Let me remind you of my road sign model that we looked at yesterday. Effective Christian witness both of the church and of its individual members requires three things: words, a supportive structure for those words and a secure foundation.

Yesterday we looked at Peter’s assurance of the church’s identity, as given by God, and the assurance of our salvation, as given by God. And we described these twin assurances as the foundation upon which both our faith in Jesus and our witness in the world are based.

What follows in the rest of the letter is mainly concerned with the structure... the authenticity of our lives as God’s people.

Chapter 1:13

Our passage this morning starts with one of the key verses in the letter 1:13 – because everything that Peter says after this is controlled by this verse. “Therefore, prepare your minds for action, be self-controlled; set your hope fully upon the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

It is vital that we take on board right at the start the importance of the word ‘therefore’, because this verse links all that Peter says about our behaviour in the following verses back to the prior assurance of salvation he has described in the first half of chapter 1. If we lose sight of the therefore, then we can get ourselves into the wrong way of thinking that the behaviour Peter talks about is a pre-requisite for salvation rather than a response to salvation.

A couple more things to notice from this verse: the first level of response Peter calls for is mental – he expects us to make a reasoned or thought out response to Christ's assurance. I don’t think this is about replacing emotion with intellect because remember in yesterday’s passage Peter’s own joy and praise as he recalled his own new life in Christ. The point here is not about being dry and dull and academic in our faith. It is instead about letting the truth and hope of the Gospel impact deeply into our very minds, the place from which all our desires and actions stem. If Christ is to ever be Lord of our lives then he has to be lord of our minds. Furthermore our minds are to be prepared for action, and this is to result in lives of self-control.

Do you know what I find curious, in church week after week we have our minds fed with insights from scripture, and yet so often those insights make precious little impact on the lives we live. It is as if we are happy to be intellectually and theologically stimulated. But at the same time find it nearly impossible to connect that stimulation to practical reality.

Peter wants us to be living as if we’re members of the of a highly trained and organised unit of crack agents – planning for what lies ahead, preparing well in advance for the action that we know is coming our way. Let me give an example... one of the minor ethical challenges we face at work is the pressure to tell lies. Maybe not big lies, but still those around us will expect us to tell little lies if they ask us to... the most obvious example is when the boss says ‘tell them I’m not here’ – in response to an angry client coming on the phone. In this circumstance most Christians tell the lie. Do you know why? They say that the request came from nowhere. Let me tell you the request didn’t come from nowhere, it came from the reality of a fallen world. But for some reason I cannot figure out, nobody ever helped the Christian to see the inevitability of this potential compromise or to get mentally prepared for it in advance.
Here’s another example. If you get into an intimate relationship, and you allow the sexual side to progress too far. I’m afraid to say that the way we’re designed as sexual beings is that one thing will lead to another, right up to the ultimate conclusion of intercourse. It’s no good afterwards saying I thought we would only go this far and then be able to stop. Be wise in advance not foolish in retrospect.

Or pornography... apparently 75% of all internet traffic is related to pornography. I think this issue relates mostly to guys. Being mentally prepared for action will mean knowing full well that pornography is as addictive as any drug. Therefore there is no such thing as the occasional glance at porn... occasional glances will lead to life altering habits. Be wise. Be prepared. Say no before you are so compromised and your life so screwed up that a reversal means throwing out your computer or your TV or cutting off your internet connection. And by the way if you need to do one of those three things to stop a problem with porn, then do it. Don’t allow room for compromise, it will lead to your downfall.

Or another... Christians marrying non-believers and then suddenly discovering that rather than the Christian having some miraculous ability to lead their spouse to Christ, the opposite occurs and the non-believer places themselves between the believer and God. It is inevitable, after all what non-God fearing man or woman would ever be happy with their partner truly submitting to Christ's lordship rather than their own.

You see the point I’m making. Failure on our part to prepare mentally for action will only ever result in the compromise of our response to God’s grace, and the compromise of our witness.

Peter says, don’t walk blindly into such things. Instead stop in your tracks right now and think about your life and where you’re heading. Get ready for action, because people who are unprepared are always the first casualties of war.
Do you see what Peter is talking about? All that follows is about how we determine to live our lives in response to grace. How we determine to obey Jesus as we have been chosen by the Father to do. How we live with the impact and influence of sin cancelled out from our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin, but unless we live as disciplined disciples we will often find sin just swamping us again and again.

The third thing I want to draw your attention to from this verse is the direction of our hope. Curiously, given the strength of assurance Peter has provided in the earlier verses, our hope is not orientated towards the past but rather towards the future, to the time when Christ will be revealed. This is because our ultimate reality is wrapped up in Christ's future glory (which is of course assured because of the Father’s past action) and it is the hope of Christ's future glory which has to set the pattern for our current lifestyle, behaviour and words.

