The Crowded Life

Headlines pile up, slang turns official, and our thumbs keep scrolling while our hearts feel thin. We open with the new dictionary entries—riz, adulting, dad bod, dumb phone, brain rot, doomscrolling—not as trivia but as a mirror for our pace, our habits, and our hunger for meaning. Then we pull back the camera: two-thirds of people say they’re exhausted by the news, and it’s no surprise when misinfo travels faster than truth and notifications never sleep. Once, news was an event; now it’s a Niagara. The question is not whether we should care about the world—it’s how to care without being consumed.

That’s where Peter’s line lands with force: “May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.” We explore what real grace means—common, saving, and the warning of cheap grace—and why multiplied grace looks like unexpected strength in hardship and steady kindness amid criticism. Peace, too, shifts from the hope of quiet circumstances to the reality of a quiet heart. Isaiah calls it a mind stayed on God; Peter roots it in growing knowledge of Christ. This isn’t about stockpiling facts but deepening fellowship with the Author through the Word He breathed. Scripture becomes the master science: it tells us what’s right, what’s not, how to get right, and how to stay right, equipping us like a well-provisioned ship for rough seas.

We end with a plan that works in real life: turn off the noise, prune the feeds, set guardrails, and trade the fire hose for a living stream. Make space to study, pray, and practice grace before the day starts speaking over you. If you’re ready to move from doomscrolling to a life carried by grace and anchored in peace, press play—and then pass the grace. Subscribe, share with a friend who’s overwhelmed, and leave a review to help others find calm in the chaos.

Transcript

New Words, Old Book

SPEAKER_00 0:26

For the first time in 20 years, I have read Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary is being revised and published next month. As a matter of fact, you might think a paper version of a dictionary would no longer be needed, but hundreds of thousands of these are sold each year. Millions of people go online to the site each week. The new edition will include more than 5,000 new words. Words that you know began as slang street terminology that you know now just went mainstream. I got a few to show you here, like this one. This one is Riz. This is a shortened form of charisma. So if somebody says you got a riz, well, that's good, I guess. They added the word adulting. This describes doing grown-up tasks, like getting out of bed in the morning, paying bills. Uh they've added the term uh which I wasn't crazy about, dad bod. Quote, this describes the slightly out-of-shape male physique. I have no idea what they're talking about on that one. They've added the word dumb phone as opposed to smartphone. This is a phone you can't get internet or email on. Probably the phone we all ought to be using. If you don't, they've added this word, brain rot. Now, mainstream, this is what happens when you spend too much time on that phone. If you if you don't care about brain rot, well, there's another word if you surf and surf and surf, it's called, they've added this word, doom scrolling. It's defined as, quote, the act of obsessively scrolling through bad news, which you've probably noticed most of it is. I have read as I began to just dig a little bit on this, the average person spends around two to four hours a day on all forms of social uh media, social media platforms. A lot of it is doom scrolling. That's one headline after another that leaves you somewhere between angry and depressed. In fact, one survey revealed this result. Here it is 66% of Americans surveyed feel exhausted by the news. The endless procession of negative or upsetting or shocking news that never stops sending notifications. 66% are tired. An article I came across from Christianity Today said this. I thought the title of it was interesting. Uh, it was this You can turn off the news and still be a good citizen. Well, imagine that. But they wrote In today's fast-paced world, the constant stream of news can feel like you're drinking from a fire hose. Political scandals, partisan squabbles, conspiracy theories, relational blow-ups, natural disasters, gruesome crimes, courtroom drama, arguments, fights, debates. The average American is inundated by the Niagara falls of news stuff. The trouble, of course, is Legion. For one thing, misinformation travels a lot faster than the truth. In fact, you really can't tell which is which. It's nearly impossible to discern what's really news worth knowing, and just uh more noise. I mean, did we really need to know what so-and-so said to so-and-so and how much the alimony payments are they're paying, or what the latest trend is, or who got a restraining order on whom, or who lost their job for what, or who won an award for whatever? Do we really need to know that? Maybe you're old enough to remember when news was an event. Now, whenever anybody says, you know, when I was a boy, you know what you're gonna hear, I'm gonna sound like my father here, but I'm gonna say it. When I was a boy, I can remember when news was scheduled in the evening. It wasn't 24-7. You watched it, they condensed it, you got an hour of it, and that was it. If you wanted more information, you got this thing called a newspaper. It was, you know, you got it in the morning. It was delivered by a paper boy, not a boy made of paper, printed on a 3D printer. This is a real boy who rode his bicycle through your neighborhood and threw your newspaper on the roof of your car in the middle of the rain. That's what you missed. News used to be daily, but not every second. In fact, if you go back 150 years, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States, the news took more than a week to travel from the East Coast to the Left Coast. And it traveled by Pony Express. You had to wait on the horse and the rider to arrive. Imagine that. 150 years ago, you had to wait more than a week to find out who stole the election. I'm trying to offend everybody I can this morning. California, whatever. I've read that the average American 150 years ago heard about or read about or was told about 200 news events a year. And today, the average person is processing more than 300 a day from this kind of fire hose of media consumption. For Christians who find themselves getting angry after watching cable news, he writes, or scrolling through social media, we must simply admit that our fallen flesh is easily addicted. We crave things that titillate us, excite us, shock us, enrage us, worry us, and we then simply reinforce those journalistic models that keep the fire hose on. We are surrounded by. You could translate that. I wish for you. I want this for you. What is it, Peter? I wish grace and peace would be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. Now, remember Peter's writing to believers. We learned in verse one that they have already received a faith equal to that of the apostles. They already knew and believed that Jesus was God, deity, and deliverer as their savior. So Peter is praying this for Christians. They need this in their world just like we need it today. And I want you to notice here that Peter isn't wishing that they had grace and peace. Believers already have them. Peter isn't praying that they'll get them. He's praying here that they will grow them. May grace and peace multiply. What does that mean to multiply? Well, the verb to multiply were helped when Jesus used it in a negative manner over in Luke chapter 24, as he talked about the great tribulation period. And he said, during that period of time, lawlessness is going to multiply. In other words, it's going to grow. Kittle's theological dictionary of the New Testament, the noun form of this word for multiply originally referred to a crowd. That's what got me thinking along these lines of a crowded life. Plato used it for a crowd of people. Numerous people, just sort of surrounding you, engulfing you. The verb form would be used back in these days to refer to the Nile River overflowing its banks. Its waters effectively multiplied. If you were caught in the flooding of the Nile River, you'd be surrounded by the water. You'd be carried along by its current. What that means is then we can be caught up in the current of our culture. And our minds and our hearts can be flooded by this never-ending stream of the sensational, the irrational, the criminal, the superficial, the trivial, the temporal stuff. The gravity of our world pulls us. Peter's saying, I want you to be surrounded by, I want you to be swept through life by the current of grace and peace. These two distinctives will keep you focused. So let's take a closer look at them. The first here is grace. He wants that to multiply, he wants that to spill over and out of our lives. What is grace? Well, as a theological concept, grace refers to the favor of God toward the undeserving. That's the simplest way you could define it. I grew up learning the acrostic of grace, God's riches at Christ's expense. It's a good little acrostic. Now, if you took a Torah scripture, you'd discover several kinds or categories of grace. You would discover what theologians call common grace. Common grace is the kindness of God upon all of fallen creation, all of fallen humanity. It's common to everyone so that an unbeliever can enjoy that music. Fall in love. Be amazed at the sunset. Write a poem. Enjoy conversation. Or it rained last night. Wasn't that wonderful? It rained. I noticed as I was riding through my neighborhood, it rained on people's lawns just like it did mine. People that don't know God. People that won't be in church. God sent rain to them as well as to you and me. Common grace restrains evil. Common grace is a reference to somebody who understands with the law of God written on their heart that they've sinned and they feel guilty, and that restrains them, even as unbelievers, from doing more of it. When you witness to somebody, you really don't need to get them to agree that they're a sinner. You just need to get them to admit it. They already know it. They just don't admit it. But we know they know because common grace has been shed abroad and the law of God's been written on their heart. They know stealing a chicken is wrong anywhere you go in the world. It's common grace. Secondly, we have what we could call saving grace. Now, this is for believers only. Paul wrote about that in Ephesians 2. You're familiar with verse 8. For by grace you have been saved. One of the five Reformation solas. We call them as sola grazia. Grace alone. It's carved on the face of my pulpit along with the other four solas. Sola grazia refers to the doctrine of salvation by grace alone. In other words, salvation is unearned, it's undeserved, it's unmerited. There is saving. Grace. Coined by a Lutheran pastor by the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the 1940s. He coined it because he was challenging the church of his era to stop watering down the gospel. That's not anything new that's been taking place since it was delivered. But he wrote this in his book called The Cost of Discipleship. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace allows the Christian to live like the rest of the world, to model himself on the world's standards in every sphere of life and not aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin. So you have common grace, saving grace, and cheap grace. Now, if you track this word through the New Testament, you can also observe what grace is going to look like when it multiplies and it overflows your life. So it might be good not just to define it, but to see it demonstrated. Let me give you just two demonstrations of grace. First, grace empowers you to handle hardship with happiness. Now, you might have expected me to put a period after hardship. It'd be great if we could. But grace empowers you to handle hardship with gladness. That's going to take grace times grace times grace, isn't it? But here's what Paul wrote about his own personal testimony. He writes this a thorn was given me in the flesh. We don't know what it is, by the way, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. In other words, he prayed, Lord, take this away. But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, now notice this, I will boast all the more gladly. You could render that happily, joyfully, of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. That is, I'll live cognizant of his power. For the sake of Christ, then I am content. I'm gladly content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. 2 Corinthians chapter 12, verses 7 through 10. It's going to take grace in your life and mine to handle hardship, period. It's going to take grace multiplied, overflowing to handle it with glad contentment, so that Christ will be glorified. Grace times grace. Times grace. Grace not only allows us to handle hardship with happiness. Secondly, let me give you one more. Grace enables you to respond to critics with kindness. Paul writes to the Colossians in chapter four, walk in wisdom toward outsiders. That's a reference to unbelievers, making the best use of the time. That is the time you have with them. You live next to them, you work with them, you go to school with them. Be wise in your use of time. Here's how you can do it: let your speech always be gracious, grace-oriented, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. So, what is it in life that allows you and me to respond kindly and wisely to noisy people in a noisy world? Grace. You know, we say past the salt. We say that a lot in the South. If you've just moved down here, we ask for it before we even taste it. We're going to assume it's going to need more of it, just like sugar in your tea. You need to learn how to drink it that way, by the way. Don't drink it unsweetened. Go back to New York or wherever you came from. It's to be sweetened, okay? There's a verse in the Bible about that, I'm sure. But we we would say pass the salt. We say it all the time. How about this? Pass the grace. Let me sprinkle it. Before I even say a word. Salt my speech with grace. Now it's interesting that our world uses the expression, if you notice, salty speech. Hey, he was speaking, he was salty. What are they using it for? Somebody who's profane, using profanity. The Bible uses it in exactly the opposite manner. Salty speech, according to God, is speaking with graciousness, with tactfulness. Tact is a great word for grace. I love the way somebody said that tact is making people feel at home when you wish they were. The world of Peter's original readers was growing more and more dangerous. External peace, social peace, relational peace, civil peace. That was all becoming a thing of the past. Peter's not praying here for the believer to have a peaceful world. That's not gonna happen until the Prince of Peace comes. I like the way one author defined this. He said that the grace of God meets every outward need. The peace of God meets every inward need. This is peace within. The prophet Isaiah told us how to get it. God keeps us in perfect peace when our minds are stayed, stabilized, fixed on him. Isaiah 26, 3. So, in other words, peace isn't related to the outward pressure, it's related to an upward focus. Now, in light of what's going to happen to Peter's readers, by the time they get this letter, Nero has only has only recently burned Palatine Hill. He's making room for a new palace. His poll numbers go way down, so he blames the Christians for starting the fire, hoping to increase his popularity back. The storm clouds are gathering. Christians are going to be persecuted openly. It isn't too many years before the lions arrived. Peter knows what it means to cave under pressure out of a little charcoal fire. When a little servant girl asked him if he knew the Lord. Not grace and peace. But he's getting to a deeper issue. You see, Peter's praying for peace because this old apostle, who's probably about 80 or 81 years of age, when he