10-17-10 The Fiery Ordeal

We are nearing the end of the 1^st Epistle of Peter.

There are just three remaining sections of the book waiting for us,

three final things our beloved Peter wants to share with us.

Our study of this wonderful letter

has brought us to the last section of the 4^th chapter,

1^st Peter 4:12-19,

a section in which Peter brings us right back to where he began the letter in chapter one.

Do you remember why he wrote the letter?

Do you remember what prompted him to write these words in the first place?

There were two major motivations.

One of them was his awareness that his own time on this earth was rapidly drawing to an end,

and the other was his deep concern

for his fellow Christians, many of whom were going through very difficult times

as a direct result of their submission to Jesus Christ.

The first thing he did for us in his letter

was to remind us of the victory that will be ours,

and of the inheritance reserved for us,

and of God’s commitment to protect and guard us here and now, each step of the way.

But then he went on to say,

1PE 1:6-7 In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ...

And then, as we moved through the letter,

we’ve seen him carefully lay out for us

both the truths and the life principles we will need

in order to face the hard times in our walk with the King successfully.

And now, as he brings his letter to an end,

he brings us right back to where he started.

1PE 4:12-13 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you; but to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing; so that also at the revelation of His glory, you may rejoice with exultation.

This section actually runs all the way through the end of chapter 4, through verse 19,

and we’ll get to the rest of this section shortly,

but first I want us to spend a little time with this first sentence.

And if ever there was a statement

that highlights the difference between our American cultural “Christianity”

and the real thing it’s this sentence.

If we listen to so much of what is said in the American church world

about the expected results of our letting Christ into our lives

we would assume that God’s goal for His people

and His promise to us

is that He will make all of us healthy, wealthy, and wise.

And I need to be careful here

so that I’m not misunderstood

because there is a sense in which some of that is true.

It is certainly true that living within God’s moral framework

dramatically reduces many of the health risks in life.

And it is also true that following the principles God gives us for money management

will allow us to accomplish more with whatever resources He’s chosen to loan to us

than we would ever have dreamed possible,

and it will also allow us to live relatively financially stress free

at any point in life,

no matter where our income level may be at any given time.

And it is very true

that the more we listen to and trust what our God says to us

about relationships, and priorities, and family, and the environment, and politics,

and every other area of life,

the more we become truly filled with wisdom,

the wisdom that literally comes to us by the Spirit of God from the mind of God.

Simply put, we understand life.

But having said that,

if that’s what we’re pushing as Christianity,

and certainly if that’s why we came to Christ in the first place,

if we thought our union with Him

would give us an easy, pain-free, burden-free life,

then we are going to be terribly disappointed.

The truth is

to join ourselves to Christ,

and to carry His banner above our heads

is to volunteer for a life-long warfare,

a warfare with the world system in which we live,

and with the enemy of our souls,

the one who seeks to rob us of our hope and our victory in Christ.

Peter’s words describing what we enter into when we enter into Christ

is vivid to the extreme.

1PE 4:12 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you;

And any Christian who has walked any length of time with his or her Lord

knows how accurately that phrase captures

certain times and certain aspects of life with the King...the fiery ordeal.

And for us to pretend it is otherwise

is either naive or dishonest.

We talked just recently

about how all Satan has to use against us in this warfare are lies,

but that in no way changes the fact

that they are lies so skillfully framed

and so deeply imbedded in our flesh, and our society, and our minds

that the end result is frequently a fiery ordeal.

And they are always lies designed to bring about the same result within us -

they are lies designed to cause us to question and doubt our God...

to doubt His love for us,

to doubt His presence with us,

to doubt His ability and willingness to bring us through whatever He has called us to face.

Perhaps the most vivid,

powerful three-verse description found anywhere in Scripture

of the fiery ordeal we are involved in each day

is given to us by Paul in 2^nd Corinthians 10:3-5.

He says, “ For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.

OK, now that part of it makes sense to us,

that sounds like so much of what is frequently peddled throughout the church world

as “spiritual warfare”.

And if we stop reading there

we will see ourselves called to be out there with our divinely powerful weapons of warfare,

slashing away at the mighty fortresses of evil in the world,

holding back the power of Satan

as he seeks to conquer the human race with evil.

But that isn’t where Paul stops.

After telling us that we are equipped with these divinely powerful weapons,

he then goes on to describe for us

exactly what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against.

He says,

“We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God...”

The battle is not our battle against the power of Satan,

it is our daily battle for our discovery of the correct knowledge of our God -

the knowledge of the true nature of His love for us.

And the attacks we face

come in the form of every speculation,

every lie,

every so called lofty reasoning process,

every emotional response within us

that seems to question or challenge or refute our knowledge of our God

and our trust in what He’s said to us.

