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 1st 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment