, I'm sorry, in Genesis 48 and 49. If you remember, he gathers his sons, and he begins to, if you will, have these prophecies over them and tell them, this is what you're going to do, Judah, and this is what you're going to do, Reuben, and this is what's going to happen to you, Dan, and so forth. And he gives these last words over them. that is a testamentum or a testament in which he's not disposing property per se, but he's giving a last words over them. That's how the word took on a meaning for these, you know, intertestamental writings. And what Peter is probably doing here, that he is giving to us last words, disposing of not material property, but disposing of the word of God, if you will, putting it out before his churches. And so that's how we want to see it. That's why it's titled, The Weight of the Appeal. We generally understand that a person's last words, if we hear a person's last words often, and particularly always in the Bible, and almost 99% of the time, last words are something very significant, like Jacob's last words to each of his 12 sons or what have you. And so often it can be significant, and that's the weight of it. I'm going to die, and I want you to remember. How he knows he's going to die, we're not sure. I mean, we know that in John 20, Jesus tells Peter, unlike John, Peter's going to be dying a particular way. We generally understand that to be crucifixion. We know that he's in Rome. We know he dies under Nero. We know kind of those kind of things. We know that this letter probably was his last letter that he wrote, obviously after first Peter, and that maybe the conditions in Rome were such that he knew that he was going to be dying very soon, that his trial was pending, you know, whatever it happened to be. We don't know that. He just knows It's going to happen. It's going to happen soon. All right. So that's that's this last weight. And the reason I wanted to just take a few minutes to do that is to say I want us to feel the weight of the appeal that he's making. If you had a chance to actually give last words. what would they be? And it would be different for all of us, but chances are that whatever they would be, they would be significant to someone that was close to us, whether it's our spouse or our children, or maybe the church. Maybe my last words would be different and significant, like Peter's last words, if you will. To the church, I want you to remember this. Now maybe your last words could be similar to that, but maybe not. Maybe it would be significant. I would have significant last words for my wife. Please don't take that what I said wrongly, but it could be that like the apostle, I have a significant last word for you. And so if you think about what would your last words be, chances are, They're not flippant. They're not goofy. It's not a joke. You're not being sarcastic. You're not being any of those things. Maybe that is you through your life. Certainly was me from time to time. But the very last thing I have to say, but not be like that at all. And for Peter, it's not like that at all. So what are his last words? Well, I want us to do it a different way. I want us to think, this is the second point, pursuing godliness as a reasonable act of service. This is what he tells us. Therefore, recall these things that I've just said. Now, maybe he, I'm of the persuasion that 1st and 2nd Peter go, two letters to the same churches that are listed in 1st Peter. That's what I think. And I've made the case. There it is. So assuming that, that now he's writing to these churches, maybe he helped found, certainly he had significance over and he's reminding them once more. It could be that these things I've written could be all of 1st and 2nd Peter. that could be the case. Maybe it's all of Scripture. Certainly the case is that at the end of 2 Peter, Peter tells us that Paul's writings are Scripture. He tells us that. There are some things hard to understand as in other Scriptures that the Apostle Paul has written. So he could be appealing to scripture, and I, in some general sense, want to appeal to that. What does scripture tell us, and do you take and feel the weight of the appeal of scripture when it calls you to godliness? Do you feel the weight of that, and do you understand the significance of that? But he could be very simply appealing to these six, seven verses that are just above it as well. But we're gonna take it as kind of a both and. Certainly what he's just written and more broadly the scriptures themselves. And so what does he tell us? Well, if you go back up a few verses to, I don't know, verse 6, let's say, he tells us, let's see, verse 3, 4, 5, "...for this very reason make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with I'm sorry, with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection. Now we talked about these things last week. Maybe I should go all the way back up to verse three. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness. What we said there was that over two letters, Peter has done something. He has told us two things significant to our salvation. In the first Peter, chapter one, verse three and following, he told us that we are regenerated by the resurrection of Christ. So we have new life. See, in here he calls us to recall that God himself has given to us all things pertaining to life. He's speaking particularly of the spiritual life, the new life that you have in Christ. But he's told us also in 2 Peter 1, verse 3, that we have these things by the Spirit, and so we have not only new life in Christ, but we have all things that need to be supplemented to make that new life grow. That's what he gets at. but then he tells us in 2nd Peter also that in the doing of this new life that you receive from Christ and the Spirit that you also are united to Christ that you are partakers of the divine nature and what we said was that you you share in you don't become God that would be absurd but you share in or as we like to say we are united to Christ he tells us both of these things So objectively something happens to you, subjectively something happens to you as well, you're brought in and you're united to Christ. And so he identifies you as a new person, a new identity, one in which you have new life and one in which you are united to Christ. We call this an act of adoption. So it has to us both a legal and a reformational kind of sense to it. It has both and. The legal