Impaired

I recently finished reading a biography about President Jimmy Carter, titled His Very Best. Apparently when Carter had been a young seaman, one of his superior officers asked him if he had given “his very best” while at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Carter had to admit that he had not, but he never forgot the question, and adopted “my very best” as something of a life motto from that point on. Peter knows that we are not always eager to give our very best in our Christian discipleship. Sometimes, we just don’t want to put forth the effort required to cultivate the godly qualities of 1:5–7. But when we make peace with spiritual mediocrity, we suffer from two types of impairment.

First, our vision is impaired. To neglect Christian growth is to become severely “near-sighted (1:9).” When you first were saved, you saw eternal realities clearly: the need to be cleansed of your sin (1:9), God’s call to share in his divine nature (1:4), your future entrance into Jesus’ eternal kingdom (1:11), a home in the New Heavens and New Earth (3:13). But now these great spiritual realities have grown dim and blurry. You can now only see what is right in front of you: the current pressures and opportunities, your relationships and responsibilities, your temptations and desires, and the distractions and demands that pull you here and there. Many of these are legitimate, but they have grown so large in your vision as to eclipse an awareness of eternity and a call to holiness.

As in the Lord’s parable of the soils, you received the word about the coming kingdom with joy at first, but the cares of this world now threaten to choke out those early signs of life (Mark 4:16–19). To return to Peter’s metaphor, you suffer from spiritual near-sightedness. You cannot see the long-term importance of growing in Christ and cultivating a relationship with him. For some, this near-sighted condition becomes so severe as to leave you functionally blind—which is how the Bible typically talks about unbelievers. Instead of walking forward with a clear-eyed focus on Jesus, there may be little practical difference between the way that we are stumbling around through life, from that of the one whose eyes have never been opened by Jesus in the first place.

Second, your memory is impaired. Now that my three children are older, bedtime is not the ordeal it once was. But when they were smaller and required personal oversight from bathing to teeth-brushing…it was a labor. Completing the task of bedtime was a major accomplishment, and supplied a definitive punctuation mark at the end of a long day. But after that major event, I might sometimes find a child eating a popsicle, requiring the re-brushing of teeth, or even slipping back outside and getting dirty again. “What are you doing?!” I would cry out, “We just got you clean! Don’t you remember!? We were done for the day! Now we have to go back and get you clean all over again!”

I once heard a pastor compare this scenario to the believer in 2 Peter 1:9. The person who slides back from Christian growth into carelessness about sin reveals a memory problem. She has forgotten that she has been cleansed of her former sins! Jesus shed his blood on the cross to purify us from the corruption that is in the world, and to set us on a new road to godliness. Receiving his cleansing is the definitive event in our lives. Why would we go back to the very sin that made his death for us necessary? This is why keeping the cross fresh and vivid in our hearts is essential for growing Christians.

So how about you? How is your vision? How is your memory? Are you growing?

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Article by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church