Living as Exiles - Week 8
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Announcements:
Work being completed on the building
Saturday December 4th - Worship Practice
Sunday December 12th - Holiday Dinner
Friday December 24th - Christmas Eve Service. 6pm
21 Days of Prayer and Fasting - January 10-30th
Prayer Requests:
Update on Louise
Sermon:
Recap last week: Missionaries, after church fun.
Blessed Ezra and Aaron with $600.00, as a church we want to continue to support them in their efforts to share the gospel.
We were at the church until around 4pm. My heart was over full.
This week and the next two weeks we will be continuing our study in 1 Peter. My goal is to finish this book out on December 5th. As we have studied through 1st Peter, we have seen the instructions given to us by God, through Peter, on how we aught to be living our lives here. Peter wrote this book to Christians who were dispersed abroad. Those Christians had the identity of exiles - that we apply to ourselves, because we understand that this is not our home. Our home is in eternity with our King. Our desire is to be there. We function here, we exist here, we build here, we even flourish and grow here, but this is not our home. And so, this series is titled “Living as Exiles” if you are wondering, we are on week 8 of that series.
Two weeks ago we started chapter 4, as Peter gave instructions to us to arm ourselves with what he called the same understanding as Christ. We looked at what it meant to think like Jesus in the midst of persecution.
Jesus resisted sin.
He did not seek vengeance
He intentionally put his trust in God.
Peter was speaking about what he saw Jesus do during his suffering. He is giving us a description of what he saw, what he heard about.
He says - “we knew the Lord was suffering, we saw the blood coming from his eyes and pores, we know the anguish he was in.” and this was what we saw.
We saw the most compassionate person we had ever known, continue to be that way.
We saw opportunity for Him to sin, and He refused.
We saw a time that it would have been perfectly understandable for him to call down legions of angels and free himself, and destroy Rome and everyone who persecuted him.. and he refused.
He put his trust in God the Father.
As you know well, we have been talking about this all year long, Our mission, our desire as a church is to Glorify God, equip the saints, and share the gospel. As we get into the word today, we are going to see how our love for others ultimately glorifies God.
If you will open your Bibles to 1 Peter Chapter 4
Pray.
The end of all things is near; therefore, be alert and sober-minded for prayer.
Above all, maintain constant love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins.
Be hospitable to one another without complaining.
Just as each one has received a gift, use it to serve others, as good stewards of the varied grace of God.
If anyone speaks, let it be as one who speaks God’s words; if anyone serves, let it be from the strength God provides, so that God may be glorified through Jesus Christ in everything. To him be the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.
Blessed are those who hear the word of God and Keep it.
Today we are going to see how our love for others ultimately glorifies God. We are going to see that the way we relate to one another matters a great deal.
Peter starts this thought with a rather daunting expression.
The End of all things is near. The way that he writes this indicates that there are a bunch of individual things and all of them will be ending soon, but that the “end of all things” as a specific event, called the end of all things is close at hand. Mathematically, he was saying way back then, at the very least - We are past the middle point, we are over halfway there. And he wrote this a long time ago. So we are much closer now. And he wants us as people who are in exile to be aware of that. He says to be alert for this time.
When Jesus talked about the end, He said that it would come like a thief in the night. Another time he taught about it he said that no man knows the day or the hour.
In Matthew 25 Jesus told a parable, explaining that some people would be prepared for the arrival of the bridegroom and some would not.
Peter doesn’t know exactly when the end of all things is going to happen, but he knows that we are closer than we have ever been.
And we know that too.
There are signs all around us. There have been signs for many years. We are getting close. We are starting to see the things. One of the things that astounds me is to see technology advancing to a point to make some of the things that the Bible declared a couple thousand years ago actually possible. Things that - even 40 years ago we would never have thought to be realistic. Peter said that the end of all things is near, and it really is.
He says know that - and because of it, be alert, and be sober minded for prayer.
Knowing that the end is coming soon - prayer has to be made a priority in our lives.
Foursquare 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting.
Prayer has to be a priority - because we know the end is coming soon.
Above all, maintain constant love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins.
Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.
The next thing Peter writes seems to me an awful lot like a Pastoral statement - he says Above all
Now, he isn’t saying that this is the most important thing in the whole list of things that you will do as a Christian in your lifetime. He isn’t saying that loving one another is more important that loving God, or glorifying him. He is saying - in the things that I am telling you right now, in this short list of so far saying that you should be alert and sober minded for prayer - you need to do those things, and this third point I am making is the most important on of those. Its like standing up here to say “if you leave here with anything, make sure it is this...” and then giving you some words to live by on how you should only cut your grass in diagonal lines rather than straight ones, or whatever.