sense is that no one is adopted other than through legal means. You are not part of God's family outside of Christ. You're not. Neither am I, but you're not part of God's family. You are aliens and strangers. But in Christ, he has brought you in. But it wasn't just a, hey buddy, come on, we'll just kind of hang out. No, no, no, it was actual legal document. It was Christ at the cross, taking the power of sin upon him. And in that, a legal effect has happened so that you, as God's elect, can now be adopted officially into because you are forgiven of your sins. You are credited with Christ's righteousness. There is a real thing that happens to you. But we're told that it's not the only thing. It's not just a legal aspect. There is something very reformational. That is, inside of you, something happens as well. You join the family of God. and as part of the family of God, you are to live as a son of God, because you have a new name placed upon you. And I've used this example many times before. When we were kids, my two brothers and I, when we were kids, my dad would remind us that it was completely inappropriate to bring shame upon the family name. Now, whether he was strong-arming us or whatever, he was right. We bore his name. And we were to act like we bore his name. Which the name itself actually is kind of a terrible name, just to be honest with you. But we bear his name. And he, because he was my father and I was his son, was not to bring reproach upon that name. Because I was a Malamasura. And we didn't bring reproach upon each other's names. I was his son. This is what happens to us here, that we are brought into God's family, and we are said, you are now to live as one who is God's son. Hence, the godliness that comes out of it, that it is not this sort of like two-step, like, oh, well, some of you, like, you're in, but you're living immorally, and some of you, you're not quite in, but you're living morally. No, when you're in, the fruit of that is that you live morally or uprightly or properly. You are godly, hence the organic nature that comes out of it. This is what Peter's reminding you of. This is what we read in Ephesians today, that we tend to forget and we lapse into our Gentile living. We lapse into the immorality that comes with when we were outside of Christ. We tend to lapse into the forbidden living that is no longer a part of us as our new natures and as our new identity, hence the reminder. Three times we're told, remember these things. I'm going to remind you of these things. This is just a simple reminder to you. And because we tend to act as those that are simply mechanistic people, and I'm gonna just, Sunday school is already a train wreck, so I'm just gonna lay the hammer down once more, that because we tend to act like mechanistic people, that we tend to forget that we ourselves are spiritual people. And we tend to think only that I have this formula that I have to follow. And Peter is saying, no, you have a new life within you and you bear out that new life. And so your mind is renewed. Your will is now bent towards God, right? This is a factual calling that now in Christ, your mind and your will and your emotions, they are now bent towards Christ. that they are now subjective to Him, and so that we walk willingly in this way. I walk in it. That's the example that's used over and over again. I willingly walk as a godly person. I willingly put the deeds of the flesh. I put to death the deeds of the flesh. Not because it's my will, but because Christ has now invaded me, and my will now is subjected to His will. My mind is now transformed and renewed to the mind of Christ. And it takes place in this way, that we are not simply just given these objective commands as automatons out here, but no, we are actually brought into Christ. We are united to him, adopted into his family, united to himself. And so now, what flows, because it says that you were established in the truth, think about that, that in fact, God himself is the God of truth. It's one of the few attributes of God that is explicitly labeled to all three persons of the Trinity. that God's the God of truth, that Jesus himself is the truth, right? I am the way, the truth, and the life, and that the spirit himself in that same discourse in John tells us that he is the spirit of truth. And so there's something significant about truth to the idea that if we are united to him, we should be people that not only seek the truth, but tell the truth and live in the truth. But not simply because we're commanded to do it, that's true it is, but because we're united to the truth himself of which we draw our life. In this book that I'm reading right now, I just started it. It's called Union with Christ by J. Todd Billings. He teaches at Western Seminary in Michigan. Beautiful book, at least the first 20 pages. He writes this. He says, we would rather have the occasional brush with God's presence or a relic of his solidarity with us so that God can be an appendage of our identity. But God wants more than that. He wants our lives, our adopted identity. We don't append God, God appends us. And our life flows from Him. And so we are to exhibit godliness from and through this union that we have, so that our lives are filled with being a people who are repentant. This is not something that we just do as a work, but it is in fact to recognize that when you read these passages, I mean, anywhere that the law is kind of written out, as I mentioned, that as people of God, we are to read this and we are to be aghast at times. Because I know that I fall short. And so when we read that passage in Ephesians, and it says that our minds sometimes tend to think like Gentiles think, we ought not to go, oh, no, no. We ought to go, oh, yes. Yes. I do. Not always, but I do. and humble ourselves in repentance. This is how Paul does it. It's how Peter does this. It's putting off the old, putting on the new. And so in this, this union with Christ, we are often exhorted in this way to put off and to put on. That's repentance. That's turning from the old ways and turning to Christ and then living out in this new life. The very characteristics that God himself shares with us. holiness, or godliness, if you will, is the primary one. And so this is why I say that remembering is a moral, spiritual act, not simply a cognitive act. That we're told to be reminded, or to recall, or something like that. But it's not