REMEMBERING WHAT IS OURS

Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on May 8, 2019 under AM Bible Study |

AM Bible Study Group: May 8, 2019 from 2 Peter 1:12-15

Theme: Remembering the things that are ours in Christ is crucial to fruitful Christian living.

(All Scripture is taken from The New King James Version, unless otherwise indicated).

It’s surprising how often the practice of ‘remembering’ comes up in the New Testament. It is presented to us as something vital to faithful and fruitful Christian living. Near the end of his letter to the Romans the apostle Paul writes;

Now I myself am confident concerning you, my brethren, that you also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another. Nevertheless, brethren, I have written more boldly to you on some points, as reminding you, because of the grace given to me by God, that I might be a minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the offering of the Gentiles might be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit (Romans 15:14-16).

Paul was confident that his believing friends had truly learned the many truths that he had been so careful to pass on to them. But he felt compelled to write boldly to them and remind them of those things anyway. He wrote a similar thing in his letter to the Philippian believers:

Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. For me to write the same things to you is not tedious, but for you it is safe (Philippians 3:1).

And even the Lord Jesus Christ wanted to ensure that His followers would remember the things He had taught them. Just before He went to the cross, He gathered His apostles—who would be responsible for passing on to us the things Jesus said—told them;

“These things I have spoken to you while being present with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” (John 14:25-26).

In order to ensure that His followers would remember the things He taught them, He sent His Holy Spirit to indwell His apostles; who faithfully declared these things to Jesus’ followers. These apostles preached these things—and in some cases, even wrote them down for us. And likewise, the apostle Peter—in his tiny second letter—emphasized the importance of ‘remembering’. After stating to the believers that they now have—as a present possession—“all things that pertain to life and godliness” through Christ (vv. 2-4); and after having encouraged them to rise up and build faithfully upon the foundation of that faith (vv. 5-11); he now writes,

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 (2 Peter 1:12-15).

How grateful we should be that Peter gave himself so faithfully and so diligently to the task of reminding his brothers and sisters of these things! How important it is, then, that we respond by faithfully striving to remember them!

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First notice that we need to work at remembering these things because …

1. WE SO EASILY FORGET (v. 12).

Peter began by saying, “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” (v. 12). For those of us who have placed our faith in Jesus, the Christian life is not a matter of searching for the resources that we will need in order to live as we should. Those resources are now already ours in rich abundance by God’s grace. For us, the Christian life is a matter of resting fully on the sufficiency of Jesus Himself, and learning to make full use of what He has given us—building on the foundation of faith with the materials that God provides and in the way that He enables. But we have this abundant provision as fallible and fallen people. We’re often like Peter when Jesus commanded him to step out of the boat. So long as he kept his eyes on Jesus, he was able to walk on the water. But “when he saw that the wind was boisterous, he was afraid” (Matthew 14:30); and he began to sink. It’s in the midst of of the trials of life that we need most to look to Jesus and remember what we have in Him.

Now; Peter said that the people to whom he wrote already ‘knew’ and were already ‘established in the present truth’. The things that he was setting before them right then were realities that they were already familiar with and were already well fixed upon. But as so often is the case, our familiarity with these things is another reason why we need to be reminded of them. We often forget these great truths because we take our knowledge of them for granted. We feel that they will always be there for us if we need them; and so we ignore them and neglect them. We forget to put them into practice. In Hebrews 5:12-14, the writer said;

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil (Hebrews 5:12-14).

Peter knew that, even when we already know these things and are established in them, we easily forget them when we most need to remember them; and that we continually need to be reminded of them and urged to put them to practical use. That’s why he said he was so diligent to remind his brothers and sisters of them. They so easily slip from our minds.

Notice also that we need to ‘remember’ these things …

2. WHILE WE HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY (vv. 13-14).

Peter goes on to say, “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” (vv. 13-14). When Peter said this, he must have been thinking of the very last conversation he had with the Lord Jesus—not long before the Lord ascended back to the Father. The Lord told him something startling;

“Most assuredly, I say to you, when you were younger, you girded yourself and walked where you wished; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish.” This He spoke, signifying by what death he would glorify God. And when He had spoken this, He said to him, “Follow Me” (John 21:18-19).

