I'll be preaching again this evening from 2 Peter chapter 3, and I am planning on making this my final message in the book. I've had three. This will be the third one in chapter 3. And since I started this series, my thoughts have been on the mind of Peter and how he was thinking, and exactly what he would have been desiring writing this chapter, and what the Lord intended through him writing this chapter. And so a lot of that has been on my mind as I've studied this passage, and it's very probable, I think, to think about the real person writing the letter as you read through the letter. Before we begin, let me open in a word of prayer. Dear God and Heavenly Father, we just pray again this evening that you'll help us to know and understand what you have revealed to us in your Word. We pray, dear God, that it would be profitable for us. We pray, dear Lord, that you would use it in the way, in each of our lives, in the way that it would be best for us to grow and prosper in our relationship with you and our relationship with others as well. So we pray to your God that you help us and bless us as we go through this chapter again. In Christ's name we do ask it. Amen. So I'll begin by reading 2 Peter chapter 3. Beloved, I now write to you this second epistle, in both of which I stir up your pure minds by way of reminder that you may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets and of the commandments of us, the apostles of the Lord and Savior, knowing this first, that scoffers will come in the last days walking according to their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. For this they willfully forget, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth, which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some count slackness, but is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat. Both the earth and the works that are in it will be burnt up. Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness?" looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless, we, according to His promise, look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, looking forward to these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, without spot and blameless. And consider that the long-suffering of our Lord is salvation, as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written you, as also in all his epistles speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of scriptures. You, therefore, beloved, since you know this beforehand, beware, lest you also fall from your own steadfastness, being led away with the error of the wicked. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. To him be glory, both now and forever. Amen. So, as I said, thinking about Peter, we realize all the time that he had with the Lord Jesus Christ, and a big part of his ministry, or a big part of the theme in this letter that he wrote, was remembrance. He wanted to remember the things that he had in the ministry, in his ministry with the Lord Jesus Christ. And of course, I took you back many times, and I went back in my mind many times, to his failure when he denied the Lord Jesus Christ. And what a difficult time that was for him as he considered denying his Lord publicly. And of course Satan would have loved to hear that, would have loved to use that against Peter and destroy Peter's ministry. But even though he failed then, we see by this letter and the evidence of his ministry that he had a great service and ministry for God. And so many of us that have failed in some way in the past, be encouraged. The Lord doesn't care about failures. Well, I wouldn't say that, but the Lord can overcome failures. Let's put it that way. And so whatever failure there's been in your past, it can be overcome and you can still have a great and profitable ministry for the Lord. And so much of Peter's ministry was remembering his relationship with the Lord and all the things that he learned, and we said that this letter was about remembrance and wording and diligence, and it's kind of been a summary chapter in that regard, because as I gave my first message in it, I said, remember the Word of God, and I talked about how important the Word of God was, that God created this universe by speaking a word, and that's how the universe was created. And then, of course, we compared that to the Lord Jesus Christ. None of the apostles, none of the prophets were ever associated with the Lord, but with the Word, but our Lord was associated with the Word, as we read in John 1, that the Word was God, referring to the Lord Jesus Christ. And then, finally, So that was the remembrance of the Word of God. And then secondly, it's a book of warning, and in our second message we talked about the fact of how the Lord was waiting, and the title of that message was, What Is God Waiting For? And I said we shouldn't make the mistake that just because God doesn't do everything the way we think he should, that for some reason his plan is failing. It is not failing, he is gracious and merciful, and that's why he is waiting. So that is the remembrance and the warning part, of this chapter, and then I think in these verses here from 10 through 18, which I'll probably primarily be preaching on tonight, is the idea of diligence, that Peter desires for us to be diligent in our service to God, and I've titled the message Four Passions, and I'll explain about that in a minute, what that means. So As we begin the passage in verse 10, the passage that