The Well-Orchestrated Life

Introduction

Evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am so grateful to God for the fact that he has tied us all together, knit us together, if you please, melded us together in a spirit of oneness, and has given us so many things to share. Our commonality is by itself an astounding thing. Our unity is a thing of power. And we are very grateful to God for the religious family that He has knitted together. I was in a meeting somewhere and someone was there that knew somebody that I knew some other place, which is not unusual. And I said, Well, it’s a small world, isn’t it? The fellow said, No, it’s a large family. And that’s true. We are a large family. And I’m sure grateful for you. I’m glad you’re here.

Glad we can be together on this spring like day and lend our voices in praise to God and offer our filial feelings of devotion to our Father. Good to see these preachers here. Uh I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed, but if there’s a preacher and his wife in the audience, after the visiting preacher gets started about 10 minutes, uh maybe five, his wife leans over and says something to him. She is not telling him how much she loves him. What she’s saying is, you can do it better than he can. And I’m and I’m not unaware that that’s probably the case tonight, but I’m glad for my preaching colleagues to come. I’ll tell you another thing that’s just uh just axiomatically so. Uh I I used to hear preachers say, Well, I have some preachers in the audience, and that means that I have several sympathetic ears.

I am not that naive. They’re critical ears is what they are, and I know that that’s the case, and I still refle respect them in the very highest way. It’s good to have them here. We’ve been talking about how we live in the society which the accident of our birth has given us, and we have noted that we have to have great wisdom to do that. And we have found out that wisdom is the ability to apply a given amount of knowledge to a given set of circumstances so as to effect the best end for everybody concerned. Wisdom is the ability to see the end of the thing from the beginning. There is an English word which has fallen into disrepute. It’s called perspicuity or perspicaciousness.

It is a term of optics. And what it is is to see all the way into a thing. That’s wisdom. It’s the ability to see into a thing so that you can make a choice that its relevancy will produce some good end for everybody. And so we’re talking about the wisdom to make it in these difficult times. Now, wisdom is not some kind of ambiguous thing or some kind of high thing that we cannot understand. The smallest amount of wisdom is very important for living life. It’s important that we garner the kind of knowledge that the Bible has, the kind of experiential knowledge that life provides, and the kind of teaching that can come from those who have studied before us and passed along to us their information, so that we can understand how we can make choices that are high choices, choices that are efficient and effectual, and so that the effectivity of those choices will not only affect our lives, but redound to the names, honor, and glory of the great God we serve.

And so we’re looking for wise choices to make. I want to read something for you tonight from 2 Peter chapter 1, if you’d like to follow along. If you don’t want to follow along, it’s all right, but I would ask you to listen very, very attentively, very carefully to the reading of the Word of God. Simon Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to them who have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Savior Jesus Christ. Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord. According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called you to glory and virtue, whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, that by these you might become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

1. 2 Peter, the Book of Hope

And beside all this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance, patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things be in you and abound, they make you that you shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But he that laceth these things is blind and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. Wherefore, the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure. For if you do these things, ye shall never fall. The book of 2 Peter has been called the book of hope. And that’s an apt description of the book, because over and over again it alludes to the idea of our reaching off into the future for that which has great substance and quality, that which is eternal, that which is imperishable, and it gives us a lock on that and makes us strong.

It contains so many rousing statements that make a great desire and expectation for the higher and nobler things that are in Christ Jesus. It stimulates us to seek after godliness. He says, the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation. What a wonderful hope that produces. Listen to it. The Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptation. There’s hope in that, ladies and gentlemen. It energizes our efforts towards faithfully, for toward faithfulness. He says in the third chapter, but the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, and it’s going to take all of us home when we’re all through with all of this filth and decadence. And this produces in us that majestic hope again. And then he stabilizes our confidence.

2. All Things That Pertain to Life and Godliness

The word of God came not from men, he said, but holy men of God spake as they gave, were given utterance. This word of God is the mouth of God. This word of God is the word that came from God through his servants, in order that we might have the knowledge that we need to handle any life situation, no matter what it may be. And so here is the great book of hope. There also, in the passage which we read and you’re hearing tonight, are great provisions of God that pertain to that hope. These provisions are marvelous. He says, first of all, these things are given unto us according as his divine power hath given us all things that pertain to life and godliness. He says there are things that are given to us that pertain to life.

