Growth Retention

An expository sermon from 2 Peter 1:14-15. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In verses fourteen and fifteen and what we're going to talk about today is growth retention. We have uh already identified that grow is the theme of Peter's letter. He begins with adding to our faith. He ends with the words, but grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is a continuous uh statement there. And so we understand he wants us to grow. And here we learn a little bit about growth retention. He doesn't just want us to have a spurt and then fall back down. He wants us to retain our growth. And so we pick up verse 14. It says, Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ has showed me. Moreover, I will endeavor that you may be able, after my decease, to have these things always in remembrance. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we count it a privilege to be able to enter into your presence to hear from you in your word, and Father, to be instructed by you. Father, we pray and ask that you would just open our eyes, our hearts, our minds, help us to receive your word today. May it do that effectual work that you designed it to do. May we be willing participants. May we not be resistant to the work your Holy Spirit wants to do in our life today. Father, I pray and ask that you would help me to preach your word and that you would help me to point people to you. And Lord, may we be able to grow spiritually and retain that growth, I pray. In Jesus' name, amen. The word remembrance is used three times in this chapter. You'll find it there in verse 12. You'll find it again in verse 13. You'll find it again in verse 15. And then you find it one more time in chapter 3, verse 1. I point that repetition out to you because when the Bible repeats itself, it is placing an emphasis. It is wanting to emphasize that subject that it is repeating. And so I've heard it said it's kind of like God's volume, and he's turning up the volume when he repeats it because he wants you and I to hear it. And uh there's a terrific example of this, I think, in the ministry of Jesus Christ, Jesus actually used repetition in the Gospel of John twenty five times. Now, and I point that out because uh if you've ever done public speaking or you've listened to public speaking, you know that we have idiosyncrasies that sometimes our brain and our mouth don't always work together, and we will repeat ourselves sometimes accidentally. Uh we have filler words and uh uh you know those sorts of things, and those are just things that come in. But when Jesus speaks, he is the divine Son of God, he is not uh inhibited by those types of cognitive issues that you and I would have in speaking. And so when he repeats himself twenty-five times, I know it's not because he's at a loss for words. I know there's something else going on. As a matter of fact, he repeats the same word 25 times in the Gospel of John. It's this verily, verily, verily, verily, I say unto you, and uh it's equivalent to saying that that's a word that the King James translators used that was relative to their time. We don't use it as much today, but it means truly, truly, surely, surely. And what it is doing is it is calling people to pay attention to this and to remember it because it is important. It would be like us saying, listen here, listen up, pay attention. I've got something to tell you. And so we find that that repetition in Scripture is doing that. And that tells me that there are some things that need to be remembered, right? If the Bible is telling me to remember, remember, remember, repetition is used so that I remember, there are some things that I need to remember. For example, Solomon closed the book of Ecclesiastes in chapter 12 by saying, Remember now your creator in the days of your youth. Solomon is writing as an old man. And as an old man, he is reflecting on life, and he knows that as a young man he didn't always remember his creator. Oh, he started off good, remember, with the sacrifice and the humbleness and the prayer. God, I'm a child, I don't know how to go out and come in, I don't know how to run a kingdom, I need your wisdom, God gives him wisdom, but then pretty soon uh he got used to the posh life of the king and he started taking advantage of all of that, and he kind of forgot his creator. And his words to the youth are remember your creator in the days of your youth. I think we'd all agree that's something good to remember. I know that when I was younger, I forgot about God. I was more concerned with what was going on this weekend than I was with what was going on in eternity. And uh, so it's a good reminder. We need to remember that thing. Uh we also are reminded that when Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper in Luke 22, he said, This do in remembrance of me. So again, there's something that God wants us to remember. Jesus gave us this memorial to remind us about his death, burial, resurrection, his atoning work on the cross, really the centerpiece of Christianity. He wants us to remember it. And so we realize that there are some things that we need to remember. Why do we need to remember them? It's not like the things you need to remember, like your social security number. Can I take a poll over here, all of the people that are in the teens? Uh how many of you all know your social security number? All right. Everybody who's not a teenager, how many of you all know your social security number? Yeah. It's a different generation. But remembering, some things, remember, it's not like your social security number, because I got to use that to fill out the record so the government can keep up with me, right? Um you'll get that. Why do we need to remember these things? Well, because remembering stirs us up. Just look at our text again, 2 Peter chapter 1. Look back at verse 13. Peter says, I think that it is meat, I think it is right, I think it is suitable, as long as I'm in this tabernacle, in this body, to stir you up. How? By putting you in remembrance. Look at chapter 3, verse 1 in 2 Peter. Peter again is talking about stirring us up, and