I'm preaching on tonight, I think it challenges us mostly to consider our heart. Now, we know that this passage, the idea from verse 10, that the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, is quite a popular passage, a famous passage. There's been many books written about it, and unfortunately there's a lot of poor teaching associated with that as well. And as I explained last time, I think that there's so much when we come to a passage like this that implies eschatology, the doctrine of last things in some way, that people are kind of prone to want to pick dates and name events, and that's what they're caught up on, is dates and events. Whereas I think that really the proper interpretation of verse 10 is just that the coming of the Lord is going to be at an unexpected time. And I would kind of liken this unto what I've already said about Isaiah 55, that God does not think like we do. My thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are not your ways. And so God doesn't think like us, so we shouldn't be expecting that we can anticipate him. And then from last time, where it says, with the Lord, one day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day, Again, I don't think we need to go into any deep speculation about that. It just says that God thinks about time differently than we do, and so we shouldn't be thinking in some way that we think like God thinks. His thoughts are different. than ours. And so we have to be careful in his revelation to us and try to understand the meaning of what he is trying to say to us and not go off on our own thinking that we can't anticipate what God is doing and what God is thinking. We can't do that. We can just follow what he has revealed to us. And so what's really important here, as I said, is where your heart is as you think about this. As you think about the Lord coming, your eschatology ultimately should lead to your heart and what's on your heart. It should lead to relationships and your service for the Lord and the idea of evangelism. That's the most serious consideration of your eschatology. I know that there are certain events and things that we can put in order and discuss about eschatology, but what we should really be aware of and excited about in our eschatology is our relationship with the Lord. That's the ultimate conclusion that we should come to in studying eschatology is, what is our relationship with God? And so with that, we'll go to the four passions that I talked about that I think Peter is trying to relate to us in this passage. And the four passions are, that I've picked out of this passage, is that we should have a passion to change we should have a passion for a good conscience, we should have a passion to fight, and we should have a passion to learn. And so those are the passions that I think that Peter would have us to learn, the Lord would have us to learn from this evening. And the reason I've, I'll explain more as I go along, but the reason I've used that word passion is because so often we believe these things, but we might not have a passion for it. In other words, we might believe it, but not pursue it. And so that's what Satan does to us many times. When he can't destroy us from believing something, he just destroys our passion for it, and he almost accomplishes the same thing. If you believe it but don't act on it, well, then hasn't Satan accomplished something? And so that's why I want us to consider these things as things that we should be passionate about. And so the first thing comes in verse 11b, where he says, therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness? And this is where I get the idea of a passion to change, because what is holy conduct and godliness other than our lives being more like Christ. We have to change, and we have to be more like Christ, and we should have a passion to change our lives and be more like Christ. But it does come in a context. It comes in the context of verse 10 and verse 11a, in which we see, and we've already read, that there's going to be a radical change in the world that we know when the Lord returns. Already we've, I think, discussed the idea that this is a sinful world, and I remember my professor at Cedarville, my philosophy professor, would say often, he would say, you have not seen one thing as God created it. And that's quite a thing to consider, that here we are looking at this universe and we see some ugly parts of it, we see some beautiful parts of it too. but all of it has been affected by sin, and that is quite an extraordinary statement to think about and to meditate on, that everything that we look at and view in some way has been tainted by sin. And I think what we should consider is why this is. It's because of man's sin. Man's sin has ruined this universe. We rebelled against God and ruined our lives, and we ruined the precious gift of the world that God has given us as well. And so the reason for the destruction and remaking of the new heavens and new earth is because God's not going to renew us and have us be new and righteous beings and sitting on a world that's marred by sin. So we see that it's kind of like putting new wine into old wineskins is just not the right thing to do, and God's not going to do that with us. When we are resurrected with resurrection bodies, we'll be on a new heaven and a new earth without the death and decay. But thinking more about the destruction of the world, I think sometimes, too, that we even don't fully get