Welcome to Gospel in Life. In his first letter to early Christians, Peter tells believers they must grow up in their salvation, much like children maturing into adulthood.

But what does it really look like to grow in our faith? Today, Tim Keller invites us to consider the lifelong journey of maturing spiritually, and

how we move toward a life that's deeply rooted in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ.

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Now here's Tim Keller with today's teaching.

In your bulletin, you have printed a passage of the scripture, the Bible, and that's what we're going to look at again tonight for the fourth time, the last time.

Whenever I go through a passage of the Bible and we stop on it and we look at it and I finally say, we've been in it long enough.

Tonight's the night. We're going to stop. At the end of this, we're going to move on. This means I have too much material to cover,

which always happens. So we are going to try to show you the basic features, a kind of overview

of it. But this passage, let me analyze it for you for a second before we read it, just so you see

how it works. It's a sandwich. It's a very tall, big sandwich. It's got five layers to it. And what

Peter's really trying to get at is he's trying to get people, we looked at this two weeks ago,

to love one another. But he knows, he's not

naive, he's not so stupid as to think that just simply exhorting people to love each other will be

enough. He says, you won't be able to love each other unless you draw on a power greater than

yourself, unless you learn to draw on a supernatural power. And so what he actually does

is he starts out by saying, draw on that power. Then he says, love one another. Then he says,

and draw on that power. Then he says, love one another. And then he says, and don't forget to

draw on that power. Like any good teacher, any good preacher, he repeats himself constantly. And that's what

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