From My Perspective

by Stephen R Bolt

Some of you heard Pastor Steve Berger speak at the Faith Financial Annual Conference in Nashville in 2006. He was passionate, insightful and right on! Last Sunday, I had the privilege of hearing him deliver a message that he felt was literally revealed to him by God. The topic was “Spiritual Maturity” and the text was II Peter 1:5-7 where Peter lists a sequence of character attributes that Christians should aspire to personify. They include faith, virtue, knowledge self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love. Pastor Berger said that there were two different theological opinions as to how to view this list: either as purely a random order, or as a sort of chronological order of building blocks. However, Steve went on to say that neither of those seemed right to him and that as he awoke one recent morning God revealed to him that the reason Peter put the list in the order that he did was because that was exactly the order that Peter had dealt with each attribute in his own life! Steve then went on to corroborate this revelation through a chronology of dramatic scriptural references that absolutely fascinated me. Many of the events in Peter’s life with Christ were an embarrassment to Peter, to Jesus and to our faith. But, now in his old age and looking back at his life, Peter was using those same painful recollections to teach the new church what to focus on – based on his own personal journey!

No one goes through life unscathed. As I recently read in a book, each of us is either about to enter a storm, are fighting for our lives in a storm, or are just coming out of a storm. Some storms are more severe then others, but the point is that life is stormy. The question we each need to ask ourselves is how do we use our life storms to help others? Just as Peter has blessed millions of Christians by relating his life/storm lessons, each of us need to be mindful that God has a divine purpose behind all that happens to us, too. The storm that ravages us can divinely become the very sustenance that helps rescue someone else. Just as blessings can quickly become a curse if we keep them for our own personal benefit, so too can storms become our personal torture if we don’t use them to help others survive theirs.

“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” From Paul’s letter to the church at Rome 8:28.