Key Truth: In union with Christ, believers have all things we need for life and godliness.

What makes for a good life?

Introduction:

“The true and full image of God is precisely godliness—communion with God, and creativity under God, in the relational rationality and righteousness that spring from faith, and gratitude to one’s Savior, and the desire to please and honor God and to be a means of helping others.  The true goal of life is to know and receive and cooperate with God’s grace in Christ, through which our potential for Christlikeness may be realized.”

J.I. Packer, Knowing and Doing the Will of God

A Faith of Equal Standing

2 Peter 1:1-2

“The preacher with a Christian congregation is therefore not bringing something fundamentally new in his sermon … At heart he is reminding them of the one thing that has been undeniably true of them ever since they first devoted themselves to the apostolic gospel: that by the work of the Spirit of God they are not what they once were … The sermon is often the moment in the life of a hard-pressed Christian when she can say, ‘Yes, that’s what’s really true.  That’s what I really believe.’ That happens when the indwelling Spirit open us up to what the Spirit is saying and doing through the word being preached to us.”

Timothy Ward, Words of Life: Scripture as the Living and Active Word of God

By His Own Glory and Excellence

2 Peter 1:3-4

“Now would to God, all cold-blooded, faint-hearted soldiers of Christ would look again to Jesus and to His love; and when they look, I would have them to look again and again, and fill themselves with beholding of Christ’s beauty…come further in on Christ, and see a new treasure in Him: come in, and look down, and see angels’ wonder, and heaven and earth’s wonder of love, sweetness, majesty, and excellency in Him.”

Samuel Rutherford, Selected Letters

Whom do you admire?
What characteristics cause your admiration?  
In what ways have you noticed your admiration for Christ grow through the means of grace?  

2 Peter 1:1-4 teaches us that:

- In union with Christ, believers have all things we need for life and godliness.

Benediction

2 Peter 3:17-18