(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

Hey, you're listening to Cut for Time, a podcast from Faith Church, located on the north side of Indianapolis. My name is Claire Kingsley. And I'm Dan Breitwieser.

Each week, one of us will sit down with the person who gave Sunday's sermon to discuss their message. Cut for Time is a look behind the scenes of sermon preparation, and they'll share with us a few things that we didn't hear from the sermon on Sunday. Thanks for listening.

All right, Tom, it's a shame. I mean, I like being here with you, but we're stuck inside and the weather is amazing. You are so right.

Let's set it up outside next time, yeah, and it'll be boiling hot. I know. My kids, I was saying, you must play outside this afternoon, and one of them was like, it's too hot.

And I was like, oh, no, you do not say that. Go get your butt outside. Yeah.

It's a perfect, perfect month of the year, May and maybe October. Yeah, I know. It's just so enjoyable to be outside.

So let's do this, and then we can both head out there. So why don't you give us a summary from your sermon on Sunday? This was covering chapter three, verses one through seven, and I love the comment that you made in your message about it didn't tell you eight and nine, like you didn't get assigned eight and nine, which would have been nice. So tell us a little bit about your sermon, the verses it did cover, and then maybe why a few extra verses would have also maybe been helpful.

Yeah. Yeah. Second Peter's a fairly short letter.

It's only two and a half pages, at least in the few Bibles we have, and there's no specific address. So who's it sent to? Well, it says to those who've obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. But my text for Sunday said, this is not my second letter.

So you go back to that first letter, and it's specifically addressed to exiles of the dispersion. So probably persecution is going on. People are being dispersed.

And it mentions Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, all modern-day Turkey locations. The gospel is spread over 30 years into vast regions of the Roman Empire. This is 700 miles north-northwest of Jerusalem, where the church started in Jerusalem.

So in chapter one, Peter delineates the provision of God for salvation, for growth in godliness, reminds us that our faith is not a mythical story, but based on eyewitness accounts of those who are with Jesus. Chapter two addresses the problem of false prophets with destructive heresies. Nathan covered that the week before.

So my chapter starts by narrowing that focus on one primary heresy, which is the denial of Christ's return. And I had really just two points. The first one is remember the promises and judgments of God with the primary application.

Read your Bible, folks. Pay attention to what the Bible says, that much of what the Bible says is already fulfilled in Jesus, but there's more to come. And it's the whole Bible that you remember the predictions of the holy prophets, probably primarily referring to Old Testament, and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles, the New Testament, as much as was done at that time.

So I take that to mean the whole Bible, not quite finished, but quite a bit of it was written by then. And I made some application about how we use or misuse our time with distractions and various other things. You might want to come back at me on that a little bit.

I support it. I support it. Yeah.

Things I said there might have been seen over the top, but we'll decide. We'll follow up. My second point is don't be intimidated by the scoffers who deny the promises and judgment of God.

With the question, where's the promise of His coming, which is what I chose for my title. A couple things, Peter notes that they were driven more by desire than facts, that following their own sinful desires was probably the primary issue there, maybe even to deny the resurrection, which would be logical from their worldview. But probably the main issue is they don't want to acknowledge the future judgment of God on them.

Often what we say we believe is driven more by what we want to be true than what really would be true if we were being objective. And so I found a quote from John Ashlyn Noll, a bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, that I think is amazing. What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.

And that convicts me as much as anything I'm trying to challenge anybody else with. What the heart loves, the will chooses, the mind justifies. And then there is a supposed intellectual objection, and I don't want to make light of the fact that people do have real intellectual questions about these things, and we need to try to answer them.

But they were arguing from the principle of the uniformity of all things, natural law, that all things now are as they have always been, and that God would not, could not intervene into the natural world and natural law. But Peter challenges that. He says, wait a minute, God did intervene, and He will again.

He intervened at creation, turning chaos into order. He intervened at the great flood, bringing a judgment there. And a coming judgment will be a judgment by fire.

So just as God intervened in the past, He will intervene in the future with the judgment and the return of Christ. And so here's where we had to end, but the delay of Christ's coming, which they're complaining about, should not be seen as a failure of His promise, but an indication of God's patience, giving an opportunity to repent. And that's where I kind of joked, I can't go into verse 8, 1 through 7 is all I'm assigned, so we're done there.

So that's kind of where we wrapped it up. But I did cheat and kind of go over a little bit into it's God's patience that explains the delay. Yeah.

So that's pretty much what I tried to cover Sunday. All right. And in our conversation before we started recording, you mentioned that you had a little bit that you had to cut with regards to maybe verse 2. And there are two parts there.

And the second part, we actually had a question submitted. So why don't you address the first part, and then we'll go to the second. Yeah.

Well, I did make that first point really short, so I gave people false hope that it was going to be a short sermon. The second part was a little longer. I certainly could have developed a lot more of what the prophecies of the prophets—I mean, you could go—I mentioned a couple of examples, but there are hundreds, hundreds of examples.

