Welcome to Truth For Life and Welcome to 2023.

We're glad to begin another year together with you studying through the Bible.

And we're not going to start this year with resolutions, but instead we're going to

consider the source of real growth and change in our lives.

Alistair Begg is beginning a study in 2nd Peter with a message titled Grace and Peace.

The context in which we come to 2nd Peter without going into a lot of details that you

can find out for your own with a good commentary is simply that the environment to which Peter

was writing was an environment in which false teaching was clearly on the rise.

We know that because he's addressing these issues and the statements being made by people.

Primarily individuals denying the reality of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And as a result of that a kind of moral carelessness and looseness was beginning to creep in amongst

the people of God.

And Peter writes to them in such a way as to remind them that the things that he and the

other apostles have been saying to the flock of God had to do not with some mystical

notion that they dreamt up, but actually had to do with historical facts and figures.

They were conveying, he says in this letter, the things that they had seen the eyewitness

accounts of verifiable events.

In much the same way as John does in his first epistle when he says the things that I'm

writing to you about dear children are the things that we have seen, that we have handled,

that we have gazed upon with our own eyes.

And also the truth that has then been inscripturated in the very letter that he is writing to these

folks.

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