From Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ--- To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have been given a faith as precious as ours:

I will sprinkle clean water on you and make you clean from all your idols and everything else that has defiled you.

I will put my spirit in you and will see to it that you follow my laws and keep all the commands I have given you.

They are God's people; he made them his children and revealed his glory to them; he made his covenants with them and gave them the Law; they have the true worship; they have received God's promises;

for it is he who is the "Yes" to all of God's promises. This is why through Jesus Christ our "Amen" is said to the glory of God.

And so the Lord says, "You must leave them and separate yourselves from them. Have nothing to do with what is unclean, and I will accept you.

I will be your father, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty."

All these promises are made to us, my dear friends. So then, let us purify ourselves from everything that makes body or soul unclean, and let us be completely holy by living in awe of God.

Now, God made his promises to Abraham and to his descendant. The scripture does not use the plural "descendants," meaning many people, but the singular "descendant," meaning one person only, namely, Christ.

But now, Jesus has been given priestly work which is superior to theirs, just as the covenant which he arranged between God and his people is a better one, because it is based on promises of better things.

But God finds fault with his people when he says, "The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will draw up a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.

Now, this is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel in the days to come, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

I will forgive their sins and will no longer remember their wrongs."

For this reason Christ is the one who arranges a new covenant, so that those who have been called by God may receive the eternal blessings that God has promised. This can be done because there has been a death which sets people free from the wrongs they did while the first covenant was in effect.

And this is what Christ himself promised to give us---eternal life.

Some, however, did receive him and believed in him; so he gave them the right to become God's children.

They did not become God's children by natural means, that is, by being born as the children of a human father; God himself was their Father.

All of us, then, reflect the glory of the Lord with uncovered faces; and that same glory, coming from the Lord, who is the Spirit, transforms us into his likeness in an ever greater degree of glory.

Your hearts and minds must be made completely new,

and you must put on the new self, which is created in God's likeness and reveals itself in the true life that is upright and holy.

and have put on the new self. This is the new being which God, its Creator, is constantly renewing in his own image, in order to bring you to a full knowledge of himself.

Our human fathers punished us for a short time, as it seemed right to them; but God does it for our own good, so that we may share his holiness.

My dear friends, we are now God's children, but it is not yet clear what we shall become. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he really is.

They make proud and stupid statements, and use immoral bodily lusts to trap those who are just beginning to escape from among people who live in error.

If people have escaped from the corrupting forces of the world through their knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and then are again caught and conquered by them, such people are in worse condition at the end than they were at the beginning.

If you plant in the field of your natural desires, from it you will gather the harvest of death; if you plant in the field of the Spirit, from the Spirit you will gather the harvest of eternal life.

Where do all the fights and quarrels among you come from? They come from your desires for pleasure, which are constantly fighting within you.

And when you ask, you do not receive it, because your motives are bad; you ask for things to use for your own pleasures.

From now on, then, you must live the rest of your earthly lives controlled by God's will and not by human desires.

You have spent enough time in the past doing what the heathen like to do. Your lives were spent in indecency, lust, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and the disgusting worship of idols.

Do not love the world or anything that belongs to the world. If you love the world, you do not love the Father.

Everything that belongs to the world---what the sinful self desires, what people see and want, and everything in this world that people are so proud of---none of this comes from the Father; it all comes from the world.