If I just went to Isaiah or just Ezekiel or Daniel or Malachi, they all have so much to say. And almost in the same passage, they'll have things that relate to the first coming of Jesus and other issues that are delayed until the second coming of Jesus. So that's just a huge, huge multiple-books study of what those prophecies and commandments are.

And so I cut that short and went on to point two. Mm-hmm. Okay.

And the second part of verse two says, "...and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles." So someone had texted in, what does that commandment of the Lord and Savior refer to? Yeah. And I think there's a couple of possibilities. So I'll tell you what I first thought and then kind of where it took me as I thought about it more.

My first thought is that, as we're to remember the predictions of the holy prophets, which means look at what they said, pay attention to them that are already fulfilled in the first advent and that's yet to be fulfilled, and then remember the commandments of the Lord and Savior through their apostles, that it just really is the same thing. I mean, you listen to them and you listen to these other, you listen to the Old Testament writers, you listen to the New Testament record as well. Pay attention to what Jesus said.

But a different perspective that I might be leaning more toward, maybe more on target, is that this maybe is referring to the moral requirements placed on believers. Not so much a list of do's and don'ts, but the call to holiness. First Peter, be holy as I am holy, jumps right on the teaching right out of Leviticus to be holy.

And as we go further into the chapter, I think that makes sense because the scoffers are following their own evil desires, and later on after the warning of judgment by fire, verse 11 says, and this is getting into Nick's text for a couple weeks down the road, but since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness? And so there's a major application, not just judgments coming, but this calls us to be serious about our walk with God. Emphasis throughout the Bible, salvation is by grace through faith, clearly affirmed. That's the only basis for salvation in Christ, not our works, but at the same time those saved by grace are to live holy and set apart godly lives.

Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect, Jesus says, wow, but then in Romans 8, conforming to the will of God, everything God brings into our lives, allows into our lives, however you say it, it's all designed to make us more like Jesus, Romans 8, 28 and 29, conformed to the likeness of Christ. So I think that second answer is probably better, but I wouldn't be dogmatic about either of those options. Okay.

All right. All right. Let's circle back to something that you said we'd get back to, which is maybe one of the practical applications that you gave us in your sermon, which was read your Bible and don't spend your time doing these other things, these other distractions.

And I think some of them are really valid. Like yes, our phone, major distraction, huge issue of our time is distraction in the fight for our attention in the first place. And then you also went on to say even devotionals, like why are you reading devotionals? Read your Bible.

So someone asked, would you be willing to share a little bit more on your thoughts about studying the Bible versus reading a devotional? Yeah. Yeah. No, even before that question came in, I was a little bit convicted that maybe I was a little harsh there and I don't want to be, I'm going to stand by my comment.

I'm not going to back away from it, but maybe I could have been nicer about it. I said, not a daily devotional, it's a waste of time, just a dopamine hit to make you feel better. There are some great devotional helps out there.

So I don't want to discourage anyone from reading their Bible and using a devotional guide. What I don't like are the little half page, a little verse in a story things. That's what I'm talking about.

I say, throw those away. They're not going to help you. Although I said, maybe right before you get a bed at night, get a little encouragement of some kind from that.

But there are great tools out there. In fact, I recommend Puritan materials. They're old, they're kind of old fashioned, but they are so rich.

The best you can find, like the Valley of Vision Puritan prayers that I use along with my Bible reading. I was given another Puritan collection called Piercing Heaven, Prayers of the Puritans. In 2008, before a lot of you were here, I challenged the church to read through the Old Testament, just half of it in one year.

And if you want to take on the challenge of reading everything, fine. But then I preached from those sections, something from those sections each Sunday. And we used a tool called For the Love of God by D.A. Carson.

It lays out Murray Machine's Bible reading plan, but then it has just his comment about a passage. But he says, if you don't have time to read the passage, don't read my comment. Read the passage, the whole chapter, and then if you have extra time, then read my comment about it.

And so that's the way I'd say devotional helps. I don't like the word devotional. I think it sounds a little too something to make me feel good, but it's not a bad word.

It's just my pickiness. So Leanne Hardy that many would know from our church, she's written a number of books, novels, but she wrote a book a few years ago called Honey from the Comb, which is a section of really just scripture, but it can be used as for devotional prayers. And so I recommend it as well, not as a replacement for the Bible, read your section, have a plan, read systematically, but these other things are helpful.

So I'm trying to be nicer. I think we all know what you're talking about. There are those that like just pick apart the Bible too much.

It takes verses out of context and you need the Bible. You need the verses embedded within, you know, the whole, all of scripture. And so we know what you're talking about and also though, I have also experienced some really good materials too.

And I also know Nathan loves some of the ones that you've mentioned, so yeah. All right. So I've got two more questions for you and they are a little bit more intense, maybe or more tricky to navigate.

So we had some soft pitches here at the beginning. All right. So specifically most of science assumes that all things, whether they're observed or the natural law, have always been as we see them now.

