2 Peter 1 (Part 4) :12-21

2 Peter, chapter 1. This is part 4 and we are beginning in verse 12. So follow along with me there as we read together. It says,

Stop there. Let's pray. Father, I'm so thankful to gather together with my brothers and sisters this morning in Christ, and I'm so thankful to worship together with them and just lift up our voices, and sing, and praise. I'm so thankful for your presence here as we gather and open our hearts to your Word. Lord, you are the teacher. We are the students. We ask you to speak to our hearts, not just to our ears, but truly to our hearts to hear what the Spirit is saying to us today as we study through this last portion of chapter 1. We pray and ask Father God, that you would grant wisdom and insight. That we might go from this place and put into practice the things that we have learned. We ask it in Jesus precious name, amen. You guys will remember last week we talked about, well, we mentioned that Peter had written about seven qualities that he listed. Those were back in verses 5, 6, and 7. And he said, those are the things that were to add to our faith and that's how we grow in our faith in Jesus. And he talked about those seven things. And we looked at all seven of them. They were, virtue, which is essentially moral excellence. We talked about knowledge and self-control and steadfastness and godliness and brotherly affection and love. And we discussed each of the qualities and we even talked about how to go about adding those things to our faith. But keeping those seven qualities in mind, because remember in, in Peter's, he just mentioned them as far as his letter goes, and he now says in verse 12, he says, “Therefore I intend… to remind you of these qualities,...” And I want you to notice there in verses 12, 13, 14, and 15 that he mentions remembering or uses remembering type words 3 times. Did you catch it? He talks about, he says, “I will “remind you,” and I will say these things “by way of reminder” so that you can “recall””. So 3 times he's talking about remembering, putting something in your heart to the point where you can remember it. And his goal was clearly to provide a way for the believers to whom he was writing, and obviously to us as well, to remember what we had been told. Even though he said, in here, I know you know these things, and yet I'm going to remind you of them anyway. I know you know them, but I'm going to tell you anyway. Right? Because that's how we learn, through repetition. I was in radio broadcasting when I was younger. It's all I ever really wanted to do from about the age of 9. I wanted to be a disc jockey. And I became one at the age of about 15 and I did it till the Lord got a hold of my heart and I even did it for a little while after the Lord got ahold of my heart. Got a chance to work in Christian radio for a while up in Seattle. That was a kick. But completely forgot why I brought that up. Something about remembering which isn't happening right now. It'll come. How long you have? Are you guys getting hungry at all? Because we might be here for awhile.

Now see if it happens to you, you maybe talking to one person. I'm talking to a few hundred and then a few more hundred online. So anyway, yeah, that's gone. Anyway, so let's just keep going here. Oh, repetition. I know. That was it. Okay, I got it. I got it. I'm back. Okay. We used to play commercials on the air over and over and of course as disc jockeys, as radio announcers, we got deathly sick of them. You thought you were sick of commercials. We were playing them, but we understood that it is through repetition, and there was, there was some kind of data that was given to us at some point about how many times somebody actually has to hear a commercial before they hear the commercial. Because have you ever watched a commercial and then it's done and you go, “What was that about?” You're like, “I don't even know what they were advertising.” And then you hear it a few hundred more times and eventually, you know. And commercials work, but they work through repetition. And frankly, we learn by repetition. That's, and that's what Peter is talking about here. I like learning new things when I go through the scriptures. I really do. And I'm still learning new things. I hope you do too. As I go through and read the scriptures, new things jump out at me all the time, things that I didn't really notice before, and that's delightful, but I also have to be satisfied going back and just going over the same things that I've learned before, because that's a great way to cement them in my heart and mind. And so we have to be careful not to dismiss the whole idea of, going over what we've learned. “I've already, I already know that. You don't need to tell me that again. I know what that's all about.” No, you need to hear it again. It's important to do that. So, by the way, before we kind of move on here about, he's talking about, remembering the things in the Word. Did you notice in verse 14 that Peter said, “…I know that the putting off of my body will be soon.” That's kind of a fancy way of saying, I know that I'm going to die. I know that I'm going to pass from this life soon. And apparently Jesus had made Peter aware of something related to the timing of his death and when he would transfer into the presence of the Lord. But you'll notice he spoke of “putting off, or some Bibles say, “set aside.” I'm always setting aside my body.

