music, even in the performing
and the singing and the enjoyment of music, your proclivities can
still overpower the joy. Perfectionism and all sorts of
little things can just be, and as a musician, those of you who
are musicians in some context or whatever sense, you can't
take your foot off the sustain pedal until the reverb of the
chord has had sufficient time to settle your soul. Otherwise
it's like, it's just too much of a cut. Can't handle it. So
I'm just waiting. Funny, isn't it? We can't even
enjoy the enjoyable things in life without trying to not enjoy
them. Turn to first Peter with me as we wrap up verse two today. But we will be coming back to
verse two every week for the remainder of this time together
in this letter. I'll read the first two verses
and then we'll pray. Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those
who are elect exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia,
Asia, and Bithynia, according to the foreknowledge of God the
Father and the sanctification of the Spirit for obedience to
Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood, may grace and
peace be multiplied to you. Let's pray. Father, as we hear these words
for the sixth week in a row, Lord, help us to not let them
just roll over in our minds. Help us to not hear the blah,
blah, blahs, the yada yadas of our internal voice. Father, help
us to not be unsettled and thinking about other things, Lord, supernaturally,
this very moment. Father, would you, by your Spirit,
set apart our hearts and minds and our thoughts and our feelings
for just a moment? Lord, would you make them holy?
in the sense that we will focus on you and meditate on you. But
when we get up from the feet of Christ, from his word this
morning in the assembly, as we gather together out of the promises
of your word, Lord, all that which is laid upon us this very
moment will still be there, but it will be different because
we will have a different perspective. We will also have a reminder
of a power that is purposeful and permanent. And that your
promises to us, your people, Lord, are irrevocable. They cannot
be changed. They cannot be negotiated. There's
nothing that we can do to decide it's not going to be for us.
Grace multiply to us. Peace multiply to us. This is
our heart this morning as we gather together, sinful as we
are, but yet righteous before you because of the righteousness
of Christ for us. And we pray all these things
to your wonderful, sovereign ear. through Jesus, your Son. Amen. Well, I'm going to focus
today on verse 2 again, specifically expanding the exegesis in this
text relating to the Trinity. I want to pull out, out of this
text, out of this little partial sentence, that's what exegete
means, to pull out, the meaning out, the meaning and the purpose
of Peter's greeting. I've been preaching out of Paul's
letters so long I forgot. It's either Paul or John. Peter. Peter's
greeting. To show some theological things,
but more importantly, not just that you would have the knowledge
of some theological things, but that you would have the grounding
in the person of God, the persons of God. I'm not even going to
deal with heresy and I'm not going to revisit Nicaea, even
though I wrote a little article on it the other day because somebody
asked me the question. So when I get a question, I write
an essay on it. So you see some days I write three essays because
I've had three questions that I felt like I needed to answer.
I'm not going to deal with that. I really want to focus on the
purpose of this letter is that we may be able to what? You do
not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with a joy
that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome
of your faith, the salvation of your souls, and in doing so,
obedience unto Christ, to love God with all your heart, mind,
soul, and strength that you may love your neighbor as you love
yourself. So there's a lot of little things in that concoction
that we need to work on. Understanding who God is, knowing
how we love him, knowing who our neighbors are, knowing how
we love ourselves, and we'll see that. We'll see that. But Peter's writing here, in
my opinion, according to the little sentence that he gave
there, is a rich theological anchor to the rest of the letter.
I've said that every week. But it's not just an anchor in
the context of whose we are and what God has accomplished, it's
a context to the anchor of who God is. The subtle revelation
that we take for granted a lot of times, that imagine being
in a culture where you've never heard the promises of Yahweh. You didn't know about a people
except these weirdos that were nomadic or enslaved that were
the people of God. You never heard the word Mosheach
or Christ or Christos or whatever language you might have been born under. You never heard
the name Jesus or Yahshua or Joshua. All the same word. And all of a sudden you get this
letter, and as a Gentile, this wasn't written directly to you,
but you get to hear this in your church, and all of a sudden you
see these things. For the first time ever, you start hearing
about God the Father and God the Spirit and God the Son in
the same sentence. Imagine what questions must leap from your
mind. Well, beloved, the outcome of
this is it will show us that the whole Godhead is operative
in love toward us in Christ. And the outcome, of course, is
several things. There's a lot of things, but the outcomes that
I'm going to focus on this morning, according to the next verses
three through nine, are going to be assurance, are going to
be joy, our love for others through obedience to Christ, and confidence
in times of trial and suffering. I heard a different perspective
this week from someone who said, just in a conversation, you know,
everybody suffers. Okay? But they made a distinction. Everybody experiences pain, but
everybody doesn't have to suffer in it. I'm like, okay, little
tongue-in-cheek, little different idea of words. And I know we're
not going to escape suffering, but I think it's a perception
issue. If I am experiencing this pain and suffering of a circumstance
or an experience, the question is, am I going to focus on the
suffering or am I going to focus on the salvation? And I thought
like, wow, that, it's not like an epiphany. It's like, I know
that, but where did it go? I mean, we've learned in our
lives, you know, we don't focus on not sinning. Because all we're
doing is focusing on our sin. We focus on loving. In our men's
meeting yesterday, we focused on the fact that we actively
operate in serving. And in doing so, our lives will
just naturally mold themselves into that which pleases God.