Peter is saying above all of these other things.
And this is where I want to break things down really closely in this one sentence. The sentence is this : above all, maintain constant love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins
Maintain..
Well, maintain means to keep, it means to cause to continue, it means to work on and keep going. There is periodical effort that has to be made to maintain things - that is maintenance. Maintenance is sometimes as easy as needing an oil change every 3 to 5 thousand miles, and sometimes it is as extensive as replacing major components to keep the entire operation going.
If you look at the maintenance schedule for your vehicle, the manufacture makes recommendations of a list of things that you should be doing every 3 months, every 6 months, every 12 months, every 24 months and so on. I looked up the maintenance schedule of a Nissan Xterra this morning, just to get an idea of what that looks like, and there were 29 different stages that they listed for different maintenance items that needed to be completed. Maintenance takes effort to keep things right.
As humans, we naturally disregard a great deal of those things. We skip them entirely.
On our vac trucks at work, there are stickers all over that say grease this, this and this daily.
We hit those metrics annually, maybe. It isn’t important to anyone on the job to make sure all of those things are done on a regular basis. It just isn’t.
But when we are talking about something that we should take as seriously as Glorifying God… We need to get serious about that maintenance program.
And what are we maintaining?
Constant Love.
The ESV - another translation of the Bible, that attempts to be more word for word, says loving one another earnestly. So it is love, but it is love that is constant, and earnest.
Constant would dictate that you don’t get a break from it.
Earnest means that you can’t just fake it!
We are instructed to love constantly, and earnestly.
This isn’t the first instance, either..
Since you have purified yourselves by your obedience to the truth, so that you show sincere brotherly love for each other, from a pure heart love one another constantly,
Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant,
is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, and does not keep a record of wrongs.
Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about love. And most of us know that chapter well, because it makes for good wall art and wedding filler.
It was written to the church because in all that we had seen and known about Jesus and about God the father, all of the examples we were given on what love looked like - the church in Corinth pretty well sucked at it. If you read the context and study chapter 12 of that letter, you would see that he is building up a correction and a chastisement of the church because they weren’t getting it right.
They were full of head knowledge, but didn’t love anybody.
They did lots of stuff and had programs and church stuff, but they didn’t love one another.
They suffered persecution and nonsense, but they didn’t love anyone. The church in corinth wasn’t getting it right, and we still struggle with it today.
Love is patient… You guys are all super patient right?
Love is kind and doesn’t envy. We never struggle with those things.
It isn’t boastful or arrogant… ....
So we are called to love one another, to love the people in this place… in the church… why?
Well first, because the end is near. It is coming. And with that comes extra stress and strife.. and with that, love covers a multitude of sins.
Hatred stirs up conflicts, but love covers all offenses.
As we get closer and closer to the end, our relationships with one another are strained. As we attempt to do church together and life together and be family here - we have this struggle with maintaining relationships. Because - we are all sinners!
Im a sinner. Your a sinner. If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, its a duck.
And guess what, when we are doing all of these things together, chances are high that my sins are going to affect you! The times that I fall short, when I lose my temper.. chances are very high that it will be on one of the people that are in this building right now. YOU are the people I am around the most.
And your sins - well, same situation.
Even if it doesn’t affect us directly - it affects us. The things that you do in your personal life, they flow into your life here. The things that you do that you think are hidden well.. aren’t.
But love.
Love takes care of that.
Because if I am loving you, I am not taking notes on all of the things that you have ever done.
If I am loving you - I’m not being rude to you, even when you have sinned against me.
If I am loving you - I am concerned about your heart, and where you are. I am concerned about your eternity.
Then he prayed again, and the sky gave rain and the land produced its fruit.
My brothers and sisters, if any among you strays from the truth, and someone turns him back,
let that person know that whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.
When someone falls away - we love them back into fellowship with the Lord.
As a believer, I need to love others. And I desperately need others to love me. Because the end is near.
Peter gives some practical ways that we can do that, outside of the list of things that Paul lists in Corinthians
Be hospitable to one another without complaining.
Just as each one has received a gift, use it to serve others, as good stewards of the varied grace of God.
If anyone speaks, let it be as one who speaks God’s words; if anyone serves, let it be from the strength God provides, so that God may be glorified through Jesus Christ in everything. To him be the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.