Now, if you have a different Bible translation on your lap, yours may not say “body," it may say “tent," because that's actually what the Greek word means. Literally, it is, “I'm going to set aside the tent of my body.” And I always kind of thought that tent was a good word to use metaphorically of a physical body because a tent is a temporary dwelling. Just like our physical bodies are temporary dwellings. And I was just up at family camp and there were several of us who are, were in RVs, but there was also a lot of folks who were staying in tents. And it's kind of funny, I don't know, maybe that's the way you camp too. And maybe that's how you define camping. But just like our bodies, people complain a lot about staying in tents. And I didn't like staying in tents back when we, when our kids were little, and we didn't have two nickels to rub together. We had a tent and we'd go camping with the kids. And so we'd, all 6 of us would pile into a tent. You know, when you got little kids, they're always bringing in dirt and worms and you got to sleep with that stuff right there on the floor. And it's not that much fun. But it's kind of funny when I see people getting out of tents in the morning. It's just, it's a pretty accurate picture of our physical bodies. I didn't understand the similarities when I was young, but I understand them now. Because when I was young, Sue and I used to, before we even had children, we'd go out and we'd just throw a pup tent on the ground and some sleeping bags and hop in and sleep all night, and then we'd wake up and roll up our stuff and on we'd go. Today you'd have to call 911 to get me out of that tent, because it's just, it wouldn't work. I found out that tents sag and leak and so do our bodies when they get older. But there's going to come a day when we're going to set aside these tents. We're all going to set aside these tents, and we're going to take up eventually a more permanent body. But now getting back to Peter's comments related to the scripture. You'll notice that he goes on to explain why it's reasonable for us to have such a high view of God's word and he talks about it in verse 16. So I want you to look with me in your Bible at verse 16, he says, “For we (referring to the apostles) did not follow (here's an interesting phrase) cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Now I want you to stop there for a moment.

That is a wonderful expression of why we have such a high view of Scripture. Because we have come to understand that it is not a book of fables or myths, but in fact, these events really happened in human history. And they're not the byproduct of some misguided person who conjured them up from his fanciful imagination. These are stories and truths and so forth that come from the Lord, and that's why Peter says at the end of verse 16, I want you to notice there “…we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” And the two key words that I want to bring out of verse 16, first of all, is the word “we”. That's just such an important word. He says, “…we (as he begins, that verse) did not follow cleverly devised myths.” Why is “we” such an important word? It's because it wasn't, there wasn't just one man. There wasn't just one person who goes, “I had a revelation from God.’ And everybody else has to follow what I know, and I'm the only one who knows it. The Apostle Paul, interestingly enough, he kind of was a Johnny come lately because he didn't walk with the original apostles. In fact, after the church got going, he persecuted the early church. And then the Lord revealed Himself to Paul, and then Paul kind of ran off to be all by himself, and that's where the Lord revealed the gospel to Paul. Paul didn't learn it from anybody. He tells us that in the book of Galatians. He says, “I received my gospel from no man (Gal 1:12).” Now, you might say, well, now Pastor Paul, isn't that the exact opposite of what you just said? It wasn't just given to one man. Yeah, but see, you know what? After Paul received the gospel, he says he went to Jerusalem to convey what the Lord had told him, to make sure that what he had received was in line with what Jesus had told them (Gal 1:18-19). He didn't just trust himself you see. He didn't say, “It's my gospel” in the sense of, it's my revelation and you guys don't know it, but I do. He said, okay guys here you are. Here's James and some of the other brothers and Peter, and he says, “All right, here's the gospel the Lord showed me. Does that square with what you heard him talking about and preaching about for, all that time?” “Oh yeah, that's exactly, it's just what the Lord has shown us.” Okay, well, we're good then. In fact, Paul even says I shared this with him to make sure that I hadn't run my race in vain (Gal 2:1-2). So you see it's not just this one man sort of a thing. So that word “we”, that simple word, “we” did not invent this thing from myths and fables. That's an absolutely huge word. And the second word is also very important. And that is the word “eyewitnesses.” Eyewitnesses were huge back then. They're still huge. Our, when you think about history, all of history is based on eyewitness accounts of what happened. The fact that we have a historical account of things like, when we read about the Boston Tea Party, is because there were people that were there, saw it, recorded it, and we were, we are given that information. We didn't make up the story. Our law courts are highly dependent to this day on eyewitness testimony to establish the truth. And it's interesting to me that one of the, one of the prominent criticisms that unbelievers level at the Bible and those who believe in it, is the claim they say that it's just a collection of writings by men. You know those, “The Bible is just, it's just written by men. They just wrote, whatever they wanted to write and they just kind of made things up out of their head” and stuff like that. It's really unfair from several different levels, especially when the eyewitness testimony of others is so readily accepted in other instances and with other, do you know there are other ancient writings that are, talk about eyewitness accounts and nobody questions those. But they question the Bible. Oh, it's just a bunch of guys. So, you kind of ask yourself the question, “Why is the eyewitness testimony of the Bible considered to be unreliable or at least assumed by many people to believe be unreliable?” Well, I'll tell you why. It's because the eyewitness testimony in the Bible often transcends our natural experience. In other words, it speaks of supernatural things. People don't like supernatural things because they can't explain them, because they're natural people. And most natural people are very uncomfortable about supernatural things. It moves beyond their ability to assess it with their five senses. And they'll even say, “If I can't, if I can't look it over with my five senses and investigate it, then I'm not going to, I'm not going to believe it.” And this has been going on for a long time. Do you remember when the Apostle Paul was giving his testimony of how the Lord had shown himself to Paul and given him a calling upon his life and he was giving that testimony in front of Festus? It's in the Book of Acts. Let me show you this on the screen.