the impact of the destruction of sin and how it has affected everything, that it's affected the world in which we live in, and it's affected the animals. And I'm not even talking about animal abuse, that's a whole different subject, but the idea that animals suffer in this world, they are subject to disease and they die as well. And we think, oh, well, that's too bad, you know, that's a sad thing. But you know what? That's because of man's sin as well. And so when we think about things like that, we see about how far-reaching our sin is. It's just ruined and destroyed everything and caused suffering to us, but then to other creatures in the world as well. as a sad thing, all the destruction that sin has brought into this world. And when we think about our work being destroyed, you know, all of the thousands of years of the history of man, when we consider it, We consider the museums that we have, and we have, of course, the flight museum here, in which we're quite proud of the fact that men wanted to fly, and they made these crude airplanes, and then bigger and bigger and bigger airplanes and rockets, and we ended up on the moon even. And we're so proud of all those things, but then we think about that, that all those things will be destroyed. And I think one thing that we should think as we think about that is that there's not a single work of man that God needs. what has man ever made that God says, oh, I want to keep that. I need what man made. There's not a single thing. And so it's quite humbling to consider the works of man compared to the works of God. And one of the things that I have appreciated, going through museums and looking and studying things, is I love beautiful buildings, I love detailed work in furniture and pottery and anything else. It's just amazing the gifts that some people have in building things and all of the skill and all of the detail that is put into some of these works. But I have to admit, honestly, none of them compare to God's work. When you consider the works of man, the detail and the precision of it, and then compare that with God's flower, there's no comparison. God is a much better engineer. We just have to admit it. And so as we think about that, it's a humbling thing. And the point of this is that We should not be wrapped up in the pride of our own works of this world, but we should want to change and be more like God. Being like Him is the most important thing, and understanding Him is the most important thing, because that has value for eternity. The things that we are learning now and that we have now, they are just a passing thing that will be gone. But we have to admit that sometimes we do love the world. A lot of times we do love the world and that's kind of a resistance to change. We have one foot in the world and one foot in the church and we kind of want to be that to be the world. want it to be that way sometimes, because we are satisfied with the world a lot of times. When things are going right, the world's okay. It's an okay place to be. But we should have a desire and want to change. And I wanted to try to put that in a real practical way, what I mean by that, that we should want to change and desire to change. And in God's providence, I think I have a good illustration. My wife's not here again tonight. She hasn't been here for several weeks, and it's because she has a terrible pain in her neck. She has to prop herself up with pillows to try to get comfortable, and even then she still has pain. And so we've been living with this for several weeks now, and It's been an experience for me and it's, I think, one of the things that shows me that I want to change. One of the things that I've had to do since she's been like this is that she can't drive for a long distance because she's afraid of being on the highway and, of course, being so incapacitated like this. And so she has me drive her when she has to go any distance. And because her neck hurts, if I accelerate or deaccelerate, of course it moves your neck like that, and that hurts her. It causes her pain. And so she has to say, be sure that you accelerate slowly and deaccelerate slowly. And if I don't do that, it hurts her. And what happens is, as we go on, and I'm trying to do this as best I can, is that sometimes she has to remind me, remember, if you accelerate or deaccelerate, that hurts me. And as she reminds me about that again and again, I lose my patience, and I start to get angry about that. What I want to try to do as a believer, as someone who believes in God, I want to try to understand why. Why is it that a person that I love is in pain, and is crying out to me to try to be understanding and gentle, why would I be angry about that? And I'm sure that if I would trace it back, and I'm still trying to figure out myself on this, you know, I'm trying to to understand why it is that I would be angry that she would keep reminding me about this. I'm sure if we trace it back somehow it has to do with my ego. Somehow I think I'm being told that I'm inadequate, that maybe I'm insensitive, that I'm not paying attention, or whatever. And the reason that that's so offensive to me is because of my sin. So even though I should be a loving and a caring person, and even though I should understand a person in this situation and want to love and care for her, instead I get angry when I get corrected over and over again. I get impatient. when she reminds me again. And I think what this tells me is that I don't want