A Prayer for the King

(Psalm 72)

Today is the last day of our summer series in the Psalms before heading back into the book of Romans next week. So I thought it only fitting that we end our series on Book 2 of the Psalter by talking about the last psalm in this book, Psalm 72.

Psalm 72, it says in the heading, is a psalm “of Solomon”—that is, King Solomon, who succeeded to the throne after the death of his father, King David. The term “of Solomon” here can either mean that Solomon wrote the psalm, or that someone wrote it about Solomon and the other kings of David’s line to come after him.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter—the psalm expresses the ideal, the hoped-for goal of the king of God’s people, Israel. It reminds those who pray this prayer of the high calling of the king. But if we know anything about the kings of Israel, we know that they failed spectacularly in this goal. Some kings were better than others—some were even kings one could characterize as good kings. But none of them lived up to this ideal. Even the good kings were very imperfect, very incomplete people.

So it’s easy to read this psalm cynically and think that this is a prayer that God did not answer, that this is an example of a failed prayer.

However, if you keep reading the Old Testament, you’ll come across other passages that make you think twice about this conclusion. Let’s take just one example, from the book of Isaiah, chapter 11. I’ll read the first five verses:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

[That is, the person of whom Isaiah is speaking will be of King David’s lineage—Jesse was David’s father.]

2  And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,

the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the Spirit of counsel and might,

the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

3  And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,

or decide disputes by what his ears hear,

4  but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,

and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

5  Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,

and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

That sounds remarkably similar to the goals we see in Psalm 72. And while Psalm 72 is never quoted in the New Testament as a “messianic” passage, Isaiah 11 is—it is abundantly clear from the New Testament that when Isaiah prophesied about this ruler who would come from the line of David, on whom the Spirit of God would rest, who would judge with justice and righteousness and faithfulness, he was actually speaking about this figure called “the Messiah”—the perfect King whom God would send to rule his people forever.

When we realize that no human king ever met this standard, and that this standard is elsewhere applied to the Messiah, we can come to no other conclusion than that Psalm 72 may be a prayer for Solomon, a prayer for the King of Israel, but it is a prayer that finally receives its answer in the Messiah, Jesus Christ. So that’s how we should read this psalm—the prayer of this psalm describes the ideal of the ruler of God’s people, an ideal no human king was ever able to meet, and which is fulfilled in the reign of Jesus Christ.

This psalm isn’t hard to understand, but what we see here is like fuel for our worship. So let’s read attentively.

We see this perfect King exhibit five characteristics, five qualities, which help us to identify this King for who he is.

Perfect Righteousness (v. 1-4)

The first quality the perfect King exhibits is perfect righteousness. V. 1:

1  Give the king your justice, O God,

and your righteousness to the royal son!

2  May he judge your people with righteousness,

and your poor with justice!

3  Let the mountains bear prosperity for the people,

and the hills, in righteousness!

4  May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,

give deliverance to the children of the needy,

and crush the oppressor!

There are two sides to the “righteousness” coin: there is purity and piety—that is, a way of life and a standard of behavior which corresponds to God’s own desires, and a total dedication to following God’s commands—and there is justice: a desire to judge fairly, to protect the weak, to support the oppressed.

On both fronts, the kings of Israel failed. As we saw before, all of the kings of Israel were very imperfect people. Even David—almost definitely the best king in Israel’s history—was at times a violent man, a murderer and an adulterer. Jesus Christ, however, was the embodiment of perfect holiness. Hebrews 4.15 tells us that he was tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sin.

We see the same contrast on the side of justice. Take v. 4 and its concern for the poor, for example. Kings can easily become consumed by greed, by a desire to accumulate wealth for themselves (and Solomon wasn’t exempt from this tendency).

By contrast, the perfect King the psalmist prays for here serves on behalf of the people—especially the poor and the needy. We read this earlier in Isaiah 11.4: God promised that a king would come, whose role was to be the guardian of justice and the protector of the poor. Indeed, when Christ comes, he describes the poor not just as “poor”, but as Derek Kidner points out, he talks about them as his poor—God’s poor. He says in Matthew 25.35 and 40:

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me… Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Perfect Sovereignty (v. 5-11)

The next characteristic of this perfect King is perfect sovereignty, or perfect reign over his kingdom. And his sovereignty is characterized in several different ways. V. 5:

5  May they fear you while the sun endures,

and as long as the moon, throughout all generations!

6  May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass,

like showers that water the earth!

7  In his days may the righteous flourish,

and peace abound, till the moon be no more!

His reign doesn’t just bring peace and justice. It would be easy to imagine such a reign lasting for a short time, then withering away when another, less righteous king took power. But this King’s reign, the people pray, will be eternal—v. 5, as long as the sun endures, as long as the moon, throughout all generations.

Obviously no human king has ever fit this bill—every single human ruler in history has died, and will die. No matter how powerful the ruler, his or her reign is always temporary.

But the sovereignty of this perfect King will be without end.

In Daniel chapter 7, the prophet Daniel describes a vision he sees of this promised King, the “Son of Man” whose dominion would be an everlasting dominion, and whose kingdom would never be destroyed. We don’t need to read far into the gospels before we see Jesus, over and over again, saying, essentially, “The ‘Son of Man’ Daniel spoke about…that’s me.” The “Son of Man” was Jesus’s favorite title for himself.

So that’s the second thing which characterizes his reign: it is eternal.

The third thing is that his reign will not just be over one particular people. He’s not just talking about the king of Israel here; his reign will be over all people. V. 8:

8  May he have dominion from sea to sea,

and from the River to the ends of the earth!

9  May desert tribes bow down before him,

and his enemies lick the dust!

10  May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands

render him tribute;

may the kings of Sheba and Seba

bring gifts!

11  May all kings fall down before him,

all nations serve him!

Dominion from sea to sea, rule over allies and enemies, allegiance and gifts from kings of all nations, everywhere. (The psalmist mentions Sheba; we remember the story from 1 Kings 10 when the queen of Sheba comes to visit Solomon, because she hears of his wisdom and his wealth, and when she sees the truth of what she has heard she makes great gifts to Solomon.)

This is the kind of rule that, frankly, makes me nervous when I read it, because I can think of all the ways this can go wrong in the hands of an ordinary human ruler—even a wise human ruler. We can easily imagine a bad ruler showing his own people preferential treatment, while exacting terrible tributes from the other peoples under his reign, overtaxing them to death and burdening them beyond their means, much like the Roman Empire did to the Jews at the time of Christ.

It reassures us that Jesus of course wouldn’t do that; Jesus wouldn’t ask for burdensome tributes beyond what his people can bear. And that is true…but in some ways, Jesus is even more exacting than that. When we see the first Gentiles come to see Christ, he doesn’t tell them he’ll be asking for gifts of riches, but rather gifts of themselves. We read in John 12.20-25:

20 Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. 21 So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” 22 Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23 And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25 Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.

So Jesus does not ask the people under his reign to give what they do not have; but he does ask that they give him all that they have.

However, he also tells them why it’s worth it: whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. As the martyred missionary Jim Elliot famously said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” If we serve Christ, the reward is honor from the Father, which is better than the life people so want to keep, in order to avoid serving Christ in the first place.

Perfect Compassion (v. 12-14)

If we had any fears concerning the goodness of this King, and whether his universal rule could possibly be a good thing, we see those fears dispelled in the following verses. In v. 12-14 we see this king’s perfect compassion.

12  For he delivers the needy when he calls,

the poor and him who has no helper.

13  He has pity on the weak and the needy,

and saves the lives of the needy.

14  From oppression and violence he redeems their life,

and precious is their blood in his sight.

We have a daughter, Zadie, who’s five years old. I am Zadie’s father; at this stage in her development, I am one of two absolute authority figures in her life. Dad and Mom are king and queen. Our house isn’t a democracy; we give our kids a vote when we can, but that right isn’t absolute. Often, it comes down to us saying, “You’ll clean your room right now because I told you to clean your room right now.”

What keeps our authority over our kids from being a reign of terror is the love we have for them, and that love came out in compassion for Zadie this week. She had an allergic reaction to several mosquito bites; she was in a lot of pain, her arms and one leg swollen up like sausages. We couldn’t heal her, but we could take care of her pain to the best of our abilities, help her not to touch the blisters, hug her and let her sleep in our bed when she was hurting.

So even though we have near-total authority over her at this point, she’s not afraid of that authority, because she knows we love her. She sees our love manifested in our compassion toward her.

We see this all over the place in the gospels: Christ manifesting his love through compassion on ordinary people, although he would have every right and authority to speak a word and wipe them off the face of the earth. We read in Matthew 9.36:

35 And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Who would be afraid of such a ruler? His power makes him worthy of fear, in the biblical sense—worthy of reverence, of the respect and awe which he deserves. But his compassion makes him approachable. His compassion removes the reticence we might feel in the presence of a powerful figure; we want to be ruled by such a ruler, because he can take care of us in ways we can’t, and he will take care of us in ways we can’t.

What a wonderful thing to be delivered when we are needy, to receive kindness when we are oppressed, to be valued when we feel worthless. And how much more wonderful to learn that this person who delivered us and was kind to us and valued us is none other than the King who rules over us. How safe do we feel, knowing we are under his rule?

Perfect Blessing (v. 15-17)

So the prayer is that God would enable the king of his people to be endowed with perfect righteousness, perfect rule, perfect compassion. Lastly, the psalmist prays that the king would display perfect blessing toward his kingdom. V. 15:

15  Long may he live;

may gold of Sheba be given to him!

May prayer be made for him continually,

and blessings invoked for him all the day!

16  May there be abundance of grain in the land;

on the tops of the mountains may it wave;

may its fruit be like Lebanon;

and may people blossom in the cities

like the grass of the field!

17  May his name endure forever,

his fame continue as long as the sun!

May people be blessed in him,

all nations call him blessed!

We already saw this a bit earlier, in v. 6-7, but here he comes back to the effect this King will have on his kingdom: not just protection, but prosperity; not just peace, but blessing. May there be abundance of grain in the land; on the tops of the mountains may it wave; may its fruit be like Lebanon; and may people blossom in the cities like the grass of the field!

In the West, in the 21st century, we are living in a time of widespread prosperity which has never been equalled in human history until now. Yet, I doubt if any of you would say that you feel as if you are “blossoming in the city like the grass of the field”—none of us would say that every single person in France is enjoying complete and total prosperity.

That’s because this kind of prosperity, this kind of blessing, was intended to be the result of the reign and rule of Jesus Christ, once he returns to renew the earth and banish sin and all of its effects, once and for all. We see hints of this in Jesus’s ministry. In John 6, he feeds five thousand men with five loaves of bread and two fish. This is a symbolic foretaste of the prosperity God’s King will bring.

But we see it perhaps most fully, I think, in Matthew 9, when he heals the paralytic. First of all, we see blessing on the material level: he heals this man who was paralyzed, enabling him to walk again. But on top of that—and more importantly for the religious leaders watching, he told the man that his sins were forgiven. The blessing he gave to this man was total: physical and spiritual.