he says, This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you, in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance. And if that's not enough, God uses repetition again through the Apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 1.6, where he says, Wherefore I put you in remembrance, so that you stir up the gift of God which is in you. I think you guys probably remember the stir-up message from the last time we were together. We need to be stirred up. And one of the ways that we can be stirred up about the things of the Lord is to remember the things of the Lord. And so Peter wants us to remember these things. On the other hand, I would also point out that some things do not need to be remembered. Some things need to be actually forgotten. God says of the redeemed in Hebrews 10, verse 17, their sins and iniquities I will remember no more. Aren't you glad that God, in his sovereignty and in his omniscience, all knowing, has the ability to not remember your sins and your iniquities to hold them against you. And so we understand there are some things that don't need to be remembered. This tells us that some things need to be forgotten. The Apostle Paul, I think, addressed this in Philippians 3, 13 and 14, when he says, Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Paul said, one of the things I've had to do is I've got to forget the things that are behind. What's behind him? His Pharisaic life, his unregenerated life, his track record of sinfulness and execution of Christians. He says, I have to forget that, and I have to focus on Christ. I have to remember Christ. Think about it. When we keep our sin in constant remembrance, it enables it to have power over us, and so we should forget it like God did. Say, why do I need to forget those things? Because if you allow those to live in your memory and in your conscience, they're going to have power over you. Any of you all ever struggle with guilt over past actions. Yeah, I think every conscientious person does. And I know that I struggled with that greatly early in my Christian life because as I was growing in my faith and I was growing in my sanctification, I was beginning to see how sinful my sin was. In our text, the apostle Peter says these things need to be remembered. These things, this list that he gave us virtue, temperance, knowledge, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness, charity. He says, these are the things that we need to focus on. These are the things that we need to remember. As a matter of fact, these things are so important that what Peter says in our verses today is that I am going to die. God has revealed that to me. And if you remember, historically he is in prison at Rome. He is under the Caesar Nero. Nero is the one who starts executing Christians and putting them in the stadium and uh making sport of them. And so Peter knows that he's not going to get out of prison alive. He knows that he's going to die. And when you are facing death, when you have a time frame for when you're leaving this world, you begin to think about what you want to leave behind. And Peter says, I want you guys, even after I am dead and gone, to be able to remember these things. I want them to stick with you. The problem is that our memory is faulty and it's fleshly. It's faulty. Listen, I used to have a real good memory. I mean, some people thought it was photographic. It wasn't quite that. I mean, maybe Polaroid type photographic, but not photographic, photographic. But I'm telling you, in the fifth decade of my life, I guess actually six, I've completed five of them. In the sixth decade of my life, it is not nearly as clear. It's kind of like when you didn't take that Polaroid and put it in your pocket to let it develop all the way. It's kind of fuzzy. And so I understand that you and I, just by natural decline, are not always going to remember everything that we want to remember. But there's another factor there. It is that our mind is fleshly. That is, it is affected by our sin nature. And your mind doesn't want to think about the things of God. Listen, your flesh doesn't want to focus on the things of God, it wants to remember other things. And uh and that causes us to forget spiritual things that we are supposed to remember, and it causes us to remember sinful things that we're supposed to forget. And so we realize that we have a challenge there. And so today I want to give you three helps for remembering. Three helps for remembering. I'm going to do something a little different than I normally do. I am not going to stay right in this text and just break it apart because this is this text just is remind telling us we need to remember. If you want to retain your growth, you need to remember. And so what I want to do is go to a couple other passages and just show you some helps. How can I remember the things the Lord that I need to remember to retain the growth that I want to have in my Christian life? Well, number one, the leading of the Holy Spirit. The leading of the Holy Spirit. Every born-again believer in Christ has the Holy Spirit of God dwelling inside of them. This isn't my opinion. This is the very teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. In John chapter 14, verses 16 and 17, Jesus says, I will pray to the Father, and he shall give you another comforter, that he may abide with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it sees him not. Neither knows him, but you know him. Why do I know him as a believer? For he dwells with you and shall be in you. And so that's the role of the Holy Spirit of God. We believe that God is a Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, one God and three persons, co-equal, co-eternal, coexistent. And we understand that the Father rules in heaven, the Son is the one who came to the earth, made the sacrifice or reconcile us to God. The Holy Spirit is the one who comes to indwell us, to make application of the payment that Christ paid for us, and to seal us until the day of redemption. And so the Holy Spirit of God lives inside a believer. God lives in every believer. That term that Jesus uses