And that's a short statement for a lot of discussion and talk.
And the same thing is true with our personal lives. There are
things that we struggle with and we battle with in our flesh
lives and we find we put more emphasis on trying to be self-deprecating
and destructive to our own voice to talk to ourselves in a way
that eliminates the ability to ever overcome these things rather
than just focusing on what Christ has done and whose we are in
Him. And it doesn't mean that you ignore the reality of conviction.
You ignore the issues that you know are not pleasing. Why would we settle in settling
or going to sleep or in a pity party rather than resting at
the feet of Christ? There's a huge difference. It's a huge difference. Christ isn't the little, Christ
isn't the cuddle spot to where we can get away from the anguish.
Christ is the sustenance of our lives. And through Him, we live
a life that is abundant. Beloved, have you ever really
woke up in the morning about, man, this is an abundant life.
Oh my goodness, this is, I've never had such an abundant life
in my life. What a life, how many times can
we say life in the same, you know. No, we don't. We don't do that.
We find ourselves grumbling. We find ourselves being thankful
for small things. We find ourselves being frustrated with ourselves
that we're not thankful for all things. And then we move around
the day as we get started wishing we could just go back to bed
or do something different or what have you. And then we begin
to labor in our prayer life. Lord, help me pray. I'm such
a worm. Step on me, God, and watch me
squirm. I mean, you know, it's and that's not original. But
it's just one of those things that I think that we do as human
beings, and we're not even aware of it. And the alternate of that
is not just get up and fake it. We can't just get up and fake
it. It's OK. God is great. You've seen the little thing
from 10 years ago. My family's great. My life's great. Little
girl standing on the bathroom counter. Everything's great.
I mean, I wonder where she is now at 30. I pray that that's
the same attitude. We can't fake it. That's why
Peter says sometimes we rejoice with a joy that is inexpressible.
It's inexpressible in two ways, and I'm giving you a preview
of what's coming next year. It's inexpressible of two ways.
One, it's inexpressible sometimes because we can't find the expression
of joy in the midst of the great suffering. And secondly, it's
inexpressible because there's no way to express such things
because the world cannot contain it. And so the overflow of our emotions
and our feelings and our thoughts have to be arrested by the foundation
of that which is true. And beloved, I am not saying
that to you, I am sharing that with you. This is the daily battle
that James Tippins deals with every single moment of the day. And I'm very aware, 90% of the
time, of my mind. I'm with you in this. little tiny half-sentence, according
to the four knowledge of God the Father, the sanctification
of the Spirit, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for unto the obedience
to Jesus Christ, and for the sprinkling of His blood, may
grace and peace be multiplied to you. This serves as a gateway
to understanding the operational love of God the Trinity toward
us, His people. This verse succinctly, I believe,
encapsulates the actions of the Father, the actions of the Holy
Spirit, and the actions of the Son in the life of a believer.
On a continual basis, on an ongoing, it's an ongoing truth in which
we stand in the presence of God, redeemed, justified, sanctified,
holy, perfect, loved, beloved, all of it at the same time, all
the time, forever. And so it offers a theological
framework that leads to the things that I mentioned earlier, assurance,
joy, the love of others, and confidence in times of pain and
suffering. So here Peter sets the stage
for this deep dive into the nature of God's love. And this love
is not passive, it's not what God has done. As I've said, it's
an act of reality. It's who God is and it's what
God is always doing. and it's not passive, it's actively
at work and it's actively reaching out to his people in the context
of the gospel, of the good report being spread, in the context
of the gospel being reminded to his people, in the context
of the assembly, in the context of the Lord's table, in the context
of prayer and the hearing and the singing of songs, hymns and
spiritual songs and everything else. in the context of being
reminded day by day of what God is and what He has done and what
He is doing. So it's actively reaching out to you today as
His child. Salvation is a promised hope
that has been accomplished. It is a finished work, but it
is an active, present, and forever work that will always be alive
in you. So if you want the peace of the
grace of God multiplied to you, you have to put that in your,
you have to put that in the lock box of your heart. You have to put that there. And
beloved, there's only several ways that happens. You stay continually
in the reading of God's word. You stay continually connected
to God's people and you live authentically before both. You can't pretend to be what
you're not. It comes out. It comes out. So we're going to look at these
three areas, these three persons. Now when we think about salvation,
when we think about the Trinity, when we think about God, the
Scripture is very clear. That God has revealed Himself
in this way, through the Scripture, in three persons. And the persons
of God are God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. And I said I wasn't going to
get into any kind of polemical thing today, but I mean, you know,
there are many ways in which we as humans in our philosophical
approach to these truths have tried to make sense of it, but
the Bible has not given us the authority or the prescription
to go and make sense of it. The Bible has said by faith we
rest in the reality of that revelation. All right, so let me say that
in a different way. Let me rewind that and put it in words. The
Bible teaches us that God reveals himself in three persons, but
it doesn't teach us to figure all that out and try to figure
out the mystery of it. And so we're just arresting it. And in the same way, we relate
to God according to the prescription of this Bible, of the New Testament
letters, we relate to God and we worship God in the way and in the manner that the Bible
teaches us. We don't have to create new ways.
