03-29-09 Street Level Holiness

1PE 1:13 Therefore, gird your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

That’s the statement we looked at last week,

but it’s actually just the beginning

of a number of things that Peter says in the next section of his letter to us.

One of the frustrating things about our inching our way through this letter

is that it so easy to forget

that this really was a letter, written as a letter,

intended to be read as a letter - all the way through in a single reading.

What Peter says at any given point in this letter

assumes that we’ve just read and understood what came before,

and if we forget what’s come before

we can easily misunderstand or misapply what we’re reading now.

That’s especially true

when we come to a section that begins with the word “therefore”.

It’s obvious that what Peter is about to say to us

grows directly out of what he’s just said.

And so, to keep us aware of where we are and how we got there

I’ll do my best to take a few minutes each week

to remind us of what Peter has already shared with us.

And if you’ve been with us the past few weeks

you know already that Peter begins this letter

by sharing with us 3 truths we urgently need to understand

if we are ever going to be equipped for the life our King has called us to.

The first truth is that we don’t fit.

Because of our union with our Lord

we do not fit in this current world system.

We are aliens in a hostile land and as such

we will never find what our spirits hunger for the most

through anything this world has to offer.

The second truth Peter wants us to know

is that even though we don’t fit in this world system

we do fit perfectly in the Kingdom of our God.

We belong to Him and with Him.

He chose us for Himself,

redeemed us with His own blood,

and now works with us each moment of the day,

helping us to rebuild our lives into greater and greater conformity with our King.

And then, the third truth Peter wants us to know

is that even the hard stuff we’re going through in our lives right now

will by used by God’s Spirit to strengthen our faith in our God.

Peter wants us to know

the kind of commitment our God has made to us,

and the kind of love He has for us,

and the careful rebuilding program He has established for each of us.

OK, that’s a quick summary of where we’ve been,

and what we see Peter doing in these opening verses

is exactly the same thing we see happening throughout the entire New Testament.

Our God never begins His conversations with us

by telling us what He requires or expects or demands from us.

He always begins

by telling us

what we can expect from Him,

and what He has already done for us and in us,

and why He’s done it.

He never begins by telling us that we should love Him,

He begins by telling us that He loves us

because He knows that only when we have first begun to hear and believe His love

will we find within ourselves

a longing to love Him in return.

It’s only after He has communicated His love to us

that we then find Him saying, “therefore”.

And last week we saw the first step in our response to His love for us

as Peter said,

1PE 1:13 Therefore, gird your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

And even there it was not what our naturally religious nature would have expected.

He didn’t begin with a list of duties,

but rather Peter began by sharing with us

mental attitudes we can choose,

attitudes that prepare us for the battles we face.

...gird your minds for action...

...keep sober in spirit...

...fix your hope on the grace to be brought to you at revelation of Jesus Christ...

Then, after helping prepare us in attitude,

Peter offers just one, clear, simple request

when it comes to daily living.

1PE 1:14-16 As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance, but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written, "You shall be holy, for I am holy."

OK, there’s a lot going on in this one sentence,

and I want us to stay with it long enough

so that we understand correctly what’s really being said.

You see, there are some deeply intrenched lies within all of us

that can cause us to misread these three verses.

Whenever we get near the concepts of God and holiness and us

we can easily revert back to our religious mode

in which we hear God demanding holiness from us

and then threatening us with His wrath if we do not perform to expectations.

It is Satan’s favorite caricature of God,

one he has been feeding the human race from the very beginning.

And so to help disarm this lie

Peter takes us through three crucial progressive steps

before he calls us to practical holy living.

The first step comes in that opening phrase, “As obedient children...”.

In that single phrase

he is both reinforcing the truth about our real identity and security with God,

and at the same time calling to the true deepest longing of our spirits.

This is not God the Moral Judge Of The Universe threatening us with His wrath,

this is God the Father...Abba Father...Papa

saying to a select group of men and women throughout history,

“You are My sons, my daughters - my children.

You and I are united forever,

our lives are bound up in one another,

and everything you do affects Me deeply.”

This Father/child union between us and God

is so critical to what Peter is saying to us here

that he comes back to it even more strongly in verse17.

We’ll get there in just a few minutes,

but for now it is crucial that we hear clearly

and understand what Peter is saying

when he opens this discussion about our performance

with those words “as obedient children...”.

This is not God threatening us with judgement or rejection if we fail to perform to standard,

this is our Papa wrapping His arms around us,

then sitting down and talking with us

about why our actions matter so very much.