(Slide) Acts 26:24-25 (ESV)

Just because things are supernatural doesn't mean they're irrational. But that's the way the world views the Bible because it goes beyond their natural understanding. They want things to conform to what they can understand through natural processes. And if it doesn't conform to those natural processes, they kick it out. They say, “Well, there's no way I can judge that, so obviously that's false.” And so, that's just kind of the way it goes. But that's really what sin has done to man. He has become a very natural man. And we've kind of been cut off from the real, any reality beyond the natural life. Do you guys know there's a reality beyond the natural life? There's a wonderful reality beyond the natural. And there is a supernatural. But if you're closed off to it because you have a holy, natural mindset, that's why people say, “I get my religion is science. I get my truth from science.” And my response is, “Well then your truth must be constantly changing.” I mean, I don't know if know, but science is constantly changing. And it's funny. People think that science is progressing so that it's adding to our knowledge all the time. Actually, that's wrong. What science does is it supplants the old knowledge with true knowledge. We find out that we were wrong actually. We don't just keep adding to our knowledge, we supplant our knowledge. I used to remember science books when I was in school that would say “We once believed …but now we know …” And this happened over and over again. So what we're doing is we're replacing, we're kicking out the old and bringing in the new. You know what that is? That's change. Truth literally has changed. And so if science is your one standard method of truth, then you're going to be up and down and all over the place. So the Bible helps us to understand that there's more to life than can be naturally understood.

And by the way, the word of God does not change. The word of God remains the same. Jesus even told us that heaven and earth will pass away, but not one word of His will pass away (Matt 24:35). So Peter continues with his eyewitness testimony. Look at verse 17 in your Bible. He says, “For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” (he says) we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with Him on the holy mountain.” And of course, Peter is remembering the Mount of Transfiguration, isn't he? And the fact that he and the two brothers, James and John, accompanied Jesus up onto a high mountain. We don't know which mountain, he doesn't say. But there it says that they, he was suddenly met with Moses and Elijah who were speaking to Jesus. Two interesting men that were there, Moses and Elijah. You ever wonder why Moses and Elijah were there? Why not some of the other, why not Abraham? Why not Jacob? Why Moses and Elijah? Well, it's because of what they represented. Moses represents the law and Elijah represents the prophets. And the Hebrews called their Scriptures, the law and the prophets. And they are literally the representation of the totality of the previous revelation of God's word to the Jewish people. The totality of the law and the prophets. And there was an important happening that took place there. Let me show you this on the screen from Matthew Chapter 17. He says, (Slide) Matthew 17:3-8 (ESV)

Now, this is a fascinating passage. But there's something that I want to highlight in this passage. So let's highlight it on the screen here for you. (Slide) Matthew 17:3-8 (ESV)

Notice about the center. “This is my beloved Son (this is the words of the Father) with whom I am well pleased;” Oh, we're all good up to there. And then look at those last three words, very important, “…listen to him.” That is why you see Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, because God the Father was testifying. Speaking of testimony, God the Father was testifying and saying that one greater than the law is here. And one greater than the prophets is here. Listen to him, right? You'll recall that Jesus made a very important statement concerning his connection to the law. A lot of Christians wonder about this. What is the, what is our, as believers, what is our connection to the Law? What was Jesus' connection to the Law? Look at Matthew 5. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law (that's what most people, they stop right there) or the Prophets; (for that matter He says) I have not come to abolish them (I want you to notice these last few words here) but to fulfill them.” (Slide) Matthew 5:17 (ESV)