We don't have to say, well, who am I supposed to pray to, and how am I supposed
to do this, and where's the spirit working? I remember being a kid
in third, fourth grade, and I would pray at night, and I would pray
to the God, I would pray to Jesus, and I would pray to the Holy
Spirit. The same prayer over and over again, like they couldn't hear me. I mean, because that's what I
did. That's how I parsed that as a child. There's one God,
three persons. I better talk to all three of
them. And then it got to be, you know, by the time I was 10
or 11, I began to tell Jesus things that I wasn't going to
tell the Father. And I have those conversations. And the Spirit,
man, there was some, I actually asked God the Spirit one time
to really give me magic powers so that my magician world would
be real. It never happened. And there's
nothing wrong with that. Kids, you ask God whatever you
want to ask Him. You grow in that intimacy. I
mean, Jesus says it. When he doesn't answer those
prayers, it's because it wasn't best for you. It wasn't in the will
of God for you. Because if you were a wizard,
you might be mean. So let's look at this. Let's
look at the love of the Trinity. And I'll just explain these as
I get going. The first thing I want us to
see is the love of God the Father. according to the foreknowledge
of God the Father. I call that, and there are different
ways in which we could call each of these three things, and scholars
that are greater than I will ever be in my left pinky have
established different words, but for today, for the context
of 1 Peter, I fill out the terms that I have selected are not
the academic terms that are the most prudent, but the intimate
terms that are most obvious. In other words, what I see initially
and the things that come to my mind initially is what I'm sharing
with you. It could change. But it doesn't change the truth
of them. Terms change. But I call this electing love.
Electing love. Yeah, Trey's gonna check them
all. Electing love. And in this electing love, it is so misconstrued,
it is so misunderstood because we have segmented salvation in
our culture down to, you know, AB and ABC, and we've segmented
salvation to, you know, here's God's offer, here's man's response.
And these are decent conversations for the coffee table theologians
throughout history, and in some sense, when nobody had a Bible
but the elite, and most people couldn't even read, there was
a necessity in those who could read to really carefully parse
out what the application looked like. But the rigidity, just
like anything else, just like the Mishnah, which is the Jewish
law, the Jewish regulations, the applied theology of Israel,
I mean, it messed it all up. It missed the point, it jumped
over the beautiful intimacy, it jumped over the romance, it
jumped over the love, right into the fire pit of bondage. He just jumped over it like a
snake pit. And so there's so much that could
be said about electing love. But this reality is just something
that God has chosen to do. Just like we see that, you know,
we see marriage unfolding in the Bible and our culture, and
we'll get into this this year, but our culture has completely
destroyed the picture of the gospel and marriage because of
some of the foundational restrictions and things that they've put on
the application of such things. We were having a conversation
earlier before service about different things that we do in
our home, different ways we talk, different things. We've got an
18-year anniversary coming up. Robin and I are 28. Vulcan and
I are 28. I don't know where the rest of you guys are, but
every few years you realize, as you said this morning, you
marry a stranger. In the Gospel sense, we are strangers
to God, no matter what we think we know about Him. We are strangers
to God without the redemption that comes in Christ Jesus because
we are not holy. We are not holy. We are not righteous. We are
not perfect. Doesn't mean there's not some
good people to do some good things. I mean, people can have compassion
and love and we ought to have, especially believers ought to
have, ought to be the epitome of that. And so what's the secret
of really understanding the difference in just like a relationship versus
a marriage that depicts the gospel is it's a daily decision to love
that person actively, not with feelings, actively every single
day. And those feelings then, I mean,
that act of love does something, it changes something, it seeks
out the other's good. with our voice, with our mind,
with our actions. And we all fail at that. And
there are seasons where we don't know that we'll ever escape the
error, but God is faithful. But only Christ is the true depiction
of perfection. So God chooses to love us. God's
electing love through the foreknowledge of God the Father. This idea
is rooted in the understanding that God's love initiates our
intimacy with Him, choosing us before we chose Him. Ephesians
1, verses 4 and 5. Even as He, God, chose us in
Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be
set apart and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined
us for adoption to Himself as children through Jesus Christ
according to the purpose of His will. This is nothing but a fulfillment
of the promise that God told His people. In Deuteronomy chapter
7, verses 6 and 8, For you are a people holy to the Lord your
God. And the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for
his treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on
the face of the earth, but it is because the Lord loves you
and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers. So the concept of foreknowledge
and love and electing love by God the Father is foundational
to understanding divine love, to understanding the love of
God. Because when we say that God
loves us and we relegate that love to something that God's
just giddy over, that's infatuation. That comes and goes. Giddiness
comes and goes. I mean, how many times have you
just not liked your children? And there's little seasons of
their lives where they come in the room and you're going, oh
my gosh, if they come in this room right now, I'm going, my head's gonna
pop off. If they ask me that question, my head's gonna pop
off. And you've got enough sense to know not to take your head
off and throw it at them. Ichabod Crane story there. But you don't like them. I'm
sorry kids, we love you to death, but sometimes we don't like you.
