05-31-09 Hard Times - High Calling Pt. 5

We are studying the New Testament book of 1^st Peter together,

a study that has taken us through the 1^st chapter

and into the first few verses of the second chapter.

What we’ve heard so far from Peter

fits perfectly with the man who wrote these words.

They are not difficult or obscure concepts,

they are clear, practical truths

about us,

and about our God,

and about this remarkable friendship that now exists between us and Him

as a result of what He’s done for us through Jesus Christ.

He began the letter by talking with us

about the high value our God places on His friendship with us,

about the way He chose each of us for Himself

because of His perfect knowledge of us.

He has wanted a friendship with us

since the instant He created us.

And Peter also talked with us

about the remarkable future our King has in store for us

and about the way He carefully protects and guards our spirits now

so that nothing can ever sever us from Him.

Then, and only then,

after first reminding us of the truth about His eternal love for us

and His absolute commitment to us,

does Peter turn our attention onto what’s going on in our lives right now.

He talked with us about the way in which

we are being distressed by various trials,

assuring us that even these are being used by God

to bring us into a deeper, stronger personal trust in our God.

And then most recently in our study

we have been listening to Peter

as he shares with us three crucial tools we will need

for our survival during the hard times of life.

We’ve looked at the first two,

and are nearly finished with what Peter has to say about the third.

The first one concerned our relationship

to what Peter called the former lusts which were ours in our ignorance.

Being just like us,

he knows how easy it is during the hard times

to look back at all those emotional hiding places and escapes

that we created for ourselves before we knew the King.

And he wants us to know

that during the hard times,

more than at any other time in our lives

we need the solid footing

that can only be found on a foundation of moral integrity.

Peter put it this way - ...be holy...in all your behavior.

He began there

not because he was threatening us with our Lord’s wrath or rejection

if we failed to perform to some preestablished standard

because he knew from his own experience

that such a thing could simply never happen.

He himself stood publicly before his world

and vehemently denied and rejected his Lord

with a string of profanity that stunned everyone who heard it.

If anyone deserved the righteous wrath and rejection of the risen Christ

it was Peter.

And yet what he found when he once again found his King

was the same thing we find whenever we come to Him -

grace without measure,

love without limits,

kindness and compassion and forgiveness.

Peter does not call us to practical choices of holiness

because he wants to scare us with an angry God,

he calls us to practical holiness

because he wants to simplify our lives.

He wants us to know

the mental and emotional security

that only right moral choices can bring into our lives.

That was the first of his three survival tools he offered us.

The second came through his call to us that we fervently love one another from the heart.

He called us to build strong love relationships

with at least a few fellow believers

because he knew how urgently we would need those friendships

during the hard times of life.

It never ceases to amaze me how this thing works.

Religious folk try to give answers and offer words of wisdom and council.

True friends simply go through the pain or the turmoil or the confusion or the loss with us.

They don’t always have answers,

they just have a love for us

that keeps them near us, with us when we need the comfort

that can only come from knowing we’re not going through the pain alone.

And then Peter moved on to his third essential tool for survival in hard times - the Word of our God.

And we’ve been chewing on this one for three weeks now,

partly because of the amount of emphasis Peter gives to it,

and partly because of how vital it is to us.

What Peter is doing with all three of these, of course,

with his call to holiness,

and with his call to us to build love relationships,

and now with his comments to us about the words spoken to us by God,

is to give us three unchangeable,

three truly secure places in our lives

as we go through the churning turmoil surrounding us.

And when he first started talking with us about the things spoken to us by God

he used two words to describe them - living and abiding.

We spent some considerable time with those two words,

talking about the unique characteristics

of those words spoken to us by our God,

recognizing that what He has said to us

is an actual extension of Himself and as certain and unchanging as He is.

And then last week we moved on to Peter’s fascinating comments

about how we can develop

a healthy personal relationship with the Word.

And what we saw

looked very different from what we so often hear out of the religious world around us.

