1 Peter 1:22-25 "Saved to Love"

1 Peter 1:22–25 “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you.”

Have you ever known someone who just seems to love everybody? Like loves them well? I’d wager that it is not many people but very few. It seems like a specialized gift. We tend to view love very generically in our ,evangelically house trained way. We know that it is something that we should do, kinda like eating your vegetables… We see it as something we will do if we can, and hopefully get better at. But some people are just better at it than others. Like a specific spiritual gift. But what we learn here is that if one Christian loves people sincerely and well, and another Christian, not so much. One of the two, is not giving evidence of being born again. Therefore, not a Christian. So then this issue of “brotherly love” becomes very serious, very quickly.

We’ve read the passage but I want to approach it by summarizing it into a sentence and then work through the phrases.

“Purified souls, love each other, because, they have been remade, for eternity.” Those are the 4 points of today’s sermon.

Purified Souls

v1- “Having been purified”, we can see that this purification he is talking about has already happened to the whoever he’s talking to. How does one get a “purified soul”? What is he talking about here? Is Peter telling us that we need to have cleaned up our act? Is he saying “since you are calling yourself a Christian, you need to modify your behavior and live up to it?” Is he suddenly teaching works salvation? Could he be saying “you cleaned yourself up so go and act like it”?

V22 immediately tells us how “by your obedience”, obedience to what “the truth”. Doesn’t it sound like he’s saying, “you have to obey a rule to be clean before God.”?

What truth has a Christian obeyed that purifies their soul? Let’s start by asking, “what do I need purified from?” “What has made me “unclean”? Sin, the primary problem, I cannot be right with God because I cannot live up to his “cleanness” if you will. How is a sinful, lost person made clean? I can check a box and obey a rule and make it alright?

You obey a command, Peter’s own preaching on Pentecost he gave the command that all Christians must obey before any other, Acts 2:38 “And Peter said to them, “Repent…. in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins,” Later in another sermon he commands again. Acts 3:19 “Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out.”

The soul that comes to Christ can only do so because they have seen the need to be made clean, if that is missing from your story you need to ponder the gospel more. As soon as the Spirit of God tells me that I must be made right with him, I am immediately slapped with my inability to do so. Romans tells us “for all have sinned and fallen short” can’t get there. Then later on in Romans Paul says “wretched man that I am who will save me?” That is to say “who will make me clean?” “Who will purify me?” And the command is , Romans 10:13 “For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”” The command is to repent and turn to Jesus. Obey that, and you will be purified of your sin.

That is who Peter is talking to. People who have experienced, and are walking in this. He says since you’ve done this, love each-other.

As a matter of fact, he says that loving others who have been made right with God, is what the purification is for. It says “having purified your souls for… brotherly love.”

That gives us the next point, the next phrase in our sentence. We said, “Purified souls, Love each-other….”

Love Each-other

Peter just answered… What is your salvation for? We know that it is to ultimately glorify God, or rather, that is what it does….. but how does that look?

The reason we are purified is to love, specifically here a love for others who have come to know Christ or have also “been purified by obedience to the truth” as you have.

You have been saved so you can love each-other. You have been given to each-other to love each other.

How are you doing that? How does the world know that you love the people in this room? How you are towards each-other is important for several reasons. One is, that you are the way that the world will see Christ. How the church behaves towards each other is going to influence what the world believes about God. Your love towards each-other will influence the view people have towards Christ. It will also dictate whether or not people think you are valid representatives of truth.

For example, “He says he is a Christian but he leaves that church and says the most awful things about those people.” It’s just like when someone sees a Christian doing an ungodly thing and they say “he’s supposed to be a Christian” or “and she goes to LBC.” Whether they themselves live like a Christian or not they have an automatic notion of how a Christian acts and they judge your validity according to it.

John 13:35 “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” And still today even an atheist can come pretty close to guessing whether someone is a Christian or not based on that. How you live together and treat each-other is the first way the world knows Him and what he is like. That means that Peter is saying that Christ cleaned us up so that he can use us to show the world who he is. What this implies is that we live towards each other first. BEFORE you consider your reputation before the world, check your love for the people of the church. We say “love God and love others”, but we are given a priority here, “love God and love each-other.”