The heart of the warfare we are involved in right now in our lives

is our warfare against all of those things we are currently thinking and feeling

that cause us to question or doubt the depth of God’s love for us

or His commitment to us to bring us through.

And the heart of the warfare we are called to fight for those around us

is the warfare for their discovery of the heart of their God,

a warfare fought through our actions toward them and our words spoken to them,

actions and words that demonstrate to them goodness, kindness, compassion, love.

A number of years ago

I shared with you one of the defining moments in my own life,

a point at which an attitude was born in me,

and attitude that, looking back now,

I realize has shaped the direction of my life

as few other things have ever done.

It came as the result of a question I asked Francis Schaeffer

in a discussion group in which I was involved in the fall of 1970.

I’d only been a Christian for about four years at the time.

I was on my way back from that one year mission trip to Trinidad

that I told you about a few weeks ago.

Francis Schaeffer was doing a great deal of writing at the time,

and I’d read everything he’d written up to that point.

I was fascinated with what I was reading,

and on the way back to the U.S. from Trinidad

I took a two month detour to visit Schaeffer’s school in Switzerland.

As I shared with you the week before Christmas,

during my year in the Carribean

I spent my time helping a missionary couple

in their efforts to start a church in the Cascade Valley

just outside the capital city of Port-of-Spain.

I told you about Tony

and about my friendship with him.

Well, another one of the kids I met that year

was a boy a few years younger than Tony,

the one we called Little Barry.

We called him Little Barry

to avoid confusion with Big Barry,

another boy in the lime who was in his late teens.

Little Barry was deaf.

He’d been deaf most of his life,

ever since, in his early childhood,

one of his brothers got mad at him

and kicked him down a flight of stairs,

causing him to hit his head,

resulting in his loss of hearing.

During the year I was on the Island

Little Barry and I developed a great friendship.

I was driving a motorcycle at the time

and several times a week Little Barry would show up at my door with a big grin on his face,

point to the bike,

and we’d take off together for a ride around the island.

I cared about that little fellow a great deal,

and found myself intensely frustrated

with my inability to know how to tell him about my Lord.

I didn’t know sign language and neither did he,

and when I left the Island

I had no idea what he understood and what he didn’t.

When I got to L’Abri

I entered into the most remarkable environment I’d ever been in before,

an environment in which all honest questions were welcomed and treated with respect.

In fact, several times a week

Schaeffer held discussion groups

in which anyone could ask anything they wanted.

I remember one of those discussion groups so well

because it was the night when I got the wrong answer that changed my life.

As I recall,

several rather abstract philosophical questions preceded mine,

and then Schaeffer called on me.

I gave him a little background about where I’d been

and what I’d been doing,

and then I told him about little Barry.

I told him about this little boy I cared about so much,

this little boy who could not hear me tell him about his Savior.

Then I asked him what God did with the Little Barry’s in our lives.

I asked that question

with the hope that Schaeffer would tell me

that I didn’t have to worry about that boy,

that somehow God’s Spirit would surly supernaturally intercede

and fill in the gaps left by my ignorance and now by my absence.

But that wasn’t what he said.

What he said was, “You can fight for your young friend.”

That was all.

That was his answer.

You can fight for your young friend.

It definitely wasn’t the answer I wanted.

It didn’t comfort me,

or encourage me,

or quiet my spirit.

But it was an answer that, in a very real sense,

God has used to shape and define the course of my life ever since.

For, in that one sentence

Schaeffer defined for me

the heart of all true spiritual warfare

and what we so often face in this fiery ordeal among us.

You see, the warfare we are called to isn’t one in which we attempt to fight against Satan,

it’s a warfare in which we fight for the ones we love,

fighting for their discovery of the true nature of God’s love for them,

fighting against those lies in their lives

that prevent them from believing or trusting the heart of their God.

I was never able to return to Little Barry,

but in the past 35 years

my Lord has brought others into my life,

because that is what He’s doing in each of our lives-

He is entrusting precious people into our care,

each one so important,

each one needing an ally ,

each one needing someone to help them see the lies

that Satan is using to blind them to the truth of God’s love for them.

And in whatever way we can

we are called to fight for them.

You see, that’s the life we’re called to with our Lord,

that’s a big part of the fiery ordeal we go through with Him,

that’s what spiritual warfare is.

It’s waging war against the lies, and the confusion, and the fear, and the ignorance

in our own lives

and in the lives of those we love,

all those things that blind us to the personal knowledge of the depth of our God’s love for us.

And how do we go about it?

We begin by loving the ones our Lord gives us,

which often means we look past whatever it is we see on the outside

that may drive us crazy or offend us or irritate us in some way,

asking our Lord to give us eyes to see their need, or their fear, or their confusion, or their ignorance.

And then, if we succeed at the loving thing,

and if they will trust our love enough

to let us in at some level,

then we listen closely for the lies they are believing

and then trust our Lord to show us how to disarm the power of those lies in their lives.

And in our world today we assume nothing.

By that I mean that we no longer assume

that those around us have any knowledge of the truth about God

or about the perfect pattern for the life He offers us.

And I’ll be honest here in telling you

that even though I’ve done my best to keep close to the generations coming after me,

listening to them, trying to keep current on the changes within our society,

it still frequently takes me off guard

and makes me furious at the world in which we live

when I see the sewage that our young people today must wade through,

sewage that’s shoved down their throats under the banner of freedom or rights or self-expression,

making it at times virtually impossible for even the best of those who are coming after us

to find truth and solid footing in life.

I just simply hate what our young people have to try to cope with.

I was in a conversation with a young person some time ago,

responding to questions he was asking me

about moral principles that, in my generation, was just common knowledge,

not just in the church world, but in society as a whole.

And I didn’t realize how profoundly different his world is from mine

until I heard his response to what I shared with him.

He said, “How can I know what’s right unless you tell me? How can I know where the lines are?”

He certainly wasn’t fighting against them in any way,

he just simply didn’t know.

When he said that it filled me with such a sense of gratitude for his trust in me,

but even more with a deep sadness

looking at where we’ve come as a society,

and what the next generation has to cope with.

My grandson was visiting us for a few weeks two summers ago.

He was just 4 years old at the time,

and he was outside playing one afternoon

when he saw me heading into the garage to get some tools

for some project I was working on in the house.

He came up to me, saw the tools,

asked me what they were,

and then asked me how they worked.

I said something about my not having the time to show him right now

and then he said, “But Pa, how will I know how to use them unless you show me?”

I thought about my grandson’s question

when I heard that young person make that comment.

“How can I know what’s right unless you tell me? How can I know where the lines are?”

And my point here is simply

that our children do not remember the world we grew up in

and far too often we look at their actions and see rebellion

when what we’re really seeing is ignorance.

They simply don’t know

because the world in which they live

is screaming lies so loudly

that they haven’t yet been able to hear the truth.

And it’s the only world they’ve ever known.

Of course a big part of what I wrestle with

is the fact that our Lord has placed us into history

at perhaps the most volatile transitional time we’ll ever know,

a time when the very foundation blocks of society

are changing more profoundly

and more quickly than we’ve ever seen before.

But even though this social tumult,

or to use Peter’s words, this fiery ordeal among you,

can be incredibly hard for us to cope with sometimes,

it is nothing that has caught our Lord off guard

and he can and will show Himself more than adequate for His people,

no matter what their age,

or what they may face from the culture around them.

Of course Paul says it better.

2CO 3:5-6 Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

And that promise doesn’t change

no matter what we may face.

Our God is God forever.

He is God for all generations

and He can and He will equip His people

for whatever they face

no matter what’s happening in the society around them.

And I’m going to end this morning

by telling you that I’m talking to myself,

telling myself the truth

and I’ve chosen to let you listen in.

There is an up side and a down side to this life our Lord has called us to,

this life in which He has called us to love the people He’s given us.

The up side is that when we fulfill that calling,

when we order our lives in a way that allows us to reach out in love to those around us

it allows us to make sense of our lives as nothing else can do.

It enables us to clearly define our calling

and to escape so many of the religious counterfeits

that Satan uses to side-track the people of God.

Simply put, we know what we’re here for and what we’re called to do.

But the down side of this calling

is that if we are not careful

we can begin believing that we are responsible

for bringing about healing or changes in the ones we love.

And we are not.

And here is the amazing thing -

God will use us in powerful ways in the lives of those around us.

He will work through us

in ways that literally changes the course of their lives.

What we will do will at times rescue their souls from darkness

and save them from destruction.

But even though He uses us for redemption in the lives of others,

we are never ever responsible for changing another person’s life.

Only God can do that.

There is only One Redeemer,

and it is not us.

He may use us to do His work in another person,

but He is the one working through us

and working in them.

And if we ever take on ourselves

the responsibility for changing another person

we have taken on a responsibility that will destroy us.

I like the way Paul said it in 1^st Corinthians 3:5-7

when he was talking about himself and his fellow teacher, Apollos.

What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one. I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.

All of which is to say

that as we look at the world around us

and at the fiery ordeal so many of our fellow Christians are facing

we must never loose sight of the two crucial truths that work together.

The first is that our actions toward others matter more than we could ever imagine,

our loving them matters more than all else,

and the second is that it matters

not because we do it right all the time,

or because we have the power to change anyone,

but rather because our God has chosen to do His work through us,

and He alone has the power to heal, and to redeem, and to give strength, and to change a life.