Again this is worth pausing for. Jesus lived and died as a human, though he was already fully God. Why? Was it for you and me? No. It was to bring glory to the Father.

How good is your perception of the Glory of God? What do you tie that perception to?

The Bible makes it clear that we have only to look to one place – to the Son, who is the image of the invisible God – the representation of the Father’s glory.

Friends, if you’re anything like me then the Glory of God is often far from my mind... and if that is true then it’s going to be hard for me to live in the way Peter commands us. Will you join me in praying that we might get a fresh vision of the Glory of the Father revealed in the Son, and that this vision remains at the heart of our lives and church?

 

Main Text

So now to the rest of today’s passage. This passage divides into four main sections:
In verses 14-21 of chapter 1 Peter is concerned with personal holiness;
In verses 22 – chapter 2:3 his concern shifts to behaviour among Christians;
Then in chapter 2 verses 4-10 he talks about the church itself;
And in chapter 2 verses 11-12 he shifts the emphasis to look outwards to how we live among non-believers, and these verses form the start of a section which flows at least through to chapter 3 verse 7 if not further.

Do you see there’s a progression here. From introspection, to inter-relationship with believers, to corporate life in the church, and then to life with the non-believer.

Of course it may just be that this was the only order in which Peter could write the material in order to cover all his bases, but I think there is a clear logic to this pattern. It reminds us that our outward ethics and moral righteousness needs to start with inner transformation... and not the other way round.

In a world which tends to judge us by what we do rather than by the private thoughts we harbour, often our feelings of self-worth relate directly to the opinions and praise we get from others, and it can be very easy for us to get into habits of assumed righteousness, with the appearance of good lives, while the rot in our hearts remains like an unattended cancer.

Peter is having none of that. What he wants is a church peopled with individuals of genuine authenticity and integrity. Not hypocrisy. So in his desire to see the church survive and flourish despite Roman persecution or Western Secularism, the place he takes us first is to ourselves. The depth of our innermost being, our minds – which are where we need to start if we too long to see the church built in a way that truly glorifies the one true God of heaven and earth.

Regarding the structure of these verses there are three other quick points to make before we get into the text:
1. First, with the exception of chapter 2:1 Peter resists using Pauline lists of right and wrong behaviour – rather leaving us to do our own honest self-scrutiny.
2. Second, each of Peter’s statements about the way we behave is linked directly to a theological argument. Because morality or ethics is never an abstract for Peter nor for us. It is never a philosophically formed position, no for the Christian our morality and ethics need to be tied directly to the character of God at every turn otherwise they are not Christian ethics but merely human ethics perhaps done with Christian language.
3. Third, each of these theological arguments is supported by scripture which reveals not only Peter’s epistemology but also his continuing desire to see the new church of Asia Minor rooted in the historic legacy of God’s chosen people in the Old Testament.

 

Specifics

There are four specific challenges Peter makes, supported by four theological arguments and each leading to it’s own application.

Challenge 1 – no longer conform to evil desires.
Verse 14 do not conform to the evil desires you had before you knew Jesus, because verse 15-16 the one who has called you to salvation is holy. You see again the imperative that right behaviour is the right response to the nature of God. He is holy, that is He is pure, faultless and distinct from all that is sinful in the world. Right through scripture this has been the call from God to His people – be holy because I am holy. And what does being holy mean – well it means pushing our evil and sinful desires and behaviour behind us.

Peter doesn’t hit on specific examples of sin, but that doesn’t mean he wants his readers to skim quickly over this verse. Each of us has hidden sin, and harbours ungodly desires and behaviour. This is a call to real life-changing repentance.

Remember what we saw yesterday that obedience is the hallmark of those who are saved by grace from the deathly impact of sin. And who are committed to living lives in which sins sin’s influence is cancelled out – not by our efforts but by Christ's sacrifice.

Every time we give in to the sinful desire of our hearts we not only break the covenant God has made with us through Christ's blood, but we effectively deny the sin-undoing fact of Jesus death.

Challenge 2 – live as strangers in reverent fear v17
The key here is the word Peter uses – parepedimos – which both in the Greek and it’s Hebrew equivalent refers to people who live in a place but without the full rights of citizens, because their citizenship is somewhere else. Like if you or I moved to Ukraine – we could live there but we would always be on the outside of culture and we would never possess the full rights of a Ukrainian citizen. The interesting thing about being a non-citizen is that however much you are involved in your host culture, you can never get totally involved – you can’t vote, you can’t buy land, you can’t fight in the army, you probably can’t even open a bank account half the time, and above all you can’t stay! And because of that your mind is always in part on home. Home is the place where you ultimately see your future. And this means that you never fully invest yourself and all your worth in the host country, because you know one day you’ll have to leave.

