Stand Firm Part 3

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Recap first two weeks:

Who Peter is

What seems extreme to begin with becomes not enough when we better understand the gospel

Extreme commands:

Hope in Jesus alone

Be holy

Intro:

Now that we’ve received these commands to hope in Jesus alone

And as we do to be holy as God is holy

Peter is going to continue in this same thread and speak a little to what this looks like

So now that we are pursuing holiness, this is what it looks like.

So, lets read 1 Peter 1:22-25 and then I’ll pray and we will get going

1 Peter 1:22–25 NIV

22 Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart. 23 For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. 24 For, “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, 25 but the word of the Lord endures forever.” And this is the word that was preached to you.

pray

Peter states: now that you’ve been purified.

Now that you are seeking holiness

And like I stated last week:

The pursuit of holiness has an affects on all relationships

Obviously we are drawing closer to the Lord

as the standard and source of goodness and purity to know holiness you must know God

to know joy you must know God

to know hope you must know God

to know love you must know God

to know freedom you must love God

You may know of these things and you may know about these things but to know them to their fullest degree we must first know God

I don’t take my truck to the restaurant when something is broken on it, I go straight to the mechanic.

When pursuing holiness I don’t go searching the world I go to God

So a pursuit of holiness is a pursuit of God

But a pursuit of holiness, when sought after biblically, will have an effect on every relationship you have.

Because holiness produces love

As we become more and more holy, more and more pure, more and more good

We are learning what is pure what is good and in the kingdom of God the thing that always rises to the top of the list is love

So extreme command number 3

love one another

Now again, remember what Peter has just brought us through.

Salvation right?

He shows off God’s love for us

So this call to love one another is grounded in what God has done for us and the love that He has shown to us

I want us to also notice some of the words around this command.

We see obedience

Our pursuit of holiness is an act of obedience and it’s lived out through the act of love

Love is not an option for believers

Love is the ultimate requirement

Love is the heartbeat of Christianity

It’s the heartbeat of the Father

Notice also the word truth here.

Love and truth are so often set at odds against one another

Here Peter binds them together

You want to know what love looks like

It’s not acceptance for tolerance sake

It’s truth when it’s not easy

If you have someone who will speak truth into your life even when it’s not easy, you have someone who loves you deeply.

That’s another word that we see here.

Deeply. it means to extend oneself, to stretch out, or to be strained

The kind of love Peter is speaking to here is not a surface level love

It’s a love to the sincerest degree

The kind of love Peter mentioned here is not a feeling

We have such a skewed version of love

The world can so easily trick us into believing so many lies about what love is

The kind of love Peter is talking about is hard work

That’s why this can be so extreme to us

Peter is not asking us to have certain feelings toward one another

He’s asking us to extend ourselves toward one another

To give of ourselves for one another

This isn’t some easy ask

And remember, Peter is writing to the early church here

That means, he’s writing to people that are divided by the jealousies and hatreds of their past.

Some were Jews, some were Gentiles.

And where the world would say there’s no way they can even get a long

Peter is commanding them to be bound together by love

Scripture teaches us that we were once alienated from God but through His love we are adopted, we are redeemed

The love then that binds the redeemed flows from the love of the Redeemer.

This is only made possible by experiencing and accepting the love of God

Peter says “you have been born again.”

The love of God shown to us through His Word and through what He has done gives us the capability to be born again

To become new creations

The power of His word, Peter says that it’s living and it endures forever

It has the power to change and transform us

So as we are soaking in the Word of God it is causing us to become more and more holy and as we pursue holiness we are choosing love and becoming new creations

So what does that look like?

Peter tells us:

1 Peter 2:1–10 NIV

1 Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. 2 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, 3 now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. 4 As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him—5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For in Scripture it says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” 7 Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe, “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” 8 and, “A stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.” They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for. 9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Peter begins to lay out what it looks like to follow Jesus

What it looks like to be born again

What it looks like to pursue holiness

What it looks like to grow deeper in His Word

There will be things that you will rid yourself of

Things you leave behind

malice = evilness/wickedness

We are chasing after the goodness of God

We can’t go towards evil and goodness at the same time

deceit

As believers we are believers in the truth

There is not room for lies and deceit in the kingdom of God

hypocrisy

We are not pretending to be something that we are not

And we are not judgmental of the world

envy

We have everything we need in Christ

And if we truly believe that there is never a reason to be envious of anyone or anything

slander

We can not operate in the love that Peter is talking about and also speak evil against someone.

We should have a craving for spiritual things

I remember the first time my wife got pregnant and obviously it was our first so neither of us knew what we were in for. And we were just do excited to be having a baby that you don’t really think through all of the steps of this process right. And I remember it being pretty great at first and then all of sudden Dorie starts getting sick. She had really bad morning sickness and all of a sudden her senses heightened and I could barely do anything. I would walk in the house and she would tell me i stunk and needed to shower. she could be in the living room and if I got something out to eat she would start throwing up. It was incredible. Well eventually, she stopped being so sick and the one sense that took over everything else was her taste. Everything tasted so good and so she would have these cravings that would make her go crazy. Mcdonalds - coke - calling corporate. Snickers in the middle of the night.

She craved this stuff and there was no talking her out of it or changing her mind or even getting her mind off of it. And it was so unlike her but the pregnancy had changed her right?

Peter tells us that, when we begin to follow Jesus. We should begin to crave the things of the Lord

Something should begin changing and shifting inside of us that we being to desire the things of God

We become someone different.

We throw off the old and put one the new

We are constantly growing in Him

We are called to become “living stones, a holy priesthood, offering sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus.”

I don’t believe it to be any coincident that Peter uses a word for stone to describe Jesus. That Christ is our living stone.

Jesus changing Peter’s name from Simon to Peter or Petra which means rock

Peter is pointing people away from himself to the true foundational rock that never changes and never moves

Jesus is the chief cornerstone

So to grow and become the people Peter is commanding us to be we must plant ourselves on the rock of Jesus and grow in our faith believe that He is true and will never change.

And growth is always growth in faith

God’s Word constantly presents the Lord of the Word.

So, coming to the word is coming to the Lord

And so this truth cuts both ways for us

We cannot detach the word from the Lord. Much like the Pharisees did

And we can also not profess obedience to the Lord while rejecting His Word.

And notice what Peter says in verse 3 here

What quickens our desire for the life-giving Word of God?

Peter’s answer: we know the taste

People always say: I have a hard time reading the Bible, or I’m not much of a reader, or it’s hard to understand, or it’s hard to read and I get it.

But my advice: read it until you want to

Reading the Bible is addictive when we being to get the taste for it

Because what we taste in Scripture is not simply the power of language and historical accounts.

What we taste is the Lord Himself.

When we read the word of God we must never forget why it is given to us and whom it reveals to us

The Word shows us that the Lord is good

Perhaps Peter here has in mind what Psalm 34 tells us

Psalm 34:8 NIV

8 Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.

I pray that we will run to God’s Word and through it we will taste and see that He is good