How about kids? How about you kids? And we who are adults,
we are, one time we're kids, we didn't like our parents. But it didn't stop us from serving
and loving them. But God's love toward us is seen
in the action. And when Paul says in Romans
8, 1, that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,
it goes on to show, especially with Hebrews chapter 4 and 5,
when we start to see the aspect of the heart of Christ, what
is the heart of God toward His children? It is not one of consequence. Listen, we're not talking about
the contingent obedience of these temporal promises of the Old
Testament. We're talking about the eternal promises. If you don't work, you don't
eat. Plain and simple, that's what Paul says. When you're hungry,
go work for it. Go find something to do. We're talking about a love that
comes from God in such a way that is irrevocable, a love that
gets nothing in return, a love that has nothing to do with anything
but a promise, as He chose us in Him before
the foundation of the world. God's love is initiating and
proactive. It's a love that chooses us when
we didn't have the capacity to choose Him. It highlights that sovereign
and gracious character of God the Father. Jesus shows us the
love of the Father. by the example of his passive
obedience and that he subjected himself to be convicted of a
crime he didn't commit as an innocent, he was innocent, and
then dying a death that he did not deserve and facing the wages
of sin, which is the wrath of God, which is death for us. And at no time do we see the
scripture teaching that we are to be scared of the love of our
Father. I shared with some of the men
yesterday about a watered-down version of my understanding of
how best to keep children in order in certain aspects of parenting. And by and large, I was overly
harsh in a lot of areas. And I regret that. But the beautiful thing is now
that, you know, as those children become adults, they'll tell you
how they felt about how you did. And you know, I've been beat
up several times by mobs of people. And I think I'd rather jump into
a mob of angry people sometimes than hear the truth. But the
truth is so beautiful because it's so intimate. It creates
a vulnerability that's absolute. When Jesus was on the cross,
the expression of God the Father was absolutely, perfectly displayed. When he says these words, Father,
forgive them. They don't know what they're
doing. That's a narrative. That's a
historical truth that we see in the life of Jesus. It's not
prescriptive. We don't see that being any kind of theological
powerhouse that something happened. We're not told the reality of
what He was intending to do except to reveal His heart for the people
who hated Him. And without the Spirit of God,
as we'll see in a minute, we would have hated Him, too. We'd have loved Him just insofar
as what our relationship with Jesus would do for us socially,
financially, or emotionally. And we can parse that out, too,
and show the disciples, all of them, that are very prominent
in the narratives of the Gospels. We see, and even Dr. Luke's Acts
of the Apostles, we see We see how these people approached and
walked with Christ. There's so much of the prophets
in my mind right now, and Isaiah's there, and so much that is just
begging to be unpacked. Maybe as we get into some other
things, I'll unpack it again, but the beauty of what the scripture
teaches about God putting a new heart in us, and finding us and
embracing us. Beloved, what has happened in
evangelical culture that God is this maniacal, angry being
ready to zap somebody? And why in evangelistic efforts
and in counseling efforts and in discipleship efforts do we
continually press that? If there's one thing that the
human race knows, it's judgment, because we're full of it ourselves.
If there's one thing every human being on this world knows, when
they have a language flowing through their brain, it is vengeance. And we who have multiple children,
we know exactly what that looks like in a child. And this kid
can't walk and can't even make a complete word yet, but they
will hit their sibling in the face when they take something
from them. Or hit you in the face. That's
vengeance. That's justice. You don't do
that. Pop. We understand justice. We don't have to remind the human
race about justice and vengeance. We got that down pretty good.
We see it in the garden. We see it with the first siblings.
We see it. We don't have to remind people
of God's wrath so that they'll have some perspective of God's
grace. Now, when the story dictates it, when the scripture shows
it, absolutely, the very nature of grace is that we are saved
from wrath, right? But we emphasize the other at
the cost of peace. Is it peaceful? Man, when your daddy gets home,
I mean, I heard that a lot, you know? When your daddy gets home,
I hope daddy doesn't get home, because we're not playing football
today. You see what I mean? Man, God's going to show up.
You better not go to church this week. You better not pray this
week. Do you want to talk with somebody
who's going to judge you? God has not judged you. Listen to
this, beloved. God cannot judge you. It is apart from His character. He cannot judge you. It is impossible
for Him to judge you. It would be wicked for Him to
judge you. He would be evil if He judged you because He's judged
Christ in your place. You see, until I said to Christ
in your place, you're like, uh-oh, Tiffin's has gone off the rails.
But I mean, that's serious, that's the point. That is the tension
that needs to be built in our culture. We need to understand
because if we don't understand the love of God for us in a pure
sense, we are not gonna actively love others in a pure sense.
We are going to have, without even our knowledge, a controlling
influence over the lives of other people in a way that we think
it is for their good and may very well be, but what is better?
