December 22: 2 Peter

(Posted on behalf of Jon Lanuza)

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2012

2 Peter

I write this from halfway around the world, back in the city where, 16 years ago to the day, Carla and I, before God, agreed to be bound to each other for better or worse, richer or poorer... yet another reminder of God's goodness, and another reason to give Him thanks.

 

In the 16 years we've been married, we have been blessed with three children.  After reading today's Bible reading, I could not help but wonder how often I'd been a false teacher to my children.  How often might I, through my words and my actions, have taught my daughter how irrelevant Christ was to me – perhaps by something as simple as missing evening prayer time with her and her brothers, perhaps by working such long hours as to suggest things were more important than people?  How often might I, by not speaking out, have seemed to condone things we know are sinful and abhorrent to God?  And by speaking out, have spoken so poorly about other people that I failed to reflect the love of God for all His sons and daughters?

 

It is so easy to focus on the "big-picture false teachers" – pastors who preach obedience to God (or to them) in hopes of getting materially rich, people who not merely condone, but advocate for the convenience of disposability in life (abortion) and relationships (unfaithfulness and divorce).  But I believe the truth is that, whenever I am adulterous and unfaithful in my relationship with God – whenever someone or something else is more important to me than He is, and when I live that way with such certainty in its righteousness, I too am a "brute beast", a false teacher "secretly introducing destructive heresies...bringing swift destruction upon [myself]" – and, sadly, tragically, on those whom God has entrusted into my care.  How much better for me to have a millstone tied around my neck...

 

Yet what am I to do?  If by my very nature I am causing the ones I love most on earth to stumble and fall, how natural it would be to give up.   And yet intake heart, for as Paul said to the Romans, "I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do...  What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?  Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

 

And so, on this, our 16th wedding anniversary, I pray that God grant me the grace, the wisdom and the strength to be the husband and the father, the teacher, that He knows my wife and my children need me to be.  And I take comfort and courage in His deliverance, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

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