The Peril Behind the Privilege of Calling God Your Father--1 Peter 1:17-21 (1 Peter Series)

            I imagine that, at some point in time, we’ve all thought about what it would be like to be the child of someone rich or famous. What would it be like to be the child of someone like Bill Gates, someone with more money than I can even imagine? How about the child of a movie star like Tom Cruise, or someone with great power and influence like President Obama?

            As Christians, we get to reflect an awful lot on the fact that we are children of God – and that reflection is a great privilege and encouragement! We very much enjoy reflecting on the protection that God provides for us and his promises to provide for our needs.

            But as Peter is going to remind us in our passage for today, there is a perilous aspect to this relationship that we may not reflect on quite as often, but we should, because it provides a significant motivation for us to behave in the proper way. I’d like to jump right in to a closer look at our text today without reading the whole text first, so we can allow Peter’s logic to unfold just the way that it would have for his original audience the very first time that they read this letter.

In the first part of verse 17, Peter calls upon us to consider just who it is that we appeal to as our father.

1. Who are you calling Father? (v. 17a)

            [READ v. 17a] Here Peter is reminding us about a father’s right and responsibility to evaluate how his children are acting and, by implication, to discipline them if necessary. After all, a good father doesn’t just hand out goodies all the time, right? He teaches and trains and guides and disciplines when it is necessary. You can count on the fact that God is going to act like a good father, so he too evaluates our actions and disciplines us when necessary.

            Peter’s main point of emphasis here is that God evaluates or judges us impartially. He doesn’t play favorites with us as he evaluates us. So, for example, I can’t harbor a sinful habit and say to myself, “Yes, but I’m a pastor! Surely that earns me the right to have God cut me a little slack!” It doesn’t work that way. Life is not Monopoly – no one gets a “get out of jail free” card or something like that. Nor can you follow a sinful path and say to yourself, “Surely God won’t hold me to a very high standard! After all, it’s not like I’m a pastor or something!” Peter is very clear with this statement – God does not play favorites; he is an impartial judge.

            So if there’s no wiggle room here – if there’s no chance for us to turn on the charm and get out of God’s fatherly discipline – how should this reality affect our behavior? We know from passages like Hebrews 12 that God takes his fatherly role as a disciplinarian seriously – what kind of perspective should that give us on our lives?

2. Live with a healthy fear of your Father (v. 17b)

            [READ v. 17] By “exile,” Peter is talking about our lifetimes in this world, when we are living away from our true, heavenly homeland.

            Now, the fear of God is a concept that can easily be misunderstood – and it often is! Many people have embraced one of two misunderstandings of this concept. The first misunderstanding is that we should fear God because he’s actually out to get us – that he watches over us just waiting for a chance to zap us into a pile of dust.

            I remember an old Far Side cartoon that pictured God sitting at a computer. On the computer screen was an image of a man walking underneath a piano that was being lifted up the side of the building. As God watched the scene unfold, he prepared to press a button on his keyboard that was labeled “smite,” apparently to send that man off into eternity.

            I understand the attempt at humor with that cartoon, but that picture kind of represents the way that some people actually think about God. They think of him as a cranky old man who doesn’t want anyone to have fun, and if we make one simple misstep in our lives, he’ll turn us into a pillar of salt.

            The second misunderstanding is that fear of God and love for God cannot possibly coexist in our hearts. This misunderstanding says that with fear and love, we have an either/or situation – we can either fear God or love God, but supposedly we cannot do both.

            Both of those misunderstandings are inaccurate, and let me explain why. As children of God, we don’t need to think that God actually has any harmful intentions toward us. He is not out to hurt us or out to get us, so we don’t need to fear that he has bad intentions in mind. The reality we must affirm, however, is that he is willing to discipline us out of love, and that discipline can be quite severe if God decides it is necessary. It could involve illness, it could involve financial ruin, it could involve broken relationships, and it could even involve death!

            Though God’s discipline is always colored by his love and mercy, he will not spare the rod, so to speak, when he knows that it is necessary. Many of us can understand this balance between fear and love by thinking about our relationships with our earthly fathers. This is not a perfect comparison, of course, because our earthly fathers are not perfect. And for a minority of us, we may actually need to overlook a lot about our earthly fathers in order to get a better understanding of God as our father.

            But for many of us, we know from our own experience what it was like to love our fathers and yet have an appropriate fear of them at the same time. We knew they loved us and had good intentions in mind for us, so we loved them for that. And yet, we knew that the claws could come out when necessary, and we feared that discipline.

            We should live with a similar, healthy fear of the Lord. Yes – we have the privilege of calling him our father, but he is not someone to be toyed with. We should not think that we can get away with things because we are children of God. In fact, we should rest assured that we will not escape discipline for our misdeeds – and we know that precisely because we are children of God, and he is faithful to discipline his children whom he loves.

Another factor in this healthy fear of the Lord is the remembrance of the priceless payment that God gave to save us.

3. You know full well the high price your Father paid to ransom you from bondage (vv. 18-19)

            [READ vv. 18-19] When Peter refers to “the futile ways inherited from your forefathers,” he’s referring to all that Judaism had become just prior to and during the lifetime of Christ. It had become little more than a collection of traditions and rituals that had become something of a substitute Savior for the Jewish people. That’s why they were largely only looking for God to send them a political leader and a military conqueror, and it’s why the leaders of the Jewish people in particular completely misidentified Jesus when he came into the world.

            But these Jewish Christians had been delivered from that futility which blinded their countrymen from seeing the Savior. They had been ransomed from it, just like a hostage is a ransomed after a kidnapping with some form of payment. And the payment that God gave did not consist of something as cheap and relatively worthless as silver and gold, but it consisted of something far more valuable – the precious blood of Christ, the only one in all of history who never sinned, the only one to ever give perfect obedience to God the father, the one about whom the Father said, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

            Peter’s point is this – if God paid such a high ransom to make us his children, don’t you think he’ll take offense when we don’t act like his children should? Should we not expect to be corrected by our father?

            I cannot say it any better than the author of Hebrews, so I’ll ask you to turn with me to Hebrews 10:26-31 and follow along with me as I read [READ].

4. Living in these fortunate times makes your connection with God possible (vv. 20-21)

            You’ll remember that back in verses 10-12, Peter revealed how the Old Testament prophets dearly desired to know what we know about God’s plan, and to live through all that we are living through. Since Christ has already come once to this world, we are living in fortunate times. Let’s read what Peter said [READ vv. 20-21].

            The Father’s plans for the Son were already in place before He even created the world. Time went by for millennia, many generations came and went, and who should have the privilege to be around after Christ had come? Why, these believers in the 1^st century, and all of us today!

            Simply because of when we live, we can not only believe in God, but believe in Him through Christ, knowing of the Lord’s resurrection and his glorious ascension into Heaven. We have a hope that is more informed and more triumphant than anything that Old Testament saints had.

            And don’t you think, my friends, that since we know more, since we have greater spiritual resources through the Holy Spirit, don’t you think God expects more out of us? If we live in such a privileged time, shouldn’t our lives reflect that? Shouldn’t our lives reveal that we are taking full advantage of the privileges that we enjoy now between Christ’s first coming and His second?

            This is yet another reason for us to live with the fear of the Lord in our hearts. It is a biblical principle, my friends, that to whom much is given, much shall be required. Truly, we have been given much! We can call upon God as our Father, we have been ransomed at a high price from lives of futility, and we have been chosen to live now, during these privileged times in which God’s eternal plan has already moved forward in such powerful ways.

            All of this should strike within our hearts a healthy fear—a fear of failing the one who gave His Son’s own sinless blood for our salvation; a fear of incurring the discipline of one who judges impartially; a fear of squandering the days we have been given in these privileged times.

            Let us remember today that we cannot receive the privilege of being children of God without also accepting that peril that comes with that relationship. God disciplines every child whom He receives, but only as needed, of course. May we allow a healthy fear of His discipline to cause us to live in such a way that we do not need to face it.

Nothing to Fear but God Himself--Proverbs series

Imagine the following scenario with me as I describe it for you, okay? Imagine that you live on a plot of land that has some land for sale beside it. One day, you see a realtor pull up and remove the “for sale” sign from beside the road, and so you think, “Oh, someone bought that property. I wonder if they’re going to build a house over there.” Sure enough, just a couple of weeks later, you see excavating equipment over there digging out a hole where a house will be built. You can tell from the size of the hole that your new neighbor is planning to build a big house.

Then one day, you see someone pull onto the lot hauling a big load of two-by-fours, and they pull up right beside the hole for the house. You think to yourself, “I wonder if that’s my neighbor,” and so, being the friendly neighbor that you are, you walk over and introduce yourself to your new neighbor, Bob. You hang out for a little while and talk to Bob while he’s doing some work, and soon you notice that he’s going around in the hole sinking the two-by-fours in the ground like fence posts—he digs out a little hole, puts the board in it, and then fills in the dirt back around it. You’re a little curious at this point and so you say, “Hey, Bob, what’re you doing?”
“I’m building my house.”
“Oh, okay. But aren’t you going to pour a foundation first?”
“A foundation? Ha! That’s a good one. I don’t think the Earth is going anywhere!”
“Well, no; maybe not the planet, but the dirt that you’re building on might move. Have you ever built a house before?”
“Yeah, plenty of times. I’ve had some bad luck with my houses caving in, but I’m going to use more two-by-fours this time!

Now at that point, you’d be thinking that you had a pretty strange new neighbor. He’s over there trying to build a house without really knowing the right way to go about it. Well, friends, that’s what its like when we try to live our lives without really understanding how life works. When we do that we’re piecing together a life that is bound to have problems because its built on a poor foundation.

We’ve seen already in our study of Proverbs that wisdom shows us how life works; it reveals the moral laws that govern how life generally plays out. Today we’re going to study the foundation of wisdom according to the book of Proverbs. That foundation is an attitude called “the fear of the Lord.” We’re going to discover what this attitude is, what its benefits are, and what characterizes the person who has it.

I. What is the fear of the Lord?

The fear of the Lord is perhaps the most important concept in the entire book of Proverbs. Now it may sound a little strange to hear that we are supposed to fear God, because the good news of the gospel is that after we accept Jesus, we are at peace with God. So why would Proverbs describe something called “the fear of the Lord” as a positive thing?

Let me first offer a definition of this attitude, and then we’ll unpack this concept a little bit. The fear of the Lord can be defined as an attitude of reverence toward God which captivates your entire being and moves you to worship Him and serve Him. Or to simplify our definition a bit, we could say that the fear of the Lord is the proper recognition of who you are in light of who God is.

I think the best illustration of this attitude is the attitude that a child has toward loving parents. This is not a perfect illustration because none of us have perfect parents, but it does give us a helpful point of comparison for understanding the fear of the Lord. As a child responds to a loving parent, there is a beautiful balance in his attitude between love, respect, and even an appropriate degree of fear. The child responds in love toward the compassion and kindness of the parents as they tuck him in bed at night or tell him how much they love him. He responds with respect toward the strength and power of his parents, like his dad’s ability to chase away things that go bump in the night or his ability to throw a football, or mom’s ability to make any scrape or cut or bruise feel better or to see things through the back of her head. The child also responds with an appropriate fear as he thinks of enduring punishment from his parents for doing something wrong—not because he thinks his parents are trying to hurt him, but because he knows their discipline will not be pleasant.

The fear of the Lord is much like that—there are elements of love, respect, and fear all mingled together in our relationship with God. We love Him because of all that He has done for us, for the compassion, grace, and mercy that He has shown us. We respect Him because of His amazing power and greatness, because He is the Creator of all things, and we seem to be so insignificant in the shadow of His glory. We also have an appropriate fear when we think about doing something that would incur His discipline.

So there is a beautiful balance in this attitude that puts us in the proper frame of mind to receive instruction from God and to respond properly. This attitude in itself compels us to serve the Lord, but we receive even more motivation when we realize the benefits that this attitude can bring into our lives.

II. What are the benefits of the fear of the Lord?

A. It serves as the starting point for acquiring wisdom (9:10, 1:7)

Embracing this attitude toward God puts us on the right path to acquire wisdom. Notice what Prov. 9:10 has to say [READ 9:10]. Notice how this ties the fear of the Lord together with the knowledge of the Holy One. Here is that recognition of who God is—when we come to know who He is, the proper response is the fear of the Lord, which puts us on the path toward knowledge. And we saw last week what Prov. 1:7 says—“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and correction.”

I’ve found it helpful for myself to compare the fear of the Lord to the picture on the front of a puzzle box. When you’re trying to put together a puzzle, the place to start is by looking at the picture on the front of the box. The picture shows you how all of the pieces are supposed to fit together; it allows you to see when you’ve got something out of place.

Well, the fear of the Lord fulfills that role for your life; it points you toward God and moves your heart to serve Him, so then you can put your life together the right way. It helps you see when something is out of place and allows you to see what it should really look like.

So the fear of the Lord points us in the right direction to gain wisdom, which means that if we don’t adopt this attitude, we can try as hard as we want but we’ll never gain true wisdom because we’re not headed in the right direction. That would be like trying to get to Copeland by heading east on 56—you’ll never make it because you started by going the wrong way. The fear of the Lord points us in the right direction to gain wisdom.

B. It lengthens your life (10:27, 14:27)

Throughout all of history, human beings have been trying to fend off death as long as we can. In our society, we have an almost universal desire to live as long as we can and to look as young as we can while we’re doing it. If we want to have a long life, Proverbs would tell us to fear the Lord. Let’s look at Prov. 10:27 together [READ 10:27]. Now over to 14:27 [READ 14:27].

According to Proverbs, there are several ways that a person might die prematurely from a foolish lifestyle. One might encounter a jealous spouse in the case of adultery, or one might have a violent plan backfire on him, or he might fall on the wrong side of the law. A foolish person might also naively wander into the wrong kind of places or situations and find himself there at the wrong time. But a wise path, on the other hand, will keep us safe from those dangers.

Now we need to remind ourselves again that proverbs like this express principles, not promises. God does at times allow godly people to die young and wicked people to live a long life, but in general we can prolong our days by embracing the fear of the Lord.

And not only can we increase the quantity of our life—we can increase its quality as well.

C. It leads to confidence and safety in life (14:26, 19:23)

Let’s read 14:26 [READ 14:26]. I think the New King James translation is correct to capitalize the word “him” in this verse to make that word a reference to God. It is true that our children receive a measure of protection when we fear the Lord and thus live in a wise manner, but I think this verse focuses on God’s protection for His spiritual children. God is like any good father—He takes care of and protects His own. Prov. 19:23 says, “The fear of the Lord leads to life, so that one may sleep satisfied, untouched by evil.”

Personal safety was a big concern back in that time. They obviously didn’t have home security systems or telephones to call the police. Well-traveled roads were the favorite places of thieves, and when people traveled they often had to rely on the hospitality of total strangers. We may feel more secure today because of the technology that we have, but we all realize how quickly and easily our safety can evaporate.

But the fear of the Lord reminds us of the awesome power of our God and of His place as Lord over everything. He is aware of every danger and every threat that surrounds us. We know what He can do and we know that He loves us, so we can be confident as we let ourselves relax in the mighty arms of our Heavenly Father.

I believe we have seen now that the fear of the Lord is a very desirable attitude to have. But what does it look when a person has adopted this attitude? What characterizes the person who fears the Lord?

III. What characterizes the person who fears the Lord?

A. He is not envious of sinful people (23:17–18)

Look at Prov. 23:17–18 [READ 23:17–18]. The person who fears the Lord does not fall into the trap of embracing a sinful lifestyle because he keeps a “big picture” perspective on life. The one who fears the Lord knows that God is gracious even to those who reject His way of life. As Jesus said, God causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and He sends rain upon the righteous and the unrighteous. God may allow a sinful person to live a long and comfortable life, but the eternal picture for that man is not good, and the one who fears the Lord remembers the eternal picture. He does not allow himself to be deceived into thinking that a sinful lifestyle is the way to go, because he remembers the big picture.

B. He is humble (15:33, 22:4)

I think above all else, humility is the primary characteristic of the person who fears the Lord. Let’s read a couple of verses—first of all Prov. 15:33 [READ 15:33]. Notice how this verse connects the fear of the Lord and humility by exalting both of them as positive traits. I think this connection is even more explicit in Prov. 22:4 [READ 22:4]. Now, in the Hebrew text that lies behind our English translation, the word “and” does not appear, nor does the word “are” –they were inserted to make for better English. So the Hebrew simply says, “The reward of humility the fear of the Lord riches honor and life.” Grammatically, there is nothing that tells us that humility and the fear of the Lord are actually two different attitudes. In fact, I think its more likely that Solomon is using the fear of the Lord to define what humility is. In other words, its like he’s saying, “The reward of humility (which is also known as the fear of the Lord) is riches, honor, and life.”

This would mean that humility and the fear of the Lord are synonymous attitudes. They are virtually identical, and I think that is really true when you think about it. When you fear God—when you understand who you are in light of who He is—there is no longer any room for pride. The fear of the Lord keeps before our minds the incomprehensible greatness of God, and it reminds us that everything we have has been given to us by God. He chose where you were going to be born, and what family you would be born into; he has chosen to give you every day that you have lived, every breath that you have taken, and every meal that you have ever enjoyed. He has given you everything that you possess and every penny that was used to purchase those things. If we are thus completely at God’s mercy, where is there room for pride? There is room for nothing but to humbly acknowledge who God is and who we are in the light of His being.

The fear of the Lord is the first and foundational attitude that we must have to gain true wisdom in life. But you can probably see that we cannot have this attitude if we do not have a proper relationship with God. Unfortunately, we do not naturally have a proper relationship with God. You see, God created us to enjoy a relationship with Him and to serve as His representatives in this world. But our sinfulness has broken our relationship with God so that we are now estranged from Him. We cannot fulfill our true purpose in life because we are separated from God, and unless something changes in our condition we will remain separated from Him forever. But the problem is that we can’t fix the problem; our sin has so deeply offended God that we cannot repair our relationship with Him.

But because of God’s great love for us, He did not want our relationship to stay this way, so He decided to take it upon Himself to restore our broken relationship. He took care of our sin problem by sending His own Son, Jesus, into this world—God in human flesh—to die in our place on the cross to pay the penalty that God required for our sin. And on the third day after His death, Jesus rose from the dead as a testimony to everyone that we could now have the hope of forgiveness and a restored relationship with God. God now offers us His forgiveness as a free gift, and if you will place your faith in Jesus and trust that He paid the price for your sins, your relationship with God will be restored, and you can enjoy a relationship with God forever—both now and in heaven with Him after you pass away. Will you place your faith in Him today?