Rather than attempting to prod us into some sort of religious system of devotional faithfulness,

Peter tells us

that our hunger for the voice of our God

is imbedded within our spirits

at the time we come to Him.

Peter compares it to a newborn baby’s hunger for his mother’s milk.

I love the way our King said it when He was here.

JOH 10:27-28 "My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of My hand.

We hear His voice.

We know the sound of it

and when we recognize it

we trust and follow.

But that process of learning to hear His voice

is profoundly corrupted in most of us

by so many of the religious counterfeits we’ve been fed.

For me personally

I think it’s been a little easier to recognize the counterfeits

because in the earliest days of my God-awareness, in His kindness to me,

my Lord gave me a vivid contrast between religion and reality.

I’ve shared with you in the past

the remarkable events that took place in my life in the fall of 1966,

and the way God’s Spirit used the first three Gospels to bring me to Himself.

But that’s only half the story.

For, you see, I also remember well

my frustrating and fruitless relationship with the Word of God

in the months prior to His entrance into my life.

I was eighteen years old at the time,

attending a Christian college in Seattle.

An upperclassman in my dorm

was selling huge leather-bound King James reference Bibles.

I thought I was a Christian.

I was a pretty good kid, from a Christian home, going to a Christian school.

What more could God want?

I do remember being troubled about my “devotional life”.

At the time I found the Bible to be one of the most boring books I’d ever read.

But rather than recognizing this as a symptom of a much deeper problem,

I just viewed it as a little difficulty I needed to take care of

so that I could keep God happy with me.

I bought one of those huge Bibles

just to prove how serious I was about this whole devotional thing.

As I recall, it cost me nearly forty dollars,

a huge sum for a college kid in 1966.

Then, each night I would try to remember to haul that thing out

and read a chapter before going to sleep.

If I could just prove to God and to myself

how serious I was about reading His Word, everything would be fine.

And that right there

is the exact opposite

of what Peter is talking about in this passage we’re studying.

Peter knows how desperately we are going to need

the clear, certain voice of our God

during those times of pain, or suffering, or stress in our lives.

There are times

when we hold to His voice

as the only anchor we have

in the midst of the worst storms we’ll ever face.

That’s why he says,

1PE 1:25 But the word of the Lord abides forever. "And this is the word which was preached to you.

It is truth that goes beyond reason.

It doesn’t deny reason,

but it takes us beyond reason,

beyond simply holding to a logical conclusion.

To hold onto the truth of what our God has said to us

is literally to hold onto God Himself,

sometimes in the face of a whole world around us

that is screaming some other message.

And, as we saw last week,

what Peter does for us here

is not to call us to some sort of devotional system,

but rather to reveal to us two things.

First of all,

our spirit’s ability to feed from the Word of God

is directly tied to how we are handling our relationships with the people around us.

And that shouldn’t surprise us.

Repeatedly throughout His communication with us

our Lord has told us

that our ability to love Him

is intricately intertwined with our willingness to love those around us.

John said it with clarity and simplicity in his first Epistle.

1JO 4:20-21 If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.

And Peter is telling us the same thing in this passage.

He says,

1PE 2:1-3 Therefore, putting aside all malice and all guile and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation, if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.

Our spirit’s ability to feed from the Word of God

is directly tied to how we are handling our relationships with the people around us.

And then the second truth he shares with us

is that, if we find no hunger for God’s truth within us,

or no ability to feed our spirits from what He says,

it is very likely because

we have allowed some form of corruption

to take root in some relationship in our life.

Only when we put aside all malice and all guile and hypocrisy and envy and all slander

will we find our spirits like newborn babes, longing for the pure milk of the word, that by it we may grow in respect to salvation...

And I have to tell you

that when I saw what Peter was saying here,

even after all the years I’ve spent immersed in the world of Christians,

it came as a remarkable and thrilling revelation.

Never did anyone explain this to me in the past.

In fact, most of what I was told about our relationship with the Word of God

strongly implied

that our relationship with God

existed in a sort of vacuum,

separate from our human relationships.