to be that way. I don't want to be that kind of a person that wouldn't be able to understand myself and change so that when she reminds me again, it's not an insult to me. It doesn't bother me. It doesn't cause me to be angry. It doesn't cause me to be impatient. rather understanding and loving. And I think that conducting ourselves in godliness means this, means that even in what we would think the small things, when we get angry about something, and this is just one example, but look at all the things that you're impatient about, all the things that you're angry about, and have you ever asked yourself why? And have you ever traced it back to the sin in your life? And that's What I want to do, I want to find out why I can't be loving and why I can't be caring in a situation like this, and think of others more, because that's what our Lord would do. I know if our Lord were here, he'd just heal her neck. That would be the easy way. If he were here, and assuming he wouldn't heal her neck, first of all, it shows our limitations. He would know exactly how she was feeling, and I know that I can't do that the same way that God would. But as far as caring for her, if she cried out and said, I need you again to to consider and be aware of my pain, it wouldn't insult the Lord at all. As many times as we cry out to Him and say, understand my pain, understand how I feel, it wouldn't insult the Lord. And yet we're insulted when somebody says that to us. And so I think the first point here, when we consider conducting ourselves in a godly manner, It should be being more like God, and I want to examine everything in my life where I have a sinful attitude, like impatience in this situation. I think it was a sinful attitude, and I want to find out why I'm like that, and I want to pray to God to help and change me. And I realize that I need Christ's help because on my own, every time, automatically what comes to me is this anger, this impatience. But if I'm truly in the Lord, if I'm truly trying to live for His honor and glory, and if I'm letting Him change me as I should, then I should have a passion to change, and I should be changed, and I know that It may be a process and it may take a long time, but I don't want to give up on it. I want to be a changed person and love people more and think of others more. And that's just one example. You can put the example in your life in the way that you want to, but we should be a people that have a passion to change. I want to change. I don't want to be a person that is unloving and uncaring and doesn't think about others. The second thing, the second passion, I think, that we see in this passage of Scripture is from verse 14. And it says, Therefore, beloved, looking forward to these things, be diligent to be found by him in peace without spot and blameless. We found by him in peace. And I think there's, well, first of all, the context of it, we read from verse 13, let me read that again. Nevertheless, we, according to his promise, look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. And as we see here, There's a motive right now to consider the new heavens and the new earth, isn't there? Because that's what it says. Consider the new heavens and new earth, therefore, looking forward to these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace without spot and blameless." So, we have a motive to consider the new heavens and the new earth, and then somehow that should cause us to have a passion for a good conscience toward God, peace towards God. Now, there's three things, three elements, I think, involved in having peace. We have peace with God, we have peace with man, and we have peace with self. Now, the peace with God, I actually think, is the easiest one, because we just really have to believe what God has said in His Word. And I think Pastor Steve's message this morning kind of said all of that. Do you believe that Christ died on the cross for your sins? Do you believe that He is your lawyer and your judge. Do you believe all those things? Well, if you believe all those things, then, well, of course we have peace with God. And so that's probably the easiest one. And I remember, I've said this before, if all we had to do was love God and dogs and cats, it would be a lot easier. But God wants us to also love our brothers and sisters. That's a lot harder to do. And so our relationship with God, and that's something to consider too, that that is the easiest one, because we know that God understands us and we know His love and compassion. But we also should have a good conscience or peace with men, and that's harder, because man is less forgiving and less loving than God is. And let's say that you hurt someone in the past, Now, it is true that if you hurt someone in the past and confess that as sin to God, that that sin is paid for. But, in the flesh, in our bodies, for this time, until we reach heaven, we are still responsible for the things that we have done. So, if you hurt someone in the past, what we want to try to do is reconcile with them. And if that happens, and many times it does in the Lord, praise God that we are reconciled with people that we have hurt, that we are reconciled with people that we have had differences with. But sometimes, as I said, man is less forgiving and less loving than God, so we can't depend on that, and it might be that we have to take responsibility for the hurt that we've done to someone else. But that's still okay. If we have sincerely and honestly tried to reconcile, and we are sincerely owning up to our responsibility, in God's eyes, He still recognizes the effort that we have made on that front. And ultimately, maybe someday we will be reconciled. the Lord, at least we've tried honestly before the Lord, to have peace with man. And so that's a little bit harder than peace with God. And then The final one is peace with self, and this one is harder than maybe the other two combined, but having peace with yourself, I think, is letting go of things. You've gone through the fact that you know God has justified you. You've gone through the fact that you know you've made your best effort with men to try and be at peace with them, but for some reason you still aren't at peace with yourself. You still have no confidence or or it still bothers you, the things that have been done. And I guess the only thing I can say is that you've got to still consider the truth of the Word of God, and that God wants you to be at peace with yourself as well, and you've got to let that go. And so if you've done those things, then you have a good conscience, and we should have a passion for that. If we are bothered in some way, we should try again and again and again to have peace with God, with man, and with ourselves. Because if not, it can be a passion killer, and it can be a killer for our ministry for the Lord. So we've got to try again and again and again. to have a good conscience, and let's have a passion for that, to have a good conscience with God. Then the third passion is the passion to fight, and we find that in verse 17. You therefore, beloved, since you know this beforehand, beware lest you also fall from your own steadfastness, being led away with the error of the wicked. And of course, that can refer back, I think, to verse 16 where the unstable people are twisting the scriptures or could refer back to verse 3 as well with the scoffers and the false teachers. So that's the context, but We should have a passion to fight and we, the trouble is that often we have doubts about whether we are in the right fight and whether we are doing the right thing, but we still have to have a passion to fight for what is right, fight for the truth of the Word of God. Many times over the years I've prayed for our soldiers, and I've prayed for them, that they would have the fight to will and the fight to win. And that's so important because we can't depend on ourselves, we have to depend on God. And it's hard to pray for our soldiers in that way because I think as a nation, as a whole, we have left the Lord and we don't want God's help. but it's so important for us to still have the desire to fight and to win. And this is in a spiritual context that I'm talking about. I'm not trying to get political here, but we can't ignore or be nice to evil. the nature of Satan is such that he has no love and no mercy. And so if you are nice to evil or ignore evil, evil will turn around and it will destroy you. And so when we consider what we're told in verse 17, that beware lest you also fall from your own steadfastness. Remember you continually have to fight. You have to fight for the truth that you know that is in God's word. You have to fight against all the temptations that that are brought against you, you have to fight for the truth of the Word of God, you have to fight in preaching the gospel, because all of these things will consume and destroy us in one way or another if we don't. So we should have a passion for that, we should not give up the fight. Many times when we have doubts about what we're doing and about the things that are happening, we sometimes give up on fighting and having the will to fight and the will to win. But in the Lord Jesus Christ, we know that we are of His right, and so following the truth of His Word and obeying Him, we have to continue to have a passion to fight. and fight against certainly the false doctrine and fight for the truth that we know that he has taught us. Then the fourth passion is in verse 18 and it says, grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. And I've called this a passion to learn, I suppose we could call the passage to grow and learn, but it's about growing in grace and growing in knowledge. What is growing in grace? Well, I think grace is all the fruit of our relationship with God. So, when we talk about growing in grace, it means the love that we have for God, but it as well means that we have the love that we have for others, the love that we have for service, the love that we have for the gospel, and on and on and on. All the things that God has given to us, those are the things that we need to continue to grow in. The thing about growing is it has to be intentional. If I said, do you want to grow, of course everybody's going to say, oh yeah, I want to grow, but it has to be intentional. If I would say, do you want to do gardening, and you say yes, but you never read a book on gardening, you never watch anybody gardening, you never get a hole and go out there and experiment turning up the soil and planting seeds, and yet you tell me you're interested in gardening and you never do any of those things, it's kind of obvious you're really not interested in gardening. And so if you're interested in growing, in grace and knowledge, you've got to put forth some intentional effort in that. And I think another word on that, as we think about growing, is that we should always want and desire to grow, no matter how old we get. We