Living Like You are Saved - Right Worship
Notes
Transcript
Review of Our Salvation
Review of Our Salvation
Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into.
Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ;
Wherefore refers back to that wonderful, glorious salvation and Peter now builds upon this as a foundation and begins instructing the readers in how to live like the salvation that they already possess and that Christ will ultimately fulfill completely in their lives.
Our salvation results in the:
Right Hope
Right Conduct
Right Worship
Ultimately, our salvation allows us to have our hope in heaven and this past week, we talked about how our salvation allows us to live holy lives. Peter reminds us to Be Holy, even as God is Holy: Instead of capitulating to evil desires, believers are to live holy lives. The pattern for holiness is God himself, who is unremittingly good.
Thomas R. Schreiner, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, vol. 37, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2003), 79.
This evening, we want to look at how our salvation results in the right worship of God. It includes two basic truths that Peter speaks about:
Fearing God
Loving Others
And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man’s work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear:
Live in the fear of God
Live in the fear of God
Peter states that we ought to fear God since He is the Judge who does not change based on the person’s social standing.
There are no masks before God - we cannot put on a facade of spirituality.
John Henry Jowett captured this sentiment clearly when he declared:
Love without holiness is deoxygenated and its ministry is that of an opiate or narcotic. Pity without holiness is a bloodless sentiment destitute of all healing efficiency. Forgiveness without holiness is the granting of a cheap and superficial excuse in which there is nothing of the saving strength of sacrifice. Begin with holiness and you put a dynamic into every disposition which makes it an engine of spiritual health ... Gentleness with holiness behind it touches the aches and sores of the world with the firm and delicate hand of a discerning and experienced nurse. J.H. Jowett
So, should we be cowering in fear and trembling?
The New American Commentary: 1, 2 Peter, Jude (2) A Call to Fear (1:17–21)
Abject terror certainly does not fit with the joy and boldness of the Christian life. Reverence, however, can be watered down so that it becomes rather insipid. Peter contemplated the final judgment, where believers will be assessed by their works and heaven and hell will be at stake (see below). There is a kind of fear that does not contradict confidence. A confident driver also possesses a healthy fear of an accident that prevents him from doing anything foolish. A genuine fear of judgment hinders believers from giving in to libertinism.
Live as a stranger
Live as a stranger
Peter again mentions this theme of being a stranger and a pilgrim upon the earth - because our inheritance is in heaven, not here on earth.
Where is my hope today? Is it in a government stimulus? Is it in a return to normality? Is it in good health?
Just a reminder - our hope is not here on earth - it is a future inheritance that is secure, so therefore, I do need to worship God and to:
Live as a child of God
Live as a child of God
The New American Commentary: 1, 2 Peter, Jude (2) A Call to Fear (1:17–21)
What is remarkable here is that God’s tenderness and love as Father is mingled with his judgment and the fear that should mark Christians in this world. Apparently Peter did not think that the two themes negated each other but are complementary. The relationship we have with God is both tender and awesome. Some have wrongly understood from the word abba that God is “daddy,” applying it in astonishingly casual ways.
Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers;
But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot:
Peter here connects God’s holiness and the cost of redemption
Live as a redeemed person
Live as a redeemed person
Peter connects the cost of redemption with God’s holiness
We look into redemption for mercy, forgiveness, condescension, love. We look for the genial flame of affection; have we been blind to the dazzling blaze of holiness? We have felt the warm yearning intimacy of love, inclining towards the sinner; have we felt the fierce burning heat where holiness touches sin? J.H. Jowett
Peter makes it clear that this is the reason for them to fear God:
they have been redeemed not by money or treasures, but by something far more valuable - the precious blood of Jesus Christ,
our Passover Lamb
From what were they redeemed? a vibrant tradition that was passed down from generation to generation - it was not wearing out or declining, but rather was a living reality within their lives.
However, Peter also makes it clear that The life of unbelievers before their conversion is futile, empty, and devoted to false gods.
Thomas R. Schreiner, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, vol. 37, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2003), 84.
When we encounter people - many think that they are doing just fine - they have no concept of God’s holiness. Until they recognize their sinfulness and God’s holiness, they will just go about living like their ancestors - without God in their life - an empty religion.
But these believers, Peter reminds that:
The blood of Christ has redeemed them, bought them back from that slavery to tradition and futile worship:
Blood is important, since … without it no one can live (Lev 17:11). L. Morris rightly argues that blood does not involve the release of life, as if life is somehow mystically transmitted by the spilling of blood. Instead, the shedding of blood indicates that Christ poured out his life to death for sinners. What Peter teaches is that the blood of Christ is the means by which believers are redeemed.
Thomas R. Schreiner, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, vol. 37, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2003), 85.
Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you,
And God had planned it that way!
Who by him do believe in God, that raised him up from the dead, and gave him glory; that your faith and hope might be in God.
Again, we go back to the living hope that Peter has stated we have - and it can only come by the redemption that we have in Christ.
God raised Christ from the dead after He shed His blood on the cross for us, so that we who believe in Him might then have faith and a hope in heaven in God
Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently:
Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.
For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away:
But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.
As redeemed believers, we are all in one family - God is our Father - therefore we need to love one another as family.
Peter reminds us that we are perishable humans and contrasts the perishable and imperishable by a quote from Isaiah 40:6-8
Jim Samra sums up this last section well by reminding us of the contrast between perishable things like silver and gold and imperishable things such as our redemption and our hope. This is a contrast that Peter has been drawing for us:
Peter's point is profound: the imperishable word of God (1:23, 25), which is the gospel message of Jesus’s imperishable blood (1:18-19), is preached to perishable people (1:24), causing them to be born again into an imperishable inheritance (1:4) through their imperishable faith (1:7). Jim Samra
So, let us live like we are saved by practicing a right worship - and we do that by fearing a holy God and by loving the people He has redeemed and adopted as His own family.