The Mystery of Salvation

1 Peter 1:8-12 “8 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. 10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, 11 inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. 12 It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.”

I remember as a young boy growing up in the northwoods of Ontario, ice hockey was one of our main activities

it was the main thing that we did and one of the only things that we thought about.

And we were pretty isolated, but we ate up any news about hockey that we could fine

And I remember how in the early 80’s a skinny kid burst onto the scene in the NHL

His jersey was baggy and he tucked it into his hockey pants on one side. He was smaller than a lot of the other players, but MAN could he play!

His name was Wayne Gretzky

And he had been drafted by the Edmonton Oilers

And Gretzky became “my guy” and the Oilers became “my team”.

I loved Gretzky and I loved the Oilers

I had never seen either one of them. Still haven’t.

Peter is encouraging believers to hold fast in the midst of persecution so that Jesus will be praised and glorified

And so that their faith will be tested and found to be genuine, purified by the fire

And then he basically says, “Hey, I know that you haven’t seen Him. You haven’t seen Jesus, but you believe in Him AND you love Him!

I’m teaching this class at Pathway, and we are talking about how secularists believe in the power of human reason.

If it can’t be seen, experimented with, touched, tasted,

If human reason can’t explain it, then it’s not worth believing.

The trouble, we are discovering, with their position is that everyone comes to the table with faith.

They come to the table believing things that other people have told them.

For example, if you end up in a debate with an evolutionist, they will come to the table with the belief that everything began at the “big bang”.

They weren’t there…but someone has told them this to be so.

Everyone comes to the table with things that they believe yet have never experienced. In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talks about the difficulty of this

“Ninety-nine percent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so....A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.”

Listen to the warmness in Peter’s written expression here:

I know you haven’t seen Jesus; but even though you haven’t seen Him, you

Love Him

Believe in Him

You rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory

Could Peter be remembering Jesus’ words to Thomas

“You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who haven’t seen, yet believe!”

Question is, how do you know?

Why do you believe?

The secular humanists that I just talked about put a lot of emphasis on experiencing things. They want evidence. They want things that you can touch and see and hear.

things that can be experienced with the senses

And if they don’t have something like that, they won’t believe.

And we think, how terrible

But, you know, I believe that this way of thinking is not unique to those in the secular world

I think it is a thought process that Jesus followers need to guard against as well.

Do you remember the story in the book of John when Jesus had returned to Galilee from Jerusalem and He was in the town of Cana

And an official from Capernaum came up and said, “Jesus, please come and heal my son!”

And do you remember Jesus’ response?

What did He say?

“Unless you see a sign, you will not believe”

This official needed a sign in order to believe

And we know Thomas’ struggle to believe when he hadn’t actually seen Jesus

Today in the church we hear this language a lot:

“I had an experience with Jesus”

“Oh, you need to have an experience with Jesus”

There are chuches and denominations that put a lot of emphasis on “signs and wonders”

We need Jesus to prove to us that He is alive and powerful

I don’t want to knock this too much because thankfully I have had experiences that I value a lot

But we are very experiantial people

The song: “You ask me how I know He lives. He lives within my heart”

Again, it’s experience.

But what about when I don’t feel like I’m experiencing Him.

What about when I can’t feel Him within my heart?

What do I do then. If I’m trusting in experience and I’m not experiencing Him, do I still

Love Him

Believe in Him?

I would like to submit to you that while, yes, we do hopefully have some experiences with Jesus,

The Mystery of Salvation is that it is based on the authority of God

That the mystery of salvation is that our faith is based on historically accurate events

We have eye-witness accounts, saying that, yes, Jesus WAS raised from the dead

That it is based on the very Word of God. His eternal plan

That He put in place even before the world began

it’s not just part of a fuzzy subjective feeling that we have.

Rather, it is based on who God is.

It is the fulfillment of His plan.

How do we know that Jesus lives?

Well, He lives within our hearts, yes.

But even deeper than that, I know that Jesus lives because GOD SAID SO.

Because God both said that this would take place and He graciously gave us human witnesses who bore witness to the fact, that Jesus

Rose from the grave

And He ascended back to heaven where He intercedes for us

We love Him and we believe in HIm because God is lovely and trustworthy

And we rejoice with great rejoicing that is inexpressible because God is worthy to be praised and because God’s ways are so inexpressible

Yet so full of grace and mercy

Verse 9. NLT The reward for trusting him (Jesus) will be the salvation of your souls.

We trust Jesus because God is always trustworthy

The Mystery of Salvation is that even the OT was written about Jesus

I find this passage of scripture very interesting

There are various opinions about the OT

Maybe we have differing opinions here in this room

Is the OT necessary? Do we struggle to get through those stories and geneologies just to get to the “good stuff”, the stories about Jesus?

Peter says here

The Spirit of Christ in the OT Prophets! Interesting