This is the kind of King he is. And that is why the blessing goes both ways: it is blessing from the King to the kingdom, in v. 6, and it is also praise from the people of the kingdom to the King, in v. 5 and 7. A King who is endowed with such righteousness, such power, such compassion and such grace deserves such praise.

Doxology & Conclusion (v. 18-20)

Now this psalm ends with a slightly different turn, and that is because the conclusion of the psalm isn’t merely a conclusion to this psalm, but of all of book 2 of the psalter. V. 18:

18  Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,

who alone does wondrous things.

19  Blessed be his glorious name forever;

may the whole earth be filled with his glory!

Amen and Amen!

20  The prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended.

This is a fitting conclusion to this psalm, however, because it reminds us that the only King who is capable of being the kind of ruler this psalm prays for is God himself.

Jesus Christ is that ruler. His reign has begun, and will one day be fully realized, when he returns and cleanses sin from his creation.

Now I have a confession to make. There’s a big part of my brain that reads a psalm like this and accepts everything I’ve just spent the past half hour saying. That’s the Christian part—the part that the Holy Spirit has rewired to see the world as he says God sees it.

But there’s still another part of my mind that reads this with a fair amount of cynicism. That’s the part of my brain that remembers what it was like before I became a Christian, and who knows how I would have heard the things I’m saying today when I was twenty. Because after reading this text, that guy would have had two major questions that aren’t easy to answer.

The first is, how can I be sure this is good news? And the second is, why does it matter?

So let’s just give the best answer I can to both of those questions, really quickly. Firstly: how can I be sure this is good news? The reason why this is an important question is because we’ve seen goals like this go wrong over and over again throughout history. Dictators proclaim lofty goals—sometimes even admirable goals—and destroy their people in order to make those goals a reality. This is what happens when human beings wield this kind of power: it does not go well. So any reasonable person would probably be a little dubious about such a prayer for a king.

But ultimately, this is still good news for us, and here’s why: our King—the perfect King for whom the people pray in this psalm—was crucified. We should make no mistake: the cross was not a bump in an otherwise smooth road. It was not a crisis to be solved. The cross was the plan all along. This King, to take power, would take the place and the punishment his people deserve, for them. The crucifixion was not a defeat—it was a coronation.

Jesus Christ was brought lower, and endured more, than any human being in all of human history, for the human beings he would rule. This is no ordinary reign, and he is no ordinary King. So those of us who feel nervous about someone holding this kind of power can relax: Christ is the only being in the entire universe who can wield that power rightly.

Secondly: why should the perfect reign of this perfect King matter?

To put it simply, the kingdom of God has already come in Jesus Christ, and will be fulfilled when he returns. If we belong to God, we are already citizens of his kingdom. And the fact that we are citizens of his kingdom means that we are inevitably going to be out of step with the world around us. The apostle Peter said that we are exiles on this earth: sojourners and strangers, belonging to one kingdom but living in another.

Every expat knows what that feels like, being in one place but really belonging to another. On the one hand—at least if you love your country—it makes you homesick. You want to be there, with your family, in your country, with your people. And since you’re not there yet, you’ll do whatever you can to experience it, even a little: you’ll listen to music or eat food or watch movies that remind you of home. At the same time, because you love your country, you want others to discover it too. You want them to know what it’s like to live there, you want them to understand and to love the things that you love.

We are spiritual expats in this world. We have our hope and our assurance in the promise that Christ is coming back, and we will be with him forever, on a perfected earth, rid of the effects of sin. And while we’re here, we want to experience every possible foretaste of this kingdom over which Christ reigns. We want to be with his people and sing his music and speak of his goodness; we want to be reminded, every chance we get, of just how good he has been to us.

And while we want to experience these foretastes of the coming kingdom, we also want to be a foretaste of the coming kingdom to others. We want them to know where we’re from; we want them to desire to be with us when we finally get to go home.

So we pull them close and we love them well and we tell them the story of our King, praying all the while that they will know him as we know him, and love him as we do, and worship him as we do. Because he deserves every song, every word, every act of obedience, every moment of thankfulness. This is our King, today. And one day we’ll see him.

“What Is My Life For?”: The Psalmist's Guide to Aging

(Psalm 71)

When we planted this church I was thirty-three years old—old enough to have some life experience behind me, young enough to still feel young. But we’ll be celebrating our ninth anniversary as a church in less than a month. What God has done in the church, and in my own life, is mind-blowing to me. Some of it has been really joyful; some of it has been really hard; in all of it, God has proven himself faithful.

A lot has changed for me over these last nine years.

One of the most profound changes is also the most obvious: I’m nine years older. Nine years didn’t used to feel like a lot—it feels huge now. I’m in my forties. I’ve been married for twenty years. Our son, who was a toddler when we planted, is now in middle school, and we’ve added another kid who’s also in school. I’m still young…but I definitely feel older.

I know a lot of you feel the same thing. For a long time, the church was almost exclusively made up of young singles. Now, many of you who were in your twenties when we started are in your thirties, some of you even edging towards your forties. We even have some people in the church who are older than me, which for a long time seemed like a pipe dream. (Can I just take a minute to thank the brave souls who have stuck in with this church full of young adults? It’s a hard thing to do, and I thank God for you every day. I’m still praying for a lot more people who are in their fifties, in their sixties, and even their seventies, for reasons I’ll articulate in a little while.) We’re a slightly more homogenous mix than we used to be.

But we are still, on the whole, a young church filled with young people. And as time goes on, I feel the burden more and more deeply as a pastor to help prepare young people for aging. You need to know that every time I get up to preach, my goal is never to simply help you be faithful over the week to come, or over the next month, or the next year. My goal is always to preach the Bible in such a way that you have what you need to stay faithful for the rest of your lives—so that thirty, or forty, or fifty, or sixty years from now, long after I’m not here anymore, you will still be faithful to Christ.

That is why I love this psalm. It’s a psalm written from the perspective of an old man who has lived a hard life. Some people think it’s David who wrote it, since it shares some elements of language from Davidic psalms; there’s no way to know for sure, and it doesn’t matter. Regardless of who wrote this psalm, it paints a picture of what godly maturity looks like. This is what it looks like to be faithful over the long haul.

We see the psalmist exhibiting three habits, three characteristics, and this is where we’ll spend our time: we see remembrance of the past, steadiness in the present, and hope in the future.

Remembrance of the Past (v. 1-6)

The psalm begins with a kind of prayer of invocation—an opening plea for God to come to his help. V. 1:

In you, O Lord, do I take refuge;

let me never be put to shame!

2  In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me;

incline your ear to me, and save me!

3  Be to me a rock of refuge,

to which I may continually come;

you have given the command to save me,

for you are my rock and my fortress.

So we don’t know exactly what this man is going through, but we know he needs help. He’s asking for God to deliver him, to listen to him, to save him, to protect him. Many psalms begin this way.

What makes this psalm different is the grounds for his prayer—the reason why he feels confidence to pray it.

V. 4:

4  Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked,

from the grasp of the unjust and cruel man.

5  For [so here’s the grounds for his prayer] you, O Lord, are my hope,

my trust, O Lord, from my youth.

6  Upon you I have leaned from before my birth;

you are he who took me from my mother’s womb.

My praise is continually of you.

The reason why the psalmist feels confidence to pray for God’s protection and help is because God has been a constant in his life for as long as he can remember. In other words, he sees God as his home, not as a hardware store. He doesn’t dip in and out, coming to God when he needs help and then continuing his own way. God is his rock and his fortress, he said in v. 3, his hope and his trust ever since his youth.

And in v. 5, he only speaks as far back as his own memory goes; in v. 6, he goes beyond that, saying that God was enough to support him even when he was in the womb. God was with him at conception, he was with him at birth, and he has been with him every day since.

We all understand why this should make a difference. We’ve all been lost and had to ask directions. How do we do it? We say things like, “Sorry to bother you, but would you mind helping me?” We call on people, without having any assurance they’ll actually be able to help us, and we apologize for inconveniencing them.

That is very different from the way we ask a close friend, or a member of our family for help. In those cases, we turn to them because we know they’re dependable, and we don’t hesitate, because we know they love us.

Our past relationship with a person is vital to our present relationship with them. Who are the people you turn to when you’re most in need? We turn to the people we know are dependable, because they’ve been dependable in the past. If we’re feeling shame, we turn to the people who have been confronted with our shame and not despised us for it, but loved us. If we’re feeling fear, we turn to the people who have comforted us.

So the first step to Christian maturity we see here is simple: remember the past.

If you’ve been a Christian for a while, take a regular trip down the proverbial Memory Lane; think often about God’s goodness to you in the past—those times when it seemed like everything was falling apart, and God helped you make it through. The way that he drew you to him and saved you. We take Communion every week because it is a constant reminder of our baptism—a reminder that the Covenant that God has made with his people, which we celebrated on the day of our baptism, is still in effect today. Keep a tally of God’s past graces to you. Write them down even, and keep that list in a place where you can return to it easily and often. Remember.

And let me add this: since a lot of you are young, you may not feel like you’ve got a lot to put on that list, because you haven’t had that many years with God at your side; the psalmist talks about God being with him from his youth, but you’re still in your youth. If that’s the case, it’s okay. These past graces are sort of like ballast in a boat, the weight that keeps it from capsizing when waves get high; this kind of spiritual ballast takes time to build up. Start keeping track of these things now, and build on it as the years continue. (And if you need help knowing where to start, Psalm 103 is a great place—it’s what’s true of all of us, whether we’ve known Christ for fifty years or five minutes.)

That’s the first step: remember the past.

Steadiness in the Present (v. 7-16)

The next sign of maturity we see in the psalmist is steadiness in the present…despite all the reasons he may have for wavering.

7  I have been as a portent to many,

but you are my strong refuge.

8  My mouth is filled with your praise,

and with your glory all the day.

9  Do not cast me off in the time of old age;

forsake me not when my strength is spent.

10  For my enemies speak concerning me;

those who watch for my life consult together

11  and say, “God has forsaken him;

pursue and seize him,

for there is none to deliver him.”

12  O God, be not far from me;

O my God, make haste to help me!

13  May my accusers be put to shame and consumed;

with scorn and disgrace may they be covered

who seek my hurt.

14  But I will hope continually

and will praise you yet more and more.

15  My mouth will tell of your righteous acts,

of your deeds of salvation all the day,

for their number is past my knowledge.

16  With the mighty deeds of the Lord God I will come;

I will remind them of your righteousness, yours alone.

So we can see a sort of back and forth between two things here. The first is the situation he finds himself in. There are people coming after him, because they see his age and the strength that is failing him, and they’re thinking, Now’s the time. Go after him. He’s weak, God is gone. That’s what’s happening; that’s what he can see.

But he won’t stop at what he can see. Because of what we saw before—his knowledge of God’s faithfulness in the past—he knows where to turn for help in the present. He doesn’t let himself get flustered by the things he sees, because he knows where his strength comes from.

This is why he praises God. This is why he asks God (v. 9) not to cast him off in his old age, when his own strength is spent. That’s why he asks God (v. 12) to hurry to help him. That’s why (v. 14) he hopes continually in God, and praises him even more, proclaiming God’s righteous acts (v. 15-16).

His knowledge of God’s faithfulness in the past has made him steady in the present. Parents experience this when they first have kids. If you’re a parent, you’ll probably remember the first time you changed a diaper, or the first time you gave your baby a bath. It’s terrifying. Those things are slippery, and they wiggle, and you’re so scared of killing them that you do a horrible job. (Poor Jack was blue by the time we finished giving him his first bath, because we were so careful, we took way too long.) But you keep at it, and eventually you start to understand how things work. You learn where to hold them so they won’t slip, how to get the diaper closed easily and quickly. Before long, you’re doing it without even thinking about it. Experience makes you steady.

Experience outside of God can do that too, but not for the same reason (and it can also have the opposite effect: if you have bad experiences, you can become fearful). The psalmist is steady because he knows that he cannot do this on his own, and he knows that God can, and God will. His experience of God has given him confidence that God truly is trustworthy. So he doesn’t fear when the same things happen again; he knows what to do. He knows to turn to his God for help, and keep proclaiming his righteous acts, because God has proven himself to him in the past.

Again, for those who are young this can be difficult. We may not be very steady in the present—we may waver and be full of doubt—because we haven’t had enough experience with God to feel that full confidence. So what do you need?

First, you need to pray that God would help you grow from your experience, help you see his hand at work in the ordinary trials of life.

And second, you need to surround yourself with older Christians, who can help steady you. Nothing is more calming in a storm than being with someone who isn’t afraid of it—who has been through it before (or other situations like it), and who knows how to remind us of what is true. So surround yourselves with older Christians. Spend a lot of time with them. Impose yourselves on them—seriously. A young man did that with me last year—asked me if we could meet for lunch, and then asked if we could meet up regularly, because he felt he needed it. I loved that. Of course, I can’t do that with everyone, but that’s the right initiative. Find someone older—it doesn’t have to be a pastor—and ask them if you can spend time with them, to talk or read the Bible together, or even just to be there, to observe them and learn from them. Get a first-hand experience of what it looks like for a mature Christian to weather difficult times.

And if you happen to be one of these older Christians, there’s a specific call here for you (and for me too—the older I get the more I realize I’m really bad at this): be that support for your younger brothers and sisters. Often they may not dare come to you, because no matter what you tell them, they don’t want to impose. So invite them in. Seek them out. Put your arm around their shoulders and invite them to walk with you. They need you.

Hope in the Future (v. 17-24)

So in this psalm we see the psalmist’s maturity manifested through remembrance of the past; steadiness in the present; and lastly, through hope in the future. And his hope here is different than it is in many other texts, because it is not the hope of heaven. The psalmist’s hope here is the truth that despite his old age, his work is not finished yet. There is still more to be done. V. 17:

17  O God, from my youth you have taught me, he says,

and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds.

18  So even to old age and gray hairs,

O God, do not forsake me,

until I proclaim your might to another generation,

your power to all those to come.

19  Your righteousness, O God,

reaches the high heavens.

You who have done great things,

O God, who is like you?

20  You who have made me see many troubles and calamities

will revive me again;

from the depths of the earth

you will bring me up again.

21  You will increase my greatness

and comfort me again.

We have to note that the psalmist’s prayer that God would protect him and revive him and raise him up from his troubles is not self-centered. When he proclaims that God will increase his greatness in his old age, he’s not talking about greatness for himself. He’s made it very clear that his goal, the center of his vision, is God alone—God’s power, God’s goodness, God’s faithfulness. These are the things he’s living to talk about, still, as an old man. And God’s faithfulness to glorify his own name, to show himself to the world as the great God he is, motivates the psalmist’s prayer that God would not let him simply flounder in his old age, not let him sit idly by, collecting seashells while he waits for death to come.

Because God is faithful to glorify his own name, the psalmist knows that God will give him strength to continue the work that he has pursued all his life. We don’t know what that work was, exactly. We don’t know if the psalmist was a priest or a Levite or simply a faithful Israelite. But we do know his goal, and that goal was to make God’s name known to those around him, and to those who would come after him.

This is what we see in the concluding verses of the psalm: continual praise to God, despite the psalmist’s obvious troubles, so that others might know how good God is to his people. V. 22:

22  I will also praise you with the harp

for your faithfulness, O my God;

I will sing praises to you with the lyre,

O Holy One of Israel.

23  My lips will shout for joy,

when I sing praises to you;

my soul also, which you have redeemed.

24  And my tongue will talk of your righteous help all the day long,

for they have been put to shame and disappointed

who sought to do me hurt.

He counts on God’s justice in regards to those people who seek to do him harm, and fixes his eyes on his objective, the purpose of his life: to celebrate the God of his salvation and proclaim his goodness and faithfulness every day of his life, until the end.

I’ve thought a lot over the last few weeks about how this psalm might sound to many of you. Many of you are still decades from retirement; old age seems to be the furthest thing from your mind.

But it is coming. I’m not that old—I’m forty-two—but one shocking thing that everyone knows but no one believes until it happens to them is that the years go by incredibly fast. I feel like I was twenty years old last week. I was talking to Loanne a couple weeks ago about the little things we don’t notice when we look in the mirror, until we do: I’ve got gray in my beard, and it’s slowly creeping into my hair. I’m getting tiny wrinkles in front of my ears, which is one thing I’ve always noticed in older men. It’s happening.

It will happen to all of us. And if it doesn’t, it’s because you died young—that happens to a lot of people too, though no one believes it can happen to them. I thought a lot about our friend Edouard Nelson during our vacation, because the anniversary of his death in a climbing accident came while we were doing what he was doing when he died: enjoying time with our family in the mountains. Rock climbing with his kids, slipped, hit his head…and that was that. It can happen in an instant.

So the question in the back of our minds at all times—the question I know was in Edouard’s mind all the time—should be this: What is my goal during this day, these hours, these minutes, that I have in front of me? Notice I didn’t say, What should my vocation be? There are reasons to ask God if he’s calling us to be pastors or missionaries or to serve in the church in specific ways—but that’s not what the psalmist is laying out here. He’s getting at the why of our lives—what am I living for?

The psalmist is living to proclaim God’s goodness and faithfulness and might, so that the people around him and the people who come after him might know who God is, and worship him and proclaim him in turn to others.

This psalm will speak to you in a particular way if you’re getting older. But it should also be a help for those of you who are younger, because the psalmist’s goal should be your goal. No matter how much work you do in your life for Christ, there is always more work to be done. There will always be people in your orbit who do not know Christ, who have never heard the good news of the gospel. There will always be people around you who don’t know that their sin deserves God’s righteous judgment, and that Christ came to take that sin and to die in our place, and that if we place our faith in him we can be declared righteous by God, and freed from the judgment we deserve.

So why are you living your life the way you are? What is your life for? What is your family for? What is your home for? What are your relationships for? These questions are never irrelevant, whether you’re ten years old or twenty years old or eighty years old. If you’re young, then you have the opportunity to decide—while you still, Lord willing, have time ahead of you—that your life will be devoted to making Christ known.

I understand why that may sound like a burden, but it’s not. This psalm begins with prayer that God will deliver the psalmist from trouble. But it ends on an overwhelmingly joyful note. The work that is still in front of the psalmist is not a burden, but a joy. Because he knows he is doing that for which God created him. He knows why he is here. He knows that nothing else he could do with his life would be as worthwhile or as eternally satisfying as living it for him.

And if you’re one of the few older people in this church—let’s say, my age or older—these questions should be more pressing than ever. We’ve seen our lives shrink. If God doesn’t take us before old age does, we have maybe half our lives left? Maybe less?

What will that time be for? What will our retirement be for?

We always talk to single people about 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul tells them that their singleness is a gift, because they are not distracted by the burden of worrying about their families—they have all the time and space they need to devote their lives one hundred percent to God.

If retirement had existed in the time of Paul, I am convinced he would have said something very similar about those years. Retirement is a wonderful thing—because now, we are unburdened by a job and free to devote our lives more completely than ever to the kingdom of God. What does that look like? There are a million possibilities, but at the very least, it looks like doing what the psalmist is doing: proclaiming God’s goodness and faithfulness to the generations that come after us. It looks like investing in the young, coming alongside them and helping them see why living for Christ is better, and how to do it.

No matter how old we are, no matter where in life we find ourselves, there is always more to do. And doing it for the right reason—no matter what the circumstance—is what Christian maturity looks like.

How do we do it?

We remember God’s faithfulness in the past; we lean on the truth of the faithfulness of God in the gospel for steadiness in the present; and we count on God’s faithfulness in the future, to give us what we need to finish well.

This is the trajectory of the Christian life, from birth to death. This is how we live well. This is how we waste nothing.

1 Pet 1.13-16

hope for holiness (1)

(1 Peter 1.13-16)

Jason Procopio

Our text today is 1 Peter 1.13-16. And if you have your Bibles in front of you, you’ll see that Peter begins v. 13 with the word “Therefore...”

It’s a good rule of Bible reading in general, when we see this kind of word, to ask why it’s there. He’s telling us that there’s a reason why he’s saying what he’s about to say, and we need to know what it is. If we don’t know, we need to go back and find out before continuing. 

So what is that therefore referring to? 

Last week we saw that God is keeping an inheritance for us, and that we are being kept for our inheritance. This is the reason why we can have joy in the face of suffering, in the face of hardship, in the face of every difficulty which comes our way because of our faith in Christ. We have joy in our sufferings because our joy isn’t dependent on our circumstance, but on our hope—and our hope, which is in Christ, never changes or deviates from its course, no matter what happens to us. This is why we can have joy in any and all situations: the gospel of Jesus Christ never changes, and the glory God has revealed in the gospel never fades.

This is what Peter has just spent twelve verses reminding his readers, and it is absolutely vital that we remember it, because everything he’s going to say from here on out is being built on what he said in these first twelve verses. He’s telling us that because we know all of these things are true, we are to respond in very specific ways. If we know these things are true, it will change the way we live.

This is the basic premise of the rest of chapter 1; and it’s important to note that today’s text and next week’s text do go together—there’s just a lot packed into those two passages. So this is part one of a two-part message, which will take us through chapter 2, verse 3 next week.

In these passages Peter is going to give us five distinct imperatives, and he’s going to give several qualifiers along the way. We’ll see two today, and three next week.

Imperative 1: Set your hope on future grace (v. 13).

V. 13:  

13 Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 

Okay, so in the French translations we don’t see it that well, but those first two verbs “preparing your minds for action” and “being sober-minded” are participles: they describe the way we should set our hope on the grace that is waiting for us. So let’s take it step by step: how should we set our hope on the gospel?

Firstly, we prepare our minds for action. Literally, this phrase translates as “girding up the loins of your mind”—it’s a goofy phrase, but it’s significant. In Peter’s day, the men wore long robes that came down to their ankles. You can’t run in robes like that (ladies, am I right? trying to run in an ankle-length skirt is no easy task?). 

So in a battle, or if a man needed to run or do physical work, he would pull up the hem of his robe to about mid-thigh, wrap it around his lower waist and then tie it between his legs: it would give him the freedom he needed to run. 

Peter is saying, essentially, that we need to be ready to run. But he’s not talking physically—he’s talking about the mental equivalent of getting ready to go to work.

The reason why this is so important is because many of us tend to be naturally lazy regarding the life of our minds. We do things, but we don’t think them through. We form opinions, but we don’t think about why we hold those opinions. We say things, but we don’t consider whether or not those things are worth saying. We act, but we don’t consider whether or not those actions are worth taking.

In every moment, in every situation, in every choice which lies before us, we have to be ready to think through what we’re doing and why. How would God have us respond to this? Why do I think God would have me respond in that way? What am I basing that assumption on? What has he already told me in his Word concerning how I should approach this situation, and why? These questions should always be in the back of our minds, so that we can easily bring them to the forefront when they are needed (because they are needed every single day, and many times during the day). 

Secondly, we are called to be sober-minded. This is similar to the first, but it’s subtly different. If preparing your minds for action is a call to anti-laziness, being sober-minded is a call to anti-silliness. He’s calling us to set our minds on things that matter. And it’s not an action he’s calling us to; this is the way we as Christians should be. 

One of the hardest things for us to remember as Christians is just how serious our life in Christ is. It was already difficult in Peter’s day—which is why he needed to give this reminder—but it has become exponentially more difficult in our modern world, because we have been trained to set our minds on things that are of absolutely no consequence. 

When I was in the hospital I had a lot of time on my hands, and I was so exhausted I couldn’t get a lot of work done. So I found myself on YouTube a good deal, and I realized after a couple of days that I had spent significant amounts of time watching videos of a competitive eater trying to see how much he could eat: butter, eggs, steak, spicy foods, jars of mayonnaise… Inevitably he’d eat until he either gave up or got sick.

Now, while it was inarguably fascinating to watch, when I realized how much time I’d spent watching this fool, it struck me that I was now dumber than it was a few days before. Like, if I was this exhausted, it would have been more helpful for me to just take a nap. 

We have trained our minds to be filled up with things which aren’t necessarily dangerous, but which aren’t anything. There’s nothing sinful about watching a guy eat a jar of mayonnaise…but there’s nothing useful about it either. And the problem is that if we have been trained like this—if this is the default mode of our minds—we will have a hard time thinking through serious things. When we finally find ourselves in a situation which requires all of our mental faculties, it’s difficult, because we are no longer used to thinking well.

I don’t want to be alarmist here, but there are few things more problematic for our Christian lives than this problem of mental weakness. In expecting Christians to prepare their minds for action and to be sober-minded, Peter is reminding us that the way we think about the gospel, and the way we respond to the gospel, are deadly serious. We are called to put forward this effort, every single moment of our lives. There is no downtime from this; there is no vacation. As long as we are in this world, we must be alert.

Now it’s not quite enough to say, “Be ready,” because eventually you’ll get exhausted, or you’ll be lulled into a false sense of security, and you’ll let your guard down. We are very easily distracted. So Peter doesn’t merely call us to be ready, to not let ourselves be distracted. He tells us positively what to do; he shows us how to be active in this.

Here’s what he says (v. 13 again):  

13 Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 

So setting our hope on the grace waiting for us is what we are called to do, and having prepared and sober minds is how we are called to do it. Don’t just try to avoid distraction; fill up that mental space with something else. Think about, meditate on, focus on, set your hope on the grace that you will receive when Christ returns. So it’s not the grace that we received when God saved us; it’s a future grace that’s promised to us, which we haven’t yet received.

What is this future grace? It is the grace of being glorified, transformed, to be like him. It is the grace of not just knowing Christ by faith, but by sight. The grace of seeing everything wrong in this world made right. The grace of living for all eternity on a renewed earth, in renewed and glorified bodies, enjoying the presence of our Savior forever.

This is what should be first and foremost in our minds, all the time. We talked about this last week: this is how as Christians we can rejoice in suffering. Our suffering, for whatever reason, does absolutely nothing to take away from the promises we have in Christ. No matter what happens to us here, what will happen to us when Christ returns doesn’t change one bit. 

Now how do we do this? What does Peter mean when he talks about hope? Hope, in the biblical sense, is far bigger than what we usually mean by that word. This isn’t like when we say, “I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow.” Wayne Grudem described it this way: “[Hope in the New Testament] does convey a sense of confident expectation, an expectation strong enough for one to act on the basis of it.” 

I’ve used this example in the past, but biblical hope is more like when you’ve been separated from your family for a long time, and finally you get on an airplane, and you fly a long distance to go back home. The plane lands, and you start to get ready; you gather your things, you make sure your hair isn’t crazy after 12 hours on the plane… And you do it all with excitement, because even if you can’t see your family yet, you know that they’re waiting for you, just on the other side of that wall. 

That is what biblical hope looks like. It is the eager expectation of the things promised to us—an expectation so solid and confident that is moves us to act in a certain way.

This is what Peter expects of us: to think about the grace that has been promised to us, not once, or occasionally, but constantly. This isn’t something we do; it is the default mode of our minds. This hope is always in the foreground, and always in the background; it is the lens through which we see everything else. It is the sun in our mental and spiritual solar system; we can’t look directly at it quite yet, but by it we see everything else clearly.

Concretely, this means that there is a lot we may need to cut out of our habits and routines, which distract us. There are certain activities, certain habits—and they’ll be different for all of us—which either help us keep our hope set on the grace promised to us, or which distract us from setting our hopes on this grace. A good way to figure out which activities or habits are good or bad for you is to consider what your spiritual life is like when you indulge in them, or when you take them away. 

We all have things we enjoy, and we’ll notice after a while that when we do these things, strangely, we find ourselves loving Jesus more afterward. And we all have things that make it harder for us to love Jesus. So we need to think very concretely here. I find that if I get too much sleep (more than 7 hours) or not enough sleep (fewer than six), when I get up in the morning to read my Bible, I have a hard time concentrating on it. I’m exhausted during the day, so I get distracted, and forget to think through the eternal implications of what I’m doing.

The same holds true for what we eat, physical activites, what we do for fun, the books we read, the music we listen to… I find, for example, that certain types of music—and not Christian music, just normal music, in which Jesus is never mentioned—weirdly make me think about him. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is for me. Things that have absolutely nothing to do with spiritual matters have a big impact on our spiritual lives. And we need to know ourselves well enough to know what habits are helpful, and what habits are distracting.

Set your hope fully on the grace you will receive at Christ’s return. That’s the first imperative.

Imperative 2: Be holy, for God is holy (v. 14-16).

The second imperative is, in some ways, even harder than the first. Peter tells us that now that we have this glorious hope in Christ, we must not go back to the things which characterized us before we had it.

V. 14-16: 

14 As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, 15 but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, 16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

OK, so we get the basic gist of this imperative: obey the Word of God, put your sin to death, be holy. We’re not surprised to hear this coming from the Bible; this is what we expect when we come to church—to be told, “Live like this, don’t live like this.”

But because it’s not surprising, often we skip over it too quickly when reading—it’s so obvious, we imagine we don’t really need to give it much thought. Peter actually gives us a lot of details here that are helpful in our fight against sin—in our fight against our rebellion against God (that’s what sin is). 

First of all, he reminds us of why this is difficult. He doesn’t just say, “Don’t sin.” He says, “Do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.” That is very different. The word translated as “passions” here is a strong word: it means a longing for something, a craving. 

Every once in a while, the American in me starts to come out, and I get a craving for American junk food. Now thankfully, I don’t always have access to it. But when that craving comes on, nothing in the world can make it go away, except getting what I crave. (And until I do, even if I eat something else so I’m not hungry anymore, I’m not entirely satisfied—I still want what I was craving.)

This is what it feels like when our passions take hold of us—whether it’s sexual sin, or anger, or whatever. Our minds shut down, and we are led by our guts. Our guts are not trustworthy, because they never take into account what is true, but only what we feel. And the scary thing is, we can’t really do anything, on our own, to stop it. We can decide to do something, or to not do it; but we can’t decide to want something we don’t want, or to stop wanting something we do want. We can’t make our desires, our passions, go away on our own.

I say all that to underline the fact that seeing this word “passions” in the Bible should be a relief to us—the Holy Spirit, who is inspiring Peter to write this, knows that this isn’t just a question of deciding to do some things and to not do other things. He knows that there are desires involved, and he knows that we can’t just make our desires go away on our own; he knows we need help.

So that’s why he doesn’t tell us to not desire, to not have passions, but rather to not be CONFORMED to these passions. We can’t do anything about having our sinful desires—we can’t decide to not be tempted to sin—but with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can resist the sinful desires we have, while God does the work in us to change our hearts and give us new desires, as he promised in Ezekiel 36. 

So there’s the commandment. Don’t be conformed to the sinful desires you’re still carrying with you, the leftovers from before you knew God. Resist those sinful desires. Don’t let them determine your obedience. 

And Peter gives us two foundations for this commandment—two reasons why this commandment should be followed. The first is that our sinful desires are (v. 14) the passions of our former ignorance. 

By the way, this is the first indication in the letter that Peter is speaking mainly to Gentiles. A Jewish person, just through their culture and upbringing, would not have been ignorant of what God expected of them. They could reject what they know, obviously; they could choose to rebel. But at least they wouldn’t have been ignorant of what God called them to be and do.

A Gentile wouldn’t have had that advantage. He or she would probably have grown up never hearing of the one true God, never understanding the story of the Bible, never knowing that certain attitudes and actions, which to us seem normal, are actually abhorrent to God. Gentiles are naturally ignorant of these things. 

And Peter’s saying that this is the state his readers were in before—and us, too (most of us aren’t didn’t grow up in Jewish families). He says, “Before, you didn’t know God; you didn’t know his ways. And your ignorance of God led you down paths, toward desires which, unbeknownst to you, were killing you—were taking you further and further away from what God created you to be.”

And the gist of his argument here is, basically, “You know better now! Now that you have met Christ, now that he has saved you, you have grown in your knowledge of who he is and of what he has called you to. It’s not perfect knowledge yet, but it’s definitely better: you’re no longer ignorant.

“So don’t act as if you still were. Don’t act as if you didn’t know any better. Don’t be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. Let the truth you now know determine how you live.”

The second foundation he gives for this commandment is simple: God is holy, so we should be holy. V. 15:  

15 but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, 16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

This is significant, and we’ll see it again multiple times in this letter. Peter, like Paul, is constantly referencing the Old Testament in his writings. In v. 16, he calls back to one of the most fundamental commandments God gave his people in the desert after the Exodus (we find it in Leviticus 11.44): God tells his people, be holy, for I am holy.

When we say that God is holy, it means that he is completely separated from sin, and dedicated to glorifying himself. And because he is the one who called us from death to life, who caused us to be born again, we should be as he is. 

