11-29-09 The Living and The Dead

We come this morning to yet another fascinating passage

in the writings of the Apostle Peter.

We begin the fourth chapter of 1^st Peter today

and we’ll be looking at verses 4:1-6.

And with these verses

we’ll also be looking at the great warfare

that every true child of God is called to fight,

the warfare that didn’t exist prior to Christ’s entrance into our lives.

And I think you’re going to find Peter’s comments very interesting

because he talks about a second dying process

that needs to take place in our lives

after we’ve come to Christ.

Let me read the passage for us

and then we’ll dig into it and see what he says.

1PE 4:1-6 Therefore, since Christ has suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same purpose, because he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for the lusts of men, but for the will of God. For the time already past is sufficient for you to have carried out the desire of the Gentiles, having pursued a course of sensuality, lusts, drunkenness, carousing, drinking parties and abominable idolatries. In all this, they are surprised that you do not run with them into the same excesses of dissipation, and they malign you; but they will give account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. For the gospel has for this purpose been preached even to those who are dead, that though they are judged in the flesh as men, they may live in the spirit according to the will of God.

OK, in the verses just before this passage

we’ve seen Peter using one of his favorite teaching tools,

that of drawing a comparison between some event from the past

and an event that takes place in the life of the Christian,

and then using that comparison

he helps us better understand some truth or principle he has for us.

In the passage we looked at last week

Peter drew a comparison between Noah going through the water of the flood

to enter into a world cleansed from all sin and corruption

and us going through the water of baptism

to enter into our new, holy, pure life with Christ.

And now, in these opening verses of chapter 4

he does the same type of thing.

Only this time

the comparison is not between us and Noah,

it’s between us and Christ.

And to make sense of this

we need to revisit the last half of the last sentence of chapter 3,

where Peter talks about ...the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven, after angels and authorities and powers had been subjected to Him.

In that phrase

he is reminding us of the way in which Christ went through death

and as a result of that death

entered into a resurrected life in which all of those forces that were warring against Him

were brought into subjection to Him.

And the angels he’s talking about here

are not those angels that remained in faithful service to God following Lucifer’s rebellion,

but rather those angels who joined Satan in his rebellion,

angels that we now refer to as demons.

You knew that, didn’t you?

Angels and demons are the same beings,

or at least they were in the beginning.

Demons are simply fallen angels,

angels that joined Lucifer in his rebellion against God.

That’s why Peter talks about angels being brought into subjection to Christ following the resurrection.

He’s talking about the fallen angels

because those angels who remained faithful

were already in subjection to Him,

but Christ’s total victory over those who were in rebellion

came only after His sacrifice for our sins had been offered.

Never again could our sin separate us from our God.

Do you remember Christ’s final words

just before His final breath on the cross?

JOH 19:30 ...He said, "It is finished!" And He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.

And at that point it truly was finished forever

and His victory over those forces that were warring against Him and against us

was absolute.

Paul makes a fascinating statement about God’s relationship with the forces of evil in Colossians 2:15.

This verse comes immediately after Paul gives that powerful, vivid description

of the way in which God took our personal certificate of debt containing all of our offenses against God

and He nailed it to the cross along with Christ Himself.

What Paul wanted to do, of course,

was to embed into our minds

a clear visual picture

of what happened to all of our sin because of Christ.

But then immediately following that description

Paul goes on to say this:

COL 2:15 When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.

And there again he’s giving us this glorious visual image,

the image of all of the forces of evil - Satan and all of his demonic angels,

and they’re all lined up, prepared for battle against the people of God.

And then God Himself steps into the picture

and strips every one of them of every weapon they possess -

no more spears or arrows or knives or clubs or rifles or pistols.

Every weapon they had was removed from them forever

and at that point He triumphed over them forever.

And to understand what’s happening here

we need to see the link between God nailing our certificate of debt to the cross of Christ

and His disarming the rulers and authorities.

And to do that

we need to take one more step back

and remember what this war is all about.

From the very beginning

it has been about God seeking an eternal love relationship with us

and Satan seeking to keep that from happening.

And before our certificate of debt was cancelled out,

before the cross of Christ existed in time, and space, and history

and our certificate of debt was nailed to it

Satan had all the ammunition he needed

to drive not just a wedge

but a canyon between us and our God.

Whenever we thought about reaching out to our God

all Satan had to do

was to fling that list in our face

and begin pointing out failure after failure,

and moral offense after moral offense,

that made it impossible for us to stand before our Creator

without guilt, and shame, and fear, and hopelessness.

And in a very real sense

we were the ones

who armed Satan

with the very weapons he then used to attack and destroy us.

But when Christ died on that cross

and offered us the opportunity

to have the Father nail our certificate of debt onto that cross along with His Son,

it forever stripped Satan

of anything he could ever again use against us.

It is finished!

The victory is won,

and as Paul put it so perfectly,

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Rom. 8:38-39

And if that’s true, (and it is!),

then why is there still such a fierce turmoil raging around us now?