The reason those are so important is, I find, that there are a great many Christians who don't focus on those last words. Those last four words are critical. Again, that's why Moses and Elijah were present on the Mount of Transfiguration. Again, they represented the totality of the law and the prophets. But Jesus came to fulfill the law and the prophets. And that's what He said, I have come to fulfill. He is the fulfillment of those things and He is the final revelation. Jesus is the last and final revelation of God as the writer to the Hebrews said, from Hebrews chapter 1. (Slide) Hebrews 1:1-2 (ESV)

And he is the final word, and there is no word beyond him. There is no revelation beyond him. He's the final one. And that's why Peter says what he does in verse 19, look with me in your Bible. This is a great statement. In verse 19, he says, “And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed,…” Isn't that great? Important words. Jesus is the prophetic word more fully confirmed. There were many prophecies that were confirmed in the Old Testament, but Jesus is the more fully confirmed, prophetic word. If we suspected that the prophetic utterances of the Old Testament were true before, the life and ministry of Jesus, has left us in no doubt because he fulfilled the law and the prophets. Jesus fulfilled so many scriptures. It is laughable to deny them. Literally laughable. If somebody says, “I don't believe the Bible talks at all about Jesus or anything.” It's like, have you read it? It is literally laughable to make such a statement. And this confirmation through the life of Jesus is something Peter says that we would do well to pay attention to. Did you catch that at the end of verse 19? He says, we “…do well to pay attention (to this) as to a lamp shining in a dark place.” We have to remember this world is a very dark place.

It's very dark, and it's getting darker all the time. Here's the good news. He's given us a lamp to light the way. He's given us a lamp to see our way in the darkness and Peter is saying, we would do, we would do very good to pay attention to that lamp. What is that lamp? What is the lamp? Let's listen to the Psalmist. What does he say? (Slide) Psalm 119:105 (ESV)

Jesus also said, look at John chapter 11. “Are there not twelve hours in the day? (He asks) If anyone walks in the day (or if you will, in the daylight), he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks in the night (or in the darkness), he stumbles, because the light is not in him.” (Slide) John 11:9-10 (ESV)

And that's a great passage. Jesus is making the point that God has given us the His light for the express purpose of seeing where we're going and not stumbling in the dark. And yet we still manage to stumble from time to time, don’t we? I mean, He's given us His light, but we're not, we don't get an A+ in following it and not stumbling. We do, we stumble, we mess up. Why? Why do we mess up? Why do we stumble even though we've been given the light? Jesus answers the question in John chapter 8. (Slide) John 8:12 (ESV)

And the key phrase there is, “…whoever follows me.” Well, and that of course makes the opposite true. Those who don't follow Him will not have the light of life, and therefore they're going to stumble. And you might say, “Well, pastor

