As Peter continues this letter to the church, he has clear and sobering warnings concerning the types of sins that we become stuck in and, worse yet, those that we return to. Our enemy is never not working, as the commercial says, and is constantly seeking to gain a foothold in our hearts and minds. So we must also constantly be at work...rooting out small sins before they grow into big sins, and then immediately backfilling the voids with gospel truths. Thankfully, God does not leave us alone in this work, but gives us His Spirit as a helper and a guide. As we read earlier in this letter, "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness," and so we press on in our work to rid our lives of sin and fill our minds with His truth.
ABOUT THIS SERIES: The Apostle Peter wrote the epistle (letter), we know as Second Peter, to an unspecified group of believers or churches, in the last years of his life. He is an older, wiser man at this point and speaks with an air of humility, much in contrast to the brash Peter we see in the Gospels. He has seen over the course of his lifetime how his own strength and wisdom have routinely come up short and he has learned that he has nothing to claim or to give, apart from Jesus. As he prepares for the horrific death that Jesus himself prophesied years earlier, he writes this letter as an exhortation to the church, reminding them (and us) to turn our back on all that is false, in and around us, and to pursue a true, deep, lasting knowledge of Jesus with all that we have.