To live haphazardly, making mistakes together and growing or being
in having an order that is not love. And how about yourself? It starts
with you. It's all about God's faithfulness.
God's electing love assures us of our valued place in his heart.
See, I'm using imagery now to establish something that I said
wasn't necessarily the so. But because he's revealed himself
in this way, we need and we can say the heart of God, Jesus.
Well, I guess I could say that, but the scripture teaches, and
actually one of the brothers said this yesterday, that when
David was called a man after God's own heart, it was not David's
identity that he chose. It was said concerning him. Who was David? A wicked, terrible,
whiny, sensitive, nothing wrong with being sensitive, liar, murderer, and adulterer. And he deserved everything that
came to him and more. But God loved him. Just like God loves you. Not
because of who you are or what you've done. Because he chooses
to every single day. Because he has eternally loved
you in Christ. Showing you that love. Eternally. You know there's no time with
God, right? Nothing ever started with him until he created the
start of something. We are valued. It is not predicated
on our merit, but His mercy. The second part, the love of
the Spirit. So we are elected, we are loved
by God, and electing love for knowledge in the Father, in the
sanctification of the Spirit. How is it that God, the Father,
loves us in such a way, and how can He approach us in such a
way? Because what He's done is, by the Spirit, caused us to be
righteous in His eyes. Caused us to be, and that's more
of what the Son would do, caused us to be what? Set apart by the
Spirit. Well, I wanna read some books
about that. Well, good luck. These are some of these things
we're supposed to embrace. And honestly, I'd rather just get
very poetic about it rather than try to become, I don't know, try to become sterile
and clinical with it. That's the problem with theology
as it is now. I mean, other than Plummer, I've never seen I mean,
the Psalms are full of expressiveness and ohs and moans and groans
and all sorts of stuff. And the letters of the scripture
are just like, I mean, it's like, wow. And then you read commentaries
and it's like it's an Ikea instruction manual for a house. Or worse. No pictures. It's terrible. But sometimes
I think when we think about the Spirit of God, we need to just
breathe in, pun intended. We need to just breathe in and
go, wow, let's just breathe this in. And when Jesus talks to Nicodemus
in John chapter three, and Nicodemus comes to him and he says with
great zeal, I mean, imagine this man, the Pharisee, who is the
primary, the principal teacher of the Pharisees in the days
of Christ. And he comes to Jesus and he is doing so under the
cover of darkness for a reason. An implication there is for the
imagery of John's writing, the darkness and the light. And the light
shines in the heart of men. The light is Christ. And Jesus
says, I am the light. And he tells Nicodemus that people
come to the light because, they don't come to the light because
their deeds are evil. He's talking about their spiritual deeds.
But those who do, do so that it may be clearly seen that those
deeds are carried out by God. Oh, Nicodemus, you come to me.
Nicodemus says, we know all Jesus of Nazareth. I can't believe
I'm saying that. Nazareth, what good comes out
of Nazareth? I can't talk to you where people
can see me, but I want you to understand that under this darkness,
I'm confessing to you that I know that you are Meshach. I know that you are the one that
came from God. And the reason I know that is
because no one can do what you were doing unless you were sent
by God. And Jesus says, Armin, Armin,
I tell you the truth, I tell you the truth, it is so, it is
so, truly, truly, whatever you want to see in your Bible, He
says, I tell you this, unless one is born by the wind, by the
Spirit, from above, they cannot see the Kingdom of Heaven. And Nicodemus was. This wasn't a nice little conversation.
Hey, did you see those stocks today? Yeah, the index went down
about 2.2%. Oh, cool. Well, hey, give me
a call sometime. We'll chat about that. We'll do a little spreadsheet.
Nicodemus and Jesus weren't having a spreadsheet conversation about
the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was speaking life into
Nicodemus' ears and brain, and until the Spirit of God woke
those ears and brains up, he couldn't see any of it. He was
like, oh, I can't see. And the answer to somebody who
can't see is not, oh, they're so dumb, or let me explain it
with my great man mind. No. It's let the Lord God the
Spirit do the work. Lay it in there and watch what
the Lord will do. And this is the way we can have
peace in our evangelism. And so Nicodemus' response wasn't
an articulated academic treatise. It was, what are you talking
about? And he said that inside of his mind and Jesus says, don't
be perplexed. He didn't say it out loud. He
said, don't be perplexed, don't be flabbergasted. You're smart.
Are you not the teacher of all of Israel? Are you not the one
who teaches every Pharisee? Are you not the one who trains
every theologian that steps foot in the temple? But yet you do
not understand these things. It's like the wind, man. Look
at the wind. It's blowing and doing and stuff,
but we can't see the wind. We can only see what the wind's
doing. Until you can see, you can't see the wind. Quit trying
to figure out what the Spirit of God is. And who He is? Just look at what He does. He
sets you apart. He opens your mind. He breathes
into you life. He settles your spirit. He brings
rest to your soul. How? Through the simple promises
of God. If you abide in my word, and
that's manifold, that's multi... In other words, it has a lot
of different meanings. But the first and primary meaning
is that we must be in the Bible. And then my word will abide in
you. You'll bear much fruit. Paul talks about it all the time.