should never get settled in our ways and say, I've learned enough, I'm going to stop here. We should never settle. There's always more that we need to learn and grow in, in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so I'm thankful for things like the Arbor Greenhouse. There are some people that grow in that way, and it's a very good program, of course. But we know that other people can grow in other ways, by books or online and Christianity Explored, other things. So there are other ways in which we can have a passion to learn and a passion to grow. for the Lord Jesus Christ. And so we should have this desire as well, always learning, always wanting to grow in the Lord Jesus Christ. So those are the four passions, and let me just kind of draw some conclusions, I think, from these passions that we have learned here. First of all, our attitude should be that we have our treasure in heaven, that should be a motivation, that should really stir us up, that should give us passion that our treasure is in heaven. But the charge has been made that those who are heavenly-minded are no earthly good, and that's true in many cases. There's some people that just keep all of their knowledge of God on a theoretical level or intellectual level. It does not change their lives in any way. They do not have service for God in any way. They just say, my treasure is in heaven. And so I think there's a contradiction there. Our attitude It should be that our treasure is in heaven, but yet our service is on this earth for right now until the Lord returns. And if we don't have service for the Lord, there's something wrong. As well, I want to reinforce the idea that the coming of the Lord, the destruction of this earth, should be a helpful and a comforting thing to us. I want to read about the first coming of our Lord, the first advent, as they say, the first advent of the Lord Jesus Christ is his first coming. The second advent will be his second coming. But this is what is said of the first advent in Luke 2.25. And behold, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him." So he was waiting for the consolation of Israel. Now, we might update that for the New Testament and say that we're waiting for the consolation of the church, but it's for a consolation that we're waiting. We're waiting for the help and the comfort of the Lord, and so it should always be a helpful and a comforting thought to us when we think about the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. Another thing we should think about, I think, is that this idea of change. I remember an individual said to me one time, people don't change. And I challenged him on that and I said, well that's not true. I said, people change, but it is rare. So, in other words, I kind of modified it. And I guess the challenge here is, I think we should make it less rare. It is true that we don't change at all, really, in our hearts, unless the Lord Jesus Christ saves us. But then, from then on, we don't change unless There's a lot of work and intent and purpose in changing. And so I think we should make it less rare. We should be a people who desire to change. And I think the reason we don't many times is because we think we are going to lose something. And once again, I think studying scripture, we should realize that giving ourselves over to the Lord and letting Him change us is going to be the best thing for us. And so we should have a motive there to change. And we should think of that as a good and a positive thing. And then, don't remember what I wanted for that note, so I'll move to the next one. Can any engineer here tell me how to measure passion? I use that word passion because I thought it was important to really say that we should be passionate about this, and yet it's always escaped me exactly what I wanted to say. And so the best that I can come up with is this, that if we want to measure our passion, think about How close do we want to be to God, and how close do we want to be to others? That's the best way to measure passion that I know. If you continue to want to be closer and closer and closer to God, then I think you have a passion for God, along with having a passion to be closer to others. Because once again, remember, you can't just have a relationship with God and forget all of your responsibilities. it means we have to have a relationship with others as well. And so we should measure our passion by how close we want to be to God and how close we want to be to others. And we should want to be closer and closer and closer for the benefit of each of us to be closer to God and to help one another. And then finally, to close, I want to close by reading the final words that Peter wrote in this chapter, and just to think about it. that Peter, with all the experiences he had with the Lord Jesus Christ, and now writing this second letter and closing it, and what the thoughts must have been on his mind, but how glorious it is as we read his final words in this chapter. To him be the glory, both now and forever. Amen. Let's pray. Dear God and Heavenly Father, we thank you for these admonitions from Peter, for all that he's learned from you and all that he's tried to teach us. And we pray, dear God, that we will take this seriously, the idea of being more passionate about the things of the Lord. We know that it will be to our benefit and to your honor and glory We pray, dear God, that that will motivate us in every way. In Christ's name we do ask it. Amen.