Jesus told Peter that he would reach old age. But He also told him that he wouldn’t die comfortably in a death-bed. Church tradition has it that Peter was crucified for his faith in Jesus in the city of Rome. And when Peter wrote the words of our passage this morning, he was already an older man. He didn’t know exactly when, and he didn’t know exactly how; but he knew the time was drawing near when he would be taken away from this earth in death. He put it in an interesting way; saying, “I must put off my tent”. A tent is just a temporary dwelling place. Pull up the stakes and it easily falls down. This didn’t mean that he would cease to exist. It simply meant that he would change dwelling places. As Paul wrote;

For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Corinthians 5:1).

And that was what Peter expected. He knew that he would soon depart from this earth—just as the Lord had told him, and would soon take up an eternal residence with his beloved Savior. But so long as he was still in that earthly tent, he thought it was right to do whatever he could to stir God’s people up by “reminding” them of the things they needed to know.

I often think of the men and women that God has placed in my life that reminded me of the things I needed to know in my walk with Jesus. Most of them have already departed and have gone on to glory. Some of them are still here; but have slowed down considerably. Some of them are still going strong; but they’re getting fewer and fewer. We need to pay careful heed to those who God has placed in our lives to help us remember our resources in Christ! We must not neglect those who remind us, or ignore their influence, or take their instruction and example for granted. We must make full use of the opportunities God has given us—through the godly women and men He has placed in our lives—to learn and remember the things we need to know to live fruitfully for the Lord Jesus Christ.

And while we can, we need to serve as the same kind of reminders to others!

And finally, Peter tells us that we need to ‘remember’ these things …

3. SINCE GOD HAS LEFT AN EFFICIENT REMINDER FOR US (v. 15).

Even though Peter would leave them physically, he still wouldn’t leave them without a constant reminder. He tells them, “Moreover I will be careful to ensure that you always have a reminder of these things after my decease” (v. 15). What specific “reminder” is he speaking of? Whatever else it may have been, it would most certainly have include the very letter that we are studying. Peter—under the leading of the Holy Spirit—knew that a word-of-mouth reminder wouldn’t be enough. What’s more, he knew that a similar token would be needed for those who would come after his most immediate readers were gone; and that an efficient reminder would be needed for Jesus’ followers in future generations, all the way up to the time of His return. And so, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he wrote those things down. And God has seen fit to protect and preserve that written ‘reminder’ for us; and here we are studying it today.

It’s really surprising how often ‘the written word of God’ as a provision of God’s grace, is referenced in this tiny little New Testament letter. Here in this passage, Peter alludes to it—saying that he is careful to leave a reminder that would remain after his demise. He speaks of it again in 3:1—saying that in two letters, he has sought to stir up the pure mind of his brothers and sisters “by way of reminder”.

At the end of Chapter 1, he speaks of the written witness of the Old Testament Scriptures to Christ; saying that …

we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts; knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:19-21).

What a great ‘reminder’ the Old Testament is! And we also have the reminder of the New Testament Scriptures. As Peter says at the beginning of Chapter 3, we must be “mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us, the apostles of the Lord and Savior” (3:2). At the end of the third chapter, he writes of the apostle Paul, who

according to the wisdom given to him, has written to 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 the Scriptures (3:15-16).

And what this all means is that God has provided us with a constant, reliable, ever-present, never-changing reminder of the things we need to know in the pages of the Scriptures—a reliable and efficient reminder that remains the same from generation to generation. In order to ‘remember’ what we have in Christ—and to make use of it as we should—and to know what we need to do about it—we need to be in the Bible regularly and feed daily from it. Keeping a regular habit of daily study of God’s word will help us to do what Peter writes about at the close of his letter;

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 (3:17-18).

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So then, dear brothers and sisters; we right now have the grace from God of a brief period of time—called ‘this lifetime on earth’—in which we are able to live for, and work for, and serve the cause of our Lord Jesus Christ. It won’t be very long at all before we will see our Master.

And when we do, we will be very glad that we had remembered the things that we needed to remember—keeping in mind that we have all things in Christ that pertain to life and godliness—and that we had lived obediently and fruitfully for Him by putting those God-given resources into practice!

EA