05-24-09 Hard Times - High Calling Pt. 4

For a number of weeks now

we have been listening to Peter’s words to us

as he seeks to equip us for the hard times in life.

He knows the hard times are not optional.

He knows they will be a part of every Christian’s life.

Some of them will come

simply as the result of our living in a profoundly corrupted world,

a world whose god is Satan,

a world so hostile to the life of Christ within us

that Peter described us as “aliens” in this world.

It is impossible to live in this world

without having our lives at times painfully affected

by the evil both around us

and within our own flesh.

And there are times

when our attempts to live in a way that honors our King

will intensify the turmoil in our lives.

We’re swimming up stream,

holding to a level of moral integrity

that causes us to move directly against the current of the rest of our society.

And people just simply don’t like it.

I like the way Paul said it in his letter to the Philippians.

PHI 2:15 ... prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world...

And we are, you know - we are lights in the world.

But the problem with light

is that it reveals what’s really there.

If you walk into a room,

flip on a light

and see rats or cockroaches running around on the floor

you have one of two options.

You can attack the filth that’s drawing the rats and roaches,

or you can turn off the light.

When we pursue lives of moral integrity,

even though it’s always a battle,

and one that we never win perfectly,

the very fact that we hold this as our goal

shines a light on the lives of those we come in contact with.

And it makes many of them

want to do whatever they can

to turn off the light.

Aliens and strangers...

And we’ve reached the portion of Peter’s letter

in which he offers us

3 tools, 3 weapons for the warfare we face as we walk with the King.

The first weapon he offered us

was a clear, simple call

that we keep our life within the moral framework of God.

Especially during the hard times

he doesn’t want us investing huge amounts

of mental and emotional energy

into dealing with self-inflicted wounds.

And there is nothing in all the world

that more powerfully equips us for life

than personal, practical moral integrity.

It does more to free us from guilt,

from fear,

from stress and anxiety

than any other single choice we can ever make.

And then we saw the second of the three great weapons offered to us by our Lord -

that of building strong love relationships

with the Christians our God has placed next to us.

1PE 1:22 Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart...

During the hard times of life

we urgently need to remember the truth -

the truth about our God’s love for us,

about His grace poured out on us,

about His kindness and compassion,

about His holding us in the palm of His hand.

But most of the time

we cannot tell ourselves those truths.

We need others close to us

who, with their words and with their attitudes toward us,

can reflect the image of our God to us.

And beyond that,

we need the kind of support

that can only be found in knowing

that someone who cares about us

is standing with us, going with us through whatever we face.

And then, two weeks ago, we made some progress

in looking at the third weapon Peter gives us,

that of our understanding the true nature of the written Word of God.

I know how it is when it comes to the Bible.

I know how skillfully Satan has convinced us

that the Bible is simply a sacred book that we really should read

as proof of our devotion to God.

Within the world of religion

our involvement with the written Word

is viewed as something we give to God

as proof of our faithfulness and commitment to Him.

In fact,

this mentality has developed to the point that

there are more than a few voices within the Christian world

suggesting that God is pleased with us when we read His Word on a daily basis

and disappointed with us when we fall short of this goal.

How fascinating it is...

When we hear a voice within us saying to us,

“You really SHOULD read your Bible today.”,

it never enters our minds

that we just might be hearing the voice of Satan.

And yet that is in fact Satan’s most effective approach

in his efforts to blind us

to the reality of what it is our God has given us in the written Word.

You see,

once Satan has succeeded in turning the Bible

into a religious duty with which we attempt to prove our faithfulness to God

our relationship with it will degenerate into an endless cycle

in which we feel good about ourselves if we’ve read it

and guilty if we’ve failed to fulfill our obligation.

And then, into this religious sewage comes the voice of Peter,

giving us not a religious duty to fulfill,

but rather an insight into the spoken Word of God

that, if we hear what he’s saying,

will equip us for the hard times in life

as nothing else could ever do.

OK, we’ve already looked at part of what Peter wants to share with us.

He talked with us about the life we live within these physical bodies,

a life that has a clearly defined beginning and an end.

