“For we have spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles—when we walked in lewdness, lusts, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties, and abominable idolatries.”
For we have spent enough of our past lifetime
This phrase literally reads in Greek: “For enough!, the having passed by of time, the will of the Gentiles to work out.” The “having passed by of time” means to go out of existence. Our life before Christ ceased to exist when we embraced Jesus as our Savior.
Now that we have become Christians, we mark that passage of time as non-Christians as a thing of the past. We clearly mark the distinction between our life before and after knowing Christ. Years without Christ were the wasted years – the time between birth and new birth. Our entire career before Christ was a waste, and we were sick of it. That life did not satisfy us. It was a wretched treadmill of vacuous sin. We came to hate our sin and bad habits.
Tit 3:3, “For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another.”
“Lifetime” is time as a series of events. We get our English word “chronology” from this word. This is the time when we ran with the fast crowd. Peter lists the fast crowd’s lifestyle by six examples later in this verse. Some people get into this fast crowd in an instant. Maybe that is why they call it the “fast” crowd! Before coming to Christ, we simply put in time on this earth. We went through the motions of life without any real purpose or meaning.
“Enough” means sufficient, adequate. Peter greatly emphasizes this word in Greek by being placed first in the sentence. Living that life in the past is emphatically sufficient! “Enough” pertains to what is sufficient for some purpose and accordingly resulting in satisfaction? We came to a place when we said, “Enough is enough already! I have had it with that kind of life. It does not satisfy.”
“Sufficient for the day are its troubles” (Mt 6.34)
PRINCIPLE:
Knowing Jesus personally gives ultimate satisfaction.
APPLICATION:
At a point in our life, we came to realize that our former life without Christ was “enough.” We had our fill of it. When we met Christ, that life no longer satisfied us.
It is difficult for us to think about past sin and the harm we did before coming to Christ. Our sin built upon itself until it sent us into a spiral downward. Sin is not a static thing because it creates a momentum of sinning. At the point when sin completely controlled us, it was only then that we came to realize the futility of our lives.