That is spiritual life. That is the life that really makes sense, the union that we have with God. That’s the kind of life that is in the Bible. We’ve been given a physical life, but we have things that pertain to spiritual existence. That’s eternity, people, and what there is in that is a fixed desire and a strong expectation of something that transcends this life and lands in eternity. That makes it marvelous. He says, God has given us all things that pertain to godliness. That is, how to live a life which corresponds to our confession of faith. That’s practical religion. The Bible is not some kind of ethereal kind of thing that is just fraught through with academic things. That isn’t it. There is no real value to just dissecting the passages if there’s never any application of them.

The Word of God has as its intention practicalization. It is in entirely written in order that we might practicalize it. Put it to work in our lives, make use of it. And so he says, everything that pertains to practical religion, that is godliness, is stated in the book of God. And then he says, this comes by the knowledge of Him who created us. He says, according as the divine power has given us all things that pertain unto life and godliness through the knowledge of him who hath called you to glory and virtue. This knowledge here is not the usual Greek word for knowledge, gonosco. This is an intensive form of that word. It is epigonosko. And it is not just knowing, but a knowledge that is directed toward an object gradually getting nearer and nearer.

3. Exceeding Great and Precious Promises

There’s hope in that, folks. It’s the kind of knowledge that says every time I learn from the Bible, I get closer to him. It’s the kind of knowledge that is experiential. It’s the kind of knowledge that is intimate, that has intercourse in it. It’s the idea of an ever-increasing, ever-deepening sort of relationship with God. That’s the kind of knowledge we’re really looking for. It’s the knowledge that has substance and quality to it. It’s the knowledge of the quality life about which we spoke last evening. And so this knowledge is a higher, it’s a more sublimated form of godliness and goodness that God has given us. And he says, through all these things are whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises. Our hope, ladies and gentlemen, is predicated on the promises of God.

Our hope is has as its fundamental fact our faith in God, our understanding full will, our trusting confidence in his ability to do what he says he will do. We have no doubt about that. Listen to me. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. I don’t ever expect to entertain any doubt about that. And because I believe that, I have exceeding great and precious promises because He has spoken. He has said things to us. He has given us information. He has told us what the life here is going to be, and how that we must toil to make it better, so that the life there is going to be far superior to anything that we could possibly imagine. So are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises.

4. Partakers of the Divine Nature

They are exceeding great because of who gave them. They are precious because of what they provide for us. Here is the man who promised, and here are the promises themselves. And may I suggest to you that there is no difference? He who promised is the same as the promises themselves. Because he was resurrected from the dead, we entertain the hope of resurrection. So then he says, by these exceeding great and precious promises, you might become partakers of the divine nature. What a glorious thought that produces in our mind. What a grand and marvelous hope that is conjured up as a result of the fact that we are partakers of the divine nature. Now listen to me. That does not say that you will be a partaker of deity.

You can’t be deity. That’s Godhood. And only Gods are part of the Godhood. Deity encompasses divine attributes, which are omnipotence, omni all. Potency, power, omnipotence, omniscience, omniscience. You know that word, don’t you? Omniscience, that is all knowing. Omnipresence, which in my humble opinion is merely an encompassing the other two. But the fact of the matter is that he knows everything that’s going on at every place at every time. You can never be a partaker of that. But you can be a partaker of his divine nature. You can become a partaker of the attributes of deity. That is, you can be lovely because he is lovely. You can be kind because he is kind. You can be benevolent because he is benevolent. Be ye holy, says the Hebrew writer, chapter 12 and verse 10, even as I am holy.

And so we can become partaker of his attributes. We can turn our back on sin and corruption that is in the world because we can become partakers. Listen to the terminology. Part takers, takers part, part is. We are partakers, we are partners with him in the things that he wants us to have that belong to him originally, but which he has distributed lavishly to us as our great father and progenitor. So, having turned our backs on sin and the corruption that is in the world, we become associates, partakers associated with the divine presence. I don’t know about you, but that is really something. Do you understand what it means to call on God and know that He hears? Do you understand the significance of saying our Father, which art in heaven?

We say that so often that we’ve lost the sense of it. I mean, you’re if I were sitting down here at the restaurant somewhere and the phone rang, and the fellow came over here and said to me, Are you Mr. Bowman? And I said, Yes, I am. And he said to the one from Texas, and I said, Yes, I am. He said, The president’s on the phone, he wants to talk to you. Would that impress you? God knows your name, folks. If you’re his child, partakers of the divine nature means that we are fit associates for the presence of God Himself. That just boggles my mind. The one who said, Let there be light, and there was light. Let there be a difference between the land and the sea, and there was that, that’s the God we’re talking about.

