'But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ....'--2 Peter iii. 18.
These are the last words of an old man, written down as his legacy to
us. He was himself a striking example of his own precept. It would be an
interesting study to examine these two letters of the Apostle Peter, in
order to construct from them a picture of what he became, and to
contrast it with his own earlier self when full of self-confidence,
rashness, and instability. It took a lifetime for Simon, the son of
Jonas, to grow into Peter; but it was done. And the very faults of the
character became strength. What he had proved possible in his own case
he commands and commends to us, and from the height to which he has
reached, he looks upwards to the infinite ascent which he knows he will
attain when he puts off this tabernacle; and then downwards to his
brethren, bidding them, too, climb and aspire. His last word is like
that of the great Roman Catholic apostle to the East Indies: 'Forward!'
He is like some trumpeter on the battlefield who spends his last breath
in sounding an advance. Immortal hope animates his dying injunction:
'Grow! grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour.'
So I think we may take these words, dear friends, as the starting-point
for some very plain remarks about what I am afraid is a neglected duty,
the duty of growth in Christian character.
I. I begin, first, with a word or two about the direction which
Christian growth ought to take.
Now those of you who use the Revised Version will see in it a very
slight, but very valuable alteration. It reads there: 'Grow in the grace
and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour.' The effect of that alteration
being to bring out more clearly that whilst the direction of the growth
is twofold, the process is one. And to bring out more clearly, also,
that both the grace and the knowledge have connection with Jesus Christ.
He is the Giver and the Author of the grace. He is the Object of the
knowledge. The one is more moral and spiritual; the other, if we may so
say, more intellectual; but both are realised by one act of progress,
and both inhere in, and refer to, and are occupied with, and are derived
from, Jesus Christ Himself.
Let us look a little more closely at this double direction, this
bifurcation, as it were, of Christian growth. The tree, like some of our
forest trees, in its normal progress, diverges into two main branches at
a short distance upwards from the root.
First, we have growth in the 'grace' of Christ. Grace, of course, means,
first, the undeserved love and favour which God in Jesus Christ bears to
us sinful and inferior creatures; and then it means the consequence of
that love and favour in the manifold spiritual endowments which in us
become 'graces,' beauties, and excellences of Christian character. So
then, if you are a Christian, you ought to be continually realising a
deeper and more blessed consciousness of Christ's love and favour as
yours. You ought to be, if I may so say, nestling every day nearer and
nearer to His heart, and getting more and more sure, and more and more
happily sure, of more and more of His mercy and love to you.
And if you are a Christian you ought not only thus to be realising
daily, with increasing certitude and power, the fact of His love, but
you ought to be drinking in and deriving more and more every day of the
consequences of that love, of the spiritual gifts of which His hands are
full. There is open for each of us in Him an inexhaustible store of
abundance. And if our Christian life is real and vigorous there ought to
be in us a daily increasing capacity, and therefore a daily increasing
possession of the gifts of His grace. There ought to be, in other words,
also a daily progressive transformation into His likeness. It is 'the
grace of our Lord Jesus,' not only in the sense that He is the Author
and the Bestower of it to each of us, but also in the sense that He
Himself possesses and exemplifies it. So that there is nothing mystical
and remote from the experience of daily life in this exhortation: 'Grow
in grace'; and it is not growth in some occult theological virtue, or
transcendent experience, but a very plain, practical thing, a daily
transformation, with growing completeness and precision of resemblance,
into the likeness of Jesus Christ; the grace that was in Him being
transferred to me, and my character being growingly irradiated and
refined, softened and ennobled by the reflection of the lustre of His.
This it is to 'grow into the grace of our Lord and Saviour'; a deeper
consciousness of His love creeping round the roots of my heart every
day, and fuller possession of His gifts placed in my opening hand every
day; and a continual approximation to the beauty of His likeness, which
never halts nor ceases.
'Grow in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour.' The knowledge of a
person is not the same as the knowledge of a creed or of a thought or of
a book. We are to grow in the knowledge of Christ, which includes but
is more than the intellectual apprehension of the truths concerning Him.
He might turn the injunction into--'Increase your acquaintance with your
Saviour.' Many Christians never get to be any more intimate with Him
than they were when they were first introduced to Him. They are on a
kind of bowing acquaintance with their Master, and have little more than
that. We sometimes begin an acquaintance which we think promises to
ripen into a friendship, but are disappointed. Circumstances or some
want of congeniality which is discovered prevent its growth. So with not
a few professing Christians. They have got no nearer Jesus Christ than
when they first knew Him. Their friendship has not grown. It has never
reached the stage where all restraints are laid aside and there is
perfect confidence. 'Grow in the knowledge of your Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ.' Get more and more intimate with Him, nearer to Him, and
franker and more cordial with Him day by day.
But there is another side to the injunction besides that. We are to grow
in the grasp, the intellectual grasp and realisation of the truths which
lie wrapped up and enfolded in Him. The first truths that a man learns
when he becomes a Christian are the most important. The lesson that the
little child learns contains the Omega as well as the Alpha of all
truth. There is no word in all the gospel that is an advance on that
initial word, the faith of which saves the most ignorant who trusts to
it. We begin with the end, if I may say so, and the highest truth is the
first truth that we learn. But the aspect which that truth bears to the
man when, first of all, it dawns upon him, and he sees in it the end of
his fears, the cleansing of his heart, the pardoning of his sins, his
acceptance with God, is a very different thing from the aspect that it
ought to wear to him, after, say forty years of pondering, of growing up
to it, after years of experience have taught him. Life is the best
commentary upon the truths of the gospel, and the experience teaches
their depths and their power, their far-reaching applications and
harmonies. So our growth in the knowledge of Jesus Christ is not a
growing away from the earliest lessons, or a leaving them behind, but a
growing up to and into them. So as to learn more fully and clearly all
their infinite contents of grace and truth. The treasure put into our
hands at first is discovered in its true preciousness as life and trial
test its metal and its inexhaustibleness. The child's lesson is the
man's lesson. All our Christian progress in knowledge consists in
bringing to light the deep meaning, the far-reaching consequences of the
fact of Christ's incarnation, death, and glory. 'God so loved the world
that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him
should not perish, but have everlasting life.' The same truth which
shone at first a star in a far-off sky, through a sinful man's night of
fear and agony, grows in brilliance as we draw nearer to it, until at
last it blazes, the central Sun of the Universe, the hearth for all
vital warmth, the fountain of all guiding light, the centre of all
energy. Christ in His manhood, in His divinity, Christ in His cross,
resurrection, and glory, is the object of all knowledge, and we grow in
the knowledge of Him by penetrating more deeply into the truths which we
have long ago learned, as well as by following them as they lead us into
new fields, and disclose unsuspected issues in creed and practice.
That growth will not be one-sided; for grace and knowledge will advance
side by side--the moral and spiritual keeping step with the
intellectual, the practical with the theoretical. And that growth will
have no term. It is growth towards an infinite object of our aspiration,
imitation, and affection. So we shall ever approach and never surpass
Jesus Christ. Such endless progress is the very salt of life. It keeps
us young when physical strength decays. It flames, an immortal hope, to
light the darkness of the grave when all other hopes are quenched in
night.