So let me ask you, how are you doing? When someone sees how you co-exist with your fellow believers, are they learning the truth about Christ or is your life teaching a false doctrine? Church in Dalhart TX we are a people who can have good jobs, great opportunities, and even nice things. But I’m afraid that our culture has quickly become one of nice houses and small tables. We will check the boxes that we think are loving, go to the right things and serve in the right places. but fail to personally love the people of God.

We are called to an earnest and sincere love. (He makes a distinction between false and sincere love). How do we know what that is? There is no better place to learn about love than 1 Cor 13 “the love chapter”. As much as we use this passage for weddings, it is actually FAR more appropriate to teach us about serving the church, other believers. Earlier I said that we often view love as a spiritual gift that some have more than others. Well, when Paul talks about it in 1 Cor 13 he does it in the middle of his teaching on spiritual gifts that are given FOR the church. And what he tells us is that if you can do all this other cool stuff, but don’t love, you are nothing. He refers to loving others, as a “more excellent way” above gifts. He says if you have this one thing, you are better off. The end of ch 12 “I will show you a better way.” (David in a Husky)

SKIP TO NEXT PARAGRAPH AFTER PASSAGE

1 Corinthians 13 (ESV)

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

In that section he shows us how we think love should look. “I gave all my stuff away, I even sacrificed my body. Surely that proves love.” Love CAN look like this (no greater love) but Paul says there are other elements that prove it to be love and not something else. Next he shows us what sincere love IS, IS NOT, and what it DOES. I’m going to compare what he says it is vs what he has told us we think it is.

Here is what sincere love IS. (v4)

‌Love is patient and kind; If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but I am not patient and kind to those I’m speaking to, It’s not love, it’s racket.

Here is what sincere love is NOT and DOES NOT DO.

love does not envy or boast; If I have prophetic powers and can skilfully convey truth but I’m envious of others doing it and boastful about my abilities, it’s not love.

it is not arrogant or rude, If I have a special ability to understand mysteries or very hard to understand things, and I have a ton of bible knowledge, But it brings about an arrogance in me and a rudeness toward others, that’s not love.

It does not insist on its own way; If I have all kinds of faith and confidence in what God is doing but assume that others need to just shut up and follow me with no regard to their faith, It’s not love.

it is not irritable or resentful; This one bites because if we compare it to v3. “I gave up my time and money and more in a really big way” If I give up all I have and constantly sacrifice myself for my kids, spouse, my church, but it makes me resentful and irritates me when I’m asked for one more thing, I’m not doing it in love. and therefore it is NOTHING.

it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, If I sacrifice my very life but gloat over others inability to overcome their own sin, Kind of a “I knew that’s how they would go down” sort of attitude, I don’t love them…

Here is what sincere love DOES.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. We would call this person willfully naive, optimistic, but tough. For the sake of love. You can’t fake those things. The showy stuff can be pulled off with or without the presence of real love. Earnest and sincere love, you can mark it because it transcends mood, attitude, situation, convenience…

‌But why is it more important that these other things?

‌V8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. V13So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Sincere and Earnest love can accomplish a host of other gifts. How in the world do I get there?

Having Been Reborn

You must be born again. When you obey the command to repent and call upon Jesus, you become born again.

Peter loves the term “born again” because, as an allegory for salvation, it is perfect. Actually, it is so perfect that you could call the physical actual birth of a child an allegory for what happens to a person when they come to Christ. The birth into an eternal life. Jesus first uses it with Nicodemus when he said, to enter the kingdom of heaven you must be born again. It is a phrase that is just familiar enough to us that we forget to think about it. It sounded crazy to Nicodemus. Do you remember what he said? basically, “My parents are dead and gone!” That’s exactly right. We have a new Father, an eternal one. Remember our previous passage? He says “if you claim God as Father” then be holy because your father is holy. Someone who has come to know Christ has been born a different person from a different father. A seed from a different tree. He says we come from “imperishable seed NOT perishable seed”. Life comes from a seed. But before the seed there was the tree that bore the fruit that dropped the seed. We now bear the resemblance and characteristics of our father. Just as you now have traits and resemblance to your physical earthly father, a believer will take on the traits of his spiritual father. We are given two major ones here, love and eternality. In Christ you have been given the ability to love others like never before, you have a reason to love other believers, because they are your siblings! With your siblings you have a shared perspective and experience. As spiritual siblings in Christ it’s the same, the perspective of people who were blind but can see, people who were lost and now found. A shared experience of being an alien and an exile and of finding hope in a hopeless world. Those are YOUR people, you should have more in common and more affection for those people than anyone else in the world. Those who found the treasure with you, those who came to the light alongside you, who have “grown up into salvation” with you. That will obviously be a different degree of love than you have for those outside.