Paul, certainly you're talking about unbelievers here, right? Who don't have the light of life and who are stumbling.” Well, yeah, sure. But do you know that it's also possible for a born again child of God to temporarily not follow Jesus? Come on guys. We've all done it. We've all, we're walking with the Lord, born again. Thank you Jesus, You forgave my sins, but I'm taking a left when He says go right. And, I'm not following where He's going just right now, because maybe it's because it's not the way I want to go. I want to go my way. And so I take my own turn and go my own way and guess what happens? I stumble. Why? Because I'm not following Jesus in that particular moment. Doesn't mean I'm not saved. Doesn't mean I'm lost my salvation. It just means I just stopped following the Lord temporarily. We've all done it, and that's what Jesus is saying. So it's very possible for a believer to not follow Jesus for a time. But it is unnecessary. Because God's given us a lamp, the lamp of his Word, the lamp of his truth, to illuminate the path in front of us. I had somebody ask me a question up at family camp. I can't remember who it was, but we were just talking about why Christians or people you know, who are believers say certain things or do certain things that are so contrary to the Bible. It's because their influence at that particular level is from the world is greater than from the Word. And do you know that can happen? I mean, if you're get, if your influence is like maybe a couple of times a month at church, and then the rest of the time you're being influenced by the world, you're going to walk away with a worldly perspective. That's just simply the way it is. You're going to view life through a worldly, sort of a visual perspective. You'll have a worldly vision of life and view rather than a biblical worldview. So, we need, we've been given the Word, the truth of the Word to illuminate the path in front of us. We need to take advantage of it as often as possible. I mean, like all the time. The final statement that Peter makes about the lamp light that he's, that's been given to us is in verses 20 and 21, as we finish out the chapter saying, “20knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own (personal) interpretation. 21For no prophecy was ever produced (look at this) by the will of man (those are important words), but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Now, there's a couple of things I want to bring out here very quickly. Peter starts off with the words, “knowing this first of all,” did you catch that? Verse 20, “knowing this first of all,” in other words, what he's saying is of first importance, you have to know this. That God has given prophecy to men and it came through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and it wasn't their own personal interpretation or something they made up out of their own mind. You need to know that, and you need to understand that. Because if you doubt the veracity of the word of God, you know you're naturally not going to be disposed to putting your faith in that word, are you? I mean, if you doubt, if you think, well, I don't know, I think the prophecies in the Bible are a bunch of hooey. I think people just kind of drank some weird tea and started writing. No, you're not going to put your hope in those things. And so that's why Peter says, “knowing this first of all,…” (of first importance, that this is the situation) “…no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man.” I think even some of the prophets didn't even want to give the words that they gave. Well, we learned that in Jonah for sure, but because they were hard, some of the words that God gave them to speak were very hard. So how did, how do we know if prophecy is given from God or not? Well, how did the Jews know that, that was an issue for them. They had all people, they had a bunch of people rising up saying, “I have a word from the Lord.” And some of them were true, and some of them were charlatans. And so they had to ask the question, “Well, how do you know?” So God gave him away. Deuteronomy chapter 18, put it up on the screen here. (Slide)

So this was the test that God gave in the Old Testament under the Mosaic Covenant related to knowing that prophecy is from God and according to that passage, really there's just two simple rules. You kind of distill that down to these two rules. (Slide) Rules from Deuteronomy 1. A prophet had to speak in the name of the Lord, not some other god. 2. A prophet's predictions of future events had to come true exactly as predicted. A prophet had to speak in the name of the Lord, not in the name of some other God and the prophet's predictions of whatever he said was going to happen in the future had to come true in the way that he said it was going to come true. That had to happen, and if it didn't happen, then you kick it out. It's really not that tough. It wasn't that tough. So if you use some of these same kind of qualifications and you apply them to the Old Testament scriptures related to Messiah, it's like I said, it's incredible. We actually have on our website, and you can access it at any time, links on prophecies. In fact, let me show you the page. It looks like this. It's the, "through-the-bible" page.

And you'll notice down toward the bottom of the page where it says OTHER RESOURCES. Let's zoom in on that section right there. So now over on the right, OTHER RESOURCES, notice there's things there. You can, they're kind of cool. The Ancient Jewish Wedding, that goes along with the Revelation study. The Last Day's Timeline. 70 Weeks of Daniel. Look at that last one, 60 Prophecies of Messiah, 60. And that's not even all of them. That doesn’t even begin to be all of them. But there are, there's a document you can access on our website that shows 60 different prophecies that was given, were given, related to the coming and ministry of Messiah that were fulfilled in Him and His work on the cross and so forth. And just in case you're wondering where to find that, here's the address, it's just ccontario.com/through-the-bible. Be sure and put in the hyphens between the words. (Slide) ccontario.com/through-the-bible And that's where all that is found. And then you can get that anytime you want. And you can go over those, and I encourage you to do that, and look up the stuff, look up the passages that are listed.

