FAITH FROM JESUS

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

This letter is from Simon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ.

I am writing to you who share the same precious faith we have. This faith was given to you because of the justice and fairness of Jesus Christ, our God and Savior.

May God give you more and more grace and peace as you grow in your knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord.

2 Peter 1:1-2

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Good day and I pray this finds you and yours blessed by the abundant goodness of our Lord.

Today, we are beginning a study of Peter’s second letter and we start with the opening two verses of chapter 1:

This letter is from Simon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ.

I am writing to you who share the same precious faith we have. This faith was given to you because of the justice and fairness of Jesus Christ, our God and Savior.

May God give you more and more grace and peace as you grow in your knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord.

As we see in many of the New Testament epistles, the writer opens by identifying themselves by name with added words that proclaim their spiritual identity. In regard to Peter, we find him not only communicate to his readers that he was a person who was sent by Jesus to proclaim the Gospel to others (an apostle) but was also a servant enslaved by his Master. Slaves don’t have the personal freedom to do as they like but rather have their lives dictated by the one who owns them and in the end translation, all people are enslaved to one of two things, sin or Jesus. Peter made it clear that he had chosen the latter.

After this, we find Peter stating his intended audience, those who shared “the same precious faith” that he and his fellow Christian believers had. Specifically, we discover later in this letter that he was actually writing to the same brothers and sisters as he did in his first letter:

“This is my second letter to you, dear friends...” 2 Peter 3:1

Who were these friends?

We go back to the very first verse of Peter’s first letter to find the answer. For there, we see he was writing to:

“God’s chosen people who are living as foreigners in the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.”

Peter reminds these “chosen people”, who we know from the first letter were suffering from great persecution, that the “faith” they had was “given to” them only because of “the justice and fairness of Jesus Christ” who Peter identified as being “God and Savior”.

Here, we find Peter making it clear that there was only one true faith and that was the faith given to all those who placed their trust in Jesus as Lord and Savior. It was a faith grounded in the guarantee of saving grace and eternal life, a guarantee that frees any Christian believer to live each day without worry or fear or anxiety because no matter what happens in this life, the best is still yet to come.

In the third part of this introduction, Peter raises up a petition to the Lord, hoping for Him to give all his readers “more and more grace and peace” as they grew in their “knowledge of God” and His Son “Jesus”. All those “living as foreigners” while exiled to their respective provinces were surely in need of a heavy dose of encouragement and Peter sought to get his letter off to the right start by delivering just that.

Tomorrow, we’ll see him write more about this matter.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to TheChristianWalkPrayers@gmail.com.