My last point. The sentence was “Purified souls, love each other because, they have been remade, for eternity.”

For Eternity

All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you.”

Have you grasped your position as an “eternal creature”? It is the other trait here that we gain by being “born again from an imperishable seed.” We get so used to watching things end,fade, shrivel and die. We get cynical and negative.

We like good weather, good health, good friends, dependable equipment, stable stock value, good economy, right leadership; those things will very naturally die, rot , decay, get spent, devalue, over inflate, retire, get sick etc…. We know that our optimism is always short term. If you had well placed hope in a good 2022 crop, guess what, it’s past and gone. Maybe it was good but you need to have moved on to this year and soon that will be gone as well. We all know that NOTHING LASTS. But here Peter doubles down on the fact that we have been reborn as eternal creatures to an eternal father. So now, in spite of all we have lost and been let down by in a corruptible world, we have FINALLY been given something that we can count on to last. The word, that we have obeyed, and been purified by, is dependable and eternal. Things that are temporary lose their relevance regardless of their truthfulness, like the quality of 2022’s crop or the Super Bowl champs of 1973, it is irrelevant. But God’s word is relevant and true, and will remain to be so. That makes it very different from the normal things we get peace and hope and joy from, like our team winning the super bowl. Who still gets the same emotional response from something months or years after it happens? That is what is different about having your hope, joy, and foundation in eternal things. It never fades into “past”. It endures as an amazing reality forever.

The last part of this passage in his call to eternity is an echo of the last part of 1 Cor 13. What happens in eternity? No matter what all will be accomplished for the Glory of God in eternity, one thing will be for certain. God will still love his people and his people will still love each other. And the kingdom work we do in eternity will be “for the love of it” not to make a living or competition or survival. It will be purely for love.

1 Corinthians 13:8–13 (ESV)

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Love never ends, Prophecies will be fulfilled and become past, we will one day all speak with understanding, the knowledge you have now will be irrelevant in eternity and dwarfed with full information. V13 Someday your faith will become sight, your hope will become realized reality, but love will continue forever.

Both of these passages recall Jesus and his “greatest commandment”(quote). It is oddly enough the only commandment that we will regard in eternity. Because it summarizes the commandments to DO something rather than to NOT DO something. Perfect people don’t need to be told not to murder, steal, covet, etc… Because as reborn people those things will no longer be apart of our new nature. Just as there is no need to tell a dog not to be a car. It is totally insane. But the command to DO something, like love God and your neighbor, will come as easily to you as breathing.

So as everything on earth dies and fades, you have in your grasp something that you will have in eternity. Your love for each other. Everything else going on here will be unrecognizable in heaven except for that one thing. And you can do that now! You can have that all important piece of heaven in your grasp right now, if you would sincerely love each-other.

We check boxes, teach ss, provide meals, visit people, attend just enough to be seen, but do we do these things because I love you and we have been given to each-other for eternity. You can do all of these things without kindness, patience. We can do them with envy, irritation and resentment. “I guess I’d better go help with that.” Attitude. We need purified from checking boxes! So that our love will be sincere and earnest. All you do here is nothing if you do not love.

We love each-other because God loves us, and we get more of the love of God through each-other. So often the way that God loves us is through other Christians! Do you want to experience the love of God? Show up, be here, and pass it on to others.

We have avenues of growing in the love of God and others. We have ways and ministries to disciple you and build up this love for each-other. Step us and taste a piece of eternity.