And Peter does something else in this opening phrase as well.

He offers us a sort of title, “obedient children”,

a title that stirs something deep within every growing child of God.

You heard it, didn’t you.

When Peter used that phrase “obedient children”

those words created a longing within you,

a longing to be just that.

Sometimes you’re not even sure what that means -

you wrestle with trying to understand how true love and true righteousness fit together.

And sometimes your flesh screams so loudly

that it’s very hard to hear and trust His voice.

But still, deep within your spirit

there is a longing to be exactly what Peter is calling us to be -

an obedient son,

and obedient daughter of your Father God.

It’s all so very different than it once was,

back in the days when you still viewed God as the enemy,

back when you heard Him demanding from you what you could not deliver

and then saw Him condemning you in your failure.

It’s all so different than it was

when you tried to relate to Him on the basis of the law,

hating it,

hating HIM,

and yet unable to free yourself from your guilt and fear.

Now, at least a little,

you’ve seen His heart,

you’ve seen His love,

and what you’ve seen has imbedded within your spirit

a longing to be one of His obedient children.

That’s part of why Peter uses that as his opening phrase,

because he wants to stir that longing within us,

to remind us of the truth -

the truth that when we are most ourselves

if we could choose any life we wanted to live

it would be a life that honors our King.

OK, that’s the first of three crucial phrases

used by Peter to help break the power

of those lies and those fears we have within us

about God’s conversations with us concerning holiness - obedience.

And the second phrase is just as helpful.

He says,

...do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance...

Now, the next thing Peter does

is to point us back to our lives before we met our King,

or before we knew the sound of His voice.

And specifically he points us back to what he calls our former lusts.

That word lusts is an interesting word.

It refers to anything we strongly desire,

anything that our minds and emotions latch onto.

It can be a lust for money,

a lust for security,

a lust for possessions,

a lust for status and recognition,

a lust for power or control over others,

a lust for some sexual relationship that is outside of God’s design for us.

Basically what Peter is talking about

are all of those God-counterfeits,

all of those God-alternatives we came up with before we met Him,

all of those techniques designed to meet our needs

that were outside of God’s protective moral framework.

And we all have them.

We all have our teddy bears -

those things that were powerless to truly meet our needs,

but things we clung to

because they helped us hid from the pain, or the fear, or the guilt, or the anxiety for a little while.

The problem, of course,

is that when we come to our King

all of those things do not instantly drop out of our lives.

In fact, not only do they not drop out of our lives,

but many of them remain ingrained in our flesh forever.

In fact, that’s the nature of the flesh -

once we have recorded those responses within our mind and emotions

they remain a part of our mental and emotional make-up forever.

Some of you here this morning

have been a part of the redemptive work of Alcoholics Anonymous.

You have faced one of your former lusts

and found victory over its power.

But you know how it works, don’t you.

I’ve met men and women who haven’t had a drink for 20 years or more.

And yet,

when I talk with them

they will tell me, “I’m an alcoholic.”

They don’t say, “I was an alcoholic.”,

the say, “I am an alcoholic.”

Why?

Because that’s the nature of so many of our former lusts-

they can be brought into submission to the leadership of the Spirit of God within us,

but they don’t go away.

They don’t simply admit defeat,

and disappear from our lives forever.

But the crucial part of this second phrase

comes in the last half of it where Peter describes our former lusts as those, ...which were yours in your ignorance...

And keep in mind here

that even though we are reading words written by Peter,

we are listening to the mind and heart of God Himself.

That’s the way it works.

That’s why God has done what He’s done

in giving us the Bible.

He knew we would need a clear, reliable window

through which we could see Him if we chose to.

That’s why Peter said what he said in that passage we were studying a few months ago.

2PE 1:21 ...for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

...men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

To read Scripture

is to know the mind and heart of God.

And I mention this at this point in our study of Peter’s letter

because I want us to appreciate

this remarkable and perhaps unexpected attitude

that we see Peter expressing when he talks with us

about all of those wrong choices,

all of that willful rebellion that was the foundation of our lives

prior to our union with Christ.

He talks about the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance...

Do you see it?

This is not the Creator God

looking out over the human race

seeing the limitless corruption and evil in our lives

wondering why we refuse to listen to Him as He demands that we clean up our act.

You see, He understands perfectly

why we made the choices we made

when we were separated from Him.

They were choices that we made in our ignorance -

our ignorance of Him and His love and His careful design of us,

our ignorance of how our needs could truly be met,

our ignorance of the tremendous destructive power of some of the choices we were making.

