As the
second century of Christianity began to unfold, the faith had spread throughout
the Roman Empire—particularly to some of its great cities, like Rome and
Carthage in North Africa. At that time, Christians were the objects of great
suspicion from their neighbors and government officials because they had given
up the behaviors of their previously pagan lifestyle.
Wild rumors
had begun to circulate in some places about what Christians actually taught and
did in their meetings together. To clear the air and defend the good name of
Christianity, a church leader in Carthage named Tertullian wrote a brief
explanation of Christian practices and a critique of the unjust accusations
that had been made against them. In his work, he wrote at one point that these
attacks against Christianity were made out of jealousy, because Christians
displayed a character of life that their pagan neighbors did not possess. His statement
highlighted a quality that will be the focus of our study of 1 Peter today.
Here is
what Tertullian wrote: “It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead
many to put a brand upon us. See how they love one another, they say, for they
themselves are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for
one another, they say, for they themselves will sooner put to death (The
Apology, ch. 39).”
There is
much food for thought in that quote. If people outside our church today were to
take a careful look at us, would their overall impression be, “Those people
sure love each other!” If people slandered our Christian faith, could we say,
“You know, they’re probably a bit jealous of us because we have such a good
thing going on here with our love for each other.”
Regardless
of where we might think we are with respect to a goal like that, it’s always
good for us to remember that that kind of mutual love is, in fact, one of our
goals as a church. When we think about that kind of love, a couple of important
questions come to mind: what does that kind of love look like, and how can we
sustain it? Peter is going to touch on those questions in our text for today,
so let’s take a look at how he answers them.
1. Build upon your baby steps (1:22)
In verse
22, Peter affirms the steps that these believers had already taken toward
loving one another, and he calls on them to round out their love with passion
and purity [READ v. 22].
I’d like
you to notice one thing about Peter’s language in that first phrase. He wrote
that they had purified their souls by obedience for a sincere brotherly love. That word “for” indicates the purpose
or goal behind their obedience. In their obedience for the Lord, they had this
goal in mind of obeying not only for their own benefit, but to build up a
mutual love within their Christian community.
I think
persecution had taught these believers just how much they truly needed each
other. They may have been having a difficult time just meeting their own daily
needs, so their experience taught them that they badly needed to band together.
This is a
goal that we need to keep in mind as well as we as individuals seek to grow in
the Lord. Obviously there is an individual element for each of us in our
relationship with God, but we need to remember that our individual relationship
with God does not exist merely for our own benefit. We must always deal with
this inescapable fact that we have been placed into the body of Christ – a
fellowship with many different parts that have different functions, yet they
are all designed to work together as one.
So as I
seek to obey God in my life and you seek to obey God in your life, we must
remember that one of the goals of that process is not simply that I might hold
the hand of Jesus more tightly, but that I might also tighten my grip with you
as well – that I might become better equipped to show love to you.
In his
command, then, Peter explains how to fill out or round out our love for each
other. He says, “love one another earnestly from a pure heart.” The word
“earnestly” speaks of a deep-seated passion or drive. Your translation might
say “fervently,” and that’s a good word. The word “fervent” comes from the
Latin word for boiling. We could paraphrase this command, “love one another
with a love that is boiling over,” or “a love that has reached the boiling
point.” Water that is boiling has much more energy and potency to it than water
that is simply at room temperature.
But how can we get that kind of life and drive flowing
through our love, and how can we maintain it? That is what Peter explains in
verses 23-25.
2. The Lord can use His word to sustain our love for each
other (1:23-25)
[READ vv.
23-25] Make sure you don’t miss Peter’s basic argument here. He states that we
can love one another earnestly because the seed from which our new life in
Christ sprang is imperishable. It is lasting. It is not like our physical
strength, which is wasting away and perishing, rather it is constant, always
pulsating with life, and thus our love can always be alive and fervent as well.
Now the
Holy Spirit is the source of our new life, but the channel or the conduit or
the pipeline that he used it to send new life to us was the word of God – God’s
message from himself about himself to mankind. This is the same channel that
God still uses today to accomplish spiritual work in our lives, so God’s full
message to us, found in the Bible, causes this book to have a unique quality
about it that makes it unlike any other book in the world.
That’s why
we call it the “Holy Bible.” The word “Bible” comes from the Greek word that
simply means book, but obviously, God’s word is a special and unique book, and
thus we call it the Holy Bible, or the holy book. And because God continues to
do work in our lives through the message of this book, he has protected it and
preserved it so that it will remain forever.
Let me give
you just one example from history that reveals how carefully God has preserved
the Bible. During my recent trip to Israel, one of the sites we were able to
visit was Qumran, the place where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Many of the
Dead Sea Scrolls were copies of the books of the Old Testament, and these
copies were written in the centuries just before the birth of Christ.
Prior to
the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest copy of the Old Testament in
Hebrew that archaeologists had ever found was from 1000 A.D., or 1000 years
after the birth of Christ. So the Dead Sea Scrolls gave us copies of the Old
Testament in Hebrew that were 1000 years older than any copies we possessed
before. And when the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls was compared to the text of
the manuscript from 1000 A.D., it was seen that the text was virtually
identical, which served as further confirmation for our conviction that the
message we read in the Bible today truly is the same message that Moses wrote
and that Isaiah and Daniel wrote and so forth.
God has
miraculously preserved the Bible for thousands of years now because it is the
channel through which he accomplishes his spiritual work in our lives. That
process of God’s work in our lives is what allows our love for each other to be
sustained with such a deep fervency. It’s not so much that simply reading a
book fuels our love for each other, but it’s the fact that the author of the
book is still alive, and in fact he has sent his own spirit to live with in our
hearts. So the author of the book takes the message of the book and makes it
become a living reality in our lives.
So our
power to love one another is not fading away as our physical strength is. It
remains within us and is fed as we read the word of God, because the author of
the book makes it a reality within us as we yield to his will.
Now we may still have a question about what it looks like to
love one another from a pure heart. This is what Peter goes on to describe in
the first part of chapter 2.
3. A pure heart comes from putting away evil and feeding
upon what is good (2:1-3)
In verse
one, Peter gives us a good list of attitudes and behaviors that defile our
hearts and thus need to be put away in order for our hearts to be pure. Notice
how these attitudes and behaviors could all undermine and compromise our
relationships with each other [READ v. 1].
It’s not
hard to see how these attitudes and behaviors cannot coexist with love. Malice
refers to having evil intentions toward someone. Deceit, of course, refers to
lying or trickery. Hypocrisy is what results when we try to hide things like
malice and deceit with a good face, pretending that all is well between us and
the person for whom we have malice in our hearts. Envy makes it difficult for
us to work for the good of someone else because we’re jealous of the good that
they already have! Slander is a very active effort to harm someone else through
the things that we say about them.
Peter’s
solution is for us to put such things away from us. The word picture behind
that verb is the action of taking off a piece of clothing and setting it aside.
When your clothes are really filthy, you don’t just put something else on over
the top of them. No – you take them off and replace them; you change into
something else.
Likewise,
when you discover one of these attitudes or behaviors in your own life you need
to lay it aside and go on without it. You must not tolerate it and carry it
around with you any longer. Let these things disgust you the way your clothing
might disgust you if you got filthy while working cattle or if you had a good
workout with no deodorant on. Put these things away from you! Confess them to
God and ask for his forgiveness, and if you have done harm to someone else,
like through slander for example, then confess your sin to that person, ask for
his forgiveness, then try to undo any damage that your words may have done.
Having put
those things away, we are then ready to grow in a different direction. Let’s
see what Peter writes in verse two [READ v. 2].
Your
translation might say something like “long for the pure milk of the word.” The
only difference here is a question about the translation of one word in the
Greek text. The ESV translation here makes a bit more of a general statement
about spiritual growth, but the point really ends up being the same. God
accomplishes his work in us through his word, so we must long for his word if
we desire to see his work in our lives.
Peter tells
us to make our longing like the longing that newborn infants have for milk. How
intense is that longing? Do infants send a message like this: “Hey mom, I think
I might be feeling a little bit of an empty stomach coming on here, so if you
think about it, maybe you could pencil me in for a feeding here in a little
while. I don’t really want to butt in on everything else that you have going
on, so whenever you can squeeze it in, that’s fine. Meanwhile, I’ll just remain
calm and totally peaceful as I wait patiently.”
Is that how
infants long for milk? Of course not! They demand it, they cry out for it, they
act like they’re instantly going to die if they don’t have milk now, now, NOW!
If they don’t have their milk, nothing will satisfy them until they do.
My friends,
if we are going to have a pure love for each other that is at a fever pitch,
that is boiling over, we need to realize just how desperately we need to feed
our souls with the word of God. The Bible is the channel through which God
accomplishes his work in our lives. It is the way that he offers his promises
to a whole new generation. It is the way that he corrects our thinking so that
we can be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It is the way that he points
out our faults and our flaws so we can put them away and grow in a different
direction – grow until this salvation that God has given to us actually starts
to have a good fit on us, so that the status of being a child of God actually
comes to fit us rather well.
Peter
closes this little section in verse three with another motivation for all of
this that is a stroke of rhetorical genius. He says that we should put away
sinful things and long for the pure spiritual milk “if indeed you have tasted
that the Lord is good.”
Peter isn’t
really questioning his audience’s experience with the Lord so much as he is
drawing them in to have them reaffirm it. When we read these words, the idea is
that we will say, “Wait a minute! What do you mean ‘if indeed?’ I’ve tasted
that the Lord is good!”
When I make
that affirmation, what have I just done? I’ve just taken Peter’s bait! I’ve
just affirmed that what he said is true, and that I really should live the way
he is describing. If I have tasted that the Lord is good, how can I do anything
but long for his pure spiritual milk? Any other response would be improper, so
with this little rhetorical flourish, Peter leaves us with no choice but to
agree that we should love one another earnestly from a pure heart and long for
the pure milk of God’s word. Any other response toward our good Lord would be
improper. May God help us to have such loving and such longing!
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