Not some worldly power. We’re talking about the divine universe. The maker, rather, of the divine universe. We’re talking about God, partakers of the divine nature. I’ll tell you what. If you want to make it in this world, you hook up with him. If you want to make it in this world with all of its filth, with all of its decadence, with all of its putridity, you hook up with God. You become a partaker of the divine nature. And he will ennoble you. He will inspirit you. He will infuse you with the divine energy that you need to overcome the world through his word. If you develop an intimate association with his word, you will develop an intimate association with him, and that will empower you to act in a way that you could not act separate and apart from him.

5. Giving All Diligence

You would be powerless to overcome the problems of the world, particularly your own sins without the power of partaking of the power of God Almighty. Then he says, giving all diligence, add certain things. Give diligence. What that says, ladies and gentlemen, is to proceed with a personal effort. These things that he mentions here. You know, we uh we have a habit sometimes of dissecting stuff to death. Uh a lot of preachers have a series of sermons on what are called the Christian graces. Only they don’t call them a series, it’s a C rees. I have a C reads on that. It’s fine to have a C reas. But a series of sermons, in my opinion, should follow understanding the big picture. Getting a look at the overall context, and then you deal with the minutiae.

Then you deal with the small particles that are component arrangements of the whole. But we need to see the thing for what he is. And what he gives us right here is that big picture. He says, I want you giving all diligence to make a personal effort to add these things to your life. It not only must be a personal effort, but it must be a constant effort. I’ve had my little woman for 46 years this year. And I like a lot of things about her. You already see she’s pretty, don’t you? Is she there? I’ll tell you, she’s pretty on the inside, too. And one of the prettiest things about her is her constancy. She is regular, a regular kind of person that keeps on all the time.

Constant, consistent. That’s what he’s talking about. Giving all diligence has to be a constant effort. And there must be tireless zeal. Tireless zeal. The kind of zeal that does not fatigue. The kind of prosecution that is indefatigable that says, I’m going to do it no matter what the externalities bring to bear. I’m going to regularly, persistently do what God said to do. Give diligence. That’s all involved in that business of giving diligence. Then he says, give diligence, giving all diligence. Add to your faith virtue, and to virtue, knowledge, and to knowledge, temperance, to temperance, patience, and to patience, godliness, and to godliness, brotherly kindness, and brotherly kindness, love. And he says, all of this is to be added. I’m really interested in this little word add.

6. Add: A Well-Orchestrated Life

It has an interesting etymology in the Greek. And you don’t have to be a Greek student to appreciate this. It is the word epicorygane. Epicorigane. And that word, if you hear chorus in that, you’re hearing the right thing. And if you hear choreography in that, you’re hearing the right thing. That is a planned action. This word etymologically comes from the old Greek thespian ideas. In the old Greek economy, they had what they called plays. And these plays were put on by people in city-states. Athens would be a city-state, for instance. And it would have an epicoreographer, a epichoreographer guy. What he was was the guy usually who wrote the play, and then by wearing masks, which incidentally is where we get the word hypocrite, by wearing a mask, he would change to different parts in the play, different characters in the play.

He might even play a woman part of the time. But he’s playing a part. And the choreographer, the guy who did all of this epicorgane business, was the guy who told them what they were supposed to say, who probably wrote the lines, who rehearsed the play, and they would be in competition with other city-states. He was an important fellow. Now this word ad here comes from that word. It means to orchestrate. It means to cultivate. It means that you make your life into something very special. I have chosen to call this a well-orchestrated life. That’s what he’s saying. Now, get my point. If you wanted to hear a good symphony orchestra, you could almost know before you got there where all the instrumentation was going to be.

Over here you’d have all the violins, the string instruments, and behind them maybe the violas. Maybe on this side over here, you would have the cellos, and maybe behind the cellos the big uh bass instruments, uh string instruments. And in the middle, you have the woodwinds like the oboe and the bassoon, and you have the various and sundry other woodwind instruments, maybe saxophones, clarinets, bass clarinets, etc. And then behind that you have the timpany, all the drums and the big kettles and uh different kinds of percussion instruments. Over here on this side, you’d have the tenor instruments, which would be the trombones and the various and sundry kinds of horns of that part, maybe the uh bearitone horns, and they would all be over here on this side.

Then behind them, you have the trumpets. Now, trumpets are just like tenor singers. You don’t need but one or two of them, that’s all. And the trumpets are way back here at the back because they’re always real loud, you see. Now, what that is is an orchestra. And what I’m saying to you is that this epicorgan here, he says, add to your faith as a chorus director would do. You point this in at the appropriate time. And he says you add all of these to your faith. Faith, ladies and gentlemen, is the thematic. Faith is the thematic. When I worked in radio and television, uh, I remember distinctly when the musical jingles first came into vogue. And the musical jingles were musical signatures. And they would, I still remember the last one where I had the radio station.

Every time you heard that, you knew what station it was. You might hear it with the John Phillips Susa March Tempo, and it would be a sports theme. You might hear it with cascading strings and it would be an afternoon theme. You might hear it with a telegrapher’s key that was going ta-da-da-da-da, and then you had this, and it was a news theme, but it was always faith is at the base of all we do. It is the thematic. Everything is added to it. And just like a symphony orchestra has a theme that runs through the whole symphony, that theme, faith, is behind everything that’s here. I want to suggest to you that knowledge and temperance and patience and godliness and brotherly kindness and love are all dependent for their fruition and for their good, for their good effectivity on faith.

It all starts there. It all starts there. Now, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. That’s the King James readering. I use the King James because I figure if it was good enough for the apostles, it’s good enough for me. I’m only kidding. But substance is an exact translation of the Greek word there. It is sub, which means under, and stand. It’s what stands under. Faith is what stands under our hope. Without faith, there is no hope. Hope cannot exist without faith. Faith always and forever produces hope. That’s the way it works. It is also not only the subsense of things hoped for, it is the evidence of things not seen. Faith being the faculty for seeing the unseen.

That which is seen is visible. That which is not seen but still visible is faith. That’s what it’s all about. And that’s the thematic. That’s what makes the orchestration go at the very outset. Now he says, add to your faith virtue. The idea here is excellence. Could I mispronounce that word so that I can give you a special emphasis for it? It is excellence. Excellence. It’s excelling. It is in the original, this word, the etymology goes back to a ridge. A ridge was always a strong area. And later on it came to be known as backbone. Does that tell you something? You say, I’ll tell you one thing about him. He has backbone. That’s orate. That’s excellence. It is moral fiber. It is the energy for translating your faith into courage without regard to consequences.

It’s saying, I’m going to do right no matter what happens. That’s excellence. Excellence is far superior to success. The Apostle Paul says to the brethren at Philippi, I want to pray that your excellence will grow and your love may get more in regard to its wisdom and knowledge. And that’s the idea of excellence. It is the courage to do right regardless of externalities. So we got faith playing, see that? And now he points in over here to the orchestra and he says, now add to that virtue. Add to faith and virtue. Now we got faith and virtue playing. That’s a nice kind of little thing sound, isn’t it? And then he says, add to your faith and your virtue knowledge. Knowledge. Add knowledge. Knowledge is understanding.

And the knowledge about which he speaks here is that idea of insight in the original. It’s that which enables us to secure a right course and then proceed. We went to the Johnson’s, no, I’m sorry, the Kennedy Space Center today. And we got a map on MapQuest before we went over there. We had a knowledge of where we were going before we went. That’s this knowledge. It’s the ability to secure a right course and then proceed accordingly. It means that you know where you’re going. Now stop a minute. Do you know where you’re headed? Where are you going? Where are you headed? What is your course? What is the focus of your life? He says, add to your faith, virtue, and to virtue and faith add knowledge, securing a right course.

Now then, we’ve got faith and virtue and knowledge playing. And he says, add to your faith and virtue and knowledge, temperance. Most of the translations render this self-control. It is a wonderful translation. Our English word control is an interesting word. It has an interesting background. It was originally counter roll. Counter roll. You ever drive along and look at the roadmap and you get through with the roadmap and you try to fold it up while you’re driving. I mean, it’ll make you make you uh throw stuff on the highway because you just get off frustrated. That’s control, say, it takes control to redo a scroll, for instance. If you’re going to re re roll a scroll, that takes intense concentration. This is what he’s talking about here.

It’s having reins on your passions. It’s patting in the sides of it. It’s being the governor of yourself. It is self-discipline. It means bringing yourself under the control of yourself. Self-control. And we got all these things playing now. We got faith and we got virtue, and now we pointed in knowledge, and then he points over here and he points in self-control. My the instrumentation is getting stronger and stronger as we go along. And the uh the the whole symphony is becoming much more compatible and much more uh uh it pro it produces much more of a kind of motive. It’s be it’s becoming motivational. He says, add then patience. Lots of definitions for patience. We usually think of patience as controlling your temper. That’s only one part.

Really, what patience is all about is two