The title of my post today is “Richly Provided Entry Into the Eternal Kingdom”.
About 40 years ago, I was fascinated and longed to listen to and read the Bible. I heard that the Bible publishers hired professional readers to produce audio versions of every book of the Bible. So, after Mom died in 1988, I received a small inheritance. I was still in college, but I decided to invest about $80, a very high cost at the time, into a 48-cassette tape audio version of the NIV Bible. I loved my audio Bible.
But one of the drawbacks of cassette tapes, as many of you Baby Boomers like me have found out, is that cassette tapes are prone to wearing out fairly quickly. And, they were very, very, very inefficient at finding specific passages. I did much winding and rewinding to find particular passages, and that led to them wearing out. I still have all those old cassettes, if you can believe it, in four nice binders on my office bookshelf, collecting dust. They may be worth some money someday, if someone can get them to work correctly.
So I think one of the greatest advantages of modern technology in today’s world, in my opinion, is the ability to listen to the Bible on the web, in addition to reading the Bible. I love that I can click and point to specific passages of the audio Bible to listen to. No more clunky cassette tapes that require winding and rewinding.
Oftentimes, there’s a particular passage that makes my ears perk up. That happened to me the other night when listening to 2 Peter 1:11. It goes like this:
“For in this way, entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ will be richly provided for you.”So, entry into heaven won't be just a little bit provided, not just marginally provided, but RICHLY PROVIDED! Sometimes I feel like I’m going to enter heaven by the skin of my teeth because of all my failures and flaws. But Peter confirms in verse 10 that if I “make every effort to confirm” my “calling and election”, in other words, follow Jesus as closely and intimately as I can, that I “will never stumble”—and I will have not just a little bit provided, but a “richly provided entry into the eternal kingdom”.