Now, can I just state the obvious? This commandment to be holy because God is holy is one of the scariest commandments in the whole Bible. (Second only to Matthew 5.48, in which Jesus says, You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.) And to illustrate why it’s scary: raise your hand if you have ever managed to be holy as God is holy. If you raised your hand, you’re either a self-deluded optimist or an actual liar.

None of us are holy; not a person on planet earth, besides Jesus, has ever obeyed this commandment, or can obey this commandment. So then why would God give it?

He gives us this commandment because he knows it will be impossible for us; that’s the point. God wants to make it crystal clear that everything he calls us to do and to be once he saves us depends entirely on who he is and what he has done. That he is both the source and the power of the Christian life.

Look at what he says in v. 16: You shall be holy, FOR I am holy. His holiness is the basis for our holiness. 

There are two really important things that Peter helps us see here, by quoting the Old Testament the way he does.

The first is that this commandment from the Old Testament, from the Mosaic Covenant, is still necessary and applicable for the people of God. He’s just spent the first twelve verses of this letter detailing the amazing grace God has given us. And then in v. 16 he affirms an Old Testament commandment in light of this grace we have received.

That’s surprising for many Christians, because often we don’t see the Old Testament as being particularly gracious. How many times have we heard it? The Old Testament is about the law; the New Testament is about the gospel. The Old Covenant that God established with the people of Israel is a covenant of works; the New Covenant that Christ established with the church is a covenant of grace.

But clearly Peter doesn’t agree. He tells us to set our hope fully on the grace that we will receive at Christ’s return…and then calls back to one of the most fundamental commandments of the Old Covenant: be holy, for God is holy.

This should change the way we see the Old Testament, and the Old (Mosaic) Covenant. The Old Covenant was also a covenant of grace. God showed the people of Israel the grace of knowing him; the grace of knowing his will, which he revealed in the law; the grace of receiving the means to be made right with him (through the sacrifices and the worship in the tabernacle). Way back in Moses’s time, in Leviticus 11.44, God’s own holiness overflowed in grace to his people; his holiness was already the basis for the holiness of the people.

So if we see that the Old Covenant is actually a covenant of grace, we can more easily see how Jesus Christ didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. 

He fulfilled this commandment for us: he was holy because his Father was holy. He was perfect because his Father was perfect.

Christ essentially took the grace God showed the people in the Old Covenant, and he made it complete. He offered himself as the perfect, once-for-all sacrifice for his people. He lived a sinless life, perfectly holy in every way. And then he took this perfection, this holy life, and he exchanged it for our sin. He took our sin, and gave us his holiness. He received our punishment; we receive his reward. He took his perfect, sinless, holy life, and put it on us, like a jacket which covers us.

Think of it this way. When you move to a foreign country, and you want to remain in that country indefinitely, your goal will be to integrate that country—you’ll want to learn the language, learn the culture, participate in society. And you can do some of those things informally. But there will be a certain number of things you can’t do yet. You won’t be able to vote. You won’t have all the rights afforded to a citizen. If you want to fully integrate your new country, you’ll need to be naturalized; you’ll need to become not just a resident, but a citizen of that country.

This is what happened to us—this is what we saw two weeks ago, in v. 1-2. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have been made citizens of the kingdom of God. His life became our life, and his death became our death. God no longer sees us as foreigners; we are citizens of his kingdom, made holy through the life and death and resurrection of his Son. 

Now, when God looks at us, he doesn’t consider our multiple daily sins; he considers and sees and rejoices in the holiness of his Son, given to us. He looks at us, and he sees holiness—the holiness of Christ. Because of that, we are brought into his family, into his kingdom, into his presence. We are given his Spirit. And in his presence, by his Spirit, we grow to be like him.

The only reason any of us can make any strides toward holiness is because Christ was holy for us. We can become holy, for he is holy. His holiness is the basis and the source and the motor for our holiness.

Peter is reminding us of all of this by connecting the grace we have received in v. 1-12, the grace we will receive in v. 13, and the holiness to which God calls us in v. 15-16. He reminds us that God is the one who caused us to be born again (as he said in v. 3), he is the one who called us—who called us with power and efficacy, bringing us from death to life. And so because the one who called us to life is holy, we too should be holy in the everyday conduct of our lives.

Our Hope in His Grace

We’ll dive into this more deeply next week, when we continue with this passage. But as we leave this place and go about the coming week, we need to remember what Peter is doing in these four short verses.

Peter is calling us to hope. He’s calling us to hope on the basis of the work of the Trinity (as we saw in v. 2): the new birth given to us by the Holy Spirit, the inheritance obtained for us by the Son, and the perseverance which the Father predestined for us. And if we have such a great hope, we will see a definite change in our lives—we will become more and more like Christ, holy as he is holy.

So this week, as you go about your lives and prepare to continue in this text, put your hope in God’s holiness. It is only because God was holy for us that we can be holy like him. It is because Christ was holy that we are declared holy, and that we can become holy. 

Like we saw, this is an impossible task for us. So put your hope in the Spirit’s power to make you holy. In his ability to work this miracle in us, to bring this impossible commandment to fruition in our lives.

And lastly, put your hope in the future grace you will receive. If you have faith in Christ, you have already received God’s grace in the past: you have already experienced his faithfulness to do what he promised. This past grace we have received is a foretaste of the future grace still waiting for us. When Christ returns, we will see God’s grace overflowing for us, and continuing to overflow for us, for all eternity.

If your hope is not in God, and his holiness, and his power, and his grace, you will not be able to live for him. You will inevitably lean on your own severely limited power, and you’ll fail—because he commands something we can’t do on our own. Hope in him, brothers and sisters; and on the basis of that hope, be holy as he is holy.

1 Pet 1.17-25

Hope for Holiness (2)

(1 Peter 1.16-25)

Jason Procopio

Last week we did part one of a two-part sermon, which I simply entitled, Hope for Holiness. We were in 1 Peter 1.13-16, and today we’re going to be continuing through the rest of the chapter—we’ll be in 1 Peter 1.17-25. So today’s sermon isn’t a separate sermon from last week’s—it’s the second part, the continuation of what we started to see last week. In these verses, Peter gives us four separate imperatives; we saw the first two last week, and we’ll see the next two today.

So just real quickly, here’s what we saw last week.

Peter told us that because of everything he had told us in v. 1-12 about this incredible grace we have received in Christ, and the incredible grace which is promised to us, we are called (v. 13) to set our hope fully on this future grace. We do that by actively and very seriously engaging our minds in thinking about, meditating on, contemplating, this future which has been promised to us. That’s the first imperative.

And he told us (v. 14-16) that setting our hope on the grace which is waiting for us will have a significant impact on our lives—we will live differently; we will not return to the life we lived before we knew God, but we will resist the sinful desires we had before, and we will be holy in all our conduct, because he who saved us is holy in all his conduct. So that’s the second imperative: be holy because God is holy. 

Imperative 3: Take your holiness seriously (v. 17-21).

The third imperative is a continuation of the that last one, but it’s subtly different, and it goes further. Let’s read, beginning in v. 17.

17 And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, 18 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. 20 He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you 21 who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God. 

So like last time, Peter gives us this central imperative: conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile. That’s what he’s telling us to do in these five verses. And we know what he means because of what he said just before, in v. 15-16, which we saw last week. He said,  15 but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, 16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” Be like God in all your conduct, because God is the one who saved you from your sin.

So when Peter tells us to conduct ourselves with fear throughout the time of our exile, what he means is that we must take this holiness to which we are called very, very seriously. Some people, when they think about holiness, take it no more seriously than they would take watching a romantic comedy.

This is going to be hard for some of us to hear and think about, and here’s why. I hope what we saw two weeks ago (particularly in v. 3-5) did you a lot of good. It did me good. Knowing that God caused us to be born again, that he is keeping our inheritance for us in heaven, and he is keeping and preserving us, FOR that inheritance, is incredibly good news. It is on this assurance that we base everything we do as Christians. 

The thing is, for a lot of people, this assurance we have in Christ, and this commandment to conduct ourselves with fear, don’t logically go together. They think, we don’t need to conduct ourselves with fear, because our salvation is assured. 

If we’re not careful, if we’re not careful in how we think about the gospel, we can unintentionally come to imagine that because we have such a great assurance, it doesn’t matter what we do, or how we live. We’ve been chosen by God, and he has forgiven us…so let’s just do what we want. We’ll see something we want to do, and we’ll think, a) It’s not that big a deal; and b) I’m already saved anyway, so what difference does it make? And so we let ourselves go with it.

Now of course most people wouldn’t say it quite like that, but how often do we live like that? How often do we find ourselves indulging in what we see as harmless sin, because we know God has forgiven us in Christ?

If that is how we think, Peter’s assertion here should be a glass of cold water thrown in our face. 

Think of how often we organize our lives in such a way that allows us to sin more easily. We know that if we put ourselves in this situation, in this particular context, it’s going to make resisting temptation more difficult. But there’s something we want in that situation, in that context, that convinces us to accept the risk. (For example, going to your girlfriend’s apartment alone in the evening, when you know you won’t be interrupted. You know the risk of sexual temptation will be harder to fight when you’re alone on the couch for hours on end, but you want to spend time with her.) We are absolute experts at inventing stories in our mind that we can buy into, so that we can keep doing what we want to do. 

And the fact that we do this proves how little we take our holiness seriously. Take whatever situation you are willing to put yourself in—if you were convinced that you would catch a deadly illness by doing that, you wouldn’t do it. 

I never want to preach to scare people, or to diminish the assurance of those whose faith has taken a beating. But there are some truths we need to hear, even if they are difficult. And this is one of them. Not just despite this wonderful assurance we have in Christ, but precisely because of that assurance, we must conduct ourselves with fear: we must take our holiness seriously.

But as usual, Peter doesn’t just tell us what to do; he tells us why to do it. 

He gives us seven reasons why we are to take our holiness seriously.

1. We take our holiness seriously because  (v. 17), God judges impartially according to each one’s deeds. 

I know this can come as a shock to some of us, because we’re so used to thinking of God’s judgment as something that is reserved for sinners. But it’s not. God judges all of us, impartially, according to our deeds.

Now, there is a subtle difference in the way God’s judgment works out for those who have faith in Christ and those who don’t. Those who don’t have faith in Christ are judged according to their works, and they receive the consequence of that judgment—and that’s bad news. All of us have rebelled against God, all of us have sinned and fallen short of his glory. Even our good deeds are far from meeting the standards of God’s perfect righteousness: on our own, even our good deeds are sin, because we are naturally dead in our sin, and dead people can’t do holy things. So if all these people have to fall back on is their own innate goodness, they will find that that’s not enough—not by a long shot. They will be judged for their sins, and receive eternal punishment from God for those sins.

If we have faith in Christ, the same thing happens, but the result is different. God judges us impartially, according to our works—which are also sinful, and also far from the standards of God’s perfect righteousness. The difference is that is we are in Christ, Christ receives the punishment of our sin, instead of us. At the cross, God put all of our sin—past, present and future—on Christ, and punished him in our place. So his judgment is rendered according to our deeds, and the sentence is placed on Christ instead of us.

In the same way, Christ was judged impartially by God, according to his deeds… But all of his deeds were perfectly holy, completely sinless. So God gives him a perfect “not guilty” verdict…and then places Christ’s reward for his holiness on us. 

That reality, rather than alleviating the seriousness of the way we live once we are saved, should increase it. And we’ll see why a little later.

2. We take our holiness seriously because (v. 17 again) this God who judges impartially…we call him Father. 

In other words, this isn’t just an exchange between a judge and a person being judged. This isn’t merely a legal matter. If we have been saved by faith in Christ, we have a relationship with God: we call him not just Lord or Master or Judge… We call him Father.

When a child’s relationship to his father is a good one, he doesn’t just obey in order to not get in trouble. He obeys because he loves his dad. Because he knows that his dad knows what is best for him. Because he knows that his dad wouldn’t tell him to do something that would steal his joy or cause him harm. 

With this word “Father” comes an incredible amount of trust. We take our holiness seriously because the God who calls us to be holy as he is holy is our Father, and we love him, and trust him.

3. We take our holiness seriously (v. 17) because we are in the time of our exile. 

You don’t invest in real estate on the edge of an active volcano. You don’t buy a home which you’ll never occupy or profit from. You might visit these places, for a short time; but you won’t put down roots there. You’ll put down roots in a place which will last, and which you love; and you’ll spend your time away from home thinking about your home.

Remember what Peter said all the way at the beginning, in v. 1: we are elect exiles. We are living in this world, but we do not belong to this world. We have been adopted by the kingdom of God. Our time on this earth is not all that we have: our time here is a time of waiting, and anticipation, and preparation—preparation for the day when Christ returns, and this world will be cleansed of sin and renewed, and we will live forever with him—perfectly free from sin, perfectly holy.

So while we are here, in our exile, we begin investing in our true home. 

I know it doesn’t often feel this way, but our time on the new heavens and the new earth will be infinitely longer than the time we spend in this life. Ten million years from now, our seventy, eighty, one hundred years on this earth will seem like a bad dream: a blip on the timeline. 

Holiness is the distinctive feature of the kingdom of God. Since we know that this is not our home, but that we belong to his kingdom, we will take our holiness seriously.

4. We take our holiness seriously (v. 18) because we have been ransomed from the futile ways inherited from our forefathers.

Remember what we saw last week: Peter is talking primarily to Gentile believers who did not grow up in an environment where God was known. And as a result of that ignorance, they were led astray into sin, into futile ways—into practices and attitudes and ways of thinking that did them no good, but only harm.

And Peter reminds us that now, we have been brought out of that. We are no longer ignorant. We know God now; we know (at least partially) what he expects of us. So we must stop acting as if we didn’t know better, as if we still had to follow in the ways of our forefathers.

5. We take our holiness seriously (v. 18-19) because we were ransomed...not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

Imagine you buy a car, and somehow you swindle the salesman into accepting Monopoly money in exchange for that car. Your ownership of that car is going to be in jeopardy; you’ll know that sooner or later, someone’s going to come knocking on your door and say, “That isn’t your car; you paid with Monopoly money, and that’s not acceptable currency. Give it back.”

What Peter’s getting at here is that our ransom, our freedom from sin, is sure and solid, because it wasn’t bought with things that won’t last. The certainty of our salvation corresponds to the value of the currency with which it was purchased. 

Brothers and sisters, you were purchased at the highest price imaginable—the life of God himself—the Son, the second person of the Trinity, who was beaten and who bled and who suffered and died to set you free: a perfect, spotless, once-for-all sacrifice for our sin. So your salvation is sure. And because the price of your salvation was so infinitely high, the holiness which your salvation brings you into is to be taken seriously.

6. We take our holiness seriously because (v. 20) your salvation, purchased with his blood, was the plan before the creation of the world.

Christ’s coming to earth—his life, death and resurrection, through which we are saved—was God’s plan before he ever said, “Let there be light.” This isn’t just a personal matter. This isn’t just about me, and what is good for me. When God saved us, he brought us into a plan which is much bigger than ourselves—a plan by which he has glorified himself through the salvation of not just individual people, but of his family. We take our holiness seriously because it’s not just about us, but about a plan which is an eternity old.

7. And lastly, we take our holiness seriously because (v. 21) our faith and hope are now in God. 

In other words, our holiness validates everything we now believe. You say your faith and your hope are in God? Great. How do you know? It’s definitely not because of what you think, because we all know how easy it is to intellectually affirm one thing and to do the opposite.

How do you know your faith and your hope are in God? It’s not just because of something you feel—it’s not some deep feeling of conviction about spiritual things, even if that feeling of conviction is important. It can’t be just about what we feel, because (as we saw two weeks ago) those feelings will be tested. Those convictions will be put to the test when we suffer. That feeling of conviction is how God often draws us to himself and convinces us of the truth at the beginning, and thank God for it—but there will be moments when you don’t feel it the same way anymore.

So how do you know? You know that your faith and your hope are in God when they change you. When you remember what he has taken you out of, and where he’s brought you now, that through Christ he has made you believers in himself, and that in the light of his gift to you and his glory, you grow to be like him. You know your faith and your hope are in God when you remember those truths, and they change you. They drive you to stop doing and thinking certain things and to start thinking and doing other things: they drive you to become more like Christ. Imperfectly—absolutely. Slowly—definitely. 

But surely. Conduct yourselves with fear during the time of your exile, because you have been ransomed from the sin which was holding you prisoner. Take your holiness seriously.

Imperative 4: Love those who share your new birth (v. 22-25)

Now at this point, after unpacking all that in a very short amount of time, Peter turns to his next imperative. Imperative 4 is that we love those who share this salvation with us.

V. 22:  

22 Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, 23 since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; 24 for 

“All flesh is like grass 

and all its glory like the flower of grass. 

The grass withers, 

and the flower falls, 

25  but the word of the Lord remains forever.” 

And this word is the good news that was preached to you. 

Peter calls us to remember what God has done for us in Christ, and to be holy in response to his grace. And what is the ultimate manifestation of holiness? It’s love. If you have no love for your brothers and sisters—no matter how unlovable they actually are—then you have not embraced the gospel.

Now I want to be careful here. People who have a certain type of disposition will hear me say that, and be tempted to think that love is holiness. That is, they’ll live in a way which assumes that love is more important than not sinning. And that is not what Peter is saying here.

He’s just spent several verses insisting on the importance of being holy because God is holy—of putting our sin to death. And he says that when we live like this, when we put our sin to death and become holy, as we purify our souls and obey the truth, as we obey God in every tiny and seemingly insignificant way he calls us to obey him, we will love people we never would have loved before. 

We see this because once again he uses the participle in v. 22—a past participle this time. HAVING PURIFIED your souls…BY obedience to the truth…FOR a sincere brotherly love…love one another earnestly. The imperative is that we love one another, and the way we get there is by purifying our souls by being obedient to the truth.

What is this truth? Peter tells us in v. 23-25: he says that we have been born again, not the imperishable, living and abiding word of God, which was preached to us. God saved us through the proclamation of his Word—of the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This Word is living, it is active, it is perfect and it is permanent. 

And he says that our salvation through this Word, and our obedience to this Word, will produce in us love for one another. 

Now the question is, why does this follow? Why would holiness produce love in us? 

I’ve thought long and hard about why that is, and it’s not easy to articulate—in some ways, it’s the kind of thing you have to experience to really believe. 

The closest I can come to explaining it is to think of soldiers. I went on a big World War II kick at the end of summer, read several books on the subject. And one of the things that constantly comes out of testimonies of soldiers in almost any war is the incredible closeness that comes out of fighting the same battles together. They become like brothers, even if they had nothing in common before, because they've been through the war together.

This is what obedience to the gospel does in the church. We realize that we have been born again; we realize that God’s Word brought us to life in Christ. We remember how little we had to do with it: that everything we have is of grace. 

And so, knowing what we have been brought into, we start to fight our sin…and as we do this, as we grow in obedience to the Word, we look around and begin to realize that we aren’t the only ones waging this war. Our brothers and sisters in the church are waging the same war, pursuing the same obedience, putting the same sin to death. And we realize that God calls us to do it together, to fight together, to be a family in our fight. 

When you are in the war against sin together, you grow to love your fellow soldiers. You look around and start to realize that your brothers and sisters are just as weak and frail as you are; that they need the same help you do. And you want to be for them what you need them to be for you.

Not only that, you look around at your brothers and sisters in Christ, and you realize that we’ll be with each other—we’ll be part of this family—forever. The Word which saved us, the Word which preserves us, is not a temporary Word for a temporary time—it is the perfect and imperishable Word of God— 

The grass withers, 

and the flower falls, 

but the word of the Lord remains forever. 

This is what the gospel does in us, brothers and sisters. It causes us to see ourselves rightly, and to see one another rightly. And thus, it produces in us love for one another. It pushes us to surround one another, and help one another obey the truth we now know.

Conclusion

Peter’s going to speak more about this holiness working itself out in community next time. But for now, let’s go back over what we’ve seen these last two weeks. 

In 1.13-25, Peter gives us four distinct imperatives: 

1. Set your hope on future grace.

2. Be holy, for God is holy.

3. Take your holiness seriously.

4. Let your holiness work itself out in love for the family of God.

Now I may be weaker than many of you (I almost definitely am); and I know I can be pessimistic. So if I’m honest, when I look at this list of imperatives, my initial, gut instinct is fear. Any talk of holiness is frightening to me, because it’s not just something we can think about or contemplate. Holiness is, necessarily, incredibly practical. It’s something we are, yes—but what we are necessarily bleeds over into what we do, in the way we live. 

Holiness is not a condition for salvation, but it absolutely is a result of salvation. If we have been saved, WE WILL BECOME HOLY. And if we are making no progress in this regard; if we still love the same things and follow the same passions as we did before we were saved, we should not have any assurance that our salvation is actually genuine. 

Now, of course my goal here isn’t to discourage you. We must remember that our salvation is progressive. It doesn’t happen all at once. And often it happens so slowly that we can become downtrodden. John Piper said once that the thing that makes him doubt the most is the horrible slowness of his own growth in holiness. It happens far more slowly than we want it to.

But it should be happening. 

Among Christians there are two types of people. There are those who are trying to live for God, but having a hard time with it—they’re struggling with their sin, they’re fighting their sin, waging war on their sin, to put it to death. This is the way Christians should be living. If you’re fighting your sin, then you’re doing what God calls you to do. So if you’re struggling with your sin, don’t worry—putting our sin to death is always a struggle. At least you’re fighting. 

Then there are people who don’t struggle at all. And these are the ones who should be worried. They live with no healthy fear of God’s holiness; they don’t struggle at all with sin, because they let themselves go with it: they allow themselves to be conformed to the passions of their former ignorance. These Christians shouldn’t be able to call themselves Christians without a good dose of worry, because no matter what they say, there is zero evidence in their life that they have true, saving faith.

And Peter is assuming here that the Christians to whom he is writing aren’t doing that. His warning isn’t a threat, but a reminder of how serious our holiness is.

So through this text, it is very possible that the Holy Spirit is singling you out this morning. It’s very possible he’s dragging your eyes down to the text and pointing, saying, “You see that? You’re not doing this.” It’s very possible he’s calling you to realize that the gospel you claim to love is not working itself out in holiness in your life.

Now the good news is, of course, that you don’t have to do this alone. The Holy Spirit works in us to will and to do. 

But as he works in us, he expects us to work—to do what he has called us to do, and to put aside the sin he calls us to put aside.

So let this text lovingly—but firmly—ask your soul some questions today.

In what are you placing your hope? What are you counting on to make it in your walk with Christ? Are you waiting on a kind of supernatural surge of power that doesn’t ever seem to come? Are you—maybe without even realizing it—counting on your own strength and your own willpower to resist sin? Peter is clear—if you are putting your hope in anything but the grace that will be brought to us, you won’t make it. Your sin will get the better of you.

So, brothers and sisters,

preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ (v. 13).

Why are you working to be holy? If you are, that’s a good thing. But why are you doing it? Are you trying to live in obedience to the Word of God because you’re afraid of punishment? Are you doing it because you’re worried about what others will think about you if you don’t? Are you doing it because you’ve been going to church so long that you don’t really know any other way to live? If you are pursuing holiness for any of those reasons, there will come a day when those reasons aren’t good enough.

So, brothers and sisters, look to the holiness of the God who saved you as motivation and fuel for your holiness.

14 As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, 15 but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, 16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

Are you taking your holiness seriously? Is this something you even think about? When you do think about it, do you think light-hearted thoughts? Do you wake up in the morning ready to engage in war against your sin? If not, then your sin will get the better of you every single time. You’ll be the weak gladiator in the ring ready to be eaten by the lion. Do you realize the price at which you were bought?

Brothers and sisters, take your holiness seriously.

If you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, 18 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. 

And lastly, is your holiness working itself out in love for your brothers and sisters? When you think about holiness, and attempt to live for God, is it a purely personal matter—just between you and him? To what extent do your brothers and sisters factor into your thinking? Do you realize that you’re not in this alone? That you need your brothers and sisters, and that they need you?  

Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart.

1 Pet 1.1-2

The Trinity Saves

(1 Peter 1.1-12)

Jason Procopio

First of all I just want to thank everyone who’s been praying for me, I had a bike accident almost three weeks ago that left me with three broken ribs and aneurisms in my spleen. They almost had to take the spleen out—it was touch and go, that’s why they kept me in the hospital for so long—but in the end they operated and managed to stop the bleeding. So I’m still hurting, and I can’t do much, but I’m here. (And just to let you know, I’ll be keeping a very good distance from everyone today—Covid is a slightly more seriously threat to me during recovery, since a strong cough could cause my spleen to rupture. So if I stay away, it’s nothing personal; it’s doctor’s orders.)

But I really appreciate all of your prayers and support, and I’m really happy to be able to be here with you today. It’s been a long time.

Church took on a weird life during the confinement, as it did for every aspect of life. So much of the way we thought about ourselves as a church was wrapped up in the faces of other people—and that’s not wrong. It’s right that a church’s life should be in part defined by the people in that church. It’s right that we should miss one another. It’s right that we should feel a little lost when we can’t see each other.

But in our sense of loss, I’m afraid it became all too easy to forget what that life was all about in the first place. We knew it wasn’t this—this isolation from other believers, this living alone in our homes or apartments for weeks on end. We knew it wasn’t that…but it may have been easy, during this time, to have focused so hard on what church isn’t that we forget what it is. 

The other strange reality we need to face is that we don’t know what the future holds. We know the virus is on the rise again, and so even if we’re thrilled to be back here, we don’t know how long we’ll get to stay here. We don’t know how long this place will remain open to us, if we’ll have to go back into confinement… We just have no idea what the future holds.

So the question we have to ask ourselves is, in this context of an uncertain present and an uncertain future, what is the church meant to be? It can’t be just the sum total of our activities, or the time we spend together, or even the people we love. If our activities are pared down, and the time we spend together is now drastically limited, and we don’t get to see the people we love as often as we’d like…what are we? What else is left? What makes the church the church in a time like this?

That is why today we are going to begin digging deep into the letters of Peter. I’ve been thinking of it as “Connexion Reboot”—after the dizzy spell that the first confinement was, we need to be firmly anchored in who we are, and what we are meant to do here. And Peter does a masterful job of telling us these things in his letters. So we’re going to be here for the next few months. (I promise we won’t take as long as we did with Luke, we’re talking eight chapters in total. But those chapters are very rich.)

Before we get into Peter’s first letter, let’s get situated. V. 1 of chapter 1 reads:  

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia...

So if you’re new to this, this can look a little strange. Back in Peter’s day they had the habit of putting the “Love, so-and-so” at the beginning of the letter, before the “Dear so-and-so.” It makes sense—back then there was no postal service, no return address written on an envelope. Letters were brought by courier or someone who volunteered to bring it. So when the letter was read aloud to a group of people (as it would have been here), they’d want to be clear on who had written the letter.

So we see that this letter was written by “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ.” Peter was one of Jesus’s closest disciples during his ministry. This is the guy we all identify with. He was well-meaning but impulsive, wanting to do well but never quite grasping the nature of what needed to happen at any given time. He was the one who suggested they build tents for Elijah and Moses during the transfiguration. He was the one who cut off a guard’s ear at Jesus’s arrest. He was the one who walked out on the water with Jesus. And he was the one who denied him three times, before being forgiven by Christ and sent out (the word “apostle” means “sent”) to proclaim the good news of the gospel and establish the church.

Now to whom is he writing? V. 1 again: 

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia...

Peter is writing to Christians “of the Dispersion”. The term “dispersion” in the Bible is typically used to describe the scattering of Jews throughout the world. But the term is used in a broader way here, since elsewhere in his letter Peter makes it fairly clear that he’s writing to primarily non-Jewish (Gentile) churches. He’s writing to churches in cities which are all found in what is modern-day Turkey. These cities were all quite diverse, but heavily influenced by Greco-Roman culture and still under Roman control. So there would have been some Jews among them, but Peter makes it clear later on that his primary focus in his letter is Gentiles.

Now, why is he writing? Peter frequently mentions persecution in his letter: this was probably the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Nero. Christians were persecuted by Nero because Roman culture was profoundly polytheistic—there were many possible gods you could choose from—but also heavily under the thumb of the emperor. And here come these Christians who say there is only one God, and that their principle allegiance is to him. Christian belief was a threat to not only Roman culture and worship, but to Roman power itself.

So essentially—and we’ll see this many times in the coming weeks—Peter is writing to Christians who are finding themselves increasingly at odds with the pagan culture around them, less and less at home in a world which does not recognize their God.

And honestly—what could be more timely than that?

So that’s the context—that’s what’s prompting Peter to write this letter. Since we don’t have a lot of time left, we’re going to go easy this morning and only look at the first two verses of the letter. (Don’t worry, we won’t go two verses at a time throughout the whole letter.) But these first two verses are absolutely packed. 

We’re going to see, very simply, who we are; who God is; and how and why he has saved us.

God Naturalizes (v. 1a)

Let’s start again at v. 1. In his introduction to this letter, Peter says very clearly some important things about whom he is speaking to—particularly about how he sees them, and how they should see themselves.

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia...

So there are two words you want to hang your hat on in this verse, and those words are “elect exiles.”

The word “exiles” here isn’t literal, like in the Old Testament. Literally it means “sojourners,” or “temporary residents.” If you are an “exile”, in Peter’s meaning, you are there, wherever you are, but you don’t belong there. You belong somewhere else.

Anyone who is an expat understands what this feels like. You grow up in one country, you inherit the customs and language and ways of thinking of your home country. There are things about you which are part of you, but which don’t come from you—they come from outside you, from the culture in which you were raised. 

And then you move to a different country—let’s say, for a temporary assignment for your job. You know you’re not going to spend the rest of your life here, you’re going to be returning home eventually. So you’re not going to try and integrate into the culture—there’s no point, you’ll be gone in a few months. Instead, you’re just there, surrounded by this foreign place, with a different language, a different culture, different ways of thinking. And at least for a while you feel like a fish out of water: you’re here, but you’ve still got one foot in your home country. The customs and ways of thinking, the food and the language, are discernible and visible, but you don’t understand them. It doesn’t feel like home. And you don’t want it to feel like home, because you know you’re going back to your real home very soon.

Now the analogy isn’t perfect, because most of us love to travel, and love to experience different cultures. But how would we feel if the culture in which we found ourselves was actively hostile toward everything we are as people—everything we hold dear, every conviction, and every love?

That’s what it’s like to be an exile, taking the word the way Peter is using it. It’s being somewhere, but still belonging to somewhere else.

Now what’s interesting is that Peter is addressing people in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia. And the people to whom he’s speaking, we have every reason to believe, come from those places. They’re Galatians, they’re Bithynians, they’re Cappadocians. So he’s not speaking to foreigners who have been exiled there, but to natives. 

If that’s the case, why does he call them exiles?

He calls them exiles because he knows something has happened in them to fundamentally change their identity. Something has happened to them which has so radically transformed everything about them that they are no longer truly Galatians or Bithynians or Cappadocians at all. That’s where they’re from, but they belong to another country. 

And I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying that their new country, their adopted country, is not a country on this earth at all, but rather the kingdom of God. God has taken these people, citizens of their earthly country, and he has effectively naturalized them into his world, making them citizens of heaven. They are living in their earthly countries, but they belong to a different place altogether. Something happened in them to shift them from one homeland to another.

The question is, what changed them?

God Elects (v. 1b)

And that is where the word “elect” comes in. This is a very loaded word in the Bible, so I’m going to pack a lot of information into a very short time.

The Bible says very clearly that human beings are born with a sinful nature. That means that we are all naturally inclined to sin—to rebel against God—and that is exactly what we do. That’s all we do if left on our own, even if we don’t realize it. Paul says in Ephesians 2.1 that we are all spiritually dead: that is, we have no natural inclination towards the life that is in God alone. So there is no possible way any of us would choose God by ourselves: dead people can’t choose to come alive.

But it’s worse than that: dead people can only choose dead things, but we do choose those dead things—our death is an active death. We live our lives and we want what we want, and the things we naturally want have nothing to do with the life of God, have nothing to do with the glory of God. So it’s not just that we’re dead—it’s that we love our death. We love the sin that is killing us. 

And our love of sin is the root of our problem. God is holy and perfect and good, and sin is an absolute horror to him—it goes against everything he is and everything he created us for. So when we love sin, that means we hate God, because by definition sin is everything God isn’t. I hope you can see that sin is much more than simply “doing bad things”; it is not living for God’s glory, in our thoughts, actions and attitudes. And because of our sin, every one of us deserves and sits under God’s wrath against our sin.

And that’s where we remain…unless God himself does something to change it. He’s the only one who could change it—and in his grace, he does.

In his own sovereign will, for no reason that any one of us will ever discern, God chooses to save his children. Ephesians 1.4 says that the Father chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. Before the world was formed, before he did anything else on this earth, God chose us. 

We’ll get into this a little more in a minute, but just think about this. If you are a Christian—if you have faith in Christ; if you have placed your faith in Christ for your salvation—then that is because before God created the world, he looked across time and said, “I choose to save ________.” If one day you chose to follow Christ, it is only because an eternity ago God chose to save you. And not in a general way: YOU. Specifically, you. He chose you.

Peter is writing to “exiles”, people who are living in one world but belong to another, and who are exiles because God chose to make them citizens of his kingdom. These people have been adopted by a new country, by a new Father, who reached across time and said, “I choose to adopt you. Now as you live in this world for a short time, remember where you really belong. Remember your true home.”

The result of this, we’ll see more and more as the weeks go by. Peter will show us that to live as elect exiles means being increasingly at odds with the world around us. Not in a confrontational way—we’re not going to go out in the street and start demanding people live like us. But as we grow in our faith, we’ll slowly but steadily see our loves changing. We’ll look at the world around us, and the things people love and the way they live their lives and the things they pursue…and we’ll find that we’re no longer motivated by the same things. We no longer have the same foundational convictions, and we no longer have the same objectives.

And all of this means that the way we respond to the trials we will face living in this foreign land will be very particular and specific to our true home: the kingdom of God.

But that’s for next week. For now, we are elect exiles, living in a world not our own through the sovereign choice of God. 

After establishing this, Peter goes further into God’s involvement in our lives and salvation, and he does it by displaying the work of the Trinity. (You may not be able to see it, but I am beyond excited to be in these two verses this morning.)

The Trinity Saves (v. 2)

So before we get into it, let’s read it again.  

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, 

To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, 2 according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood: 

May grace and peace be multiplied to you. 

So Peter mentions a few things that God does for Christians here, and we’ll see them all, but it’s important to note that his list isn’t chronological. He’s not talking about what’s called the “order of salvation” (ordo salutis). There are many things that happen in and for our salvation, and Peter’s hitting some of the highlights.

His point isn’t to give his readers an exhaustive summary of what it is to be saved, but rather to show that salvation is the work of the God who is Three-in-One. That’s why I called this last point “The Trinity Saves”, rather than just “God Saves,” like in the first two. I just as easily could have called the first points “The Trinity Naturalizes,” and “The Trinity Elects,” because that is Peter’s point. He wants us to clearly see that our salvation doesn’t come through only the work of the Father, or the Son, or the Spirit, but all three.

Now if you’re new to the Christian faith and you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s what I mean by the Trinity (and I’m sorry, it may not be any clearer after I’m done than it does right now). The Bible teaches that there is one true God, who created and sustains all things, and that this one true God exists eternally in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In Christianity we call these three persons of God “the Trinity”. Each member of the Trinity is distinct from the others—the Father isn’t the Son, the Son isn’t the Spirit, the Spirit isn’t the Son or the Father. But at the same time, each member of the Trinity is God—the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God.

People have tried for centuries to explain how this is possible—they’ve come up with illustrations and symbols to help us imagine how God could be three in one. Some of them are helpful, most of them are even more confusing than the simple explanation I just give. None of them gets it quite right.

If you’re confused, that’s okay—all of us are. The nature of God is, by definition, mysterious—above what we as human beings can comprehend. We all have had the experience of accepting certain things we don’t understand (the theory of relativity; or guys, if you’re married, how this beautiful woman could possibly want to be with me): this is one of those things we accept on faith.

But it’s important that we know that this is what the Bible teaches, because we want to know God as accurately as possible, even if we don’t understand everything about him. And verses like v. 2 help us enormously. Peter tells us, first of all, that his readers are elect exiles…according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

Now, many people have used this as a way to get out of what I said earlier about God electing us. And I understand why they do—it’s a troublesome idea that God would choose to save some but not others. So people say that because God knows all things, he foreknew who would choose him, and he chose those people. The problem is that a) that doesn’t make any logical sense; if God’s only saving those who would have chosen to follow him on their own, he’s not choosing anything, but merely responding to our choice; and b) the Bible clearly tells us the opposite. We saw this earlier—we were dead in our sins, and unable to choose God on our own, and he chose us in him before the foundation of the world.

So that’s not what Peter means when he talks about the foreknowledge of the Father—he’s not merely saying that God knew ahead of time what we would do. When the Bible speaks of knowing someone, it is nearly always referring to an intimate relationship—that is, it is not just about information. When God knows his people, that means he sets his affections on them. It means he pours his love into them. It means he sets them apart to be his own. 

The foreknowledge of the Father is this type of knowledge. Before the world existed, before any of his children were here, the Father knew us. He set his affections on us. And because he loved us, he chose to save us.

I’ve given this illustration before, but it’s the best I can do. My wife and I waited nine years before we had our son, and another six before we had our daughter. In both cases, our waiting wasn’t entirely intentional; it took a long time to have both of our kids. So before they got here, we had been praying for them, and thinking of them, and dreaming of them, for a long time. And for both of my kids, I had the same experience. When they finally came out, and I looked at their little faces for the first time, my first thought was, I know you. I’d just seen them for the first time, but I knew them; and I knew them because they were mine.

The Father’s foreknowledge is that kind of foreknowledge. An eternity before he created us, he set his love and affection on every one of his children, and because his heart was set on us, he chose to save us.

Secondly, we are elect exiles…in the sanctification of the Holy Spirit. 

The Holy Spirit does a lot of things in us. He gives us faith to believe; he opens our eyes to see the truth in the Word of God; he gives us power for the life he calls us to live. And one of the most fundamental things that he does is that he sanctifies us. That is, he changes us, from the inside out, so that we might be like Jesus Christ. Not just live like Jesus Christ, but be like Jesus Christ.

God described this sanctification through the prophet Ezekiel, by saying he would remove from our flesh the heart of stone, and give us a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36.26-27). He’s talking about a complete rewiring of everything we are. When we become citizens of heaven, we begin to take on the characteristics of heaven.

It’s a progressive thing—it doesn’t happen all at once—but it does happen: we grow into it. I grew up in the United States, and I’ve been in France for sixteen years now—more than a third of my life. There’s still a lot about me that’s very much American. But over sixteen years I’ve adopted a lot of characteristics that are definitely more French. You can’t help it: when you are adopted by a new country, you begin to take on the characteristics of your new country.

That is what happens in us when we become citizens of heaven, but far more completely, through the work of the Spirit. He takes what was spiritually dead in us and brings it to life. He reorients our desires and our thoughts and our attitudes, so that we might love what God loves. He changes us. And the change he works in us brings us into step with the Son, which is what Peter says next.

We are elect exiles…for obedience to the Son. 

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became a man, lived a perfect, sinless life. And during his life and ministry, he taught his disciples, not just how they ought to live, but how he himself lived. Every single teaching of Jesus is a description of how he himself lived, what was precious to him, what was essential to him. 

I have two younger brothers. When we were kids, they obviously looked up to me, imitated me, wanted to be like me—for better or for worse. That’s how it is with all siblings who have a good relationship: the little brother imitates the big brother.

Paul tells us that through Christ’s work, God has made him the firstborn among many brothers (Romans 8.29). You see what I’m getting at: our big brother Christ teaches us how we ought to live, by showing us how he lives. The Father set us apart as elect exiles in order that his Spirit might make us like Christ, that he might help us live as he lives.

But all of that is only possible through what Christ accomplished after his ministry was finished. That is why Peter adds, finally, that we are elect exiles…for sprinkling with his blood. 

Under the Jewish sacrificial system, a pure animal was sacrificed in place of the people, for their sins; and the animal’s blood was sprinkled on the altar, as a sign before God that the people’s sin had been punished. These sacrifices had to be offered on multiple occasions, over and over, because no animal is sufficient to pay for the rebellion of God’s people.

Jesus Christ is the perfect sacrifice an animal could never be. The Son—God made man—lived a perfect life,  took our sins upon himself, and was punished for those sins. His punishment was brutal, and it was bloody. His blood, figuratively sprinkled like the blood of a sacrifice, satisfied the wrath of God once and for all. Because Christ absorbed God’s wrath for us, there is no longer any wrath against us. 

And in exchange for our sin, Christ gave us his perfect life, that we might be reconciled to God. When he was raised from the dead, he applied this finished work to us—and God adopted us as his own, brought us into his family, into his nation, into his kingdom.

Our salvation is not owing to anything in us; it is only and completely the work of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit for us.

Conclusion: Grace and Peace

Peter ends his salutation with this phrase which we so often take for granted:  

May grace and peace be multiplied to you. 

This is the most fundamental blessing one human being could wish upon another. And it is anything but generic. It is Peter’s prayer that God might multiply his grace, and his peace to his children.

It is not a small thing to realize that the grace of God for us is not merely a past event. Many of us think we received God’s grace—past tense—when we received Christ. And that is absolutely true. But so many Christians assume (often without even realizing it) that once they have received God’s grace in salvation, the rest is up to them. They see the gospel as the good news of what God did for them in Christ, and not the good news of what God is still doing for them.

But every moment of every day, God is constantly working in us, to bring us into conformity to his Son. He is constantly sanctifying us. He is constantly renewing our hearts and drawing us to him and changing us that we might obey and love him. God’s grace is on display every day of our lives, if we belong to Christ.

And the result of realizing this truth is peace. When we know that God’s grace for us is neverending, we know that we don’t have to be good enough to finish our race—we can’t. When we know that God’s grace for us is multiplied day after day, we know that it’s not up to us to get the job done. God is working in us to bring us where we need to be. 

That simple truth is the antidote to most of the things that worry us. When we know that God’s grace is working not despite our trials, but in them and even through them, we don’t see those trials the same way, do we? The last three weeks rank among the worst weeks of my life. I had a bike accident that left me in the hospital, three broken ribs, I had to have an operation to repair my injured spleen, I was in more pain than I can remember feeling. While I was in the hospital, Loanne discovered bedbugs in our home for the fifth time (and she’s allergic), so she and the kids had to get out of there. Then the day before I got out, Jack started coming down with some Covid-like symptoms, so I’ve been ordered to stay quarantined from them—after two weeks spent apart.

I have rarely prayed more than I did these last few weeks. Because everything about our situation was—is—painful and worrisome. I worried about my wife and how heavy all of this was weighing on her, I worried about my family’s health, I worried about my own health, I worried about the church… But every time I prayed, I came back to the truth that the God who elected us, the God who adopted us into his kingdom, the God who saved us, is the same God who preserves us in his grace day after day after day. He is just as sovereign over my family’s situation as he was over my own salvation.

What worry can stand in the face of such assurance? Knowing these things doesn’t take away the struggle…but it does bring peace into the struggle. 

We are elect exiles, brothers and sisters, saved by the finished work of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, so that he might multiply his grace and peace to us throughout all eternity. And we’ll be spending the next few months digging deep into that reality.