Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, July 2, 2023
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: As people of faith, our prosperity is all about our posture—if we keep Jesus at the center of everything we do, we won’t be able to help but be changed for the better.
Epistles—the collection of letters in our New Testament scripture—can read like instruction manuals when we break them up for the sake of curating lectionary readings. Because they were sent to multiple communities in the Ancient Near East for the purpose of providing centralized teachings in a brand-new religious culture, the focus of many of the Epistles is behavioral. These letters lay out, in terms both broad and specific, how to live a good and faithful life.
2 Peter is no different. What we can sometimes forget, though, and what might be best to bring to the forefront of a reflection today, is the fact that Epistles always dig deeper than the surface level. Sure, they focus on tangible, everyday practices, but they always tie behavior back to its source in their calls to action. And that source is Jesus.
According to the author of 2 Peter, the one and only prerequisite for “never stumbling” in a life of faith is to remain eager. For him, living a life of faith isn’t so much about what you do. It’s about how and why you do it, namely, with genuine excitement and because you know Christ. The author of 2 Peter figures that if Jesus is at the center of your meditations and your motivations, then your actions will naturally reflect Jesus. If you have truly internalized the good news of Jesus—the fact that you are loved without end and that there is nothing that can strip God’s grace away from you or separate you from God—then you can’t possibly be the same person as you were before you knew Jesus. Once you start building and deepening your relationship with God, you will be empowered beyond your normal limits to be excellent. Knowledgeable. Controlled. Focused on endurance. Godly. Affectionate. Loving.
“Never stumbling” doesn’t mean getting everything right all the time. It means being truly engaged and genuinely eager to center Jesus in your day-to-day life. Look at our secondary text from the Gospel of Matthew. The subject of each of those parables made sweeping decisions with abandon, not because they were impulsive or impatient or ignorant or stupid, but because they had great faith in the transformative power of the wealth they had been gifted. They were engaged. They were eager.
