08-16-09 Aliens And Strangers Pt. 2

Our study of 1^st Peter last week

brought us to the first few words

in a new section of the letter.

Well, it’s not really a new section

but rather the next logical step

in the message Peter is seeking to communicate to us,

but it is the beginning of the practical application section of his message.

And we spent last week

looking at the passage as a whole

in the context of the entire letter,

seeing what a truly powerful and remarkable section it is.

If you’ve been involved in our study of 1^st Peter during the past few months

you will remember that Peter wrote his letter

to equip his fellow Christians

with the attitudes, principles, and information we need

to successfully handle those times when we are under attack

because of our commitment to our Lord Jesus Christ.

The phrase used by Peter to describe his target audience

is those who are distressed by various trials,

which pretty much includes all of us at certain times in our lives.

And we listened to him throughout the first half of his letter

as he offered us the essential tools we need for those hard times.

From there he then went on to offer us

a tremendously powerful

and truly remarkable statement

of who we are in the eyes of God.

And obviously, who we are in the eyes of God

is who we really are.

God doesn’t pretend,

He doesn’t say nice things just to make us feel good.

He simply, clearly, always tells us the truth.

And the truth he offered us

is truth that assigns to us

both an amazing identity

and a crucial position in this world in which we live.

1PE 2:9-10 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Then, on the basis of that truth,

Peter uses the last half of his letter

to explain to us how we can go about fulfilling that calling effectively,

even at those times

when we find ourselves under attack.

And what we saw last week

was not at all what we may have expected.

It defied all conventional cultural wisdom

and flew in the face of our modern religious marketing strategies.

Rather than coaching us in the techniques for achieving

prominence, or power, or leverage within our society,

Peter focuses his attention directly on our own individual private lives,

calling us to standard of behavior

that sets us apart from everyone else around us.

And he tells us that if we follow his instructions,

1PE 2:15 ... by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men.

We saw last week

that Peter’s whole blueprint for our impacting the world in which we live

is based on God’s basic design

of one life influencing one other life at a time.

It’s not a few super-hero Christians

winning hundreds of thousands to Christ,

it is hundreds of thousands of individual Christians

carefully dispersed throughout the world under the careful leadership of the Spirit,

each touching just a few lives,

one day, one person at a time.

I know we spent some considerable time on this concept last week,

but the significance of one life impacting one life in God’s plan for His people

is so critical,

and so easily lost in our big-name, media-oriented, mass marketing, glittering-program-oriented world

that I don’t want to leave this

until I’ve done whatever I can to help us see the truth.

This has become such a huge part of my own life,

and I’ve been involved in this long enough now

so that I can now see some of why it’s so powerful

and why it forms the very heart of everything God is seeking to do through his people.

Maybe the best way I can illustrate what I want us to see here

is to share with you a portion of a letter I received earlier this year

from a man who’s now in his 40's.

I was involved in his life many years ago,

long before this church fellowship even existed.

What he wrote affected me so deeply when I read it

that I now carry a copy of it in my Bible, and I always will.

It affected me so deeply

because it confirmed so powerfully

what I see our Lord telling us in His Word

and what I’ve known must be true - one life touching one life has more power than we could ever begin to imagine.

This is part of what he wrote:

“Larry, I want to thank you for taking me under your wing when I was a struggling little boy. I didn’t realize how much I needed your intervention in my life at the time, all I knew was that your place was my favorite place to be. ...you made me feel loved and accepted. I couldn’t get enough. That is what God gave you to minister to the lost world. It will impact the world more than all your teaching of the Word.

I was taking my boys to school yesterday. It was cold and really dark. I could hear God telling me how blessed I was to have these boys to father, of course you came to mind and I couldn’t help but think how you not only changed my life for eternity, but in so doing, you also changed the lives of my boys, and my wife. One of my boys has become a mini-me in just about every way. The really cool thing to watch, though is how his life is so different than mine because you taught me how to love unconditionally. He still struggles with telling the truth and other regular boy issues, but he has a love for Jesus and a glow about him that is there because of the love that he is open to receive. I feel what you did for me, just in the nick of time, was to show me how to receive unconditional love. My boys are growing up with a father that knows how to love and discipline them in a way that I would never have known if you hadn’t made a choice to spend time with me and show me how to love.”

