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Welcome back for day five of our look through 2nd Peter chapter 3. As we start
this day, we are going to be looking together at some encouragement from Peter
for you personally to grow in your faith. He all through these letters, 1st and
2nd Peter, has been encouraging us to look at Jesus and as we look at Jesus to
grow in Jesus, to become more and more who Jesus wants us to be.

And as you end this letter about how to live the kind of faith that lasts, he
ends with this very simple word of encouragement. In verses 17 to 18, he says,
"I am warning you ahead of time, dear friends, be on guard so that you will not
be carried away by the errors of these wicked people and lose your own secure
footing. Rather, you must grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ.

All glory to him, both now and forever, amen. " So Peter says once again,
instead of falling away from your faith, God wants you growing up in your faith.
Instead of being on an insecure footing, he wants you on a secure place.

Now we've talked about falling away all throughout this study. Let me remind you
again that falling away does not mean God stops loving you. It does mean that
you stop putting love for God and love for others at the center of your life.

That's what it means to fall away from a place of faith. And God doesn't want
that to happen in your life. He wants to have you instead growing, growing in
faith the rest of your life.

God wants you to grow. Peter specifically says here in one of the great phrases
about growth in the entire New Testament, you have to grow in the grace and the
knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. God wants you to grow in grace.

God wants you to grow in knowledge. God wants you to grow in grace. Growth is
not based on guilt.

It's based on grace. And God wants you to grow in knowledge. Growth is not based
on rules.

It's based on a relationship. Let's look at these more closely. First, you grow
in grace.

Growth is not based on guilt. It's based on grace. A lot of people try to grow
in their life based on some kind of guilt that if I make myself feel bad about
not growing, then I'm going to grow in Christ.

That just makes you want to be farther and farther away from God. Because you
recognize you feel guilty and we always want to get away from what we feel
guilty about. That's the natural human response.

So you end up running away from the only one who can help you to grow. It might
work for a moment, this guilt motivation. It cannot work for a lifetime.

So he says instead you grow in grace. What does it mean to grow in grace? Let me
just remind you that growth is not how many.

It's not counting up how many of something you have in your life. It's not how
many meetings you attend as a Christian, how many verses you memorize, how many
books of the Bible you read this year, how many minutes you had in your quiet
time. These obviously can produce growth, but it's easy to fool yourself with
counting these things up.

Just because you're around a growth producing activity does not mean that you're
growing. So it's not just a matter of how many. It's like somebody who attends a
health club and counts up the minutes of time they're there in the weight room,
but they don't lift any weights themselves.

They just watch other people lift weights and they're so proud of themselves for
the hour they spend in the weight room this week that they have an ice cream on
the way home to reward themselves. It's ridiculous. Growth is not how many.

Growth is in one sense how much. It's how much closer you are to God. It's how
much you love people in your life.

It's how much your character has changed. Jesus didn't come and say, "I have
come to give you more things to do. " He came and He said, "I have come to give
you life, life in all its abundance.

" Growth isn't just something more. It's something better in your life,
something different in your life. So He gave us His grace, not just for
salvation, but also for your daily growth.

He gave us His grace and He enables you to grow and to change by His grace every
day of your life. If you look at the world around you, change seems to be coming
faster and faster and faster. If you look at yourself inside, change usually
doesn't come nearly fast enough.

At least I feel that way. I would guess you probably do too. You ever felt like,
"Why am I still struggling with that same sin?

Why am I still facing that same fear? Why am I still making that same mistake? "
Join the human race.

Just being a Christian is not guaranteed that change is going to happen in your
life. No, it's leaning on God's grace that allows that change to happen. And
Jesus teaches us how to cooperate with God in such a way that you can
drastically increase the rate of God's change in your life.

Not nearly to what you're going to want it to be, but you can increase it. How
do you do that? How do you lean on God's grace so that change happens?

Well, if you're thinking about your own growth, "If I could just try a little
harder," you get tired out by just the prospect of trying a little harder
because you've tried a little harder a lot of times. I've got some great news
for you, some great news. You don't need to try harder.

That's not the secret. In fact, trying harder often keeps you from change
because that makes it based on you and what you do. And it might work for a few
weeks, a few months, it doesn't work for a lifetime.