Peter talks about it. James talks about it. John talks about it.
And the letters are always about being in the spirit, walking
in a spiritual sense, a spiritual sense. It's not walking around
with the right understanding of the Holy Spirit academically
or theologically or doctrinally or whatever kind of funny words
we like to use in English that never existed before English. It's not about walking in a manner
that looks like other people who are actually spiritual. It's
not following a set of rote instructions on dress or speech or all this
kind of stuff. It's about testing the heart
of the matter and knowing that what I am and what I'm doing
and all the proclivities that I have and all the problems that
I might have and all the mindset that I might have and all the
issues that are going on in my life and every little piece of
hatred and love and everything else that I'm trying to battle
with, every bit of that is only possible to be brought to life
by the Spirit of God so I will walk therein by faith and I will
rest therein and I'm not going to try harder or work harder
or work deeper or any of this kind of stuff. I'm going to stop
doing those things and sit still and know that God is God and
that is the love of God the Holy Spirit to set us apart. That's it. And don't ask me to
repeat that because I don't know what I just said. I don't It's just a thing that
we have to realize that God the Spirit moves us, grows us, brings
us, teaches us. Well, the reason you're not spiritual
is you're not praying to be spiritual. You know what? Romans 8 says
that when I can't pray, my ahhh is good enough. My complaints sometimes are a
prayer of reprieve. Isn't that beautiful? The Spirit of God reflects the
nature of God's justifying love and that the good works that
we do, including our faith and our rest and the struggles therein,
is something the Spirit purposes. The Spirit's role to convict
and to cleanse and to renew us and to bring us into right standing
with God in our minds is where our assurance comes from. It's
where our confidence comes from. And we know this. And sometimes it's
evident in our lives when we don't know that. When do we finally
know this? When we've come through the season of what we would even
think that God had abandoned us. We've come through the season
of the time where we don't think we'll ever be healthy again in
our mind or our body. We come to a season of wondering if our
friendships and our marriages and our children and the relationships
we have will ever be healed. And then one day God the Spirit
reminds us, hey, you remember that? Wow. And then we get a little
arrogant. Man, look what I did. I was so
good. And then God's like, whoops, you fell in a hole again. I'm
here. Pride comes before the fall. Paul talks about this in Thessalonians,
the second letter. He says, oh, what does he say? He says, but we ought to always
give thanks to you brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord because
he chose you as first fruits. Some of the first people to know
the gospel and to understand the power of the spirit. And
he says through the sanctification of the spirit to be set apart
by the spirit and the believing of the truth. And Ezekiel 36. I want to preach through Ezekiel
so bad. Verse 26, the prophet writes
the word, the voice of God. He says, I will put, I will give
you a new heart. I want you to listen to this.
A new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove the heart
of stone. That means this rocky, hard,
resistible fortress. The stoicism. this independence. Oh gosh. And I will give you
a heart that's alive, a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit
within you and I will cause you to walk in my statutes and to
be careful to obey me. This Holy Spirit sanctification
is a transformative aspect of divine love. It opens our eyes
to see the love of the Father in electing us. And as we'll
see in a minute, to see the obedience of Christ that we might also
obey in like manner in love. And in doing so, we love God. This verse that we sit here in
2 Thessalonians 2, underscores the Spirit's work
in cleansing our conscience, in cleansing our mind, in setting
apart our lives for His purposes. And God has promised this new
heart, this new mind. In doing so, we reflect on the
holiness of God, we reflect on the love of God, we reflect on
the purposes of God. And it's a comfort to us, and
as I've already displayed, it's a challenge for us. It's not
easy because the nature of the fall is not erased. And so we can live out our faith
with devotion but not fear of destruction. And let's look at this third
way in which God the Son loves us. And we know this one, right?
We get it, right? We often get the idea of God
the Son. See, Jesus embodies saving love. Saving love, salvific love, justifying
love. Through His life, His death,
His resurrection, He offers and secures redemption and reconciliation
for God's people. John 3.16, for God loved the
world in this way that He gave His Son, the only one that He
had, that those who are believing in Him would not perish but have
everlasting life. So the believing ones have everlasting
life. Why? Because they're resting,
they're not working to salvation, they're resting in salvation.
And if we're resting in salvation because of the love of Christ
and the work of Christ, which is the love of Christ, then we
are able to stand bold before the throne of grace. We're able
to love others in like manner and it's complicated. That's
why the Bible says that we ought to be together in the assembly.
This assembly, we do not need to come here with pretense. We
do not need to come here with a mask on. We do not need to
be strangers. At the same time, your level of vulnerability is
yours. You should feel free to be who
you are to whatever level of intimacy you want to be. But
you should never fear it. And when we fear intimacy, it
is because, and we fear intimacy within the church, it is because
we've been hurt so badly. I'm just going to be honest with
you. I mean, even if it's just one time, we've got a thousand
moments of awesome fellowship and awesome love and awesome
stuff that people have done for us in the name of Christ, but
that one person, right? That one person that comes into
this fellowship and maybe here, maybe in the past, and they say
or do something to such a way that it actually destroys the
very fabric of our hope, and then we don't know what to do.