He understood

that all we had as a resource

in our frantic attempts to fill the painful voids within us was ourselves.

And the answers we came up with

frequently only made things worse

and in the end generated more pain than they eliminated.

And what I want us to see

is the remarkable and probably unexpected compassion and kindness

that our God communicates to us

in Peter’s opening words about our call to holiness,

kindness and compassion designed to disarm any remaining fears of His anger or wrath or condemnation.

Basically what our Lord says to us through Peter in these first two opening phrases is,

“You are My child and will always be My child.

I know there are some areas in your life

where you are still in bondage

to those lies that dominated your life before we met.

I understand why they are there

and I know how to help you break free from their power.

But trust Me in this

and let me show you the way.”

And then, before Peter finally offers us his call to holiness,

there is one more phrase he includes.

1PE 1:15 but like the Holy One who called you...

And here again the power of these words

comes from our listening closely to what’s actually being said.

Obviously Peter is calling us to model ourselves after God Himself - our Lord Jesus Christ.

But look at the way he says it.

He doesn’t just say that we should model ourselves after the Holy One,

but rather he describes God as the Holy One who called you.

Now, why would He do that?

Why would the Holy One, the only Holy One in all of creation call you to Himself?

Why would He care?

Why would He want you with Him,

next to Him,

joined to Him,

you who, right now, have areas of your life

that are far less than holy?

Why? Because He loves you.

This isn’t the Holy One who condemns you,

this is the Holy One who calls you to Himself,

just as you are,

because He loves you.

And it is only after those first three opening phrases,

As obedient children,

do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance,

but like the Holy One who called you...

only then does Peter offer us our call to holiness -

...be holy yourselves also in all your behavior...

And even then he does not simply stop with the call,

but rather goes on to offer us an incredible direct promise from God,

a promise intended to give us an absolute foundation of hope,

...because it is written, "You shall be holy, for I am holy."

And the promise God is offering us has two parts to it.

The first is fulfilled through that absolutely holy inner spirit

that God recreates within us when we come to Him,

a spirit that loves God and hungers and thirsts for His righteousness.

And the second part of that promise

is fulfilled through our Lord’s daily redemptive rebuilding work in our lives.

He wants us to know

that He would never give us a calling

that He was not able to fulfill in our life.

In other words,

He can and He will show us

how to break the power of those “former lusts”

that we brought with us into His family

as we listen to His voice and follow His lead.

And I don’t want us to end this morning

without listening to what Peter says next

because the three verses that follow

can only be correctly understood

in the context of what we’ve just seen.

The next thing Peter says is this.

1PE 1:17-19 And if you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each man's work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay upon earth; knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.

And if ever there was a passage

that may help to illustrate the power of the religious lies within us

it’s this passage.

What phrase did you especially notice from those 3 verses?

I think with many of you

the phrase that caught your attention was the phrase conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay upon earth...

As soon as we hear that word FEAR

we forget everything that’s come before

and everything that follows

and we just automatically revert back to our fear of the wrath and condemnation of a God who’s looking for any reason to pounce on us.

I’ll explain to you what it is we are suppose to fear in just a minute,

but first let me just list for us

all of the concepts surrounding this word “fear”.

We’ve looked in some detail at the ones that come before it.

This God has already eternally made us His children.

He understands that what we struggle with

is rooted in our past and grew out of our total ignorance of both Him and the truth.

This holy God has called you to Himself because He wants you with Him forever.

And then looks at what follows this word “fear”.

We are among the very few who have an absolute right to call Him our Father.

He Himself has already redeemed us from our futile past life.

That redemption was made with His own blood poured out for us.

Now, honestly,

is there any way we could ever read the context of this passage

and come away from it believing

that our God was trying to instill in us a fear of His rejection or judgement if we fail to measure up to some preestablished standard?

The debt is already paid in full,

and we are truly redeemed.

So then what is it we are to fear?

OK, let’s look at the context.

Peter says that because we alone have the right and the privilege

of addressing God as our Father,

there is a healthy kind of fear that needs to be a part of our lives.

It is the fear that our life,

our choices would bring a blot on the family.

It isn’t God that we are to fear,

it is what our lives, our actions, our choices say to the world about our God that we are to fear.

You see, whether we like it or not,

once we openly identify ourselves with Jesus Christ

everything we do says something about Him.

And Peter is simply calling us

to choose to live in a way

that proclaims the truth about our God’s ability

both to redeem and to transform a life.