their comforter means advocate. And so the Holy Spirit advocates God's causes in your conscience. When you get saved, one of the things that you'll discover is that some of the stuff you used to do, we'll call it sin, you're not as comfortable doing it anymore. Because there's something gnawing on your conscience. There's something there that wasn't there before that's saying this isn't good, this isn't right, this isn't godly, and you didn't get it from a class, and you didn't get it from hours of church. You got it when the Holy Spirit came to live inside of you. He is God's advocate, and he's going to advocate God's causes in your conscience. Really, it's the only way to explain why Christians do some of the things that we do. We give 10% of our income back to the Lord. Well, who does that voluntarily? I mean, I I can tell you, I if I could get out of paying taxes legally, I'd do it. I don't want to give my money back. But my disposition on tithing, I'm happy to do that. That's strange, isn't it? How do you explain that? Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit advocating in my conscience, saying, this is right, this is good, this is obedient to the Lord. And so the Holy Spirit of God will advocate God's causes in your conscience as a believer. He is there to plead God's case in every decision that you make. Every decision that you make. And so, young folks, when you are faced with some decisions like you're going to be faced with in life, um, some of them are going to be moral decisions. You're going to have God's advocate in your conscience who's advocating God's cause. It is usually the voice of restraint. It is usually the one that is saying, hold on, don't go there, don't do that. It's the one that gives you that feeling of uh that you're not supposed to be going into this realm. I would encourage you to be sensitive to that conviction. The good news is that the Holy Spirit never leaves you, no matter how far you get away from God. He never leaves you. No matter how far you get away from God. There are some people that believe that you can get so far away from God as a believer, you can backslide so far that the Holy Spirit will remove his presence from your life. That's not what Jesus said. Jesus said there in John 14, 16, He will be with you forever. Forever. Ephesians 1 says that he is the seal of God on our life until the day of redemption. And so you will never lose the Holy Spirit, no matter how far you get away from God, but you can maximize or minimize the Spirit's impact on your life. That's why we're told in Scripture not to quench the Spirit, but to be filled with the Spirit. So understand that when you get saved, the Holy Spirit comes, takes up permanent residence in your life. He's God's advocate in your conscience, and he will never leave. But you can mute him or you can turn the volume up, right? You can minimize his impact or you can maximize his impact on your life. It's not that we get more of the Holy Spirit, it is that the Holy Spirit gets more of us. That's how to think of the filling of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes people think, oh, I'm going to get more of the Holy Ghost. I mean, I'm going to stand under the waterfall of the Holy Ghost. I'm not going to have a trickle of it. No, you got all the Holy Ghost you're ever going to get the day you got saved. You got all of him. He is a person. He's the third person of the Trinity. What it means to be filled with the Spirit is that you give him more of yourself. You give him more control over your life. And when you do that, when you give him maximum control, then that equals maximum impact. I heard it or read it described this way. It is like when you get, say, the Holy Spirit enters your house, right? Just like a guest comes into your house. He is in the residence. But it is up to you to open the doors of the rooms to him. And there's a lot of people who want to keep the Holy Ghost in the kitchen, right? You ever been to one of those visits? Stepped into somebody's house, you kind of feel they didn't want you seeing what was going on in the other rooms. And so they kind of kept you right there near the entrance. Sometimes that's how we do the Holy Ghost. We're like, I don't want you to see in that room because you'd probably bother my conscience about what's in there. So we're going to keep the door closed on that part of my life. And I don't, you know, probably don't want to see this. Let's keep that door closed. And what it is to be filled with the Holy Spirit is just to open up all the doors of your soul to the Holy Spirit. So you've got access to every part of it. If you want to go in there and throw something out, throw it out. If you want to rearrange the furniture, rearrange the furniture. Whatever you want to do, it's your house. Not my house. It's your house. And when you and I yield our will to him, he has a greater impact on our life. And he will, watch this, bringing it full circle. He will help us remember the important things of God. Listen to what Jesus said about the Holy Spirit next in John chapter 14, verse 26. He said, But the comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance. Whatsoever I have. Have said unto you. That's what we want, isn't it? We want to remember these things. I want to learn about the things of God. I want to grow in the things of God. And I want to keep them in remembrance. Well, you and I have the Holy Spirit of God who not only advocates God's case in our conscience, but he also brings to remembrance the things that we have learned from Jesus Christ. Isn't that wonderful news? As believers, we have a divine aid to help us remember the things of God. But this is not the only help that God gave us to help us remember. Number two, listening to sermons. Preaching is important. Not just because I'm the preacher, but because you will see the primacy of preaching in the New Testament. By primacy, I mean that it is given a primary spot in the New Testament. Just think about the New Testament with me for a moment. The New Testament begins with the preaching of John the Baptist. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare you the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. That's how it begins. It begins with preaching. And then, very quickly, the Lord Jesus Christ enters the scene. And before he goes to the cross to do his atoning work, do you know what he does for three and a half years? He preaches. He goes from city to village to the temple, from the south to the north, and he preaches. And so the Lord Jesus Christ himself gives primacy to preaching. Jesus calls twelve apostles, and he commissions them to go into all the world and to preach the gospel. He didn't commission them essentially to be writers, although some of them wrote, not to be humanitarians, though they did good for humanity. He called them to be preachers. The foundational stones of the New Testament were the preachers that God called. Furthermore, preaching is central to the purpose of the church. As it says in Acts 5.42, daily in the temple and from house to house, they ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ. Daily, it said, they were preaching. In fact, you cannot read the New Testament honestly without noticing the prominence of preaching. Would you agree? Okay. Why is preaching important? Why is preaching important? Well, Paul explained it to Timothy in the pastoral epistle when he said this. If you, the preacher, Timothy, put the brethren in remembrance of these things, you shall be a good minister of Jesus Christ. Nourished up in the words of faith and good doctrine. Why is preaching important? Simply put, because preaching helps us to remember the important things of God. It stirs us up. Remember the paint? Remember the paint when you've got a paint bucket and you get it out? And sometimes those ingredients, they're all there. They have just separated and they've settled down. And you put that stick in there and you stir it up and it comes back to the form it's supposed to be in. I'm telling you, that's one of the things that preaching does for believers is stirs up our remembrance. It reminds us of the things that are important, the things of God, and it brings us back to where we need to be. But hearing alone is not enough. It needs to be coupled with doing. Which brings us to the third and final help: living out the scriptures. You say, How do I keep these things in remembrance? Well, you uh you follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, you listen to that voice that is ever so soft in your conscience, you listen to preaching. I understand there's a lot of liberty in the Christian life, and I understand that people say, Well, I don't like organized church, I don't like this. I don't know how else to tell you, but God, the Lord Jesus Christ, started the church and he filled it with preachers because that's his program. And so if you got a beef with that, the beef was with Jesus, but that tells me it's essential to my Christian life. I need preaching. I need preaching. And then living out the scriptures. James 1, 22 through 25 says, But be ye doers of the word, not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass, for he beholds himself and he goes his way, and straightway, listen what he says, straightway forgets what manner of man he was. But whoso looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues therein, being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed. You see, the person who does not put their knowledge into action is prone to forget it. The person who doesn't put their knowledge into action is prone to forget it. This is proven in our daily lives. Just think about how when you stop doing something for a while, you forget how to do it. Sometimes something that you did every day. As I was reflecting on this, I was thinking back to my college days and was thinking about the different places that I worked and how that all of those places had a computer system. And I was trained on those computer systems. And so I was trained on computer systems at Lowe's. I used to know how to go in there and look up those items and the prices and do all that stuff. I was trained on the computer system at JCPenney or JC Pinet, if you were fancy. I used to know how to work the registers and look up the catalog orders and do all of that stuff. Uh when I worked for GC Services, that was a credit card collection agency. Uh man, I knew how to get in there and I could get all your information. I could call you up and track you down, do all that stuff. I worked for Associates Housing Finance, and so that was debt collection, but we had collateral, and so if you didn't pay, we'd come take your trailer. And so I knew how to work that system. And I did those jobs every single day. But if you were to take me back to any of those places, I would have no idea how to operate those systems. Why? Because I haven't been doing it. I learned it. I knew it one time. I was proficient in it for a while, but I stopped doing it and I forgot it. This is why we need to be doers of the word and not hearers only. This is why God says, don't be a forgetful hearer. Because it makes the difference. Doing the word makes the difference between forgetting and remembering. The Apostle Peter doesn't just want us to grow in the short term, he wants us to retain our growth in the long term. He wants us to grow, yes. He wants us to uh be on the upward ascent in our spiritual life, but he also wants us to retain that growth long term. What good would it be for our growth to be like a rocket that just shoots up and soars up high, but then as soon as it runs out of fuel, it falls back down. And sadly, sometimes people's Christians grow Christian growth is like that. I mean, they come out of the gate, man, they are on fire for the Lord, and it seems like they grow real fast. And then sadly, sometimes they drop off just as quickly. That's not the design for the Christian life. It is for us to grow and to retain that growth until Jesus comes back. And so if you want growth retention, then it's going to take some help. Follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, listen to biblical sermons and live out the scriptures. Would you bow with me?