It has to be based on God's grace. Because God's grace is going to be there for
you to stand on, to rely on, to count on the rest of your life. It's not what
you do, but what He's done for you that enables you to do what He wants done in
your life.

Let me say that again. It's not what you do, but what He's done for you that
enables you to do what He wants done in your life. So if you're trying to guilt
yourself into growth, good news, you can stop.

Instead, lean on His grace today. Grow in grace. And then grow in knowledge.

Now, remember, we've come across this word before in Peter's writings. Knowledge
is not intellectual knowledge. This is relationship knowledge.

This is knowing Jesus. This is getting closer to Jesus. And when it comes to
growth, you need to remember again and again that you do not grow in faith based
on a list of rules.

You grow based on a deepening relationship with Christ. If rules could create
spiritual growth, the Pharisees of Jesus' day would have been the most
spiritually healthy people who ever walked this planet. But Jesus often told
them that they were not spiritually healthy.

They didn't know God. They had keeping the rules down, but they didn't have the
relationship part. Their rule keeping, in fact, had actually become a barrier
between them and God.

Now, when you think of rules that cause you to grow, do you have some like
little pet rules where you say, well, you know, if I read the Bible today, I
know that God's going to love me more. If I memorize a verse this week, I know
that God's just going to be crazy about me. A relationship is something you can
count on with God.

And whether you read the Bible or not or memorize a verse or not this week, His
love for you is not going to change. So you can lean on that love no matter
what. So Peter writes and he says, I want you to grow on for the rest of your
life.

But it's going to have to be built on grace. It's going to have to be built on
this relationship knowledge. Grow in this grace, he says.

Now, by the way, that's something you do. You choose to grow in this grace. You
choose to rely on that relationship.

People often ask, what's my part in this growth? I know God's part. I mean, He
saved me.

He's working in me. He's put His Holy Spirit in me. But it seems as you read the
Bible that there's some choices I have to make.

And if you think that, you're exactly right. What's my part? My part is to
choose to trust in Him.

God has purposely decided to give you an opportunity to be involved in the
process of your growth. And it's this process. As you walk through this process,
many people describe it as a three steps forward, two steps back process.

It's the process of learning to live God's truth. And as you talk to a lot of
very mature believers, they would say, it wasn't all steps forward. I made a lot
of mistakes.

I trusted in myself way too often. So how do you keep growing? You keep getting
back to this place of trust.

So in order to grow, you trust in God's grace. You trust in God's love. You lean
on your relationship with Him as you make a decision.

You're stepping forward as you do that. But then all of a sudden, something
happens and you let guilt set the tone for a conversation. You start to lean on
yourself for a decision and you're stepping backward.

And you feel it. You know you're stepping backward. One of the key decisions in
your growth is what are you going to do when you feel that?

A lot of people feel like, well, I messed up. That's it. God doesn't love me
anymore.

Well, of course He still loves you. He knows you're not going to be perfect, but
He knows that He can work in your life towards a kind of perfection, a kind of
maturity. So what do you do when you feel like, oh, I stepped back a little bit?

Don't focus on yourself. Instead, refocus on God and step forward again. Trust
in God's grace.

Trust in God's love. Lean on your relationship with Him. That's how you keep
growing for a lifetime.

That's how you have the kind of faith that lasts for a lifetime. Let's pray
together. Jesus, thank you for Peter.

Thank you that he followed you for a lifetime. Thank you that through your Holy
Spirit, you inspired him to write these words that help us to follow you for a
lifetime. And we just come to you right now and say, that's what we want to do.

So help us to live with this kind of faith. Help us to grow in this kind of way.
Help us to have the kind of life that grows based on grace that you have given
us and based on the relationship that we have with you, Jesus, because of all
that you did for us on the cross.

I pray for myself. I pray for every single person that's listening in this
moment that personally we would hear from you, "Yes, I want to grow you in
grace. I want to grow you in knowledge for the rest of your life.

" And that whether we feel like we've been stepping forward lately or stepping
backward, we get back to that place of trust in you. Let us just not hear
Satan's voice right now of worrying about the past or what happened or what
didn't happen or what could have happened. We have a choice to make right now.

Are we going to trust in you? And we say, "Yes. Yes, we trust in your grace.

Yes, we trust in our relationship with you. " In Jesus' name we trust. Amen.

on a day-to-day basis.