And if anything was said about the connection between our relationship with God and our relationship with others

it was exactly the opposite of what Peter is saying here.

Peter is telling us

that if we keep our human relationships right

then our spirits will be freed to hunger for the Word.

But what I was told

is that if we read the Word

we will then be able to keep our relationships right.

And yet here is Peter telling us

that our spirit’s ability to drink from the Word

is inseparably linked to our willingness

to keep our human relationships pure.

And then there is one additional fascinating qualifying statement

that Peter offers us

about our spirit’s ability to drink from the Word.

Did you notice that last phrase in verse 2:3?

He says,

1PE 2:2-3 like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation, if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.

Now why would Peter include that last qualifying phrase - if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord?

Well, he’s telling us

that the Word’s ability to feed our spirits

in a way that brings about growth in our Christian lives

is directly linked to whether we have tasted the kindness of the Lord.

If we have not tasted His kindness

we will not be able to drink from the Word

in a way that produces a deepening, growing love relationship with our Lord.

Now, why does he say that?

He says it

because he knows that a correct understanding of the cross

is the only doorway

into a correct understanding

of everything else our God has to say to us.

If we have not heard and believed and received

and allowed our spirit to bathe in the kindness of our God

poured out on us at the cross,

we will continue to assume and expect

some measure of the wrath of God

poured out on us

if we fail to achieve some pre-established level of performance.

I cannot tell you how many times

I’ve heard people tell me

that every time they try to read the Word

they come away feeling worse - more fearful, more guilty, more condemned.

And rather than their spirits drinking from the Word

and their being able to grow in a deepening love relationship with God,

what they read

actually makes them want to cower in some dark corner

as they wait in terror for the judgement of God to be poured out on them.

And if you find yourself feeling condemned when you read the Bible

it is very likely because you have either never really heard

or else have forgotten what our God is saying to us through the cross.

You have not yet tasted of the kindness of God.

MAT 11:230 "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My load is light."

LUK 22:19-20 ."This is My body which is given for you; ...the new covenant in My blood.

COL 2:13-14 And when you were dead in your transgressions ... He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us and which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

The debt is paid.

YOUR debt is paid,

not just part of it,

all of it forever.

What God has poured out on you already,

and what He seeks to pour out on you now and forever

is His kindness.

I don’t know why

except to say that it is somehow deeply bound up

in the way He loves us.

And I do know

that we can never correctly hear anything He says

until we have first heard and believed

the limitless kindness in His voice.

Though I rarely hear what others say about my teaching,

I am aware that there are some

who have on occasion criticized me

for being unbalanced in my presentation of the grace of God.

My friends, there simply is nothing balanced about the grace of God.

I know we are far more comfortable

attempting to blend the message of His grace and kindness

with some measure of the law and our obligation to obedience.

And if such a message could truly bring about life transformation

I’d be all for it.

But it doesn’t.

What it does do

is to deeply complicate and corrupt

our ability to enter into a discovery of His love for us,

a love that, when we finally see it correctly,

becomes the consuming fire of our lives.

Paul said it nicely.

GAL 3:21 ... if a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed have been based on law.

If there was any set of rules,

any devotional system,

any religious structure

that, if we submitted to it and obeyed it,

could transform the human spirit,

and free us from our bondage to sin,

and flood us with a deep love for our God

then God would have given it to us

and avoided that hideous, horrible, bloody death in our place.

GAL 2:21 ... if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly.

But the only thing that can ever bring us into true freedom,

and true righteousness,

and give us both the willingness and the ability to LOVE -

to love our God,

and to love the people He places near us,

and to love His Word,

is our personal entrance into the discovery of His love for us

and His kindness poured out on us each day.

And Peter wants us to know

that, if we come in contact with the Word

and, rather than it feeding our spirits,

it fills us with fear or a sense of failure and worthlessness,

then we need to go back to the beginning,

and remember all over again

His kindness, His love, His grace given without measure forever.