writes this letter, oh, he's learned that the peace of God within the heart of the believer is not found in the absence of trouble. It's found in the abiding presence of Christ. Peter learned by experience not to focus on the storm. We're not going to rage at the wind. We're not going to rage at the waves. We're not really raging against the noise. We just know it exists. Focus is on the Savior who's in the boat in the middle of the storm. Now, here's the question. We want these to multiply in our lives. These distinctives of grace and peace. That's Peter's wish. That's his prayer. Well, how do you get them developing? You have them. How do you grow them? Well, the answer is that now. In verse 2, look again. May grace and peace be multiplied to you. Now notice, in that is by means of the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. This is the first time of ten that Peter's going to refer to knowledge. In fact, Peter opens the letter with it. The very last verse of this letter ends with it. To grow in the knowledge of our Lord. Now, knowledge is a key word through this letter. You could call it the key principle of growing in these distinctives of grace and peace. Now, I don't want to bore you with grammar, but the normal word for knowledge is gnosis. You might have heard the word gnostic, secret knowledge, which was error. But gnosis is personal intimate knowledge. Here, Peter, though, adds a prefix to it, epitnosis. You could wouldly translate it to grow in knowledge towards something, to deepen your knowledge about something. This is the direction your toes are pointed. You haven't fully matured, but you're maturing as you grow in knowledge toward an object. Now, what's the object? We gives it to us here. Two of them: God. That's a reference to God the Father and God the Son, Jesus Christ. You're growing in knowledge toward them. More knowledge about them. We know our divine teacher is the Holy Spirit who opens the word for us so that we can understand and apply it. He's using this inspired textbook of Scripture to reveal the truth. What we know about God, what we know about Jesus Christ is found here. This is the self-disclosure of himself to us. So we're not just talking about facts. You know, Stephen says we got to get smarter. That's not the point. It's not facts written about the author. It will include that, but that's not where you stop. Knowledge relates to fellowship with the author. See, the more you learn about the written word, the more you come to know the living word, Jesus Christ. The knowledge of Christ is the highest knowledge, the greatest knowledge. We've never been told to get in a room and you know just meditate with an empty mind. Hum something. No, we're to meditate on the truth that introduces us to the truth, who is Christ. One author said that the knowledge of Christ is the master science of all sciences. Other sciences, he wrote, can bring new skills, new knowledge, new abilities, new discoveries. But the master science, the knowledge of Christ, brings you what no other science can give you grace and peace. Some of the greatest scientists of our world have discovered this, like Blaise Pascal, brilliant scientist of the 17th century, came to faith later in life, considered the knowledge of Christ greater than any other human reasoning. He's the one who famously said, What you've probably heard that there's a hole in the heart of every human. It can only be filled by God, the Creator. Or more recently, Francis Collins, the leader of the genome project. It produced the first complete map of the human DNA sequence, finished ahead of schedule, 2003. Became famous because of it. Imagine mapping more than three billion or around three billion pairs, and then giving us that picture that we've all seen of that amazing spiral, just a little section of it. Collins wrote this the God of the Bible is the God of the genome. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful. Collins would write that knowing Christ was greater than any of his scientific achievements. Now let's be clear though, the only book, again, on planet Earth that reveals him to us is this book. This is, in a sense, then, the science book of the highest, greatest master. Science. So there can't be any substitute then. If we want to grow in grace and peace, if we want to see it rise as water in our lives, as it were, and overflow into the lives of everyone else, nothing can replace the study of this book. The Apostle Paul wrote to Peter and said, This is breathed out by God. All scripture inspired, God's breath, God breathed. It's profitable for teaching, for proof, for correction, for training, so that the man of God, in general terms, the believer, can be equipped for every good work, for life. I love the way Warren Wearsby outlined it. I give it off into my greenhouse class. He said it this way: all scripture is profitable for teaching, that tells you what's right. For reproof, that tells you what's not right. For correction, that tells you how to get right. For training and righteousness, that tells you how to stay right. Isn't that good? So that you will be equipped for life. That word equipped was used for a wagon that was stocked with supplies as somebody prepared for a journey. It was used uh for a ship that had brought on board all the supplies it needed before it set sail. I mean, how many Christians think they can sail through life, and we can think this that we can sail through life and forget the supply. We can take off on our little wagons, a giddy up, and we we forgot to take along with us the right equipment. The right equipment in the context of our illustration is not a new iPad. Peter is reminding them and us that growth in grace and peace is going to result directly from dedicated time and study. It is simply impossible to know God intimately if we treat this book casually. It's impossible to live biblically unless we think biblically, and we can't think biblically unless our minds are transformed by biblical truth. This is gonna demand for us, especially in light of the context of the illustration. It's gonna demand that we develop the discipline of denial. We say no to the noise. Put up guardrails, put up the muffler at the right time. If you're being crowded by everything else in your life so that God's word is being crowded out of your life, get rid of that other crowd. Go to war with that crowd. In practical terms, turn off the noise, turn off cable news, limit social media, get rid of half your apps that you don't need, turn off notifications, clean house, every distraction, whatever it might be, and you alone know what it is. I've given you just a few illustrations because that's common to all of us. Whatever is keeping you from growing, robbing you of the time to be studying the master science, deny it, remove it, and pray this prayer with Peter, that you will make his wish come true, that grace and peace will begin to multiply in demonstrations in your heart and life and through what you say and do as you as you come into a more intimate knowledge of this book and buy it a deeper and more intimate walk with its author. Jesus Christ.