The Call
II Peter 1:3-4 & Mark 1:14-20
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The person who wrote II Peter knew a lot about failure, this is the Peter who told Jesus that his plan to go to Jerusalem and face crucifixion was potty, this is the man who promised he would die for Christ and who bottled out when a young girl challenged him. By the time he had finished, Peter was almost ashamed to look Jesus in the eye. As an expert in failure, Peter has something very important to teach us:
His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. [1]
Peter the failure discovered by personal experience that God gives all the resources we need to life a godly life (that is, to make a decent fist of living as a Christian) and he wants us to understand this and draw confidence from it. From time to time I meet someone who tells me that they cannot become a Christian because they know that they will find it impossible to keep the Christian life going. They do not want to start because they know that they will fail. Let me tell you that i f you want to become a follower of Jesus then you will fail – but God in his amazing generosity is committed to provide you with all the resources you need to get through in the end.
It is a promise!
What this series is about
During the next few weeks we are going to examine this short passage in II Peter very closely because it gives us a superb insight into what it means to make real progress in Christian living. We are going to use Peter’s life and writings to illustrate and fill out the teaching of this passage. This first-century disciple of Jesus is going to help us twenty-first century disciples to grow,
But if I were to ask you the question, “What is a disciple”, you may find it difficult to define, it is a word that we don’t use much today. It would be better to talk about apprentices because that is closer to what Jesus did. Disciples lived with their teacher, they watched and listened to him; he gave them a practical as well as a theoretical training. This was more than you could get just by reading a book; being a disciple involves being in relationship with a person. An apprentice does exactly that.
In due course I want to tell you how you can discover the relational side of being a disciple and restore that to your own development as an apprentice of Jesus.
Watch this space!
The Call – how to become a disciple
Here is how Peter puts it: he says that God has called us (3). It is best to see what this looks like in Peter’s own experience:
Mark 1:14-20
This is how Peter remembered his decision to follow Jesus [2] . But the other gospel writers tell us that there was more to it than this brief summary. From them, we know that Jesus was becoming well known in Galilee, and was staying with Peter’s family as a house guest. Peter had seen Jesus do several miracles before this dramatic and sudden call to leave everything and follow him. Before this moment Peter had a profound respect for Jesus but that is as far as it went.
Years later in Rome, dictating his memoirs of Jesus’ life to Mark, Peter remembers that Jesus eventually challenged him in a way that he could not ignore or refuse (16-17). That was the moment Peter left his old life behind and began his apprenticeship with Christ. Mark left out the background to this and cut straight to the challenge – it is his way of telling us that real discipleship begins with a moment of conversion.
It is possible that you have been on a spiritual journey that has brought you to the point where you respect Jesus – he is impressive and you can’t ignore him. You are rather hoping that being with his disciples will give you what you need and don’t see the point of making a big fuss about commitment or conversion. Can I challenge you about that?
In the UK when we learn to drive we put red ‘L’ plates on the car to indicate that we are learning and have not yet passed our test. Once we are through the test we are allowed to drive solo, but some people continue to wear ‘L’ plates to indicate that they are still learning the basics, only now the ‘L’ plates are green. If you have been learning about Jesus these last few months I want to invite you to swap the red ‘L’ plates for green ones – respond to his challenge to decide to be his apprentice.
Once you start on this road you begin to make mistakes. Peter knew this very well and the fascinating thing is that he told Mark all about them – maybe it went something like this:
“There was the time we got really annoyed at Jesus for not turning up at a meeting – we didn’t realize that prayer was the source of his power” [3] .
“And there was that time in Caesarea when Jesus outlined his plans to go to Jerusalem and I tried to stop him”. “Do you know what he said, Mark? ‘Get away from me Satan!’ how would you feel about that?” [4]
“On the mountain way up in the north, when the curtain between heaven and earth seemed to melt away and Jesus was transfigured. I had no idea what was going on, Mark, no idea at all!” [5] “Do you know, we even argued amongst ourselves about which of us was Jesus best disciple!” “That kind of pride didn’t stop us all running away when the going got really tough” [6] .
One of the reasons that I am quite convinced about the integrity of the gospels account of the life of Jesus is the way those first disciples resisted the temptation to present themselves in a good light – if anything they did the opposite!
So Peter, the expert in failure, tells us this:
His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. [7]
He calls you, not to be perfect, but to be his apprentice. Put on the green ‘L’ plates and drive off.
The Promise – the thing that keeps us going
It is common sense. If you are going to commit yourself to someone as his apprentice then the end result had better be worth it, before investing your life you need to know where this is leading. So what is promised, what is in store?
When Peter was challenged Jesus told him that “The time has come, the Kingdom of God is near”. That was a promise: the invasion had begun.
Back in 1941 most of Europe was conquered by the Nazi party. Millions of Jews were being persecuted; anyone who didn’t think like the Nazis was persecuted. Museums were emptied and treasuries stripped, life was cheap. During 1942 and 43 the people of the occupied nations wondered when it would end; how would this evil be challenged and removed? Then one morning in June 1944 the people of Normandy looked out to sea and all they could see was ships – hundreds of thousands of men pouring onto the beaches. By the end of the day those soldiers had established their presence – they were there to stay. The war was not over but the invasion had begun.