simply that we just recollect something. We should, obviously, but that's just sort of like a primary, that's a baseline. But the remembering is to the fact that we are to be godly people, not ungodly people. It forms us out as those who are His. And so how does God do this? Well, we say that he does this through what we call the means of grace. I don't want to truncate things, but that we hear the word of God regularly upon which every week the word of God is presented to you with Christ displayed to you, in which you are to run to him forsaking everything else. But you are to remember God's gracious acts. It's funny, because tonight, this is what I'm going to mention. In 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, Paul is talking about giving an offering to poverty-stricken Jews in Jerusalem, and he wants them to do it out of remembering Christ's work at the cross. That it was the most gracious act ever, and thus our response should be gracious. is amazing because he doesn't just say, you know, kind of twist their arms. What he does is he says, here's how gracious God is. And so in that reminder, let's respond. Let's be like God. Let's be like his son. How is it that he ought to live or we would live? And so we hear this all throughout the New Testament, this call to recollect what has been written. Just two examples, because there were too many to actually write down. I started looking around and realized, well, we could just read these passages and that would be the whole time. Romans 15, 15. But on some points I've written to you very boldly by way of reminder. Because of the grace given me by God, he links that up in the previous verse with living a godly life. Jude verse 5. Now I want to remind you although you once fully knew it that Jesus who saved the people out of the land of Egypt afterward destroyed those who did not believe. The remembering there was not simply recollecting but it was to the degree that they had faith or in forgetting they didn't have faith. I want to remind you that the people who disbelieved, who actually engaged in this, but didn't believe, those people, God himself brought to their judgment. And so while readers often know the truth, that's what you're getting at here, the writer gives a reminder. It's not simply the same old, same old. But it is, in fact, a reminder to the fact that we need to avail ourselves by faith to God's work in Christ. Which just brings me to the third point, and this will be relatively brief. Remembrance in worship, this very thing that we're doing, the medium is the message. We are called upon continuously to remember the scriptures, but not simply the scriptures generally, but the work that God does in Christ in the scripture. So his creative act, his redemptive act, those kinds of things we're called upon. This is why we begin and end with scripture and have it everywhere in between. We sing it, we pray it, we read it, we announce it. This sounds at times a little overkill, I suppose, pedantic, silly, but there's a reason why. Because I want the medium, worship, to be the very message itself that should be shaping you into the conformity of Christ, God's Son. But it's not my idea to do it this way. I think this is how we are supposed to do it. That is, with Scripture. And so it's forming us. When we come in and I tell you, here's God's greeting to you, I hope that at that point, if you haven't done already, that your hearts are lifted up to God and that your faith is now exhibited and you are saying, yes, God, I'm so glad that we are here today together. Because otherwise I know that I could be like Agen or I could be like a whole host of other people that had their earth swallowed me up or that were struck down in some other way. And yet here I am. I mean, that's pretty good, right? But it's shaping us. It's saying that God is present here. But I'm not just saying it, God himself is saying it. And so he comes to us and then he sends us out and all in between the word of God is here. And so the whole event is catechetical to us. The whole event is training to us that we know God's word. We've received it with joy and gladness. Yes, we should read it. Yes, we should memorize it. Yes, we should do all of those things. But all of that is only ever towards being conformed into the image of Christ that we may live a godly life. which he had talked about in those verses above. When we come to the Lord's Supper, we'll just mention a few things in terms of remembrance. But the whole worship, the whole of worship should cause you to remember Christ and avail yourselves to his work for you. to remind you that you are united to Him, that you may live a godly life to be conformed to Him. That's the appeal that he makes to remember. And then he says, and just the weight of it is, I want this to be the last thing that you remember, because I'm about to die. That's the weight. And so this is what Peter has done. He's left us what this thing is called a testamentum or testament. It's his final speech. It's the one that in which he's not disposing of his property, but he is calling upon us to hear his last words of significance and to remember them. But the remembering is not simply a recollection, a cognitive exercise. It is a moral spiritual exercise in which we unveil ourselves to live godly lives. That's what he calls us to remember. What's upcoming are the bad false teacher influencer people of which he's going to remind them that in light of what he's telling them, that they need to stand firm when these people show up at your door. Because they're not godly. That's the implication. They don't have the truth. That's the implication. You do Stanford. That's what he's going to tell them. But for now, it is simply that we need to be reminded that our sole purpose of life in enjoying and glorifying God is that we are godly people. That is a reasonable service to God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we do bless you and give you thanks for the word that you've given to us. And I ask that each of us here would not only call upon your name, but in hearing this word, we ask again that we would receive it with the joy and gladness that comes as your son. And I pray, oh Lord, that you would bless us as we go, that in that we would go forth. to live out our godly lives by your spirit. And so we give you praise, glory, and honor, and give you thanks, and we pray through Christ, amen.