In fact, he compared it to a stalk of flowering grass

that springs up, flowers, and then is gone forever.

But he brings this up

not to depress us,

but rather to offer it in contrast

to the life given to us by our Lord when we come to Him,

a life that literally has no end.

He says we have been born again

not of a seed which is perishable, like our physical bodies,

but rather of a seed that is imperishable - that will remain forever.

And then he tells us what that seed is.

It is what he calls the living and abiding word of God.

And we spent a little bit of time with those two words two weeks ago.

He wants us to know that there is something utterly unique

about every word, every truth, every concept, every promise

spoken to us by our God.

The word of God is living.

By that he means

that it is a literal extension of God Himself.

It isn’t just that He speaks the words,

but He also personally makes certain

that they are fulfilled exactly as He spoke them.

This is certainly true of all the promises He’s made to us

and the prophecies He’s shared with us,

but it extends far beyond that.

Take, for example, God’s declaration that He loves us.

When we tell another person that we love them

most of the time we are simply communicating to them

the feeling of the moment.

At the time we speak the words

we feel love for the other person.

But if that relationship deteriorates

it is altogether possible

that six months later we could be saying,

“Well, yes, I did love you at one time,

but I don’t love you any more.”

And in that statement we would be expressing

the changes that have taken place in our feelings toward that person.

But that isn’t the way it works with our God.

When He tells us that He loves us

He’s making a statement to us

not about how He feels at that particular moment,

but rather about the way He has chosen to approach us,

the way He has chosen to relate to us.

And having made that declaration

it will never ever change.

He will continue to relate to us in love

no matter how we my be responding to Him at any given time.

And it’s more than that, of course.

It’s not just that He chooses to relate to us in love,

but that He does so because of His deep, heart attachment to us.

He delights in our uniqueness,

in our very existence,

and He always will.

I find it interesting

that God never tells us that He loves His angels,

or that they love Him.

What He does tell us

is that they were created by Him

to help Him express and communicate His special love for those of us who would come to Him through Christ.

The author of Hebrews,

talking about the angels, says, “HEB 1:14 Are they not all ministering spirits, sent out to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation?”

He had no plan of redemption for them,

no interest in dying in their place for their rebellion against Him.

But with us it’s all different.

With us, from the very beginning

He established a relationship between us and Him

in which real love could be exchanged.

And having declared this as His intention,

having spoken the words telling us that He loves us,

He then lives out the daily reality of that declaration.

And His words to us are “living”

simply because they are an extension of Himself.

And Peter also tells us

that his words are abiding.

He comes back to this again in the last verse of this first chapter

when he says,

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

And His meaning is obvious.

Once God has spoken,

what He has spoken is true and unchanging forever.

He never forgets,

He never retracts,

He never mis-speaks, as our politicians are so prone to doing.

If He has said it,

we can trust it,

more than we can trust the sun above our heads

or the dirt under our feet.

Now, I know we’ve talked about some of this two weeks ago,

but if we are going to understand

what it is that Peter is seeking to do for us in this section of his letter

everything depends upon our gaining

a correct perspective on the spoken words of God,

because Peter knows

how urgently we need some places in our lives

that simply will not change, ever -

solid places,

certain places,

a foundation upon which we can build

without fear of it crumbling under our feet.

And that foundation is what our God has spoken to us,

His living and abiding word to us.

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

What He has said

we can trust.

Now, from there Peter then goes on

to explain how we can develop

a healthy relationship with this spoken word of God.

And here again I find both what he says

and what he does not say to be fascinating.

In the first four verses of chapter 2

he goes on to say,

1PE 2:1-4 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. And coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected by men, but choice and precious in the sight of God...

OK, in these verses

Peter talks with us in practical terms

about how we go about developing a healthy relationship

with the things our God has said to us,

a relationship that allows our spirits

to literally feed on the His words,

to draw strength and nourishment from them

in a way that allows us to grow in the same way a baby grows from his mother’s milk.

And before we see what he does say,

let me first point out what he does not say.

He does not say

that we should structure some form of daily devotions into our lives.

He does not offer us any kind of religious form or structure

that will then lead us into a nurturing relationship with the Word of God.

