Again, 2 Peter 1, beginning in verse 10. Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure. For if you do these things, you will never stumble. For so, an entrance will be supplied to you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. For this reason, I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things, though you know and are established in the present truth. Yes, I think it is right, as long as I am in this tent, to stir you up by reminding you, knowing that shortly I must put off my tent, just as our Lord Jesus Christ showed me. Moreover, I will be careful to ensure that you always have a reminder of these things after my decease. May God add a blessing to the reading and to the hearing of his word, and let's pray again. Lord, we thank you for these revealed truths. We thank You for speaking, communicating to us on a level that we can understand, even as a parent will often stoop and speak in a language a child can understand. You have spoken to us in Your Word. Allow us to have illumination. Give us light to be able to see these truths and to embrace them. We ask this in Christ's name, Amen. You may be seated. I think I pointed out a couple of times that in 2 Peter 3 and verse 1, Peter had put forward the purpose for this little letter, and that is to stir up your pure minds by way of reminder. So he writes to prod the saints toward greater faithfulness. And we all sometimes, don't we? We all sometimes need a kick in the seat of the pants, don't we? To get going. We need to push forward in the right direction. And God has provided, through the inscripturation of His Word, a prod. I know when I was a child, my father would raise some cattle, and we'd go to the cattle market, and they had those electric prods. And boy when they hit the rear of those cattle they moved. And Peter's word here is a prod. to move us on toward godliness. Now, the passage we're looking at this morning is a classic challenge to those who profess to be believers. And that challenge is that we are to make our calling and our election sure. We are to make our calling and our election sure. That is, we are challenged to prove that what we profess to be a fact is in reality true. Now, we hold unashamedly to the great doctrine, one of the five points of the doctrines of grace called the perseverance of the saints. And that doctrine teaches that if you are authentically converted, even though for a season you may sin, you may backslide, you may grieve the Spirit, you will not, if you are authentically converted, in the end, fall away ultimately from the love of God in Christ. And so, we uphold our belief today in the perseverance of the saints. And yet, on the other hand, we need to take seriously what Peter is challenging us with this morning. And that is there ought to be seasons of examination, seasons of testing and proving when we make our call and election sure. When we show that we have what we call the assurance of salvation. and that is the confirmation internally and externally that we are indeed in Christ. Make your call and election sure. And it's interesting, if you look through the New Testament, you see several times over where this prod occurs. It occurs several times in Paul's writings. In 1 Corinthians 10 and verse 12, Paul wrote, Therefore, let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. So, there are some people who think they stand in the faith. But they should take heed, lest they fall. And then, another classic one in the end of the book of 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians 13, verses 5 and 6. Paul says, Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you? unless indeed you are disqualified. But then Paul says, but I trust that you will know that we are not disqualified. But the challenge is, examine yourself, test yourself to see whether or not you stand in the faith. One commentator on this passage in 2 Peter said, God's grace does not lead to moral relaxation, but to intense effort. We're prodded on. Some people picture the Christian life as being like a process of climbing a mountain. and there's a mountain of doubt, and disbelief, and sin, and you scale all those obstacles, and you make it to the top, and you profess faith, you shout it from the mountaintops, I believe, maybe you're baptized, and you say Jesus is Lord, and then they begin to think that after that, I mean that's the pinnacle, and then after that, everything else is just downhill. You just profess faith in Christ. You walk the aisle. You raise your hand. You pray the prayer. And then after that, it's just coasting. It's just coasting the rest of the way. Well, Peter is telling us, listen, you may think you're coasting. You may think you have your fire insurance against hell. You may think you have your get out of hell free card. because of what you did, because you walked an aisle, because you were baptized. But Peter is here telling us that you may be deluded. You may have thought you were in the faith when you really were not. And you may really be in the faith, but you may be confused, thinking that the Christian life is just a matter of coasting. It's just a matter of moral relaxation from that point on. And Peter is telling us, yes, there may be times when you're cruising down the incline. There may be times when you walk peacefully through plain valleys. But he's going to tell us as well, there are times in the Christian life when there are steep uphill climbs. that