I share that with you

because I know the power of those lies

that tell us we are tiny people with tiny lives that make no difference at all.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

God’s entire healing process in each of our lives

is carefully designed by Him

to equip us with the ability

to reach out in love to the people He places around us.

Certainly I understand

that the first part of that process

involves the sometimes extensive work He needs to do within us,

rebuilding our lives on a strong foundation of true Biblical morality.

Do you remember where we were a few months ago in our study of Peter’s 2^nd letter?

To your faith supply moral excellence,

and to your moral excellence knowledge,

and to your knowledge self-control,

and to your self-control perseverance,

and to your perseverance godliness,

and to your godliness brotherly kindness,

and to your brotherly kindness love.

That is neither an easy

nor a quick process in any of our lives.

But the ultimate goal of that growth and healing process within us

is to equip us to reach out in love to those around us.

And when we do...as we do

our life...our being here

makes sense and has a purpose and a power as never before.

And at the heart of it

is always one life touching one life at a time.

Most of the time

we do not see what God is doing through us

or the effect it has on the lives of those we come in contact with.

But the only way we can fail

is if we succumb to Satan’s lie

that our love makes no difference.

Well, the heart of what Peter wants us to see

in the last half of his first letter to us

is that our greatest power for silencing those who attack us

or those who seek our destruction

is to offer them a daily approach to life that proves the reality of God.

And the way we do that

is very different from what we might expect.

OK, the first thing he says to us is this:

1PE 2:11 Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts, which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may on account of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.

Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers ...

Now, don’t you love that?

That isn’t just the voice of Peter, you know,

it’s the voice of your God.

Is that what you expected Him to say?

Knowing that He is opening a conversation with us about our behavior,

did you expect Him to begin the conversation with that word, “Beloved...”?

How little we understand about our Creator...

You know what He’s saying, don’t you?

He’s beginning this conversation by saying,

“My precious child, because I love you so very much...”.

And if you do not yet understand that

you will neither believe nor receive correctly

anything else that follows.

And it gets even better because His next words to us

are not what we would have expected either.

He doesn’t say, as we are so often led to expect Him to say,

“I demand that you...”, or “I command you to...”.

He says, “...I urge you as aliens and strangers...”.

I urge you...

Do you know what that is?

That’s the voice of a Father filled with care and compassion for His son, His daughter,

a Father who is for His child as only a Father could be,

a Father who is cheering for us as only a Father can cheer,

a Father who’s jabbing the guy next to him in the stands when the race is at it’s most intense,

pointing and saying, “That’s my son!...That’s my daughter!”

This is your God telling you

that the two of you are in this together.

And then, once again

He brings us back to the basis upon which all of His instructions are built.

He brings us back to the affirmation of our true identity.

“...I urge you as aliens and strangers...”.

And with this phrase

he is offering us the first of the two most powerful defenses

against the lies imbedded in our flesh,

the lies that are so hostile to the life of Christ within us.

And probably the best way to see this

is for us to look at the verse as a whole

because Peter gives us both of those statements in this single sentence.

He says, 1PE 2:11 Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts, which wage war against the soul.

OK, what he’s urging us to do, obviously,

is to abstain from fleshly lusts.

And it will help you to know

that this word “lusts” is a word that has broad application.

If I were to offer you a definition

I would say that it refers to anything that is outside of God’s moral framework

that we have attempted to use to meet some physical, emotional, or psychological need in our lives.

And the problem with these lusts is two-fold -

they never really meet the need we’re trying to meet

and once we’ve given ourselves over to them they sink hooks into us and hold us.

But Peter wraps that request that we abstain from fleshly lusts

in the two strongest defenses we will ever have

against their continued power in our lives.

The first is found in that phrase as aliens and strangers,

for in that phrase Peter is saying, “Remember who you really are.”

You are not sinners trying to earn God’s acceptance

by cleaning up your life a little bit,

you are God’s beloved holy ones,

redeemed by His blood,

filled with His Spirit,

serving as His chosen priests here on this earth.

You are temporarily on assignment for the King

in a foreign land,

in a culture that is profoundly hostile to who you are.

But this is not your home,

it is not your future,

and it is certainly not your hope.

And the second defense against those patterns imbedded in our flesh

is found in that last phrase “...which wage war against the soul”.

And with that phrase

Peter is simply asking us to be honest

about the effects of those impulse-driven choices

that fueled our lives prior to our union with Christ,

those choices that drove us outside of God’s protective moral framework.