I begin most days of my life

looking once again at something my God has written down for me.

Sometimes it’s just a single verse or two.

Sometimes it’s a larger section.

I certainly don’t do that

so that I can then tell myself I’ve fulfilled my devotional duty.

I do it because I desperately need truth,

and because I so quickly forget.

I forget that my God loves me,

I forget that He holds me in the palm of His hand,

and that nothing touches my life apart from His knowledge and His involvement.

I forget that He is well pleased to live in me,

and to live through me in a way perfectly matched

both to where I’m weak and where I’m strong.

I forget that nothing can ever separate me from His love,

and that He has personally committed Himself to working all things together for good in my life.

I so quickly,

and so often forget everything about Him that matters the most,

and it helps me to read it over and over again.

But what fascinates me about what Peter does here

as he talks with us about our relationship to the Word

is that he doesn’t tell us to try to add the Word to our lives,

but rather he tells us to remove from our lives

those things that have the ability to block our natural hunger for the Word.

It’s as if he’s telling us

that a dependance upon the Word

is as natural for the Christian as hunger for milk is natural for a baby.

But there are some things

that, if we allow them to remain in our lives,

will block or stifle that natural hunger.

And he names the ones that are most common.

...malice and all guile and hypocrisy and envy and all slander...

Interesting, isn’t it,

though not at all surprising

that our relationship with the Word

is directly linked to our relationships with one another.

Malice is wishing evil for another person,

wanting to do evil to them

or hoping that evil would happen to them.

Slander is speaking evil of another person.

They are both common expressions

of a root of bitterness within us.

Has someone hurt you?

Have they brought evil into your life

and you’ve found yourself longing to find some way of getting even?

A hunger for God

and a hunger for revenge can never coexist within us.

Until we choose to let go of the wrong we’ve suffered,

choosing to place both the wound we’ve received

and the person who inflicted it into God’s hands,

there will be no hunger for the truth within us.

We do not forgive others for their sakes, you know,

we forgive them for our own sakes.

We have only so much mental and emotional energy,

and we can focus on only one thing at any given time.

If we choose to give ourselves over to malice,

to the longing for evil in another person’s life,

then we have also chosen suppress any hunger for the truth.

And then Peter mentions guile.

This is a fascinating word.

It describes a wilful craftiness and deceit,

a desire to deceive another person for personal gain.

Frequently it’s for financial gain,

but it can equally apply to anything we’re trying to get from another person.

It is the opposite of that transparent honesty

that should form the foundation of our relationships with others.

Peter then takes this concept one step farther

when he mentions hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is guile applied to the world of religion.

It is the intentional creation

of a facade of holiness and goodness and devotion and faithfulness

in order to gain status from other Christians,

a desire to deceive

for the sake of social status.

The destructive force of hypocrisy within the family of God

simply cannot be overstated.

Of all the sins we face in our relationships with one another,

it is the one sin that has more power to destroy the health of the family of God than any other

because it destroys the one pillar upon which everything else is built.

This right here, the family of God,

is suppose to be the one place in all of human society

where we can risk being honest about ourselves without fear of rejection or condemnation.

Tragically, the longing for power or social prestige within the religious world

has made hypocrisy and facade-building so common

that many church settings

are the last place where people feel safe enough to be honest.

And, as Peter points out,

once we are focused on the facade

we also loose our hunger for the Word.

The final enemy of the healthy hunger mentioned by Peter is envy.

And here again, he wants us to know

that envy, and the heart of greed or competitiveness that gives birth to envy

will strip us of our hunger for the Word.

But what I want us to see here

is the remarkable simplicity

with which Peter reveals to us the pathway

that leads to a healthy relationship with the Word of God.

A hunger for the Word is the default setting in the life of the Christian.

If that hunger isn’t there,

the solution is not to attempt to pile on a load of guilt

with the intent of driving the believer into some sort of devotional duty.

The solution is to look honestly at our life

to see where we’ve been deceived into a corrupted approach to some relationship

that’s blocking our spirit’s natural hunger for the food we need.

Well, we’re not done with this,

but we’ll pick it up here next week.