The implication of this is obvious – live in the world not as someone who is completely inculturated by the standards and values and rights of the world around us. Not as someone who sets their value by the aspirations, ambitions and desires of the non-believers around them. But instead as someone who knows that the only place worth making any long-term investments is the kingdom of God.

What are the things you hold as having value in this world? Your car, your career, your house, your good looks, your marriage, your status in society, or even in the church, your possessions, your freedom? As you look at your life what do you think gives you value?

If it isn’t Jesus, then you need to repent and ask the Lord to embed this one single truth upon your heart that you were born with the precious blood of God’s one and only precious and dear Son. And that God in His unfathomable and bizarre grace considered you and I to be worth the sacrifice. Dwell on this thought a while. When I had my first child Annie I was overwhelmed by the extent and depth of my love and protective care for her. I realised that perhaps for the first time in my life here was someone I would die for if I was ever put into the position of having to chose between her and me. That is a God given love for my little child. Yet what God does in salvation history is to completely turn that right feeling on its head as He sends His Son to die. It is not because He loves His Son any less than I love my daughter. I’m sure my father’s love is a mere shadow of the true depth of God’s love for His Son. No the Father doesn’t ask the Son to die because His love is incomplete, but rather because His love for you and I is so great and nothing else can fix the problem of our sin.

Think about it.

And now live in reverent fear because of the majesty of the Father and the sacrifice He was willing to make for you.
Don’t spend all your life just building your own little career, or reputation, or love-life, or house, or lifestyle, or possessions. Because every time you build these things you become more tempted to take up citizenship where you are – remember Jesus says where your treasure is there your heart is also. And if you start to live as a citizen of this world not of God’s ultimate reality world then you will find yourself tugged this way and that in your priorities and moral choices.

Think about what Peter says. Even silver and gold are like temporary rubbish compared to the value of what God has given you in Jesus. If silver and gold are like rubbish and yet so valuable in our world, what can you possibly ever have that is of more worth than Jesus? That’s right, nothing! Perishable things only bring an empty way of life verse 18. The imperishable blood of Jesus brings new life and ultimate fulfilment.

Challenge 3 – love one another deeply from the heart
I hope you’re still with me. I have found the challenge of these verses exhausting to prepare because they seem to leave no part of my life unaffected.

So the challenge is that we should love one another deeply from the heart, and that to do so – chapter 2 verse 1 we must actively put an end to all malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander – because these are the hallmarks of sibling rivalry and deep seated jealousy and bitterness, not the hallmarks of love.

The theological justification of Peter’s position is that we as believers are all born not of the sin-bearing seed of Adam, but instead we are born into new life through the very God-breathed ordaining of the Creator God Himself. And if I am born of this seed, and other believers are born of the same seed, then we have to recognise that at the very core of our beings.

Think about your attitude towards fellow believers. In my church in the UK we are stricken by the sin of snobbery (perhaps as a residual factor of the English class system). For one reason or another – whether it’s wearing the right or wrong clothes, speaking with the correct accent, having the right education, coming from the right background, even possessing the right spiritual gifts. The tendency is to quickly categorise people into the ‘like us’ group and the ‘not like us’ group. And the truth is that those we place in the ‘like us’ group are the ones we inevitably value more highly, while the others can be quickly dismissed from our minds. Peter says such attitudes have to go – replaced by real deep family love.

Perhaps the most destructive element at work in the church is ego – human pride. It is everywhere, from rivalry between preachers, to our petty and pathetic desires for status or recognition. Have you ever sat in church business meetings, or seen the politics between different Christian organisations. The positions taken by people are often puffed up with right sounding language and a ‘deep commitment to the truth’ but so often the same breath that speaks that deep commitment simultaneously denies it by ungracious slander of those who oppose them. Does that sound familiar to you at all?

Of course we need to be custodians of Biblical truth, but we also need to be individuals of love, where our love helps us to see through some of the sinful barriers we like to impose around us to the genuineness of brothers and sisters who may just be different to us.

Pride has to go because it is the root of sin, the desire to see God displaced from His throne to be replaced by me. Obviously a force as determined and misguided as this needs to be taken out of the church if the church is to survive and flourish.

It is interesting that this call to love one another as brothers comes three times in this letter, it is obviously an injunction to the church that rebounded around Peter’s mind. It is something so important for us to hear that it can’t possibly be said just once in case we miss it. Why is love so important among believers? Because this is how the world will know that we are Jesus disciples – if we love one another. And every time we live out of love we deny our calling in Christ.