Now the end of verse 21 is where Peter says these words, “…as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Speaking of the prophets who received their message from the Lord. And that is a wonderful definition of inspiration. When we talk about inspiration, we're not talking about somebody who went out and saw a sunset and was inspired to write a song or write a poem. That's not biblical inspiration. Biblical inspiration is just what Peter says, “…they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Here's what's interesting. Carried along does not mean that they went into a trance and they kind of just repeated robotically what the Lord told them to say, “And the Lord would say unto you” sort of a thing. That's not how it worked at all. God actually worked with the individual's own personality, education, nuances of language. Do you know, it's interesting. We can read books of the Bible without anybody telling us who the author was, and we can tell who the author was just by reading for a while. John's writings are very Johnny. I mean, they're very similar. You can read the books and letters of John and it's just John all the way. Luke was an educated man. He uses words that are were known to doctors. He uses a higher level of Greek then do some of the other biblical writers. Most of the biblical writers write in what we call Koine Greek, which is kind of child level Greek. But Luke goes beyond that and he uses a much higher form because he was a more educated man. God uses that sort of stuff, and he doesn't overwhelm these people. He super intends the process of their writing so that what they're writing is what God wanted them to write. That's biblical inspiration where God literally carries them along through his Holy Spirit to write what is needed. And so it's a beautiful work of the Spirit. And there are several ways that we recognize the Spirit in biblical writings. And we, there's ways that we recognize that it is in fact inspired. And one of them, I'll give you four. Then I'll end with this, okay? First of all, number one, consistency of the revelation. Here's what's crazy, and this is why when people say, or I hear people say, that the Bible is just written by a bunch of guys. Okay, you do what the Bible did then, you take 40 different authors from different cultures and backgrounds and have them write about God and eternity and sin and then stretch them out over 1500 years. And you tell me how much consistency you'll have. You know what's interesting about the Bible? God is always God. He is always the creator. Jesus is always who Jesus is. He is God in human flesh. He came once. He's coming again. They all agree. They don't disagree. There is a consistent thread through 40 different authors over 1500 years. You try to get that put together where there is absolute consistency in the writings of 40 different people over 1500 years. You can't do it. The only way you can do it is if there is an Author behind the authors, and that is the work of the Holy Spirit. And we see that in the scripture. I, this is my third time teaching through the Bible, and I'm telling you, it's consistent. It's consistent. Sin is always sin and the things that are sin are always sin in the Bible. And again you get different opinions going from different people, different cultures over different periods of time. What have we seen in the last 10 years here in the United States of America about how we define sin or how we don't define sin or what we used to think was a sin, but now we're like, well, maybe it's not so bad. The Bible doesn't do that. Next is prophetic accuracy. And we've already alluded to that there, the things that they foretell concerning the future come to pass. People sometimes will say, “Well, if Christianity is true, then why are there so many other world religions?” Let me tell you something about those other world religions. The element of prophecy is glaringly omitted, but it is there in the Bible. Right there for people to read and see and check out for themselves. And to and look through those things, investigate those things. Next is historical accuracy. We see this is a work of the Spirit. They write about real people in real events because they were eyewitnesses and the archeological evidence supports them. You guys know, right, that Joseph Smith wrote about this whole group of civilization down in South America that has never once been corroborated by even a shred of evidence archeologically or historically, or any other way than his own diluted ramblings. That's it. What do we find archeologically related to the Bible? We just keep confirming the Bible over and over and over again. So there, there's an accuracy there that you can't deny it. The Bible talks about towns and places. Some of them still have those same names. And if the towns been lost, we'll eventually dig there and find out that it was there. And there it is. It's happened so many times over and over. And then there's the confirmation of the Spirit in our hearts. And I am not talking about a burning in your bosom. I'm talking about the witness of truth. When you read the Bible, or when you hear somebody talking about God or something about the truth, there is a confirmation of the Spirit. It's difficult to describe, but it's an inner witness of the Spirit that causes us to hear the truth, and in our heart we say, “Amen.” And it's just there. You hear it and you know it. You know that you know that you know, that's true. And the converse is also the case. You hear somebody's given some whacked out opinion and there's just this check in your spirit and the Holy Spirit is speaking in your heart going, this guy's whacked. There isn't a shred of truth coming out of that guy's mouth. But when somebody speaks the truth, you're just like, yeah, yeah, amen. Amen. All right, let's stand together. We're going to have our prayer people, Brandon, come up and close us out with the worships on. Would you please? We're going to have our prayer team here. Can we do, "I'm satisfied," again? I love that song. And when you pastor your own church you can pick. But anyway, we'll have some people down front here to pray with you and if you need prayer, if you need prayer don't leave the place burdened. Come and get prayer and leave those things at the throne of grace, right? Father, thank you so much. The wisdom and power of your Word. Thank you, Lord, for the witness of the Spirit. Thank you, Lord, for the things that Peter talked about here. All these reasons why we have such a high view of the Word of God. And we understand that the scriptures and the prophecies that they contain were given as the men who wrote them or carried along by the Spirit. And these are not personal interpretations. These are not wild diluted ramblings. These are real, true historical events. These are real truths sent from heaven, and you've given them to us, and we benefit from them, and we grow in grace when we embrace them. Now, Lord, help us to walk them out. Now, receive Father God, as we worship before we go in Jesus' name.