of men and women are precious. The souls of men and women are
going to live on forever and ever. I don't know about you,
but I've been to several funerals lately and I have another one
to go to tomorrow. And it's becoming increasingly
grievous for me to go to funerals and to be aware of the terrible,
terrible destiny. Before us is a wooden box and
a body in a box. but there is something about
that person. The reality of that person is
actually their soul, and their soul has gone somewhere. Either
their soul has gone to heaven and is rejoicing in the glory
of God and the work of the Lord Jesus, or their souls have gone
to hell where they will forever they will forever bear the righteous
judgment of God upon their sins. They will be forever aware that
their souls are filthy. The soul that sins, it shall
die. And the longer I go on being
aware of these things and the more the Lord seems to lay them
heavily on my heart, the more conscious I'm aware of the fact
that we have in the Gospel the one thing that God has promised
to save the souls of his people. And at the end of it, and it's
this word, all flesh, the flesh of my cousin who I won't see
but I'll know is in that box tomorrow, that flesh is like
grass. And all of the glory that he
had for his 75 years is like the flower of the grass. I'm
a farmer, I don't know if you realise, but grass, everything
that has a seed has a flower. But have you seen the flowers
on grass? We see the flowers that we grow
in our gardens and they're big and impressive. The flower of
the grass, and the word here means real grass, like lawn grass. That flower is so incredibly
tiny that a lot of them, you need a jolly strong looking glass
to see them. They are tiny. God is saying
all flesh is like grass and its glory, whatever people think
is their glory, is like the flower of the grass. It withers and
it falls off. It's gone. It's gone to its destiny. But the word of the Lord endures
forever. And so we call ourselves Shellhaven
Gospel Church because it's the gospel of God which has formed
us as a church. It's God bringing his gospel
to us. the gospel that is about God
and His glory, the gospel that is about, as verse 19 says, the
precious blood of the Lord Jesus, not the common blood of a man
who came 2,000 years ago trying to save people. God says it's
precious blood. blood that was spilt with a purpose,
that God's children would be purified by it, God's children
would be saved by it. And that's what we rejoice to
proclaim. We rejoice to proclaim God's
eternal salvation. We rejoice to proclaim what Peter
proclaimed here. And let's just quickly go through
these verses. being reminded that these things
come and live in people's lives because of the preached gospel. And we need to be reminded that
God says there is one gospel that saves, there is one gospel
that is the power of God unto salvation, and God says that
all other gospels are damning to the souls of people who hear
them, damning to the souls of those who believe them. And so
when you appointed me as your pastor some time ago, you gave
me a heavy, heavy responsibility before God, because God has made
me responsible to proclaim the gospel to you people, and God
has charged me with the fact that if I do not proclaim that
gospel faithfully, then I am not free of the blood of all
men. Paul preached for two years in Ephesus and he said, I am
now free of the blood of all men because I have not failed
to proclaim the whole counsel of God. And the whole counsel
of God is what he went to Corinth about, which was to preach Jesus
Christ and him crucified, which is the gospel. And this is a
gospel which is powerful. It's powerful because of its
eternal source. And that's where Peter begins.
He talks to these people who are pilgrims of the dispersion,
strangers in verse 1. We don't belong in this world. I met a fellow down the street
I've known for 30 or 40 years and there I was with my Bible
out and my notes this morning and he talked happily for a few
minutes and then he asked me what I was doing. And as soon
as I mentioned that I was preparing for this message this morning,
for him it was just this strange thing. He had no comprehension
that it meant anything at all and he quickly went on his way.
We're strangers to them. Religion makes people do all
sorts of strange things that we see around us. But God's children
are strangers to the people who have known them the longest and
the best. They can't understand what makes
them tick. They can't understand what motivates
God's people. We're strangers. But they're
strangers who are God's chosen ones. They're strangers who according
to the foreknowledge of God the Father, and foreknowledge is
to be in a love relationship. It just doesn't mean that God
is really smart and knows a lot of things. To foreknow someone
is to be in a love relationship with them. They're chosen according
to God's foreknowledge by the sanctifying work of the Spirit. by God's sending His Spirit into
the hearts of people who are His children. To obey Jesus Christ,
and we'll see as we go on, to obey Jesus Christ is to trust
Him, is to have faith in Him. and to be sprinkled with His
blood. Be sprinkled and continually
sprinkled with the blood of the Lord Jesus. And it's brought
to us, this knowledge, this life that we have now is brought to
us by God the Father sending the Spirit to apply what Jesus
has done to us. And it brings in God's people
the prayer that God's saints pray for their brethren all the
time, may grace and peace be yours in abundance or be multiplied
in the fullest measure. To have grace is to have peace
with God. For those, and especially those
who claim to be Christians, who find that they don't have peace,
the place to go is back to God and say, am I now living like
the Galatians? living by works. Have I fallen
from grace? Has my peace gone? As Paul said
to the Galatian believers, what's happened to your joy? What's
happened to your freedom? Grace must come before peace
will come. And it's a great prayer that's
answered for God's people, isn't it? God's people have grace and
peace, and God's people know that the source of all that is
God himself. And we return his grace, with
blessing in verse 3. Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ. God in the scriptures is not
some spiritual being without historic roots. In the Old Testament
the God of the whole creation is the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob, the one Simon mentioned earlier, who makes promises and
keeps promises to his children. In the New Testament, it's the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And this is why we praise
Him. This is why we sing blessings
to Him according to His great mercy. has caused us, God the
Father has caused us to be born again. All praise that comes to God
through the lips of his people must be something that he works
in our hearts. As we've been seeing in Mark,
the one thing the Pharisees never do is rejoice. They never praise
God for what He's doing. They never rejoice. God's children
praise God the Father because they have been born again to
a living hope. Our hope is alive. This is the way God saves people,
isn't it? This is what my message today
is about and what Clay is bringing here to us. This is the way God
saves his people. Salvation that comes from God
is the result of His mercy. Salvation that comes from God
causes His people to live. As we read earlier in Ezekiel
36, God's people live as the Word of God powerfully comes
to them. And it's a hope, not in someone
dead, not in someone separated from us, but it's a living hope,
because our Saviour lives and reigns in heaven right now. It's a hope in a risen Saviour
and it's a hope for all eternity. And it's a hope that we receive
because of an inheritance. It's not something we receive
because of things we do. It's something we receive as
an inheritance because we are God's children. And what an inheritance
it is. An inheritance that's incorruptible,
that cannot perish. An inheritance that cannot be
defiled, it's undefiled, it's pure. An inheritance that will
never fade away. And it's an inheritance that's
reserved, kept in heaven. What a place to keep your inheritance. A place where Satan can't touch
it, where sin can't touch it. Nothing can get into heaven except
holy and perfect things. It's a great place to have your
inheritance. It's reserved there in that perfect
place. Then verse 5 talks about one
of the wonders of saving grace, where actually God's children
are kept, they are protected. It's a military term, they are
guarded. God says that he guards his children
and it's a present continuous. It means that God guards his
children and he continues to guard and continues to guard.
He doesn't need to sleep. He doesn't need to rest. He watches
over His little ones all the time, never ever needing to rest,
never taking His eyes off them. In fact, not only does He never
take His eyes off them, absolutely everything that ever happens
to them is because of His perfect sovereign activity in their lives. We are kept by the power of God. And this power of God works in
our lives through faith. And I love these next words,
that for a salvation which is ready, God's salvation is ready. God's salvation is finished. God's salvation is ready to be
revealed at the last time. It's been done, says the Lord
Jesus. His works were finished before
the foundation of the world. It's now ready to be revealed. And this is why God's people
are people who rejoice. God's salvation causes rejoicing. causes great rejoicing according
to verse 6. It causes rejoicing in the midst
of the fact that we live in this world where our sins and the
sins of others and the rottenness of this world cause us to be
grieved by many, many trials. And we can't make light of the
fact that the grieving is real, real grieving. We hurt, and God's
children hurt deeply. When I go to that funeral tomorrow,
in many ways I'll be hurting more than a whole bunch of other
people there. God's children hurt in different
ways. We're strangers in this world.
Our hurts are different from their hurts. God has circumcised
our hearts. We hurt in ways that other people
will never understand. We grieve over people that we
love who don't know the Lord Jesus. We grieve over people
we love who claim to know the Lord Jesus and then deny fundamental
things about Him. And we are distressed by the
fact that we know that we can do nothing about these things.
Part of the trial of Christians is that we are made to be resigned
to the sovereign will of God all the time. We will rejoice,
but we will grieve, says God. We do grieve. But this salvation
is a salvation that has come as a result of God making promises. And God writes His promises down. And these verses show us that
the prophets prophesied of this grace. We don't have something
new to proclaim to people. We have something old we proclaim
to people. We proclaim the Gospel that was
proclaimed to Adam. We proclaim the Gospel that Abel
believed. We proclaim the Gospel that Noah
believed. We proclaim the Gospel that Abraham
believed. We proclaim an old Gospel. We haven't invented anything
new in this church. What we've done is says we will
go to the old paths and we will walk in those paths. And as Jeremiah
6 says, that in those paths we will find rest for our souls. So God's salvation is consistent
with all of the scriptures. And we, as God's children living
in 2011, live in a privileged time in this world. the prophets looked forward to
the coming of the Lord Jesus. The angels, according to verse
12, they longed to see God's redemption work out. And we have
seen it through the eyes of faith. We are a privileged people according
to the Scriptures. And so therefore, According to
verse 13, we are people who are to prepare our minds for action,
because our God, who has made all of these things happen, is
actually continuing to work. The Lord Jesus is gathering His
people. He's wandering this world sovereignly,
gathering every one of His chosen. Every one of His chosen. Not
one will ever be missing. And He calls on God's children
to be obedient. We are born again to a living
hope. To be obedient to God is to trust
the Lord Jesus. It's to trust the Lord Jesus
and to rest in His promises. He says to be holy in verse 15
and then he makes a promise in verse 16. You shall be holy for
I am holy. One of the things that we want
to keep proclaiming is that holiness is not something that you can
do. Holiness is perfection. Holiness is absolute purity before
God. We cannot do holiness. God says
we can be holy and we can be holy because of who the Lord
Jesus is. Down in verse 22 it talks about
the people of in obedience to the truth, in trusting the gospel,
they've purified their souls. Remarkable, isn't it? that the
letter is about and our church is about the salvation of souls. In Acts 15 after the issues that
Peter had spending time with Cornelius and, in a sense, in
the eyes of Jews, defiling himself by eating with the Gentiles.
He then reports what God did to them. And God did the same
to the Gentiles as he did to the Jews. And he says, God says,
they purified, these Gentiles purified their hearts by faith. To have a purified heart is to
have grace from God. To have a heart purified by the
blood of the Lord Jesus is to have peace with God. I don't know how many of our
friends know what it is to have purified hearts, purified souls. if it involves you looking to
what you have done, that you might do or that you could do
in any way at all, if it involves looking into yourself for anything
ever, you cannot purify your soul. Purification of our souls
is about us looking to Jesus. looking to the only one who ever
was pure, looking to the only one who can make his people pure
and make them holy. And this is what verse 23 talks
about. that this purifying of souls
which works out in love for other people, love for the brethren,
love for people from the heart, because, verse 22 begins, for
you have been born again, not of seed which is perishable,
not of seed which is corruptible, but imperishable. We've been
born again because a seed has been sown. And this is through
the living and enduring Word of God. In our conference next
week, we will have the living and enduring Word of God proclaimed
to us. We will have God sending His
servant who will speak to us by the power of the Holy Spirit
and he'll speak living words and enduring words. And you in
your flesh are like me. We've been born of corruptible
seed. I have been born of corruptible
seed. I gave to my children many of
my attributes and I gave them corruption. I received corruption
from my parents, and they received it from their parents, and all
parents will give to their children corruption." God says that His
children are not born in that way, just as the Lord Jesus was
not born in the normal way that men are born. He was born by
the power of the Holy Spirit. He was born as a result of promise. born imperishable. And God's children are born again,
according to God, by this word of God. It's remarkable, isn't it, that
God is doing things in the preaching of His Gospel which have eternal
significance. It's a living Word and it's an
enduring Word. It's a word that comes because
there is life in God. It comes to bring life and then
it comes to bring life that endures and endures and endures for eternity. And there's another reminder
in verse 24 of the frailty of our flesh. It's just like grass. No wonder the religions of this
world offer continuous work and continuous frustration because
what they want to do is get flesh to be busy doing things, to get
people busy working and doing things. Get flesh to get active
about flesh, cleaning up flesh. It's just grass and its glory
is like the flower of the grass and eventually it will wither
and the flowers, whatever seems to be its glory, will just fall
off and they'll disappear into nothingness. And that's what our church is
about, isn't it? That we actually want to proclaim that the Gospel
is a declaration of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The Gospel
is a living and enduring word from God about His dear Son and
the way God saves His people. we find offense, and I trust
that God would increase our offense, at churches that proclaim that
the blood of the Lord Jesus is a common thing. common for all
men, that Jesus died for everyone. The Scriptures nowhere state
that, and yet if you did a survey of the churches of this land
and the Bible colleges of this land of ours, you would find
that 99% of them believe that Jesus' blood is a common thing. Jesus' blood, according to God,
and I trust He makes it according to our hearts, is a precious
thing. The blood of the Lord Jesus was
not spilt in vain. If you turn in your Bibles to
Hebrews 10.28, there's a very, very strong passage of warning
from God. There are warnings in Galatians
about people tampering with the Gospel, tampering with the finished
work of the Lord Jesus. There are warnings all the way
through the Old Testament about bringing anything to God other
than the finished work of His dear Son. But in Hebrews, as
if the writer to the Hebrews who was so familiar with the
history of that people under the law says that in all of the sins
that were committed under the law, if you wrap them all up
together and put them into one bundle, there is a sin today
which is greater than them. Verse 26, For if we sin willfully
after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer
remains a sacrifice for sin, but a certain fearful expectation
of judgment and fiery indignation which will devour the adversaries.
Verse 28, anyone who has rejected Moses' law dies without mercy
on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment
do you suppose will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son
of God underfoot and counted the blood of the covenant by
which he was sanctified a common thing." And the result of it
is that these people who will suffer this punishment have insulted
the Spirit of Grace. The blood of the Lord Jesus according
to God and according to those who are his children, in verse
19, is precious blood. We have been redeemed. We have
been bought out of what we earned for ourselves in the fall of
our father Adam. We have been bought out of what
we earned for ourselves as we lived in this futile way of life
that we inherited from the tradition of the fathers. It's a huge thing
the Lord Jesus did to buy his people out of that, to buy his
people from the vanities of life. What are people doing today but
vain things? That futile way of life, it means
vain, it means deceptive. It means devoid of force, devoid
of truth, devoid of success, devoid of results. In a word,
it's empty. and it's aimless. Life without
the Lord Jesus is futile. Let them collect their toys.
Let them enjoy their toys. God says it is futile. Let them enjoy their pleasures.
God says it's aimless. God says it's deceptive. And that's where we were until
the Lord came and redeemed us. That's where so many of the people
that we love and care for. And our prayer is that God would
bring them to a place where they would hear this living word,
they would hear this enduring word, and that God would be pleased
to save people that we love. And this word, comes to us through
the Gospel, the declaration of the Lord Jesus, the declaration
that He is God, the declaration that He has finished His work,
the declaration that He is a successful Saviour, the declaration that
He, as Peter says, is now seated enthroned in heaven and is a
satisfied Saviour. And His will is being done. And may God cause us to be excited
about what He is doing. Let's prepare our minds for action. Let's prepare our thoughts to
look over the horizon of life and be excited about what Jesus
is doing. to be excited about our Great
Shepherd gathering the souls of His people, those souls that
He purified by His blood. He will gather them. Heaven will
be full, not an empty chair. God is in the business of glorifying
Himself in the salvation of His people. And that's what Peter is writing
to us about. That's what we pray Clay would
preach to us about. That we are obtaining, we are
receiving, we are receiving as a gift of grace from God the
outcome of our faith. Verse 9, the salvation of your
souls. Let's pray.