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April 2020

1 Peter 2:1: Putting out the rubbish.

“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.”NIV

‘’Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.’’

 Note the words ‘’all’’ and ‘’every’’. Take no prisoners! Show sin no mercy. Everything that needs to go should be shown the door. We need to live in an atmosphere of radical repentance.

In our homes, we regularly put out the rubbish. Imagine what it would do to the atmosphere if we didn’t. What a smell there would be. Peter tells us to put out all the sinful rubbish, knowing that we can do so as brand new people in Christ. (We have been ‘’born again’’ 1:23).

These are not the only sins people are capable of, but they are among those which ruin relationships – and in the next section he is going to write about the church.

It strikes me that we do need to distinguish between temptation and giving way to it. I’d be surprised if any Christian hasn’t felt tempted at times to hold on to resentment for example, or to be envious of someone else. But it’s one thing to feel the pull of temptation; quite another to give in.

‘Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin,’ says a famous hymn. (I’ve underlined the operative word).

Martin Luther apparently said, ‘You can’t prevent the birds from flying about your head, but you can prevent them building a nest in your hair.’

PRAYER: Lord, please help me by your Spirit to not let the smelly rubbish accumulate in my life. Strengthen me to keep on putting it in the bin – where it belongs!

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1 Peter 2:1-3: Grow up!

“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.”NIV

Following on from yesterday, I was thinking about Paul writing:

‘’This is my gospel, for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God’s word is not chained.’’ (2 Timothy 2:8b/9).

We may be confined and restricted, but God’s Word isn’t. It is very much alive and active in the world

Spiritual growth is not automatic. There are certain things we have to do (‘’…rid yourselves…crave…’’). Once again we find that the Bible, which is instrumental in our new birth, is also essential for our growth to maturity. Everyone loves a baby, but there is something quite wrong if the baby stays a baby; and there is something grotesquely sad about an adult who still behaves like he’s back in the nursery.

No, growth is not automatic. But it is wonderfully possible. Peter knows this. He is going to write in his second letter:

‘’His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness’’ (2 Peter 1:3).

We have the power supply for growth, and this is very good news.

Warren Wiersbe writes:

‘Just as a baby has an appetite for the mother’s milk, so the child of God has an appetite for the Father’s Word. If you lose that appetite and stop growing, check to see if any of the sins listed in verse 1 are infecting your life.’

‘’So clean house! Make a clean sweep of malice and pretense, envy and hurtful talk. You’ve had a taste of God. Now, like infants at the breast, drink deep of God’s pure kindness. Then you’ll grow up mature and whole in God.’’ The Message.

PRAYER: Lord God, may it be true of me that I ‘’crave’’ your Word.

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1 Peter 1:22-25: “Word” Power

“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 for ever.’And this is the word that was preached to you.” NIV

Here is incentive enough, if we should require it, to go on ‘preaching’ God’s Word, whether formally in public, or informally one-to-one. There is power in His Word. There is life in the ‘’seed’’. Mysteriously, and wonderfully, it produces Christians. People are ‘’born again’’ by it. It has been said that God’s Word is His work.

‘’He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.” (Mark 4:26-29).

The ‘’word of the Lord’’ is also described as ‘’the truth’’ in this passage. Not only are people converted by God’s Word; they are also transformed by it. As we ‘obey’ it, we become more ‘’deeply’’ loving (22). Christianity changes ‘’the heart’’ and we are enabled to live obediently and lovingly out of changed hearts.

In a book I’m reading at the moment, the author comments that in evangelical Christianity we have been too quick to measure spiritual growth in terms of how much we know, rather than how well we love. Knowing is important, but it has to lead somewhere.

Pause to ponder: What does loving ‘’one another deeply, from the heart’’ look like for you in these days of ‘social isolation’?

PRAYER: Lord, Peter gives a timely reminder of the transience of wealth and of people. Thank you that he points beyond this impermanence to the enduring quality of your Word. It is encouraging to know that the ‘seeds’ we sow now, may well bear fruit long after we have gone.

