1 Sermon Series: Faithful Living in Faithless Times 1 Peter 1:22-2:3 Faithful Living Means Faithful Loving Pastor Brian Long: October 4th, 2015 Big Idea: Sincere love calls for purging your corrosive ways. So far in our series Peter is doing a huge amount of celebrating and rejoicing. He s celebrating the grand gospel of Jesus Christ. Peter is fired up about the gospel because in his great mercy and grace God has offered to forgive our sin and give us new birth into a living hope that is indestructible. Why? Because this living hope of salvation is kept in heaven by God s power for each and every one of us who have believed and placed our trust in Jesus who was crucified, died, and was raised to life again from the dead. This hope is living because it is grounded on the resurrection life of Jesus so it will never perish, spoil, or fade. Peter is celebrating because the surety of this heavenly hope can inspire us to persevere in earthly trials. In fact, the surety of this salvation means that the grief we might suffer in all kinds of trials can work to strengthen and deepen our ability to trust as we sink deeper into the faithful arms of Jesus. Peter is celebrating because the surety of this salvation also means that rather than being trapped in unhealthy, destructive ways of living, we are now free to live different kinds of lives more healthy lives, more godly lives. In the portion of his letter we ll be looking at today, Peter drills down more specifically on this opportunity we now have as Christians to live different kinds of lives. Peter specifically helps us understand that Christians those who have believed in Jesus as Savior and are learning to trust him as leader in their lives have a new and improved capacity to love. Look at 1 Peter 1:22. Christians are called to sincerely love others deeply from the heart (22-25). Notice what Peter is saying here. Obeying the truth = embracing the gospel of Jesus (admitting sin, believing onto Jesus who paid for your sin, and learning to trust Jesus as leader in your life).
2 Peter says by obeying the truth (embracing the gospel of Jesus) they have been purified. Remember what we learned last week about being holy in status in front of God because of Christ, and then becoming holy in reality as we grow and mature in Christ. Peter is basically saying, Now that you have become a Christian you have a new capacity for sincere love for your brothers or other Christians around you in your gathering. In other words, when you become a Christian you are purified and empowered to love with a new and improved quality of love. So, Peter calls Christians to love one another deeply, from the heart. You see sincere love for others is born out of sincere love for God. Now, LOVE is an enormously unwieldy subject to try to understand. Later in this message, I want to at least scratch at the surface of understanding this new capacity to love. What does it means to love deeply from the heart? How does that differ from our culture s understanding of love? How does it differ from what is sometimes called love, but is really codependence, enablement, timid avoidance, or compliance? For now, I want you to grab onto Peter s main idea here When you become a Christian you have a new capacity to love sincerely and deeply and we are to practice this with one another. And this new capacity is eternally durable far surpassing energizer bunny status because it is grounded on the living enduring truth of God s word. Look at verse 23-24 Again, sticking with the new birth theme, Peter is saying your purification and your new and improved capacity to love sincerely and deeply is born out of your new relationship and new life in Jesus. And your new relationship with Jesus, that you gained when you embraced the word of truth the message of the gospel is rooted and grounded on the living, enduring word of God. Please realize that God s word is his work is his person. As we see in the creation narrative, God speaks and by his word he creates what he desires and what s in his image. And In John 1 John calls Jesus the Word who was with God and who was God and then became flesh in the person of Jesus.
3 Here Peter is informing us that the Christians new capacity to love has God s everlasting power and life behind it. How? It s through the presence of the Holy Spirit in us, as we live in Christ. His word is his work is his person and our capacity to love sincerely and our call to love deeply is really empowered by all of God. This reinforcing of the solid, enduring nature of our capacity for sincere, deep love reminds us that it s not something we are left on our own to conjure up. Its source is God in us. It also reminds us that we must never give up seeking to practice it in our lives, because God will never stop loving us deeply and sincerely. So, there are tons of reasons to be hopeful and optimistic that we can answer the call to love others sincerely and deeply. In fact, the quote that Peter uses here is taken from Isaiah 40 when Isaiah is delivering a message of hope by encouraging those in Exile to never give up because God is with them and has promised them by his word that he would deliver them from exile and free them to live as his people once again. And the words and promises of God will never fail. Peter s point for his 1st Century reader and for his 21st Century reader? Despite the trials, persecution, and hard times you experience, never, never give up loving one another sincerely and deeply because this love originates and flows from our living, everlasting God. With those foundational realities firmly in view, Peter now begins to drill down what sincere, deep love looks like in real time in our ways of relating with one another. Sincere love, according to Peter, calls for purging relationally corrosive ways of relating. Look at Chapter 2:1 Sincere love calls for purging relationally corrosive ways (2:1) I m calling these relational ways corrosive because they all work to erode and eat away at healthy relationships and healthy community. And that is Peter s target thought is in this section the community of relationships among those who have chosen to trust Jesus as Savior and follow him as leader of their lives. Next week he ll speak more about we are to relate to those who are not yet Christians. To rid yourself of these corrosive ways of relating means to stop practicing them, to put them out of your life. It s the same concept the
