2 PETER+—An Illustrated Summary of Life Applications from Every Chapter of the Bible by G. Campbell Morgan

"On every page of the God-breathed writings are many thoughts that stretch out like long, clear arms of light across the darkness, discovering things otherwise hidden and illuminating wider areas than those of the immediate context. They are searchlights. I have selected one in each chapter of Scripture, for at least one central thought in every chapter should arrest the mind and affect the life," wrote G. Campbell Morgan, a skilled, wise, warm-hearted Bible teacher who conducted a classic 3-year study called Life Applications from Every Chapter of the Bible. Here is the fruit of that research—summarized, illustrated, and amplified with useful details—on all 66 books of the Bible.

GENESIS, EXODUS, LEVITICUS, NUMBERS, 

DEUTERONOMY, JOSHUA, JUDGES, RUTH, 

1 SAMUEL, 2 SAMUEL, 1 KINGS,  2 KINGS, 

1 CHRONICLES, 2 CHRONICLES, EZRA, 

NEHEMIAH, ESTHER, JOB, PSALMS, 

PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES, 

SONG OF SOLOMON,  ISAIAH, JEREMIAH,

 LAMENTATIONS, EZEKIEL, DANIEL, 

HOSEA, JOEL, AMOS, OBADIAH, JONAH, 

MICAH, NAHUM, HABAKKUK, ZEPHANIAH,  

HAGGAI, ZECHARIAH, MALACHI,

 MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE, JOHN, 

ACTS, ROMANS, 1 CORINTHIANS,

2 CORINTHIANS, GALATIANS, EPHESIANS, 

PHILIPPIANS, COLOSSIANS, 1 THESSALONIANS,

2 THESSALONIANS, 1 TIMOTHY,  2 TIMOTHY, TITUS,

PHILEMON, HEBREWS, JAMES, 1 PETER, 2 PETER,

1 JOHN, 2 JOHN, 3 JOHN, JUDE, REVELATION

2 Peter 1:9 "Whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins." Second Peter is the second of two letters the apostle Peter wrote. He begins with this astonishing reality for all true believers in the Lord Jesus Christ: "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness ... by which He has granted to us His precious and very great promises so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature" (verses 3-4). That is God's part in our sanctification, or progressive holiness and Christ-likeness. This is what Peter says about our part: "Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue ... knowledge ... self-control ... steadfastness ... godliness ... and brotherly affection with love" (verses 5-7). The verse highlighted above is a graphic description of the spiritual condition of a Christian who fails to advance as Peter outlines. The condition, thankfully, is not total blindness, but a serious form of nearsightedness. Such a person sees what is immediately before him or her, but fails to recall what is eternal. He focuses on himself but not on God. He has "forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins," which means he has failed to respond to the enlargement of life and vision that came to him when he received the cleansing of his nature at the beginning of his Christian life. The cure for this nearsightedness, Peter says, is to "be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities," the aforementioned virtues that characterize our Savior, who purchased our forgiveness, "you will never fall. For in this way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" (verses 10-11). High levels of assurance rightly accompany high levels of obedience rooted in God's grace.

2 Peter 2:19 "They promise freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. Whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved." This entire chapter is a serious warning about false prophets or teachers who promise freedom, but cannot deliver. This verse explains why they cannot. The apostle Paul says something similar here: "Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?" (Romans 6:16). It is a truth mankind is slow to believe because it means that the freedom of the will is strictly limited. I am free to choose my master. I am not free when I have chosen. I become the servant of that master. A man or woman may choose to yield to temptation and sin, but in doing so he or she becomes the servant of that sin. It is impossible for anyone to treat sin as completely under his control, to be either indulged in or set aside at will. Yielding is yielding and that means submission, the bending of the neck, and being compelled to obey the commands of sin. The only way to freedom from the mastery of sin is escape through submission to Christ, and that submission must be more than an act, but instead an attitude maintained by steady action. Otherwise, to quote Peter, those who superficially profess faith in Christ but are again entangled in the defilements of the world, "the last state has become worse for them than the first. It would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them" (verses 20-21).  This truth humbles the soul and leaves no room for pride of will. When we recognize and obey it, however, we will remain free from the dominion of sin. Abandoning ourselves to the Lord delivers us from the power of sin, but in no other way shall we be anything other than slaves of sin.

2 Peter 3:8 "Do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." Peter concludes his final letter with a challenge to Christians of all times and places to rethink how we think about time. We basically need to cancel the time element when contemplating the ways and works of God. Time is as nothing to God. We become hurried and flustered because we have only a day in which to do something. God has no such unrest, for in our small one day He is able to accomplish things we could only hope to do in a thousand years. On the other hand, we look down on the long time that must elapse before things can happen that we earnestly desire, but to God a thousand-year wait is as a day in passing. Throughout this chapter Peter has been talking about the imminent return of our Lord Jesus Christ. People today tend to declare either that the promised return is false because about 2,000 years have passed since the promise was made or that He who made it is not acting as speedily as He might. But when we look at time from the Lord's perspective, thanks to Peter's clarity, we see that the purposes of God are so vast that their working out in human experience must take place at what He deems to be the optimum point in our time. On the other hand, His power is such that if and when He will, things can be done in the "twinkling of an eye" that will revolutionize all life, something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. To let Peter have the last word, "What sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to His promise we are waiting for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells" (verses 11-13). Meanwhile, "grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity" (verse 18).

Read All the Applications for Yourself!

Sexual Morality—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

These Kinds of Things Change

On this delicate topic C.S. Lewis carefully defines the key terms: "The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of 'modesty'... i.e. propriety, or decency .. .how much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to, and in what words.... While the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes.... When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so ... to excite lust ... then they are offending against chastity. But if they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of bad manners. When, as often happens, they break it defiantly ... to shock or embarrass others, they are not necessarily being unchaste, but they are being uncharitable: for it is uncharitable to take pleasure in making other people feel uncomfortable. I do not think that a very strict or fussy standard of propriety is any proof of chastity or any help, and I therefore regard the great relaxation and simplifying of the rule ... as a good thing.... It has this inconvenience ... people of different ages and types do not all acknowledge the same standard.... A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems."

"Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.... The Christian rule is, 'Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.' Now this is so difficult and contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct that has gone wrong. But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want ... most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but ... not for ten.... But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.

Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act.... Suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theater by simply bringing a covered plate onto the stage and then slowly lifting the cover ... to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained ... a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?.... The sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons.... You and I ... have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told ... that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing in up, everything ... will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not.... If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think ... the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess....

"Christianity is almost the only [religion] that thoroughly approves of the body—that believes matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, or beauty and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But, of course, when people say, 'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,' they may mean 'the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of.'... I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food....

"I do not say you and I are ... responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favor of unchastity.... God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them."

"Perfect chastity ... will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you ... that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind.... Ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.  For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection." 

"When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression. On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue—even attempted virtue—brings light; indulgence brings fog. 

Better to Be Neither

"If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred.... That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."

Highlights from chapter 5: Sexual Morality, book 3: Christian Behaviour in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

The Four Pivotal Virtues—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

The Four Cardinal Virtues: From the Latin Word for the Hinge of a Door

C.S. Lewis gives us a glimpse of what it was like for him addressing a nation at war on the BBC: "If you are allowed to talk for only ten minutes, pretty well everything else has to be sacrificed to brevity. One of my chief reasons for dividing morality up into three parts (with my picture of the ships sailing in convoy in the last chapter) was that this seemed the shortest way of covering the ground. Here I want to give some idea of another way in which the subject has been divided by old writers." The four cardinal virtues "are those which all civilized people recognize.... The word cardinal has nothing to do with Cardinals in the Roman Church. It comes from a Latin word meaning 'the hinge of a door.' These were called 'cardinal' virtues because they are ... pivotal." They are PRUDENCE, TEMPERANCE, JUSTICE and FORTITUDE.

 
Prudence = Practical Sense. This means "taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it.... Because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are 'good,' it does not matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding. In the first place, most children show plenty of prudence about doing the things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly. In the second place, as St. Paul points out (Ephesians 4:14), Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary. He told us to be not only 'as harmless as doves,' but also 'as wise as serpents' (Matthew 10:16). He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian ... you are embarking on something that is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.... Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world" (John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress).

 
Temperance = Moderation in All Things.  "Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further.... One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way.  An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.... A man who makes his ... motorcycle the center of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes ... is being just as 'intemperate' as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it doesn't show on the outside so easily ... but God is not deceived by externals."

 

 
Justice = Fairness. "Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law courts. It is the old name for everything we should now call 'fairness'; it includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises." C.S. Lewis provides an example of this promise-keeping aspect of justice in his chapter on marriage.

Fortitude = Courage. "Fortitude includes both kinds of courage—the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that 'sticks it' under pain. 'Guts' is perhaps the nearest modern equivalent." C.S. Lewis spoke of this elsewhere in one of his first books, The Abolition of Man. This thought-provoking quote is one of the most famous from it: "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

"There is a difference between doing some particular just or temperate action and being a just or temperate man.... A man who perseveres in doing just actions gets in the end a certain quality of character.... It is that quality ... we mean when we talk of a virtue.... Right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character.... We might think that God wanted simply obedience.... He really wants people of a particular sort ... for ... the deep, strong unshakable kind of happiness [He] intends for us."

Pictorial Chapter Highlights

First-Class Fighting Trim: Military

First-Class Fighting Trim: Boxing

A Book That Still Astonishes the World

 You Decide for Yourself!

Highlights from chapter 2: The Cardinal Virtues, book 3: Christian Behavior in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.