 

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Peter 1:21: ‘The Window into God’.

“21 Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.” NIV
 
In the New Testament the knowledge of God is unmistakably Christ- centred.
In Jesus we see most clearly what God is like. Canon Michael Green once observed, ‘Jesus is the window into God.’
It is only through Jesus that we can approach God and have a relationship with Him (See e.g.John 14:6/Acts 4:12)
How can we explain the resurrection and ascension of Jesus without taking seriously the Bible’s own explanation that this was a work of God? Although Jesus had the right to both lay down His own life and take it up again (John 10:17, 18), the uniform testimony of the New Testament is that the Father did this.
Therefore Christian ‘’faith’’  is in this very real God who is revealed in Jesus, and our certain ‘’hope’’ is of being with Him and seeing Him for ever. As I write these words on Easter Sunday afternoon, the Word of God shines even brighter than than the brilliant sunshine outside, and it’s warmth reaches my heart. The risen Lord still cause hearts to ‘’burn’’ (Luke 24:32).
 
There is a God, and if you want to know what He is like, take a long, hard look at Jesus. Then trust in this same Jesus to bring you to Him.
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1 Peter 1:17: Our true home

“17 Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.” NIV
 
Here is a further thought on being ‘’strangers here’’. In another ‘coincidence’, I just happened to read this extract from C.S.Lewis’s ‘The problem of pain’ on the same day I arrived at this text. In it, Lewis is writing about the effect crises have on us, and once again it seems so relevant to the present time:
‘My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens a serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ.’
However, Lewis goes on to describe the human tendency to ‘backslide’ when everything returns to normal:
‘God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over – I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed.’
That is so insightful.
But I pray that when we return to ‘normal’ – whatever that ‘normal’ may look like – we will not return to being the same, where during this time we have realised we need to be different. God gives all kinds of insights in uncomfortable situations. Let’s hold tightly to these ‘treasures’.
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1 Peter 1:18-20: ‘Rum thing…’

“18 For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. 20 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.”NIV
 
During the Lent period, I have been reading a book of extracts from the writings of C.S. Lewis. In his autobiography, ‘Surprised by Joy’, Lewis writes engagingly about his conversion, and also about the time leading up to it, when, you might say, his armour was being pierced. This is what I read on the morning of writing today’s thought:
‘’Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the gospels was really surprisingly good. ‘Rum thing,’ he went on. ‘All this stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once.’ To understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since shown any interest in Christianity). If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of toughs, were not – as I would still have put it – ‘safe’, where could I turn? Was there then no escape?’’
Peter, here, affirms that it really did happen once (recently, in fact, when he wrote) although it had been long planned. Jesus died, as the perfect fulfilment of the Old Testament sacrificial system, and in that dying He paid the price to buy people out of an ‘’empty way of life. That is what is so ‘good’ about Good Friday.
We are again reminded that ‘’silver’’ and ‘’gold’’ are ‘’perishable’’ (18). The ‘’precious’’ blood of Jesus, however, is of supreme and abiding value. By His blood we can be ‘’redeemed’’ – that is bought out of the slavery of sin.
Today’s passage is so clearly and helpfully rendered in ‘The Message:
‘’It cost God plenty to get you out of that dead-end, empty-headed life you grew up in. He paid with Christ’s sacred blood, you know. He died like an unblemished, sacrificial lamb. And this was no afterthought. Even though it has only lately—at the end of the ages—become public knowledge, God always knew he was going to do this for you.’’
THOUGHT: ‘When I survey the wondrous Cross, on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.
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1 Peter 1: 17: ‘Strangers’

“17 Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.” NIV
Somebody once described the contemporary church as ‘the best disguised set of pilgrims the world has ever seen.’ In the whirl of ordinary life, with its many demands and distractions, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that we don’t belong here and we won’t be long here. As the gospel song says, ‘This world is not my home…’
We are living through remarkable days, when much of the world’s machinery has been completely shut down. I think God is wanting – maybe among other things – to get our attention and wake us up to the realisation that life is short and fragile, and we are not in control. He is! How easily we forget that there is an eternal dimension. Life is brief; eternity is long. One day we must give an account to God for what we have done with the lives, resources, opportunities etc He has entrusted to us.
I was thinking, one of the institutions to take a battering in the Coronavirus storm is the entertainment industry. I’m not saying it’s all bad, but so much of what it pumps out has to do with that ‘’empty way of life’’ (v.18) which Jesus came to rescue us from. How often do we go back there for refreshment, only to find what deep inside we always know to be true: the well is empty and it does not satisfy? Our true home is in the ‘Father’s’ company. When we call on Him we are at home.
At the moment, Jilly and I are using ‘A Diary of Private Prayer’ – an updated version of a devotional classic by Scottish theologian John Baillie. When I read this morning’s prayer, I thought it so relevant. Here is an extract from it:
‘Here I stand, weak and mortal amid the immensities of nature…
Let me remember that my mortal body is only the servant of my immortal soul;
Let me remember how uncertain my hold is on my own physical life;
Let me remember that here I have no continuing city, but only a place for a brief stay, and a time for testing and training;
Let me use this world without abusing it;
Let me be in this world but not of it;
Let me be as though I have nothing, and yet possess everything;
Let me understand the vanity of what is time bound and the glory of the eternal;
Let my world be centred not in myself, but in you.’
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1 Peter 1:13-16: A call to arms.

13 Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming. 14 As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. 15 But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; 16 for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’ NIV

John Stott once wrote that we must actively cultivate a Christian lifestyle, for holiness is not a condition into which we ‘drift’.

You will note that Peter does not say here, ‘Don’t have ‘’evil desires’’ ‘. In this life that would be impossible. Even after you have set out to follow Christ you still have a sinful nature, and you can think, feel and act in accordance with it, rather than living out your new identity in Christ. What Peter does say, though, is ‘’do not conform’’ to these desires. It’s not the case that you won’t have them, but you don’t have to give into them; to capitulate. They don’t have to rule over you.

But we certainly do not ‘drift’ into holiness. This paragraph is in many ways a call to arms. Living a life of holiness will involve your ‘’minds’’ (v.13a); your will (v.13b: ‘’be self-controlled’’)and your heart (v.13c: ‘’set your hope fully…’’). It will involve the whole person.

In yesterday’s passage we saw that the Christian life is cruciform in shape. It is Christ-centred and therefore cross-centred. The pattern is suffering, then glory (v.11b). In ‘the problem of pain’ C.S. Lewis wrote: ‘The sacrifice of Christ is repeated, or re-echoed, among His followers in very varying degrees, from the cruellest martyrdom down to a self-submission of intention…’

When the seed falls into the ground and dies, the beautiful flower of holiness can grow.

PRAYER: Lord, I did not want or choose these days of crisis, but please show me what it means to grow in holiness right in the middle of them. Help me not to postpone growth until a brighter day dawns. By your grace, help me become more like you today.

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1 Peter 1:10-12: ’It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!’  

“10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, 11 trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow. 12 It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.” NIV

Here is a postscript to yesterday’s thought. There are a number of other important things to highlight in the passage:

  • Salvation in the crucified and risen Jesus (11) is all of ‘’grace’’. It is a work of God, and it is undeserved. What a sense of privilege we should carry: ‘’Do you realise how fortunate you are? Angels would have given anything to be in on this!’’ (Verse 12: The Message);
  • Searching into spiritual things – into the Word of God with its over-arching theme of salvation in Jesus – should always be done ‘’intently…and with the greatest care’’ (10b). It requires diligence, recognising that we are dependent on the Holy Spirit for understanding;
  • Biblical leadership is never self-serving (12a). It is always for the sake of others. Simon Sinek reflects a Biblical understanding of leadership in his book title: ‘Leaders eat last’;
  • The Christian life is cruciform in shape. Jesus gives us the pattern for the life of discipleship. It involves suffering then glory (11b). If it is a Good Friday in your experience, you know that Easter Sunday is coming!

 

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