04.16.2023 - Our Inherited Life

Scripture: 1 Peter 1:3-9

1 Peter 1:3–9 NRSV

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, 7 so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Our Inherited Life

The Poor in Spirit?

In the three years of His ministry on earth, Jesus probably preached only a handful of sermons. Rather than giving the people around Him something new and exciting every week, He repeated the same lessons over and over, occasionally using different words or stories. Some might say you cannot improve on perfection, so why change? Our God is unchanging. But He is not unmoving or unmoved.

He moves and grows in us as His Word takes root, shapes, and transforms us. Those literal words that Jesus spoke were captured by the minds and hearts of His disciples as He called them from the fishing boats and fields, synagogues, and marketplaces. They had an idea in their minds of what it meant for the Good Shepherd to leave the 99 sheep and go after the one lost lamb. When Jesus fed more than 5,000 people in the wilderness with one small boy's lunch, they saw that parable in a different light. Again, when He cast out hundreds of demons from one man living in Gerasene, they saw that parable in a different light.

This is true of all of His teaching. I’m sure many of them were a bit puzzled when Jesus preached the first line of His sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

What does that mean? Who is poor in spirit? Do I need more spirit? It sounds like that is supposed to be a good thing, but I thought the goal was to be spiritually rich. And so that teaching faded into the back of their minds as Jesus moved on to other lessons. I wonder if it resurfaced at the feeding of the 5,000 or any of those healings and miraculous events. Did they remember it when Lazarus rose from the dead? Did those words resonate in them as Jesus carried His cross to the hill on which He would be crucified? “Blessed are the poor in spirit...”

As Jesus continued to reveal more and more of God’s power and plan to them, those lessons began to grow deeper in their minds and hearts, revealing more precise meaning and direction. Some things cannot be understood outside of faith, and their faith was still growing. Some of the things God asked of them were impossible until they had come to trust Him with all their lives.

Peter is an excellent example of a growing faith that failed often but bounced back quickly. He did not let yesterday's mistakes hold Him back from allowing God to shape Him in the image of Jesus. By the time this former fisherman wrote the words of our passage today, He had learned that God holds and protects our eternal lives safe from harm when we give our life to Him.

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Kept Safe

Like the disciples before us, we understand the scriptures in ways that grow with our faith and relationship with God. So, for example, when we are young in our faith, fresh out of our fishing boats, we might read this passage and focus on the safety of our lives when we decide to follow Jesus.

Can we trust what Jesus says?

Is He powerful enough to keep us from all the world's evils?

Can He forgive all of our sins?

Peter says yes, and he knows from personal experience. He was the one who followed Jesus out, walking on the water. He was there when Lazarus came out of the tomb alive. He was the one who denied Jesus, not once, not twice, but three times as Jesus was being whipped and beaten, and still Jesus forgave Him. Peter was not a straight-A student and knew how much help he needed from Jesus, his teacher.

Our new life in Christ begins the moment we ask Jesus to be our Lord and Savior, but this inherited life He has saved for us in heaven is also essential. Those first Christians did not have 2000 years of testimonies about lives being changed by Jesus. They weren’t sure that Jesus had the power of God. So Peter reminded them of His resurrection and assured them that Jesus had the power to offer new life.

Even today, though, we sometimes focus so much on what Jesus can do for us now that we forget what Jesus offers us when our earthly life ends. We don’t want to think about death. We want to experience all of that joy and happiness now. But Peter reminds us of the life we will inherit from Jesus after we die, and this is so important because we will all face death at some point. When we do, we will realize how much we will leave behind. There is so much that we cannot take with us. So in transitioning from the temporary to the eternal, we need to know what awaits us.

Just as Paul wrote to the Colossians that our life would be revealed when we see Jesus, so Peter tells us that our life, our salvation, is kept for us, waiting for us, in heaven, imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. It won’t get stolen away from you. You won’t accidentally lose it. There is no safer place to put your life than in God’s hands.

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Refined

God created us to grow both physically and spiritually as well. As we grow, our questions and wonders grow with us. While our confidence remains that God will keep our eternal life safe with Him in heaven, we begin to wonder what to do with the rest of our earthly lives.

Do we go back to normal?

Does everyday life for a follower of Jesus look any different than anyone else?

Some of our biggest questions come out of the challenges we face. When we first came to Jesus, many of us hoped He would take away all the pains and problems from our lives. We want to stay forever in the joy of the Lord, even if we don’t know what that means. We want to stay there, reliving Easter Sunday forever, watching Jesus as that perfect example of God’s love and grace, surprising us at the empty tomb. But we know we cannot stay in the upper room forever. Pentecost is coming, and the world is waiting for us to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and share His love and grace with everyone who is still missing out.

While Peter assures us that our life is safe in the hands of Jesus, there is nothing automatic about the transformation that takes place. Instead, there is a refining process that God brings us to as we follow Jesus. Our faith is purified as we follow Jesus from baptism to His fasting and temptation in the wilderness. It is encouraged as we follow Him sharing the gospel in word and deed in the power of the Holy Spirit. Our faith becomes a witness and example to others in our suffering as we pick up our cross and follow Jesus. And we experience the joy and reward of God’s work in us when we hear Jesus call us out of our graves, free forever from the power of sin and death.

Our lives go through the refining fires of life, and some of the things that cause us the most pain and concern are the very things that God allows to happen to purify, shape, and temper our faith. What we claim we believe and have committed to God is tested by the fires and trials of life. Perhaps you have heard that “There are no atheists in foxholes.” - referring to the soldiers on the front lines of battlefields. I don’t know if that is true, but I would believe there are no hypocrites there pretending to have faith. There are few hypocrites in hospital ICUs and ERs either. When life tosses us into the fire, everything fake about our faith is burned away until only the truth remains. The pure faith that glorifies God will shine, no matter how big or small it may be, and everything else will be destroyed. Whatever is left of us will shine for His glory by the time we see Jesus face to face.

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Building on God’s Kingdom

It can be scary to look at your life and figure out what things are there because God wants them and what things are there because you and I want them. You may even have some things in your life that are not your will or God’s but have been put there by others.

In the next few weeks, we will learn more about daily life following Jesus and how God grows pure faith in us and strips away everything else. Joe Dowdy shared some of the things we can do last week in our midweek devotion. These are prayer, reading scripture, and spending time with other believers. We will go deeper, though, because those acts we do alone and with others to grow our faith are tested by what we do when we put our bibles down and head into the Monday mornings, Wednesday workdays, and Friday nights.

That starts by looking at who you and I are today and who Jesus calls us to be.

Are you building your life on the Kingdom of Heaven, or have you been building on good intentions?

When you hear that the poor in spirit inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, do you still wonder if that applies to you?

What have you earned that you need to turn over to be tested and purified by God as you learn to rely on His grace and provision?

Peter and many others lived a life that grew into a love letter to God and produced disciples that lasted. He did not always get it right, but He kept bringing His eyes back to Jesus and following where He led. He did not let failure or crisis stop Him from growing in His faith because He saw Jesus defeat death. And Peter believed that Jesus would lead him into His eternal life as he let go of his old life and moved into the eternal life Jesus was preparing and keeping for him.

God holds your new life in Christ, pure and unblemished, with Him as your inheritance as well, and He is leading you to learn to live it one day at a time.

Will you trust God enough today to allow Him to test and refine your faith and give you the life He is preparing for you?