require determination, that require intense effort, that require struggle, that require sacrifice, that require pain. Maybe some of the kids have heard their parents say, you know, they used to walk uphill both ways to get to the schoolhouse. It's almost as if Peter is telling us here, sometimes you have to walk uphill both ways to get to heaven. You have to make your call and election sure. You have to work at and struggle to attain the living of the Christian life. That it is a life of constant readiness and effort. Make your call and election sure. He's telling us if you call yourself a Christian, if you profess to be a Christian, then you must give some evidence of that reality. Believe as Christians believe. Obey as Christians obey. Love as Christians love. And so that's what he's laying before us. The primary challenge he's laying before us. So we look at our text, and we walk through the text a little bit this morning. I think we can break this passage down into two sections. First of all, in verses 10 and 11, Peter challenges the believers to possess what we were just talking about, an assurance of their salvation. To possess it by making their call and election sure. And in the second part of the passage, verses 12 through 15, we get an insight into why Peter feels that he must urgently deliver this challenge. And it's because he's reaching the end of his physical life. He knows that the gateway of death is ahead of him. And this is supplying, this is fueling the urgency that he has. So, let's look at these two parts. Let's first meditate on verses 10 and 11. And that's Peter's challenge to the believers to possess the assurance of their salvation. And so he starts off in verse 10. Therefore, brethren, Be even more diligent. Let me just pause there for a second. I don't know if you picked up on this, but diligence is a theme, one of the themes of this opening chapter. You remember this? We talked about this last week. Look back at verse 5. But also, for this very reason, giving all diligence. And if you look forward to verse 15, what is translated in the New King James Version, moreover I will be careful to ensure, really in Greek it's the same exact verb. It would be translated, moreover I will be diligent. And so three times, verse 5, verse 10, verse 15, there's a note about pursuing diligence. We might even say hyper-diligence. And last week I pointed out how isn't it interesting how we have a tendency to display great diligence in pursuing worldly things. I mentioned diligence in pursuing sports, or recreation, or our health, or entertainment, or technology. But here, Peter is calling on us to give diligence in spiritual things. Our spiritual life can become an add-on, an accessory. Something we do if we have some spare time. If it's convenient for us. If we get all the important things done, then we can pursue something spiritual. But Peter is telling us, listen, we must get our priorities right. We must be diligent about the things of God. And what he's calling back to, what he's harping back to, again, are the eight graces or virtues of the Christian life. faith, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, love. We are to be diligent again in pursuing these things and he says our diligence in pursuing these things will result in the making sure of our calling and our election. Let's meditate a little bit on these two realities that Peter points to. First of all, what does he mean when he says, make your calling sure? What is our calling? Well, what he's referring to is what the theologians sometimes call the effectual or the efficient call of God. And it's the idea, by calling you, he's not talking about your vocation, whether or not you want to be a plumber or a doctor or something like that. He's talking about the call of God. Make the call of God sure in your life to become a believer. All those who are in Christ have at some point heard the call of God in the preaching of the gospel. Sometimes we talk about the external call and the internal call. The external call is what we receive with our physical ears. We go to church on Sunday, a preacher stands up, he opens the Scriptures, he talks about the Gospel, and if your physical ear is in good working order, you can receive the audio waves and you are receiving the external call. But there's a second call, isn't there? There's the internal call. And that's what you hear in your heart. And so there are people who can receive externally lots of sermons. Man, you can listen. These days with the internet, you just listen to sermon after sermon, load them on your iPod. You can listen and listen and listen. You can receive lots of external stimuli. Maybe you've sat in church your whole life and you've heard lots of teaching and lots of preaching. But you can receive all of that and never receive the internal call. That's the preaching of the Holy Spirit, knocking on your heart, saying, what this man is speaking about is true. What Jesus said about Himself is right. What He accomplished on the cross is a reality. What He's warning you of is accurate. What He's promising is true. And so that's the internal call of God. I heard a report not long ago that pointed out that younger people, people who are chronologically younger, actually have the capacity to hear some high-pitched sounds that older people are not able to hear. Maybe you've heard this also. And apparently you have it when you're younger, but as you age