Did they reduce our stress level?

Did they bring us the inner security we longed for?

Did they bring us peace with ourselves?

Did they build deep, strong, healthy love relationships?

Or did they complicate our lives,

and drain our mental and emotional energy,

and produce unresolvable tension both with ourselves and with others?

Did they, in fact, wage war against our soul?

Remember who you are,

and remember honestly the consequences of those choices you made

that took you outside of God’s moral framework.

But having said that,

there’s something more I need to say

because right now some of you are caught in lies

over which logic simply seems to have no power.

If you could step back and look logically at your actions

and then remind yourself of who you are in Christ

and remember the devastating consequences of these same actions in the past,

and then, on the basis of that knowledge, simply turn away it would be great.

But for some reason

for you right now

it seems as if the force of the powers working against you

are utterly unaffected by logic and reason.

Some emotional or physical or psychological addiction

seems to be driving you in a direction

that you feel powerless to change.

And for me to stand up here this morning

and simply tell you to remember who you are

and remember the consequences of your past wrong choices

doesn’t help you a bit

because you are not yet at a point in your walk with the King

where the power of the lies has been broken.

If you find yourself in that situation

what I want to do for you right now

is to give you hope - not human hope but true Biblical hope - the absolute assurance

that your God both loves you enough and is strong enough

to break the power of the bondage you face.

And that is what you need, you know -

you need a God who both loves you enough

and is strong enough

to break the power of the lies that bind you.

Right now if you dare to think about Him at all in the context of the turmoil in your life

I would guess that you see Him requiring from you

that you fix what’s broken in your life.

You see Him demanding from you

what you find yourself powerless to deliver.

Well, what I want to offer you right now

is a starting place.

When you hear it

you may be inclined to simply set it aside

because it seems as if it will change nothing.

But I will tell you honestly

that what you need right now

is not more discipline,

or more techniques,

or more principles,

or more knowledge.

What you need is a very real God

who is willing to involve Himself in very real ways

at the deepest levels of your life.

You don’t need answers,

you need a Savior.

And you need to approach Him on that basis.

Don’t bring Him your promises,

don’t bring Him your assurances that you’ll change,

don’t try to bring Him anything.

Don’t try to conquer the flesh through the power of the flesh.

It can’t be done.

You see, from the very beginning

what our God has offered us

is not a second chance to do it right.

What He’s offered us is Himself,

and if He doesn’t make good on that offer

there simply is no hope.

I love the way Paul put it in his letter to the Galatians.

GAL 6:14 But may it never be that I should boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

And what I would like to offer you as a starting point

comes from a statement made by John in his first letter.

If we hear it correctly

it is the beginning of hope.

In 1^st John 1:9 John says, If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Now, the last half of that verse contains two incredible promises from our God.

He promises us absolute forgiveness,

and even more, He promises that He will cleanse us -

He will break the power of unrighteousness in our lives.

But it’s the first part of the verse

that we can more easily misunderstand.

If we confess our sins...

Sometimes we are led to believe

that this simply means that we acknowledge to God that we have sinned.

But there is more involved in it than just that.

That word “confess” carries with it

an attitude of absolute agreement with God about whatever it is that’s shredding your life.

It means that we see ourselves,

our actions,

our situation through His eyes.

And just so that you understand what that means,

let me tell you what that looks like.

“Lord, I know that this is not right. I know it is not what You want for me or what You have for me. I know it isn’t even remotely who You designed me to be. And I know, too, that I cannot change myself. Please do whatever You need to do in my life to break the power of this bondage. I need You, my Savior.”

And then you just keep bringing it back to Him,

asking Him to be what He promised He would be - your Savior, your Redeemer, your friend.

And how in the world is that going to change anything?

I don’t know...

because I’m not your God.

But I do know that the hardest part of His work within us

is His bringing us to the point

where we will stop rationalizing,

and justifying,

and excusing our bondage

and face it honestly, agreeing with Him - confessing our sins.

Once He’s finally brought us to that point

He can and He will lead us into a path of healing and redemption,

a redemption in which we finally discover

that the true grace of God is not the freedom to sin,

it’s the freedom from sin,

and it is infinitely more wonderful than anything we’ve ever known before.

And He’s very, very good at what He does, you know,

because...well because the Father and the Son

have been doing business with folks like us for nearly 2000 years.