Purity and Purpose

I hate chores. I think everybody hates chores. There might be a few people who genuinely love cleaning their houses, but they are weird. There are chores I hate and then there are chores I hate less, but there is no chore I love to do, otherwise it wouldn’t be called a chore. Of all the household responsibilities, the two I hate the most are laundry and dishes. I hate them the most because they are never ending. There are always dishes to clean and there are always clothes to wash. But if Marci and I are going to divide and conquer, I’ll be in the kitchen washing dishes every time. I can get them clean faster than I can fold laundry.

But you know what I can’t stand about dishes? If you leave leftover bits of food on a plate and it dries up, it feels like that stuff is never coming off! Macaroni and cheese is the worst! If you let macaroni and cheese dry on a plate, you’ll be scrubbing that thing for half an hour! And the dishwasher never seems to get it completely off. So I am very quick to rinse off remnants of food to avoid something getting stuck on there. Nobody eats off a dirty plate in my house.

Last week we talked about the pursuit of holiness. We are called to be set apart. We no longer belong to the world. Rather, we were called out of the world to go back into the world to change it. To do that, we must submit to a process by which God does transformative work within us leading to the character and competency of Jesus Christ. We anchor our hope in Christ alone. We are not looking to any other system or person to rescue us. We resist conformity to the world he saved us from. We cultivate a deep reverence for God in light of the high cost for our salvation. We work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

In the final verses of chapter one, Peter builds on the commands of fixing our hope on Christ, being holy, and conducting ourselves in reverence, he adds another command that is an outcome from living a genuine faith.

1 Peter 1:22–25 NASB95

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, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring 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 off, But the word of the Lord endures forever.” And this is the word which was preached to you.

Purification is the process of removing a contaminant from something. We do this to our water supply to remove impurities so it can be drinkable and reduce illness that could come from it otherwise.

I love smoothies. Do any of you love smoothies? Have you ever looked at the inside of a cup after drinking a smoothie? Bits of fruit are stuck to the sides. Have you ever neglected to wash a glass that had smoothie gunk in it? It’s terrible. But what’s interesting is if you run enough water through it, the gunk rises to the surface, spills out, and you are left with a clean glass.

If I did not clean the inside of the smoothie glass and left it on the counter, eventually I would run into health problems because I drank from a dirty glass. In the same way, we are impure because of the sin in our lives, and Christ came to purify us so that we can stand before a holy God. Our destiny is not to be the dirty glass, but by being cleansed, we are made pure. This change has profound effects on our lives. Just as a clean glass is ready for use, our purification through Christ prepares us to live differently—specifically, we are called to love. Because we have been purified and born again through the enduring Word of God, we must love one another sincerely and earnestly.

Purification is not a solo effort.

If we read verse 22 in isolation, we can run the danger of thinking that we purify ourselves. This is not the case. As we obey the principles of scripture, we are purified. But we only obey the scriptures because the Holy Spirit has illumined our minds to understanding. He then gives us the capacity to pursue righteous living since we are no longer slaves to sin. We have been born again with a new nature that has the capacity for righteousness. It’s just that for now we are constantly at war within ourselves as our old nature tries to reestablish dominance.

But we do not do this work ourselves. This is a partnership with God himself. We cannot sit here and assume God will do all the work himself, but we cannot do the work of purification absent of his power. We are called to kill sin in our lives, but we must do so in partnership with God. It never happens outside of his power.

Have you ever been convicted of a sin in your life and you thought to yourself that you would just try harder to quit doing that thing? How did that work out for you? Sometimes we take that attitude and just try really hard not to do something, but then we fall into the same old trap. Then we feel guilty because we couldn’t stop doing the one thing we swore we would stop. That’s because we often take it upon ourselves to transform our lives and forget to let God do the work with us.

Transformation comes when we first allow the word of God to change our mind, then we will change our behavior. So remember that you are not alone, but it is not a passive experience either. Purification is what has taken place, by way of obedience, for cultivating a sincere love of the brethren, that is each other.

Purity will bear its fruit.

It is absolutely impossible to have an encounter with God and not change. When you experience God in a powerful way, it changes you. We see more clearly who we are and it ought to respond in instant humility. When Isaiah saw God in the heavenly throne room in Isaiah chapter six, he responded by saying,

Isaiah 6:5 NASB95

Then I said, “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

Then he is met with grace, mercy, and forgiveness:

Isaiah 6:6–7 NASB95

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth with it and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven.”

Isaiah had an encounter with God and he was never the same! If you are here today professing faith in the risen Jesus Christ, you have never been the same! God began a work in you and is still working in you and one of the fruits of that change is a sincere love for the brethren.

We say it all the time here because it is our mission. When we place our trust in Jesus, we receive adoption into the family of God. I will preach this until I am dead. Take a look at the people sitting next to you. Look in front of you and behind you. Spend a second looking around the room. These are your brothers and sisters. Not in theory, but in actuality. At the center of our faith is a love for one another that is unparalleled to anything else the world can offer.

Verse 22 says fervently love one another from the heart. Do you know what fervently means? It means with extreme enthusiasm or passion. We ought to love each other like crazy, and that is the indicator of who we are and who we belong to. Jesus said,

John 13:34–35 NASB95

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

So loving one another points people to Jesus. If the church does not have such a love, the church cannot be very Christlike. If you genuinely love Christ, you will love Christ’s bride, of which you are a part. Our love for one another is modeled after Christ’s love for us, which spills over to the rest of the world.

None of us is perfect at this, but what I can tell you is that people who have visited have at least commented on the love we all appear to have for one another. Our core values as a church are to be the most loving, generous, and hospitable people we can possibly be. The atmosphere among the brethren should be so counter cultural that the world takes notice.

So we have been purified (that’s what), in obedience to the truth (that’s how), for a sincere love for the brethren (that’s purpose). The command is to love one another fervently. And the justification (that’s why) is because we have been born again through the living and enduring word of God. I want to remind you that everything you own will no longer be yours one day. If the Lord does not return before we pass on, someone else will own our home and our land. Your car will be worthless one day. The possessions in your home won’t go with you. It’s not bad to have things, but try and remember that if you are investing more in temporal things than eternal things, you are making a poor investment.

Matthew 6:19–21 NASB95

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. “But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

We don’t live for this world. We live for the world to come. The Word of God is our guide for living a life of godliness. Everything else fades. Even your body won’t last forever. But the word of God endures forever. It teaches us how we ought to live here and it will continue to guide us in eternity.

We preach the gospel to each other by the way we love one another, by the way we put up with one another sometimes, and how we choose to bear one another’s burdens. Remember the people you walk out of here with are not just your fellow church goers. They are your brothers and sisters. And if family means anything to you, my hope is that we look at one another as such.

ACTION STEPS:

Evaluate your relationships. If you looked around the room, would you say your love for those in this room are genuine? What about others in your life? Who might need some extra attention this week?

Protect the unity of the church. This means that we love each other in spite of driving each other crazy. It means bearing one another’s burdens. It means meeting a need if we see one. It also means actively pursuing conflict resolution.