Take a moment and ask the Spirit of God to show you when you last stepped out of love with fellow believers – were you envious? Were you malicious? Did you deceive? Might you possibly have been hypocritical? Have you ever – and I mean absolutely ever – gossiped about a fellow believer. If so then you, like me need to repent of these things.
For Peter, the disciplined route towards ridding ourselves and our fellowships of the effects of sinful pride will be to become people who crave and dwell on the written word of God.

Ok it’s all been pretty heavy so far, and you thought you were coming to a series of expositions on building a Christian witness that works. Well you’re here, and that is just what these expositions are about.

Because Peter is concerned not just for the witness of one individual but for the survival and the witness of the whole church. And he sees these issues of personal morality, ambition and pride as issues which we need to address head on alone and together if the body of Christ is ever to function in a viable and fruitful way.

So at this point in the letter it feels like the tide is turning. In the next section the challenge is about how we as the church present ourselves to the world.

Challenge 4 – live as a royal priesthood and a holy nation
There are two themes in this section – one regards the form or nature of the church and the other regards it’s purpose.
As we saw yesterday the language is taken directly from Exodus, when God first called Israel to be His people. And the role he sees for the church is the same as that intended for Israel.

First – the characteristics of the Holy Nation. We’ve already spoken about the identity of the church as chosen by God to be His people set apart for His purposes. But Peter wants to emphasise the approach that we as individuals must take as members of that set apart people. We are to think of the church as our nation, and that implies unity – we are like living stones being built into a spiritual house. Obviously the house is nothing if the stones choose to stay isolated or in little clusters on the ground. But isolation isn’t an option for us, we are God’s people – we belong to Him.
Now think about the church in Spain. Sure there are the vestiges of the once great Catholic church – I’m not talking about that sort of institutionalised church. Think about the diverse groups of people across the denominations who claim to follow Jesus and who choose to live their lives under the authority of God’s word. Do all those churches cooperate with each other and find unity on core Gospel truths regardless of their own traditions. If your country is like every other I’ve visited then I fear the answer is a vary loud NO.

In Montenegro, i'm told there are 120 protestant believers spread over 3 congregations. Two of these congregations are in the capital Podgorica, and sadly those two congregations are in feud with each other. What are they feuding about – I don’t know – maybe one is Baptist and the other is Pentecostal. Ask them if the love Jesus, and if they long to see fellow Montenegrans come to Christ and the answer you will get from both is yes. Ask them if they hold tightly to scripture as their authority and again the answer is yes. Ask them if the other church is a legitimate partner in the Gospel and the answer will be less certain. Ask them if they are in true Christian unity with each other, and I’m afraid all you’ll get is a list of excuses and blame for why the other church isn’t doing or teaching the right thing. Perhaps the difference is as trivial as the style of music they use for worship!

Does that sort of disagreement ever happen in England You bet your life it does!

And I am convinced that every time it happens between congregations of Christ loving biblical Christians it must cause the Lord to hang His head in dismay.

How many of us fall into the trap of speaking ill of another congregation of group of churches based purely on hearsay or pre-conceptions? How many of us dismiss an entire group of fellow believers because of our history or our own disappointment with one of their members?

The truth is this. We are called to stand firm by Biblical truth, but we are called to do so with grace and with a desire for uncompromising unity with all true believers.

If we are preparing ourselves for the long haul of Christian witness in our continent then we need to learn to see through our prejudices and to become bridge builders to other believers.

And if by any chance you’re just fed up with church in general, or your lazy about getting along and getting committed, let Peter’s teaching stop you in your tracks. The church is your national identity. To deny your membership of the church would be as foolish as me trying to pretend I was French not English. You are who you are. And who you are is a part of the people of God – His Holy Nation.

As we think about the structure of our authentic Christian witness in the world, we have to know that church is a fundamental part of that, and that even if we don’t like the way everything is done, or even some of the people there, it is our duty – our act of spiritual worship – our honouring of God – to be a part of it.

Second – what does the Royal Priesthood look like. Well the priesthood has a double function – first it serves the Lord and second it mediates His love and blessing to the world around. So as we declare the praises of Him who called us out of darkness, we declare them both to the Lord Himself and also simultaneously to the world we’re in. Israel so often got tied up in remembering God’s promises to Abraham of a Nation and a Land, that they forgot completely about the role they were created for – to be a blessing to all nations.

Our involvement in the church should never be purely introspective dealing with internal affairs, but should also be extrospective because we are Christ's witnesses to the nations. If the nations don’t hear about the glory and love of God from the church and its members where will they ever hear it from.

And finally – the fifth challenge – live such good lives among non believers that they see your good works and glorify God.

But more on that tomorrow

 

Tim Vickers