That phrase that Jesus loved to use so much, “The Kingdom of God” contains all the promises that God has given his people throughout the centuries:
The promise that the Satan’s dominion of darkness would be challenged and destroyed by a kingdom of love.
The promise that David’s ancient dynasty would last forever and that a righteous king would reign upon his throne
The promise that the wickedness in our own hearts will be forgiven and flushed out, and that a new humanity would emerge that is responsive to the commands of the king.
The promise that there will, one day, be a new heaven and a new earth; the home of righteousness.
This is what Peter means when he writes about “his rich and wonderful promises” - you haven’t seen anything yet.
You haven’t seen anything yet.
But when you look in a mirror what do you see? If you are an apprentice of Jesus what you see is nothing like what you will one day become. Peter focuses on one specific promise in these few verses – we are going to do the same – the promise that you and I are destined to “share in his divine nature” (see 3b and 4b). This is a big subject and you will need to concentrate!
What does it mean to share in the divine nature? Well, if you gather together all the information the Bible contains about God and make a huge list of those things that are his nature – the way God is – you make some interesting discoveries.
God is independent – he doesn’t need you or me to sustain him – he just is. He never changes; he is utterly dependable and constant. He is infinite; he has no beginning and no end; he is timeless and sees every event in history equally vividly and he is omnipresent – he is everywhere all the time! [8]
All those aspects of God’s nature are unique to him and can never be shared with anyone – much less with finite human beings like us. But that is not the whole story.
God is also spirit, and he is wise and truthful. He is good and he is full of love, he loves justice and he becomes angry when justice is not done. God is perfect and beautiful and he is glorious. All these aspects of God’s nature can be shared with us and he intends to share them [9] .
The purpose of becoming an apprentice of Jesus is so that we can learn how to be as wise and truthful as he is, so that we can be full of love and goodness just as he is. By following Jesus we learn to control our sinful anger but we learn to love justice so that we become righteously angry when justice is not done.
Look at yourself in the mirror. If you are an apprentice of Jesus then one day it will be impossible for mere humans to look at you because God intends that you will eventually be as beautiful and glorious as he is.
Now according to Peter, these are the promised that keep him going – they are part of the resources God has given us to life a godly life. A disciple has a hope and a future – put the green ‘L’ plates on and drive purposefully into the future, you are going somewhere!
The Great Escape – where we have come from
If the journey turns out to be arduous, there will be times when you will ask yourself the question, “Is the effort worth it, why don’t I just stay where I am?” Peter didn’t regard that as an option (4) calling our society decadent and evil.
We may find this sort of language exaggerated and a bit embarrassing. Surely our world is not as bad as that? Our problem is that we have grown up with the evil and decadence all around us – it seems as normal and as acceptable as the smog used to seem in Victorian London. A second look may convince you otherwise.
Look at the people we admire. I am old enough to remember the Great Train Robbery when a train driver was knocked senseless by a team of thieves. Most of those thugs became folk heroes – especially Ronnie Biggs who later escaped justice by fleeing to Brazil. That is the kind of society we are. That is why, when a young person is given and ASBO [10] he is greeted as a hero by his friends. Shameful behaviour is regarded as a badge of honour.
It is not just street kids who behave like this. Our culture is in love with people who live overtly sleazy lives – people like Kate Moss or Amy Winehouse whose drug-taking habits provide the profits that reward the gangsters. Do we admire these people because we would love to live like them if only we had the money, or the courage? When you buy their products you are, in part, fueling their evil. [11]
Of course, none of us likes to be included in this analysis of human decadence. We stand aloof and condemn those whose lives are conspicuously adrift – we are not like them!
Once more, the Bible is devastating in dealing with this Daily Mail mentality, this false sense righteousness. That is why Paul wrote Romans chapter 2:
You may think you can condemn such people, but you are just as bad, and you have no excuse! When you say they are wicked and should be punished, you are condemning yourself, for you who judge others do these very same things. And we know that God, in his justice, will punish anyone who does such things. [12]
We are all smeared with the decadence and evil we grew up with – so Peter tells us to escape from it and choose a new kind of life which is inspired by the example of Jesus and fueled by the promises of God.
If you are going to be an apprentice to Jesus then you need to be clear: you and I are living in an evil and decadent world – a disciple is someone who has responded to God’s call to escape from it and who is sustained by his promise that the invasion has begun – one day the war will be over!
Sounds good? Time to choose!
[1] II Peter 1:3 – New Living Translation
[2] According to an early Christian writer, Peter wrote his personal memories of Jesus down with the help of Mark – this became Mark’s gospel
[3] Mark 1:35-37
[4] Mark 8:31-33
[5] Mark 9:2-6
[6] Mark 15:66-72
[7] II Peter 1:3 – New Living Translation
[8] Theologians call these aspects of God’s nature his incommunicable attributes – the ways in which God is different from us. There is a great chapter on them in Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem, IVP, ISBN 0-85110-652-8
[9] These are called his communicable attributes – the ways in which we can be like God – Grudem is good on this too.
[10] Anti Social Behaviour Order – a controversial means of dealing with people who are a nuisance in the UK
[11] That’s why Amy Winehouse’s partner’s parents recently appealed to the nation not to buy her records – an appeal that was met with derision by our decadent and evil society.
[12] Romans 2:1-2 – New Living Translation