up, you lose the capacity to hear a certain high pitch sounds. And so there was a major city, I think it was in the UK, it might have been in London, where they had a problem with young people loitering on certain corners. And so they set speakers up and they transmitted this high-pitched sound so that when young people got together, they would just disperse because they could hear the sound. But older people, people my age, walked by and they would never hear it. It would never bother them. They would be completely oblivious to it. You see, they were receiving exactly the same external stimuli, but they couldn't hear it. They couldn't hear it. We can draw an analogy, can't we, here as to what happens when the gospel is preached. In this case, the call goes out, and it doesn't drive people away who hear it. It calls them to come to Christ. The call goes out when the word is preached. Some hear it, and some do not. The difference is not whether you are young or old, but whether you are among the elect or not. That's why Jesus said in Matthew 20.16 and Matthew 22.14, many are called, but few are chosen. And this leads us then to the second term that is placed in tandem with calling, and it is that of election. Those whom God calls are among the elect or the chosen of God. Sometimes we overlook that word elect. Get a concordance and look it up and see how many times in the New Testament the word elect or election shows up. It is all over the place. In 1 Peter 1 and 2, the first letter that Peter wrote, it was written to whom? To the elect pilgrims of the dispersion. To the chosen pilgrims of the dispersion. I remember a few years ago I was talking to a man who is from Iran and not a native English speaker and I was telling him that I was going to be preaching on Sunday on the topic of election and he asked me whether I was going to encourage the people in my church to vote for Bush or Gore. It tells you how long ago that was. I had to explain to him that by preaching about election, I wasn't going to be preaching about a political election, but I was going to be preaching about the election of God. But there is a parallel with human elections that helps us understand the election of God. When we have an election, the people get together and they choose among candidates. I had the privilege when I was a missionary to be serving in Hungary right after the fall of communism and to be in that country when they had some of their first rounds of free elections and people were going to cast ballots who hadn't voted for 45 years. There's going to be an election in this country in November and there's a lot of talk about what's going to happen with the country, who's going to be chosen to be our leaders. But when the Bible talks about election, it's not talking about what we're talking about with these political elections. Although, again, there are some parallels. The word election means choosing. When the Bible talks about election, it's not talking about men choosing God. It's talking about election in which there is one voter. And the voter is God, a sovereign all wise, all powerful, all merciful, all loving God. And He should reject everyone. He should reject everyone. Because all sin and fall short of the glory of God. And He is so holy. The Prophet Habakkuk said, he cannot bear to look upon wickedness. He should reject all. But in his mercy, he chooses some. He chooses some. It's inscrutable to me. I can't explain it. I don't know it. I know some people tell me, Jeff, because you believe this, you're a fatalist. Or what about freedom? I can't explain it. I just believe the Bible teaches it. And because the Bible teaches it, I have to believe it. Maybe the place where this great doctrine is explained best is in Ephesians chapter 1. If you haven't discovered this chapter, it's one you ought to read and meditate upon over and over again. Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 3. Listen to how Paul describes it. He says, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. Listen to this, verse 4. Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself according to the good pleasure of His will. to the praise of the glory of His grace by which He has made us accepted in the Beloved. Somebody asks you, do you believe in that doctrine of predestination? Isn't that a Presbyterian belief? It's just a biblical belief. It's what the Bible teaches. We don't understand it all, but it's what God has chosen to reveal about Himself, and we're in rebellion against Him if we challenge it. This is the truth that God has revealed about Himself. You will never understand. Isn't it great to see secular people singing Amazing Grace? Willie Nelson used to sing a great version of that. And you can sing Amazing Grace, John Newton's great song, and you can never understand a single word about what he was writing about until you understand Ephesians 1. You don't understand a word of it. What this man was writing about. Until you understand Ephesians 1. Paul also describes these two concepts of call and election in Romans 8, 29 and 30. A passage that is sometimes called the golden chain of redemption. In there, he deals first with election and then with calling, which seems to make more chronological sense because his electing act would happen prior to his calling act. In Romans 8, 29, Paul said, For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover, whom he predestined These he also called. And whom he called, these he also justified. And whom he justified, these he also glorified. And now we come back around to Peter's exhortation. Peter is saying, if you claim to be among the saints of God, prove it! Prove it to your own conscience, subjectively. Prove it to those who are around you. Make your call and election sure. One commentator points out that the Greek word here for sure Bebeon was a legal term that meant to make valid, ratified, or confirmed. Peter is saying, place the stamp of authenticity. Go to the notary and place the stamp of authenticity upon your profession of faith. Then, after this exhortation, if you look at verse 10, make your call, election sure. Peter provides this. He says, 4. If you do these things, you will never stumble. What does he mean by that? I want to offer two interpretations of this promise that I think are wrong. And then a third one that I think hits the mark. If you do these things, you will never stumble. First, I think Peter is not saying that if you live the Christian life, this means that you will never sin. That's not what he's saying. He is not teaching perfectionism. If you become a believer, if you profess faith in Christ, it doesn't mean that you will never sin or you will be able to live a holy life seven-eighths of the time. And one-eighths of the time you won't be able to. Or eight-eighths of the time you will be able to live a perfect life. I don't know. The reason we know that that's not what Peter is teaching is revealed if we turn our Bibles probably over just one page to 1 John 1, verse 8. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. And the truth is not in us. We do not achieve full sanctification in this life. Peter, the man who had denied Christ three times, and who had been forgiven of Christ and recommissioned of Christ, knew this truth more than most. The Scottish minister Robert Murray McShane prayed, Lord, make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be. Make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be. He's not teaching perfectionism. Peter is not saying here that the saint could possibly lose his salvation. That's the way some would interpret 2 Peter 1 and verse 10, for if you do these things you will never stumble. They would say, well that implies that you could stumble and you could lose your salvation. Some believe that you can jump in and out of the Christian faith in the same way as you jump in and out of the shower in the morning. Why would Peter not be saying that here? Again, he would not be saying that because it would run counter to the whole counsel of Scripture. The whole counsel of God. In John 10, 29, Jesus taught, No one is able to snatch them. Meaning the Father's sheep is beloved. No one is able to snatch them out of my Father's hand. And in Romans 8, starting in verse 33, Paul said, Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? Who will be the prosecuting attorney against the saints of God? Who will sling mud at the saints of God and tell them that they are sinners who are going to go to hell? Paul said, it is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? Those are two false options, but then third, what then is Peter saying? when he says, if you do these things, you will never stumble. I think Peter is saying that there is a reward given to the person who makes his call and election sure. He has the reward of living the Christian life without haltering, without stumbling, without bumbling, without limping, without backsliding. Make your call and election sure. Walk, Peter would say, in bold, noble, glad assurance that you have full citizenship in the kingdom of God. John Calvin said of this verse, the meaning then is labor, that you may have it really proved that you have not been called or elected in vain. Peter continues then in verse 11, Peter is here providing one of those exceedingly great and precious promises that he alluded to in verse 4 of 2 Peter 1. And really it's the promise here, we could say, of heaven. of the promise of the entrance into an everlasting kingdom. And so, if you make your call and election sure, you are promised entrance into heaven. We can notice just two things quickly about the language that Peter uses here in this verse. First of all, I was struck by the word entrance. In Greek, it's the word eis adas. And it's a compound word, it's made up of two Greek words. One is the preposition AIS, which means into. And then secondly, it's the word HADAS, which means way or road. AIS HADAS. And the New King James Version translates it as entrance. What Peter is saying is if you make your calling election sure, a way into heaven has been provided for you. An entrance into heaven has been provided for you. Maybe you remember that story a couple of months back about a couple who crashed a White House reception. They didn't have an invitation, they didn't have a ticket, but they just showed up and somehow they were able to talk themselves into the party without a proper invitation. But Peter is saying here that if you are among the chosen of God, and if you have heard the internal call of God, and if you are striving toward living a life in Christ, including striving toward receiving and supplying to your faith those graces and virtues that he described earlier in this chapter, then you have been given an entrance, an official entrance, an invitation properly. You're bona fide. You are in the faith. And you can enter into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Secondly, I'm struck by Peter's use of this word, to supply. For an entrance will be supplied to you abundantly. And actually in Greek it's the very same verb that was used back in verse 5 when he said, add to your faith virtue. That verb add is exactly the same in Greek. I don't know if some of you remember this. It's the verb epikoregeo. And it was a verb that was used, a word that was used in Greek to describe a benefactor or a patron of the arts who would put up the money for some artistic event like a chorus or something like that. And so in verse 5, Peter's point was, you are to not leave your faith in Christ naked, but you are to supply, you are to add these other supporting companion virtues to your faith. But here, Peter turns it around and he says, you should not act like the benefactors, but you should understand that you are the recipients of the largest, of the patronage of the God of the universe. Notice that it's in the passive. Verse 11, for an entrance will be supplied to you. You won't supply it for yourself. You won't add this to yourself. It will be supplied to you. It will be given to you. And it won't be given in a miserly manner, will it? He says it will be given abundantly. The Greek word there is plousios, which literally means richly. We have been given all the riches of Christ. Let's move on to the second part of the passage. And I really dealt with some of this in the introductory message I did on 2 Peter and I don't want to belabor some of that so I just want to call to your mind some of this. You might remember that earlier when I preached that first message I described the whole book of 2 Peter as something like a farewell address or a last will and testament of the Apostle Peter, because here in this passage, verses 12-15, he talks about the fact that he's anticipating that his life is soon going to come to an end. And I believe God gave that sense to some of the Apostles before their death. We know he gave it to Paul. Paul writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4-6. And he says, I am already being poured out as a drink offering. The time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. Paul knew that the end was coming soon for him. And in a similar way, Peter has a sense of his impending death. He knows that he will soon finish his course. And so he wants to speak with urgency. And what if you found out today You had some terrible disease and your life was going to end within a few days or a week. What would you want to say? Who would you want to call next to you? What would you want to say to your wife, or your husband, or your children, or your parents? And so Peter has that kind of urgency. And so in verse 12 he says, For this reason I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things though you know and are established in the present truth. And what Peter tells us is, listen, I'm not going to be negligent in my duty. I'm not going to shirk my duty. I know I've got a short time and I'm going to make the most of it. Have you ever worked in a job with fellow employees where some people were just kind of lazy employees? They clock in to do the job and then they spend all their time trying to avoid work. There's a character in the Dilbert cartoon, I forget his name, but he's kind of like that. He's always on the job, always drinking coffee, but he never does any actual work. And some people are like that. They bide their time, they go through the motions, they hide, and then in the end they want to get the reward, the paycheck. But Peter is saying, I'm not going to be like that. I will not be negligent to remind you. I am going to use every moment and every opportunity for my Master. I'm going to serve Him as much as I can, in every way I can, with every bit of my energy that I can. And he also expresses here in verse 12 that his purpose in writing this letter is not so much evangelistic, not so much to share the gospel, but really for the end of seeing men sanctified in Christ, because he says, though you know and are established in the present truth. He's writing people he knows who are believers. He continues in verse 13, Yes, I think it is right, as long as I am in this tent. By tent, of course, he's using a metaphor for his own physical body. As long as I am in this tent to stir you up by reminding you. The word here for stir can have the sense of to rouse or to awaken. To rouse or to awaken. In fact, one commentator said it had the sense of stabbing someone awake. That is, jarring a man so forcefully that he must wake up. So Peter's saying, you're sort of in a spiritual coma, and I'm writing to you to stir you, to jab you awake, so that you become fully conscious of the spiritual realities that are before you. And then in verse 14 he says, knowing that shortly I must put off my tent, just as our Lord Jesus Christ showed me. The Lord had given to Peter a sense that he was soon going to die. I believe earlier in that initial message on 2 Peter, I took you to John 21, verses 18 and 19, where Jesus had told Peter There was a day when you were young and you were led places where you wanted to go. And when you become older, men will take you by the hand and they will take you to places where you don't want to go. And then John explains to us that Jesus told him this to reveal to him the way in which he would glorify God in his death. And then Jesus says to Peter, follow me. Peter knew that he was soon going to run his course, that his life would soon be over and so he's trying to put his house in order. He wants again to make the absolute most of every opportunity in this life that Christ has given him. He wants by the help of the Holy Spirit to have an impact on future generations through the writing of these very words that we are reading now that will become part of the New Testament Scriptures. Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever thought about not just the impact your life has on other people right now, but what it will have for generations? Have you ever thought that how you live your life right now will make an impact on your unseen grandchildren and great-grandchildren? Maybe in your life, maybe you have a heritage where there's a string of broken marriages and upset and alcoholism and addiction and excess and poor behavior and there's a string that just comes down to you. And you have an opportunity to be a circuit breaker and stop it. And you have the opportunity to live a godly life. To be a faithful man. To be a faithful woman. And then to see God use that should the Lord tarry through future generations to be a blessing to others. Peter had a vision for that. He's thinking he's soon going to die, but I better quickly write down by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit this book, so that 2,000 years from now some people in Charlottesville, Virginia will gather and read it and be edified by it. That's an incredible vision that God gave to Peter. What did he say in verse 15? Moreover, I will be careful to ensure that you always have a reminder of these things after my decease. Was he successful? It's right here in our hands today. We're reading it. We're hearing it. We're listening to it. I want to look at one more word. Look at, in verse 15, the word that's translated decease. The New King James Version, there's a little note, and it says literally, Exodus. Departure. Two words. Preposition X. The word Hadass. Way. Isn't it interesting to compare that back to the previous verse that we looked at? In verse 11, Peter will say that the saint will be given an entrance, an eis hadass, into heaven. And here Peter says he's about to experience an exodus, a way out. And Peter's telling us something here, isn't he, about how the saint is to look at death. On the one hand, it is an exodus. It means a leaving, a crossing over, just as the Israelites left the bondage of Egypt to enter into the promised land, to go to the land that God would show them. And so when we leave this life, it is also an exodus. But Peter is telling us here within the span of this one passage, it's also an eisadas, it's also an entrance. It means entering into the glorious presence of our God and taking up our eternal vocation, the bliss of being lost in wonder, worship, full satisfaction and admiration of our God. We tell some people that life in heaven is going to be a life of worship. They say, it's going to be boring. You've never worshipped. If you've caught ever in your moment one millisecond of bliss or blissful enjoyment of God, imagine that stretched out for eternity and you experience it for all time because you're in the presence of God. An entrance into an everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. some concluding thoughts on this passage as I looked over. I was struck by the fact that, again, once again, we're hearing the testimony, the last words of a dying apostle. One of the old appearances, Richard Baxter, said that preachers, when they preach, should preach as a dying man to dying men. See, every time you preach, preach as a dying man to dying men. And that's what Peter is doing here. I was also thinking about how Throughout church history there have been, it's an old custom and I think it's something we've lost touch with because we're so afraid of death these days, but in the old days they used to really be intent on listening to the final words of men as they died. And we have records of this all throughout church history of men, godly men coming in their lives and having something important to say to people before they leave. There's a story in the early church about a man named Polycarp. He was 86 years old. And the Roman authorities found out that he was a Christian, a Christian pastor. They arrested him. And they told him, you need to, you need to denounce this Christian faith. They called the Christians atheists because they wouldn't worship false gods. And he said, we want you to say away with the atheists. He turned to all the Roman pagan guards that were there. And he said, away with the atheists. That wasn't exactly what they wanted him to say. They said, listen, if you don't reject Christ, then we're going to burn you alive. And Polycarp responded, Eighty and six years have I served him, and he never once wronged me. How then shall I blaspheme my king who has saved me? And he went to his death. We got His last words. If God gave you eighty and six years, would you come to the end of that and say, oh, eighty and six years has He given me, He's never wronged me. He's never wronged me. Why would I deny Him? When Martin Luther, the reformer, died, it was recorded that he prayed among his last words, Lord God, I thank you that you have willed me to be a poor man upon the earth and a beggar. I do not have home, field, possession, or money that I relinquish. You have given me wife and children, and I give them back to