And right here is where it may sound as if I’m just playing word games,

but I’m going to go ahead and say this

and then try to explain it as best I can.

The battle we fight now

is not a battle to win the victory,

but rather it is a battle to accept and rest in the victory that Christ has already won.

You see, right now

the only thing Satan has to use as ammunition in his warfare against us are lies,

lies carefully designed by him

to keep us from knowing the truth that has the power to set us free.

The problem is that he is a very, very good liar,

and we all know very little of the truth with which to defeat those lies.

And to complicate this warfare further

the kind of truth we need

is not simply a process of gaining and retaining facts.

It requires us to rework the very foundations of our lives,

rebuilding our entire mental framework,

and doing it in the face of an entire world system

that contradicts the truths we so desperately need.

Let me see if I can explain what I mean.

In the few minutes we’ve been together this morning

I’ve already shared with you

some of the most important truth we’ll ever know -

I’ve told you

that our God loves us with a endless, eternal love,

and that He is working daily to communicate that love to each of us.

And yet even as I’ve been talking about this truth

our enemy has been offering you all sorts of “proofs” that your God does not love you,

“proofs” that seem to be powerfully supported

by the society around us,

and by what’s going on in our lives right now,

and by events from our past.

It may be something as minor as an upset stomach,

or a head-ache,

or something as major as the loss of someone you loved very much,

or the tragedies you see taking place

in the lives of those around you,

or the irreversible loss of your own health.

But with everyone of us

there are a massive collection of “proofs”

used by Satan to keep us from the deep, abiding truth

that our God does indeed love us with a perfect and endless love.

Most of these “proofs”

concern things that Satan tells us

God should have prevented in our lives,

or things He should have done but failed to do.

“How could He love me and allow...?”

And then we fill in the blank with whatever it is about our life right now that we don’t like.

The problem, of course,

is that we have all bought into Satan’s lie

that God should have created for us

a limited, conditional sort-of free will,

a free will that allows us or those around us

to choose good things,

but that draws the line when they or we seek to choose evil beyond a certain limit.

We want a type of free will

in which God sets reasonable boundaries on the consequences of our rebellion against Him,

a free will in which He intervenes whenever things get too far out of control,

or at the very least a free will in which He continually steps in and corrects our wrong choices.

What we want is a free will like those little cars my daughter and I drove at Disneyland

when she was 4 years old.

The little car had a real gas engin,

and a real accelerator and brake,

and a real steering wheel that let you turn any direction you wanted to turn.

But if you didn’t quite turn far enough to stay on the path,

or if you turned too far,

there was an iron bar running down the middle of the road

that forced you back on the right path.

It gave you the illusion that you were driving,

without the freedom or the consequences for doing it wrong.

But that isn’t what our Lord wanted,

and it isn’t what He’s given us

because such a free will

would have made it impossible for true love ever to exist between us and Him.

True love only exists

and it only has the power to change our lives

when we know that both of those involved in the love relationship

have the absolute freedom to choose not to love.

And it becomes all the more powerful between us and our God

when we know that there are so very many reasons

why He really shouldn’t even like us at all,

and yet He does.

Well, I didn’t intend to get quite so involved in all of this,

but what I wanted us to see in these last two verses of 1^st Peter 3

is that Peter is talking about the way in which Christ went through the death of His body

in order to give Him absolute victory over sin and the forces of evil

that fight against Him and His purpose for us on this earth.

Christ suffered death in the flesh

to bring about His victory over sin.

And then, having stated this,

he uses this pattern in the life of Christ

and applies it to us.

1PE 4:1-2 Therefore, since Christ has suffered (death) in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same purpose, because he who has suffered (death) in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for the lusts of men, but for the will of God.

And with this statement

Peter introduces us

to what I consider to be one of the most fascinating parts

of the Christian’s pilgrimage with our Lord.

You see, when we come to Christ,

we come with hearts that are open to Him

and eager to serve Him and follow His lead.

But we also come

utterly ignorant of what it means for Him to live through us.

All we know is life in the flesh -

life lived on the basis of our natural talents, abilities, and determination,

and we just assume that what God is asking us to do

is to use our natural flesh abilities

to do what we are suppose to do.

The one thing we understand is the flesh

and our trust and confidence is in the flesh

and in it’s ability to pull this whole thing off.

But there are two huge problems

with the flesh-based walk with the King.

The first, of course,

is that the flesh simply cannot ever do what our Lord calls us to do.

The flesh can do fine with religious systems.

It can generate tremendous faithfulness to the system,

and productivity within that system,

but it cannot do what we’ve been called to do -

it cannot love,

it cannot forgive,

it cannot reach out in compassion and kindness,

and it cannot live in trusting submission and dependance and devotion to Christ,

giving Him the glory and the gratitude for His life lived through us.

And the second big problem with the flesh

is that there always has to be a flesh-fulfilling motivation behind it.

There has to be something that makes the flesh feel good.

Do you know what drove Peter’s devotion to Christ before the crucifixion?

Certainly He loved the Lord,

and that made it a whole lot easier,

but his most basic driving force

was his certainty that this Jesus was the rightful King of Israel,

and when He was finally

crowned

the man standing right next to Him would be Peter the rock,

the right-hand man of the King himself.

Do you remember what the disciples were arguing about

at the last meal they shared together just before their Lord was crucified?

Which one of them was the greatest.

That’s the flesh,

and even when the goals appear to be righteous,

there are always self-fulfilling motives underneath.

Sometimes those flesh-driven motives are obvious to all -

things driven by a desire to make the body feel good at any cost.

Peter mentions some of them in this passage - ...sensuality, lusts, drunkenness, carousing, drinking parties and abominable idolatries...

Sometimes the flesh-driven motives are far more subtle,

and far more socially acceptable -

Who’s number one in the organization?

Whose building is the biggest?

Whose budget is the largest?

Whose attendance is the greatest?

But whether they are the crude, pleasure-driven flesh goals,

or the more subtle ego-driven flesh goals

the end result is the same -

it is a life being lived “for the lusts of men” rather than “for the will of God”.

And here is the truly remarkable thing,

the thing none of us expect,

the thing that so effectively fuels Satan’s great religious empire on this earth,

his alternative to the true life in the spirit -

man-made religious systems and the lusts of men make perfect soul-mates.

The religious system

provides our lust for success,

or for social prominence,

or for control over others,

or for financial gain,

or for a way to hide our unresolved immorality

with the perfect structure, the perfect framework, the perfect protection.

If we can continue to pursue our flesh-driven goals,

and yet do it under the banner of Jesus

not only does no one criticize us,

but we actually gain tremendous social status in the process.

Peter knew all about this, of course,

because he spent the first four years of his life with the Master

driven almost exclusively by the lusts of his flesh.

Certainly he loved his Lord deeply,

but he lived with his Lord primarily on the basis of his flesh abilities,

driven by his flesh-based goals.

And in the end,

when he was forced to choose between those flesh-based goals and his Lord,

he chose his flesh.

Now, I want us to look closely at that point in Peter’s life

where he personally suffered death in the flesh,

but we’ll need to save that for next week

because we don’t have the time to dig into it this morning.

Which means we sort of have to stop this study in mid-sentence

and leave what we started unfinished.

But I don’t want to close

without saying just a little bit more

about how we can honestly evaluate our own motives in our Christian life.

Early in my Christian life

I was in a conversation with a Bible teacher I respected,

talking with him about some of these same issues.

At that point in my life

I was keenly aware of many of my own flesh-based motivations

and I began questioning everything I was doing.

I’d just begun doing some Bible teaching myself,

and I knew that what was happening within me was something God Himself was doing,

but at the same time I discovered that I really loved

the status and the affirmation I received in the Christian community because of it.

And as I shared my struggles with him,

he responded with a single sentence

that has become an anchor for me and a place of peace ever since.

He said, “Larry, no one ever does right things for completely right reasons.”

And as soon as he said that

I knew what he meant.

He wasn’t making excuses for those flesh-driven motives that are always present within us,

but he was saying that neither should we allow their presence within us

to cause us to deny the reality of the life of Christ through us.

As long as we are in these bodies,

living under the guidance of minds and emotions

that were trained by a spirit that was in rebellion against our Lord,

we will always fight the goals and the desires of the flesh.

But when we look at ourselves honestly

what we want to look for is our deepest motivating desire.

Paul’s words to the Corinthians will help us here.

He was offering a response to some of the Corinthians

who were critical of the way Paul was approaching his Christian life.

And in response he said,

1CO 4:5 Therefore do not go on passing judgment before the time, but wait until the Lord comes who will both bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and disclose the motives of men's hearts; and then each man's praise will come to him from God.

And with that statement

he gives us the two tools we must have

if we are to evaluate ourselves wisely.

The first is to look at the motives of our heart.

Certainly there will be some flesh-impulses within us,

but what is it we truly want more than all else?

If we can answer that to ourselves by saying,

“More than anything else, more than everything else, what I long for is a life lived in trusting submission to my King, a life that truly honors Him.”,

then we have a solid foundation for moving ahead.

And the second ingredient Paul gives us for correct evaluation

is to look at what he calls the things hidden in the darkness.

He’s talking here about what we do

and who we are

when no one is watching.

When we are all by ourselves

do we still see within ourselves

a longing to live a life that honors our Lord?

If so, then there is something very real, and very good taking place within us,

something that only God Himself could create within us.

The true walk with our Lord is warfare.

But what many of us do not expect

is that much of that warfare is not with the evil around us,

but rather with the evil within us.

Paul put the terrifying truth into a single sentence when he said, (ROM 7:21) “I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good.”

But then, having said that, he goes on immediately

to assure us that, ROM 8:1 Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus...,

because, ROM 8:10 If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness.

And then the next thing he says

is the hope and the foundation of every day we live with our King.

ROM 8:11 But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

And next week we’ll pick up our study right here

and let Peter share with us through his own life

at least part of how Christ accomplishes that within us.