4 Apostle Paul uses in Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3 when he calls Christians to put off your old self and put on the new self. As we saw last week, this is calling each of us to intentional living. As Peter said last week in verse 13, Prepare your minds for action, and be self-controlled. In other words, while the capacity for sincere, deep love is made possibly through God, it takes our intentional practice and implementation in our relationships. Let s take a quick look at this list of corrosive ways of relating. These are all attitudes and behavior that corrode and destroy relationships and community. Malice = Hurtful, Ill-will towards another that corrodes harmony Deceit = to deceive by using trickery and falsehood. This of course involves lying, or withholding the truth or the whole story. Deceit and introduces pretense and disingenuousness to a relationship so that the trust necessary for love vanishes. Hypocrisy = to give an impression of having certain purposes or motivations, while in reality having quite different ones. This term originates in the Greek plays where an actor pretends to be a certain character, by concealing his true self be wearing a mask. Of course in life you can practice hypocrisy with malicious motive, pretending to be someone you re not, or you can practice hypocrisy out of shame or fear of letting others know the true you. Both corrode relationships. Envy = a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities, or luck (http:// dictionary.reference.com/browse/envy). Envy is also contrary to the sincere love Peter is calling for, because instead of desiring the best for others, it hopes for their downfall or prefers the advancement of oneself to the joy of others. Slander of every kind = This word slander is a compound word made up of the first word in this list, malice meaning evil motive and the word speak. It stresses any kind of speech or talk that tears down another and criticizes them. Slander is not limited to spreading false stories about others but also involves disparaging others. Well-timed
5 words that carry insinuations about others are often all that is necessary. Think about what each of these practices do; they disrespect others, they use others, they put others down and lift you up or make you look better or feel better about yourself. They feed off the degradation and destruction of others in order to nurture or promote your self. Peter could not be more emphatic Sincere, deep love calls the Christian to purge these relationally corrosive, abusive ways of relating out of our lives. The fact that he commands them to rid themselves of these things means that they were present already and need to be purged out. Now, any time you start talking about purging any sort of negative habit or style of relating out of your life, the only effective way to do it is to focus on something godly or healthy that replaces that old worn out style or habit. It s the ole don t think about apple pie thing If you are trying not to think about apple pie it doesn t work to just sit there and think I can t think about apple pie. It s far more effective to find something else to think about to take the focus off the negative. Notice what Peter says in verses 2-3. Feeding on the word of God is to replace feeding on the destruction of others (2:2-3) Again, staying with the new birth, born again theme Peter uses an analogy of newborn babies to tell us that the most effective way to stop feeding on others is to feed on the Word of God. This means we must seek to retrain our brains and instead of instinctively practicing these corrosive ways of relating we must begin to soak and marinate in the word of God so it begins to characterize our instincts. It s worth knowing that in this entire passage today, this is the only pure command Crave the pure spiritual milk. In the same way a newborn baby instinctively, desperately, from its core seeks to nurse and be nourished, so Christians are to eagerly, incessantly, and from our core draw nourishment regularly from time with God, reflection in his word, and prayers for his work in our lives. Peter suggests Christians have tasted and seen that the Lord is good at conversion, but
6 there is more to be had. The more-of-the-lord-to-be-had involves feeding on God and his word, rather than feeding on the destruction of others. Learning to practice sincere love, verses practicing relationally corrosive ways of relating. Refusal to do so would stunt their growth in the new life. In the book of Philippians when the Apostle Paul is inviting Christians to let go of anxiety and allow the peace of God to settle into them and guard their hearts and minds, he challenges them to focus on whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable if anything is excellent or praiseworthy think about such things. Thinking about, reflecting on, and focusing on these healthy, godly things is the key to experiencing more healthy, godly emotions, which lead to more healthy, godly behaviors. The godly behavior Peter is calling Christians to today is sincere, deep love from the heart. This is not the shallow, self-serving love we often see depicted in our media today. It is not a merely a warm, fuzzy feeling, or good spirited friendship around the Connection Café on Sunday or the water cooler on Monday. It may involve those things, but it s much more rich than that. The word deeply in verse 22 speaks of the effort required for this love, the depth of it for one another, and the duration of it (until the end). The word is frequently associated with characteristics of prayer: fervency, constancy, and effort (cf. Luke 22:44; Acts 12:5). Peter expects his churches to be filled with people who love one another in that way, who try to understand one another, who give the other person the benefit of the doubt, and who reach out to others in the same love. Sincere love is righteous behavior toward others that cultivates an intimacy among people where masks are dropped, honesty prevails, and that sense of communication and community beyond the human abounds where there is literally the fellowship of and in the Holy Spirit. Conclusion/Application Perhaps you find yourself struggling with a proneness or habit of practicing one of the corrosive, abusive ways of relating Peter calls us to purge from our lives.
7 If you are a Christian, then you have the capacity to change this about your life. And you have a new and improved capacity to love sincerely and deeply from the heart. As I mentioned last week, change can be a difficult and long process. But, cultivating godly ways in our lives begins by calling on God to fill you and open your eyes to any ways of relating that might be corrosive to your relationships. This is where the marinating and feeding of the pure spiritual milk of God and his word comes into play. As we become aware of something that need purged from our lives, we have to get intentional about purging the corrosive way out by cultivating a loving way in. This new loving way will be difficult at first and feel awkward. But don t give up. Keep practicing it and in time this sincere, deeply loving way will come to characterize how you relate with others. Can you remember a time when went sledding at a time when the sledding hill was full of fresh untracked snow? The first sled goes down slowly, carving out a rut. Other sleds follow, over and over, down the same path, smoothing and packing down the snow. After many trips a well-worn groove develops, a path out of which it is hard to steer. The groove enables sleds to stay aligned and on course, gliding rapidly, smoothly, and easily on their way. Character traits are like that: the first run down, which required some effort and tough going, gradually becomes a smooth track that one glides down without further intentional steering. Of course, a rider can always stick out a boot and throw the sled off course, usually damaging the track as well. So too we can act out of character, even after being in the groove for a long time. In general, however, habits incline us swiftly, smoothly, and reliably toward certain types of action. But it starts with time with God, identifying what needs purged, choosing to cut a new path in the snow of your relationships, and practicing it over and over and over.
8 In this way our lives can become characterized by deep love for one another from the heart. Church of the Foothills 2015