you. Nourish, teach, and keep them as you have me thus far, O father of orphans and widows. What if your children, your wife, heard you pray a prayer like that on your deathbed? What would it do for their faith? Just before John Calvin died, he called in the ministers of Geneva, and he talked to them from his sickbed, and he recounted to them First time he had come to the city of Geneva to be their pastor, and he said, when I first came, there was no reformation. All was in confusion. And then he recounted all the struggles he had had. He said, I have lived in marvelous combats here. He described how he was mocked, how men shot guns off at his doorstep to intimidate him. How at one point he was hunted from the city and fled to Strasbourg. How at one point when he returned he was called a scoundrel and dogs were set upon him who bitted his cloak and his legs. But then he said, I admit I have had many faults which you have had to endure. And then he said, all that I have done is of no value. This is the man who wrote the Institutes. This is the man who was the brains of the Protestant Reformation. He said, all I have done is of no value. Then he said, the wicked will seize upon that word. But I repeat that all I have done is of no value, and that I am a miserable creature. But if I may say so, I have meant well. My faults have always displeased me, and the root of the fear of God has always been in my heart. You can say that the wish has been good, and I beg you that the ill be pardoned. But if there has been good in it, that you will conform to it and follow it. As to doctrine, he said, I have taught faithfully and God has given me grace to write. I have done it with utmost fidelity and have not, to my knowledge, corrupted or twisted a single passage of Scripture. Would you be able to say at the end of your life, I have not, to my knowledge, twisted a single passage of Scripture? And then he ended, I have written nothing through hatred against anyone. But I have always set before me faithfully what I have thought to be for the glory of God. Some dying words. That's the last will and testament. The amazing thing about him is he died. He's the most famous man in the city. He left orders to be buried in a common grave in Geneva. And we don't know to this day where this man's gravesite is. Contrast that with some evangelists who build big monuments to themselves in museums. It's said that before John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, died, he said to some who stood by him, I am but sure of two things. I am a great sinner. And Christ is a great savior. And the last words, among the last words of the Apostle Peter were, make your call and election sure. Peter's drawing us close. I'm about to leave, friends. The last little bit of counsel I have for you is make your call and election sure before your exodus from this earth Make sure of your entrance into the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. I've been working my way through a Puritan book called The Almost Christian by Matthew Mead. And he said he wrote this book in order to awaken sleepy, formal professors and to discover hypocrites. He says at one point, many are good at wishing, but bad at working. A lot of people wish they could be Christians. I've done it many times. I wish I could prove in this way. We're good at wishing, but bad at working. He also adds that we may have outward reformation. We may not be robbing banks. We may not be drinking alcohol. We may have reformed externally our lives. But he says it is good to be outwardly renewed. But it is better to be inwardly renewed. Throughout the book, Mead asked the reader to consider Judas, who was one of the twelve apostles. Judas was among the disciples. He walked with Jesus. He listened to Jesus. The external call. He saw what Jesus did. He saw the miracles. He saw the works, the deeds of Christ. He was around Christ all the time. He did amazing things in Christ's name. According to the record of the Gospels, Jesus sent out the twelve and they cast out demons. That would have included Judas. He cast out demons in the name of Christ. And yet he wasn't converted. He wasn't actually converted. He was a false professor. Mead says, Judas was a saint without, but a sinner within, openly a disciple, but secretly a devil. And Peter is pulling us close and saying, don't be a Judas. Make your call and election sure. And if you need to make it sure today, make it sure by calling upon the name of Christ for salvation. And if you believe you know Christ, run again to Him this morning. Run again to Him. And rest in Him. Find your rest in Him. Make your call and election sure. I invite you to stand. Let's pray. Oh Lord, we've been made mindful this morning of the brevity, the fragility of our lives. Oh Lord, it's a brief sojourn we have here before we leave. And Lord, I pray that you would make all of us mindful of our exodus that is ahead. and whether or not we will have an entrance into your kingdom. I pray that we would not just hear externally the call, but inwardly the call. And those of us who are saved, that we would be living a Christian life that would give evidence of our calling and our election. We thank you for Peter. We thank you that his labors were rewarded by you by allowing us to read his words this morning. And being dead, yet he speaks to us and challenges us. Help us to take this to heart today. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen.