01-31-10 The Fiery Ordeal Pt.3

We are nearing the end of our study of 1^st Peter

and we’ve come to a section in which Peter once again returns us

to the major theme of his letter - standing strong when life gets hard.

And in fact his greatest concern

is with the added turmoil that comes into our lives

as a direct result of our submission to our Lord Jesus Christ

and our faithfulness to Him.

Peter begins this section by saying,

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.

And with those words

he tells us that aligning ourselves with Christ here, now, in this world

will at times increase what he calls the fiery ordeal in our lives.

In other words

there are times when it makes life harder,

when it increases our pain.

And during the past few weeks

we’ve looked at some of the reasons for that.

Simply the fact that we care, that we love, that we see the pain in others and try to help

will add to our turmoil in life.

Do you want a pain-free life?

Seal yourself off from those around you.

Stop caring about them,

stop loving them,

just seal yourself off.

Of course you’ll also have to forfeit being loved by others

and you’ll never know a true sense of purpose or fulfillment in your life,

but you won’t know pain,

except for the constant pain of loneliness and insolation.

But that isn’t what our Lord has called us to.

He’s called us to be like Him

and being like Him

means to place loving those around us

as the highest priority in our lives.

For Him it meant loving to the point of giving His life for us.

Rarely does He call us to that level of giving,

but He certainly calls us to care,

and to care deeply,

knowing that our caring will at times cause us pain,

and profoundly alter our values, our priorities, our goals, and our daily choices.

And Peter calls it the fiery ordeal...,

but he doesn’t stop there.

He goes on to assure us

that this fiery ordeal is never the end of the story.

In fact before he ends this sentence

he assures us that there will come a time when we will see the revelation of His glory,

and what we see at that point will cause us to rejoice with exultation.

Sounds a bit like Bible words, huh?

What he’s saying

is that there will come times

when we will gain at least some glimpse of what our King is doing both in us and through us,

and the result will be a depth of joy within us

unlike anything we’ve ever known before.

And it’s more than just the results, you know.

It’s more than just what He does,

it’s that He does anything at all.

It’s our being confronted with the reality of our God’s involvement in our lives.

It’s our being reminded of His presence with us always,

of His absolute awareness of every issue in our lives,

and most of all of the way He cares.

It’s having our God pick us up and hug us,

and it changes everything.

You do remember what this is all about, don’t you?

From the very beginning,

and I do mean from the beginning of God’s creative acts

it’s always, only been about our discovering what He’s really like,

discovering how He loves,

discovering that He loves us -

not us corporately,

as in His taking some great satisfaction from being able to create what He’s created,

but that He loves individually,

each person, fully, completely, eternally.

It’s about our coming to a personal awareness of that love

in a way that allows us to see it, and believe it, and respond to it.

And isn’t it amazing

that even when Peter is talking about this fiery ordeal in our lives

he tells us that this, too, will become a channel through which

we will be able to discover at a new depth

that our God loves us.

And if that doesn’t happen

then we have misread what’s happening

or misunderstood what our God is doing and why.

OK, that’s as far as we got in this passage last time,

but that’s not where Peter stops with his comments.

So let’s move ahead and see what else he has to say to us.

The next thing he says is,

1PE 4:14 If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.

And the main thing I want to point out here

is that this is not so much a promise

but rather a simple statement of truth.

He is describing for us

how the spirit of a Christian responds

at those times when we have known what our Lord is asking of us,

and done what He’s asked to the best of our ability,

and then been attacked, or humiliated, or criticized because of it.

At such times

God’s Spirit simply wraps His almighty arms around us

and gives us peace.

A number of years ago

we had a man attending our fellowship here.

He was an extremely well educated Christian

with a doctorate in some area of Christian studies.

Though I didn’t realize it in the beginning,

his motivation for getting involved in our group

was so that he could fix me.

Somewhere he’d come in contact with things I’d written,

and he’d decided that I was way off base,

teaching things that he felt were totally wrong,

and he was being called by God to intervene.

Soon after he began attending

he started sending me e-mails each week,

critiquing what I’d taught the Sunday before,

pointing out what he believed was error after error.

At first I tried to dialogue with him,

offering him a response to his criticisms,

but the barrage kept coming, becoming more and more intense.

It was a fascinating experience for me

because my internal responses were so different from what I would have expected.

Rather than becoming defensive,

or feeling hurt or crushed,

his words, some of which attacked my teaching and some of which attacked me personally,

just rolled off.

In fact it got to the point where,

when I’d see another one of his notes in my in-box

I wouldn’t even bother to read it.

Then, after several months of this,

one Sunday morning after I finished teaching

I cornered him before he slipped out the door

and offered to buy him lunch.

He responded by saying, “With the amount of work we need to do lunch will never be enough time.”

I told him it was all I was offering - just a free lunch if he wanted it.

He agreed and we got together.

When we finally got together

I told him that I was grateful for his concern about me and my teaching,

but then I went on to tell him

that if he had hopes of me changing he was going to be deeply disappointed.

I told him that what I teach isn’t just something I learned in a class,

nor was it simply a set of ideas I’d accepted.

I told him that what I teach is an extension of who I am.

It is an external expression of what’s going on between me and my God on a daily basis

and it’s not up for debate, or discussion,

and it’s not going to change because I can’t change it.

It is simply my best attempt

at expressing what I’ve seen and what I’ve experienced

in my ongoing discovery of my Creator.

What you see is what you get.

Then I told him that he was certainly welcome to continue his involvement in our fellowship

if it was something that he found to be of value,

but I didn’t want him to have any illusions

about there ever being any hope of any change

in the basic message he would hear from me.

One week later he told me he’d decided his time and efforts were being wasted here

and he would be attending elsewhere.

I share that rather strange part of my past with you

because it came to mind when I read that statement from Peter telling us that, if you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.

What he’s telling us is a simple statement of fact -

when we are where God wants us to be,

doing what we believe He’s asked us to do,

His Spirit supports us and reassures us even if we get attacked by those who don’t agree.

To be honest, that whole episode from my life fascinated me

because it was so inconsistent with my natural temperament.

I am by nature a self-doubter.

I’m also a self-blamer...

if someone tells me that something isn’t right

my first response is to assume they’re right

and I’m responsible for it not being right.

But when that fellow attacked what I knew was the expression of the life of Christ through me

it just rolled off.

I honestly didn’t care what he said or what he thought

and his words simply served to reconfirm within me what I knew to be true.

And it helped me to understand what Peter means

when he tells us that the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.

From there Peter goes on to offer an important qualification to this whole suffering thing.

He says, 1PE 4:15 By no means let any of you suffer as a murderer, or thief, or evildoer, or a troublesome meddler...

And part of what he’s saying there

is that it is ridiculous for us to invite unnecessary suffering into our lives

by choosing to live outside of God’s protective moral framework.

To which we all say, in theory, “Well of course! How stupid.”

But when it comes to our individual lives,

and individual choices

it’s not that easy, is it.

There’s always a reason, isn’t there?

Especially for the child of God

it is not an easy thing to go against what He’s told us,

and we only make such choices

when we are convinced that there is no way our needs can be met

if we stay within His moral framework.

Years ago when I was working on The Grace Exchange

I devoted an entire chapter to what I believe is one of Satan’s most powerful tactics

in his efforts to defeat the life of Christ within us.

The chapter was titled The Lie That Binds,

and in it I talked about the way in which our enemy

so skillfully uses our basic human needs

as his doorway into our lives.

God has designed us with a wide range of human needs.

Many of our physical needs

are so obvious we rarely even think of them as needs.

We need oxygen, food, water.

Without them we die.

But we also have a wide range of emotional, psychological, mental, and spiritual needs.

We need a sense of security and purpose in life,

we need love and affection,

we need human touch,

we need to know we have value,

we need to see ourselves being productive,

and on and on.

These needs in themselves are not sinful, nor are they the result of sin in our lives.

They are simply a part of the way our Lord designed us.

Sin did not create our needs,

it simply separated us from the One who knows how those needs can be met.

Before we come to Christ

the only resource we have for meeting our needs is ourselves,

and everyone of us come up with our own game-plan for meeting those needs.

How can I prove to myself that I have value?

How can I find love?

But we do this under the leadership

of an inner spirit that views God as the great enemy,

the One who cannot be trusted,

the One who doesn’t understand.

As a result

we all come up with need-meeting techniques

that don’t really meet our needs and

that frequently create far more problems than they solve.

When we come to Christ

and begin to discover that this God we’ve been so terrified of

is the One who loves us more than anyone else ever has or ever will

it helps in that we will no longer fight against Him just to prove we can run our own life.

But we understand very little of His ways,

and we still have recorded within us

all of those need-meeting techniques

that we built into our lives prior to our union with Him.

So what Satan does

is to seek to maneuver us into a situation

in which we are confronted with some intense need

and then he will convince us there is no way we can meet the need

and still remain within God’s protective moral framework.

In other words,

he will attempt to place us into a situation

in which we feel we must choose between meeting some need on one side

and obeying and trusting our Lord on the other.

And once he’s created that belief within us

no matter which choice we make

it will have a devastating affect on our life with the King.

If we choose to step outside of God’s moral framework

in our attempt to meet our need,

we will discover too late that the need is not truly met,

and that we will have very likely deeply wounded both ourselves and some other people in the process.

But even if we choose not to step outside of God’s moral framework,

once that lie is in place within us,

the lie of believing that our God is demanding that we choose between obedience and meeting our need,

even if we choose obedience

it will build within us a resentment and mistrust of our Lord.

It will blind us to His love.

As with all lies,

only the truth has the power to set us free.

That truth begins with our having a correct understanding of the protective moral framework our Lord gives us.

One of Satan’s most effective weapons in this warfare

is his use of man-made religious systems

with which he writes for us rules God has never given us,

rules that rob us of the incredible freedom we have in Christ,

freedom to be ourselves, to express ourselves,

freedom to immerse ourselves in life to its fullest.

And breaking the power of religious lies within ourselves

through understanding clearly and correctly

the true moral framework our King has given us

is an essential first step in finding the freedom that will set us free.

Then, building on that foundation, when we find ourselves in turmoil,

feeling as though we must choose between some need and obedience to our Lord,

there are times when we must strongly reaffirm to ourselves

the truth about who our God is.

This is the God who did all and gave all

to express to us the depth of His love,

the God who told us that He came so that we might have life, and that abundantly.

This is the God who has told us that no good thing would He withhold from those who walk uprightly,

the God who assured us that He would meet our needs through His riches in Christ Jesus.

There are times in each of our lives

when our emotions simply scream lies at us,

times when we feel so strongly

that trusting the King will simply never work.

Our beloved Peter understood that perfectly.

He’d been there

and he knew what it was like to feel so strongly

that his Lord was getting it all wrong,

doing it all wrong,

and that the only solution was for him to step in and do what he knew must be done.

And that, of course, is where we sometimes find ourselves as well.

We find ourselves convinced that our Lord is getting it all wrong

and we simply must step in and take over, doing what we just know must be done.

If Peter would have succeeded,

he would have stopped the crucifixion of Christ

and deprived both himself and the world of true redemption forever.

And at those times when we feel that same kind of turmoil

if we charge ahead we too will deprive ourselves

of God’s redemptive work in some area of our lives.

Before he ends this letter

Peter will bring us back once again

to this kind of intense turmoil in our lives

and share with us some of the most powerful words of encouragement

found anywhere in Scripture.

But even here in this section

he does not end

before giving us an attitude that must be a part of our lives

if we are to break the power of some of those lies within us.

In verses 17 and 18 he tells us clearly

that God cares enough about us

to work for our freedom from those lies

even when His intervention into our lives

may not at first feel like love at all.

1PE 4:17 For it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?

1PE 4:18 And if it is with difficulty that the righteous is saved, what will become of the godless man and the sinner?

And sometimes it is with great difficulty that the righteous are saved.

Interesting wording, huh.

Did you notice the title he gave to the people of God?

He called us “the righteous”.

He does that because we are.

Even at those times when we are struggling inside,

churning over sometimes incredibly hard choices,

the very reason we do churn

is because God has placed within us a pure, holy, righteous spirit that longs to please our God.

But it’s the final statement Peter makes in this section that I want to leave us with this morning

because it captures the heart of what our Lord has called us to.

Peter says,

1PE 4:19 Therefore, let those also who suffer according to the will of God entrust their souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right.

And Peter’s wording is both so careful and so powerful in the statement.

He doesn’t tell us to OBEY OUR GOD.

He calls us to entrust our souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right.

You know what that is, don’t you?

That’s our reaching out to our God

at those times when everything we feel

screams at us to turn our back on what our King has said,

reaching out to Him and saying,

“Lord, I hurt. I hurt and I don’t know how to make the pain stop. But You know, and at the right time You will. And until that time I place my hurting soul into Your faithful hands and trust You because above all else this one thing I know - You really do love me, and You can and will bring me through.”