Wednesday, February 7, 2024
May grace and peace be multiplied to you through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.His divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. II Peter 1:2-3 CSB
Finding Grace and Peace
Grace - power to perform God's will – unmerited favor
Peace - the result of the work of grace – inner wholeness
Be multiplied - abounding to the level of every need
The verse above says that grace and peace are multiplied to you through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. Grace is received by faith and obedience. We experience a measure of this peace through receiving God’s grace through our salvation. We place our hand of faith in God’s hand of grace, which He has reached down to us through no merit of our own. But there are people who have experienced great peace in that area of their life but still have great turmoil in other areas of their lives.
Look at 2 Peter 3:18: But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. This is a command, which means you have to decide to do it. Every command that God makes in the Bible requires a choice to obey on our part. That means it is possible that you don’t do it. To disobey is to turn aside from the grace and peace we receive through the knowledge of God. Unless a Christian grows, this grace and peace is not multiplied to him in the sense that Peter is speaking, and he doesn’t enjoy many of the family privileges of being a child of God.
In the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord means more than just filling a pew every Sunday morning. The Christian life is a relationship, not a religion. The knowledge of God is the sphere in which grace and peace are communicated to the soul; they cannot be found outside that sphere. It is, not merely of intellectual apprehension, but rather of deep contemplation; the knowledge which implies love—for only love can concentrate continually the powers of the soul in close meditation upon its object. To know Him is to love Him, serve Him, and trust Him.
Everything Required for Life and Godliness
All that believers need for spiritual life and godly living is attainable through our knowledge (RELATIONSHIP) of Him (Christ). An intimate “full knowledge” of Christ is the source of spiritual power and growth. The Christian life begins with saving faith in the person of Jesus Christ. But when you know Jesus Christ personally, you also experience God’s power, and this power produces “life and godliness.”
When you are born into the family of God by faith in Christ, you are born complete. “…and in Him you have been made complete” (Col. 2:10). God gives you everything you will ever need “for life and godliness.” Nothing has to be added! Just as a normal baby is born with all the “equipment” he needs for life and only needs to grow, so the Christian has all that is needed and only needs to grow. God never has to call back any of His “models” because something is lacking or faulty. The believer is “genetically structured” to experience “glory and virtue.” One day we will be like the Lord Jesus Christ. We have been “called... to His eternal glory” (1 Peter 5:10), and we shall share that glory when Jesus Christ returns and takes His people to heaven. Christ called us to this life of godliness by His own glory and goodness. Christ attracts people enslaved by sin by His own moral excellence and the total impact of His glorious Person.
Christ has given us the capacity to rise above ourselves and our sin. He has blessed me with the wisdom and power of His Holy Spirit to sanctify me in and not just after my earthly experience. Through growing in a relationship with Him we can find the grace and peace only He offers.
For this reason also, since the day we heard this, we haven’t stopped praying for you. We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. Colossians 1:9-12
