Pet. i. 12 — 15. I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth. Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in re- membrance ; knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, eue7i as our Lord Jesus Christ haih shewed me. Moreover, I luill endeavour that ye may be able after my de- cease to have these thinqs always in remembrance.
TO undervalue the principles of the Gospel would be highly sinful : bat to forget the ends they are to answer, and the effects they are to produce, would be not a whit less contrary to the mind of God. The restoration of man to the Divine image is the end of all that God has done for us : and the attain- ment of that image should be the great object of our desire. It is by keeping that in view, that we must glorify God ; and by labouring after that, we must grow up into a meetness for our heavenly inheritance. Not any one of the Apostles gloried more in Christ Jesus than did the apostle Peter : but, in the words before us, we see how extremely jealous he was on the subject of personal and universal holiness.
Let us consider,
I. What were the truths which he so constantly laboured to inculcate —
If we look back to the preceding context, we shall find tliat he has been speaking of the graces which the Christian must exercise in order to approve himself a Christian indeed. And it is in reference to these that he says, " I v/ill not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things." Now,
These are things which Christians are but too apt to forget —
[Principles are easily retained in memory : but it is not easy to bear in mind all the virtues which we ought to practise. When graces are to be brouglit into action, corruptions rise in the heart, to blind the mind, and to dissipate our thouiilits. Grace has a victory to gain, before it can put forth itself so as to display its real excellence. Evil is foremost and upper- most in the mind : and all the propensities of our nature lean to it : and hence a man is carried down the stream before he is aware. A mariner is often driven out of his course by cur- rents without discovering it, till lie comes to make his observa- tions : and Christians, through the power of temptation and corruption, are often drawn aside, when they imagine that they are in-osecuting the path which God has assigned them. He sometimes mistakes his very faults for virtues : and verily persuades himself that he is serving God aright, when he is acting from a vicious principle, or prosecuthig a good object
in