And so everything from that point forward is, yeah, I hear that
too, everything from that point forward is tainted. It's tainted. The prophet Isaiah tells us the
passion of Christ, that he was pierced for our transgressions.
He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement
that brought us peace, that through his wounds we are healed. If
we have peace, we should be at peace. And the reason we're not
at peace is because we fight the very fabric of that hope
of the love of God. We fight against the love of
God because deep down inside of us, because of the way we
were raised, because of the situations that we've experienced, because
of the way that we process our emotions, we are going to be
jaded in how we look at the love of God. And until God the Spirit
opens us up to truly see and to work through these things,
then we're always going to have issues, and it's okay because
these issues are part of our growing in grace. You can't escape it, but you
can surely live through it. So I told you in the beginning
that these three ways in which the love of God was manifest
here in this text will take us through the rest of this. So
when we hear, do not be conformed to the passions of your former
ignorance, we need to hear it through the love of God, the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When we see, put away
malice, put away deceit, put away hypocrisy, put away envy
and all slander, we might say to ourselves, well, I'm not doing
those things, but are you thinking those things? And below it, I find myself in
a lot more turmoil with what I think than what I actually
do sometimes. Because sometimes the doing is
easier to reconcile than the thinking. And the doing always comes from
the thinking. So I don't need fuel for the next explosion.
How do we do it? We taste and see that the Lord
is good. Peter says it right there in chapter 2 verse 3. So
I want you to see the connectivity. I want you to see the supernatural
working of this letter. This is why we know that the
scripture that we have, these list of letters that we hold,
are not human. in their illumination, they're
human in their construction, they're human, this pen, the
personality of Peter, I can read things, even in the Greek, you
can read, and I can tell you if it's Paul or John, especially,
they're easy to distinguish, because of the vocabulary. I
can tell you if Luke wrote it, because I don't understand half the words.
You see? Their personalities are in there,
but the message is infallible. The application, sometimes, is
personal. We see Paul saying that. I'm
telling you right now that this is what you need to do and God
has not told me to say this. I know the difference. So there's
a protection there. But how do we live in the fullness
of the love of God, this triune God? This electing love, this
justifying, set-apart, holy love, this saving and redemptive love. God's electing love calls us
to live with a sense of purpose and belonging, knowing that we're
chosen and loved unconditionally. This should inspire us to extend
the same love to others, recognizing their value as fellow humans. The love of the Spirit, we're
made right with God through the Spirit, we're called by the Spirit,
we're given understanding by the Spirit, we're called to live
holy by the Spirit, and this is not a burden, but a joyful
response to love others as we have been loved. And then the love of Christ.
We embrace the sacrifice that Christ has given us with gratefulness,
with thankfulness, and then in turn, we ought to have a life
committed, committed, listen to this, to living out a reflection,
this is from two weeks ago, a reflection, a mirroring of the attitude and
the mind of Christ. This should compel us to share
the story of this love with others, the good report. What does it
bring? It brings a lot, but I've got
four things that I want to focus on throughout the remainder of
the teaching in 1 and 2 Peter. I want to focus on assurance,
I've already said these twice, this is the third time and I'm
going to unpack them very quickly in closing. love of others, loving others,
and finding confidence in suffering and pain. Assurance. What is it? Being
certain of something. Being certain of something. We
can be certain of the love of God. We can be certain. Assurance comes from the unbreakable
bond of love between us and God through the sacrifice of Christ. I like to envision it this way
as like a father or mother would hold the hand of a child very
tightly or even pick them up and carry them in a crowded place
or a place of danger. You know, the old cliche wooden
plaque thing from the 70s or wherever it was, the footsteps
and the sand type thing, you know. The two sets of footprints,
and now the one set of footprints, and it's God carrying us. I mean,
it's hokey because we've seen it a thousand places, and it's
lost its punch, but that's not so far from reality in the simplicity
of it. Remember, Christ says that faith
as a child is what's most precious and most powerful. But Paul says
it this way in Romans 8, 38 and 39, a verse that in my 14th year
of life became so powerful I became obsessed with this reality.
Almost to the point of warrior-like confidence. To the point I would
do and approach ridiculous circumstances with almost, not hubris, with
idiocy. And I'm convinced of this, that
neither life nor death, nor angels, nor rulers, nor the things present
or the things to come, and of course, depending on what you
know, principalities, rulers, right, things present, things
to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other thing created can
ever separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord. And there's a hee-yah and a kick and a punch behind
that. Nothing. You've heard Pastor
Trey say it, you've heard me say it, you've heard Pastor Jesse
say it from this pulpit over and over again over the last
12 years. God himself can't separate you
from his love for you, because God is unchangeable. And I've got some friends and
family who would disagree with that, and they are in turmoil.