Does 2 Peter 3, 5-7 address this assumption? I know the passage is focused on his second coming, but does it also allow the possibility that the earth long ago and this present earth could actually work under quote natural laws that could be different in some ways? Yeah, that's a very challenging set of questions. I'll try to address it. My first answer to the first question is yes, I think the Bible, I put the Bible above other truth claims.

It will always rise above in my mind. But I don't think that diminishes the value of science. I think behind the latter question, is there a difference between the earth long ago and this present earth? There are some views out there that maybe there were different laws prior to the flood and then after the flood things were different.

I don't know enough about that to comment on it. My general sense is probably not. Probably they were the same.

But I believe natural law or assumptions about uniformity that preclude God's intervention, to me that's the issue of the passage into what we call the natural world, which is really God's creation, into the cause and effect reality that we observe every day. To say the creator of that can't intervene and do something different, I think that's a serious error. And so I would deny that the seeming uniformity, which is God's grace, that things do follow a consistent pattern, or we couldn't live, doesn't mean he couldn't do something different.

So I think we have to remember that, hey, God put these laws into place. God sustains the universe. I believe God gives you every breath you take.

If he stopped sustaining the universe, we'd all be gone in a flash. If he didn't keep this amazing precision that's necessary to keep it going. I think somebody the other day was talking about the atmosphere around the earth is actually a very thin layer, and if that changed at all, life on earth couldn't be sustained.

So the natural order that we talk about is an amazing gift from God, but God can and will break into that natural order in a coming day of judgment and the return of Christ and the burning up of the earth and the heavens. I don't know exactly what that means or how that looks, but I'm confident that it means a renewal of all things, and ultimately the new heavens and the new earth. And again, I'm getting into Nick's text now, but that's the end of where we're headed, and God's gift to his forever family that everything will be renewed.

And if he didn't intervene, that wouldn't be possible either. So I'm glad God has God, and I'm not, and neither are any other scientists that are listening. Yes.

I loved the imagery from your sermon of just like God taking his finger and just pulling it back. I mean, I don't like it because it's a terrifying reality, right? But it's just, yeah, just remembering that even the way that, like you're saying, the natural order and the way that we're sustained is fragile. It doesn't feel fragile right now.

Sometimes you just lose sight of that. And that really connected with me. So yeah.

Yeah. All right. Last question for you.

It's really easy to believe in God and following God's plan when it's something we believe, even if then there are people around us who aren't. How can we check ourselves to ensure that we're not just forcing the data to support our own conclusions? Well, there's no easy answer to this except to say that we have to check ourselves constantly. And if we, I mean, some people may second guess themselves so much they never settle anywhere.

But I think most of us can be overconfident in our views, in our perspectives. And so we have to constantly check our motives. Is it to my advantage to interpret the Bible this way instead of another way? As I look at the data and what the Bible says, am I making a genuine effort to be objective, or am I just trying to force it into the mold that I've got to have, or I'm not going to be happy? Am I only listening to one point of view? I mean, this relates to theology, to politics, to morality.

If I only have—I've got the Bible as my primary source, but if the people I listen to in the world, the things I read, the things I watch, if I'm only getting one source, if I have one news source, it's just feeding what I want anyway. So I think we have to really listen to alternative interpretations. Do I listen well, or do I just try to prove my point? I mean, I don't want to sway in the wind.

I want to have convictions, and I hope I do. I don't want to change my mind with every new opinion. But at the same time, we need to be lifelong learners and willing to consider our views, and does the way we look at it best line up with Scripture? And because it's a hard issue, it's going to be a lifelong battle that we'll have to keep reminding ourselves, is this what I want, and I'm forcing the data, or is it what really God is saying? The value of the church, that we don't just study the Bible by ourselves, but we have the church to help us to push back on each other.

That's a vital part of it. And of course, the power of the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us. That's challenging too, though, because it involves the subjective side, is it the Holy Spirit guiding me, or is it my own inner desires guiding me? And I think, tragically, we get those two confused at times as well.

But great question, requires a lot of attentiveness to our own minds and hearts. We do. And I think it just supports something that we've been saying over and over again, not just in this series, but just, I feel like keeps coming up and cut for time in sermons, is just doing it alongside others.

It's a projection against ourselves, and for the people that we're with, if we're walking closely with people in community, and close enough where they could challenge us, or question us, and really, that's what we need, that sharpening, and this is one of those ways it plays out, is checking ourselves and making sure that we are, you know, keeping an open mind and listening well, and being open to different perspectives. Yeah. That's great.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree with that.

Yeah. Anyway, it was a great text. I enjoyed it, and a lot of work, and I hope it was helpful to a few folks.

Yeah. We appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time, writing the sermon, and your additional time recording cut for time for us.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Blair.

Appreciate it. Thanks, Tom. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Cut for Time.

If you wish to submit questions to our pastors following Sunday's sermon, you can email them to podcast at faithchurchindy.com, or text them in to our Faith Church texting number, and we'll do our best to cover them in next week's episode. If this conversation blessed you in any way, we encourage you to share it with others. We'll be back again next week.

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