To Partner with God (02-07-2025)

KEM Sermon: 2 Peter 1:2-4
In an aw-inspiring grace-empowered moment of massive revelation, a feeling of serenity envelops you as you discover God’s perfect will. The magnitude and excellence of His plan for you is sobering; He wants you to be His partner and to know Him on the most intimate level possible. In human terms, it can be compared only to the experience of consummating a marriage. It is in that moment the feeling of oneness is so real that you cannot discern where you end and your partner begins. When that occurs between you and God, you will know what it is like to have His power at your disposal, in addition to everything good you could ever imagine for your life, and more. Your life will become a never-ending joyous pursuit of sustaining that intimacy with God, while apprehending His every precious and exceedingly great promise. Having then experienced this intimacy, every lustful desire to please your carnal nature and every temptation to reattach your source of satisfaction to the pleasures of this world will have faded into oblivion. It is only then that you will truly understand what it means to be God’s partner, as if His essence has become your essence.
We have a word for this in our language; it’s called love. And all of a sudden this immortal idea finally makes perfect sense. You can come to know and believe the love God has for you by first recognizing that God is love. He who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in Him. God is love and God is perfect. The relationship between love and perfection is that love is the unifying force in the universe that glues together all of the component parts of perfection, what eventually becomes the mature finished product, -a Christlike human! In other words, love is the connective tissue that binds together all the parts that unite man with God as one-what makes a disciple look like Y’shua!
And because God is love, without it you won’t ever know true intimacy with God. Furthermore, how can you claim to love God if you don’t love others-it’s just a lie. As such, you owe one another just one thing-love. God’s will can literally be summed up in that single idea because he who truly loves others simultaneously fulfills all of God’s law. This is possible because each of God’s commands is ultimately represented by that single idea-to love your neighbor as yourself, while never willingly bringing harm to another person. In other words, love in action completes, or binds together, every one of God’s legal requirements, and is indeed the only way you can recognize a true disciple of Christ.
And that is why love is the ultimate goal of a mature disciple; you must be diligent to practice your faith by adding to it these things: virtue, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and finally you arrive at-love. And that is why to know that level of intimacy with God was Y’shua’s ultimate prayer for you before He went to the cross. He prayed that, “We would all be one; even as He and His Father are one, the Father in Him and He in the Father.” Y’shua also revealed how it is through the impartation of God’s glory that you can develop this intimate relationship, “The glory which You have given Me, I have given to them, that they may be one, even as We are one, I in them, and You in Me, that they may be perfected into one.” Peter acknowledged that same path to intimacy in his final letter; “through the intimate knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and virtue.”
It is paramount, as such, that you believe these prayers and begin to think like Christ. If anything short of that is acceptable to you, break that stronghold and destroy every image in your mind that exalts itself above knowing God with this level of intimacy. Bring every thought into captivity that disagrees with this calling and bring it into submission to the truth of Christ. Then call others to do the same. That is what it means to be a disciple and to become a true ambassador of Christ, as if God actually speaks through you to the world! That is what it looks like to become a partner with God-to partake in His Divine Nature.