They literally, by what they order when they go out to eat
food at a restaurant, contemplates whether or not it would make
God angry. That's abuse. And I pray that you're not bringing
spiritual abuse upon you. And if you've ever been spiritually
abused by this bullpit or any other, I am sorry. I know that
that is terrible. And it affects every aspect of
your life. And we'll make it right. God's electing love. Gives us
assurance to know His love is secure. And know what we want? Isn't that what we want in everything?
We want to know when we wake up in the morning that those
who love us and that those we love are there. You know what? That's not always
the case, is it? And it's out of our control, but when everything
else is falling apart, that love that God has for us does not
end. The assurance of our salvation is also there. Now let's look
at the second part, joy. Joy is not a fleeting emotion.
Joy is not happiness. Joy is not confidence. Joy, as
Peter will see in chapter 1 there in a little bit, and talk about
verse 8 and 9 soon. I'm going to teach all of that
next week, and then we're going to break it down into several
sections. But joy is sometimes inexpressible, as I've already
said. Sometimes it's inexpressible because we can't find it, but
we know it's there. There's a resolve of joy in the
inner part of our heart. being, our DNA, if you will,
our heart, mind, soul, gut, or whatever era or epoch you might
be in in history with language. And we just can't find it, even
though we have it. And then the second part of that
inexpressible joy is the fact that sometimes we don't know
how to express it. We know it's there, but we just don't have
words because the love of God is so foreign in the comparison
of every other metaphor that's ever been given to us, living
or imaginary. What's a living metaphor? Marriage,
relationships, romance, children, those things, pets even. Our
love for nature, looking at beautiful things. Our love for music. I mean, it's so weak in comparison. Sometimes we just don't know
how to express it. Psalm 16, verse 11, you make known to me
the path of life. In your presence there is fullness
of joy. At your right hand are pleasures
forevermore. Consider the joy of a reunion
with someone you love deeply. This joy mirrors our true experience
with our Father, with our Son, with His Son and with the Spirit. So we have joy. We also have
the power and the understanding of loving others, which is obedience,
which is not burdensome, which is also loving God. 1 John 4,
11 and 12 says, Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought to love
one another. No one has ever seen God, and if we love one
another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
Love is a natural response. Loving others is a natural response
to comprehending God's love for us. But I will take that a step further
in saying without the Holy Spirit, it will never happen. So the
natural response of love comes through the supernatural power
of God's love. Sort of like a ripple effect. I mean, think about, what are
we doing? If we, like, drop a rock or, you know, we used to take
the sand, these big mud ball, you know, when they'd harrow
things at the pond as kids, and you'd skip rocks, but there was
nothing greater than throwing a piece of clay about that big
into a pond, especially if your brothers were close to the edge.
And it goes, kakaboosh, and it comes up, like, 10 feet, and
they got mud and dirt and, like, flesh-eating bacteria, like,
yeah. Brotherly love. You didn't push them in, they
were standing too close, not your fault. You shouldn't have stood too
close. I didn't see you there. I mean, you know, whatever excuse
you give your parents as you're being disciplined. But what happens
when that hits the water? The water moves and moves, and
the physics behind that is just, it's fascinating to me. And then
across the way, even if it's almost undetectable to any instrument,
the ripple of that plunge hits the shore on the other side.
Even if it's not noticeable. And the creatures that live in
there, they feel the movement of the water. They're very sensitive
to these things. And our love for others is exactly
like that. We don't have to have grand gestures.
We don't have to have huge ministries. We don't have to be like the
missionary of missionaries. We just need to start with ourselves,
and then we need to branch out into our homes and begin to do
small things. Small ways. And eventually, when
everybody is loving accordingly, one day you're gonna get the
rest of this, because Trey's gonna continue to preach it.
But we see that that is the point of maturity. that the whole body
grows up in maturity, in love, into the head who is Christ.
That's what it's talking about. It's not talking about this functional,
practical holiness and all these little nuanced ways of delivering
life every day on a silver platter to God. It's talking about loving
one another in a real tangible, simple sense. So this chain of
reaction inspires other people. And it illustrates how we can
embody the love of God in the world around us. And beloved,
we are called to love the very people who hate us. And I'm going
to be very candid. I had this conversation with
a brother on Tuesday. I am honest for the first time about this
because I didn't see it in me. I get excited and almost giddy
when I think about loving people who hurt me and want to destroy
me because it puts hot coals on their heads. And that's sinful. But there's a little piece of
me that goes, when I know someone is just like talking trash about
me and I see them and I have that little invisible sweat and
you go, I just want to go. I mean, you know, I'm not going
to tell you those things anymore, but you just you want to just
get real sometimes. But instead, the spirit of God
says, why don't you just bless them? Why don't you just buy
their meal? Why don't you just go over there
and put your hand on their shoulder and tell them you love them and
genuinely pray for them? There's just a little bit of
me. He's burning. It's killing him. And that's not right. But being honest is the point,
right? Because after a while you get
to where you're actually seeking to love these people and it doesn't
make you giddy that because God transforms their heart. And then
you're like, ah. So when you hear me say that
sometimes I'm like Jonah, that's what Jonah is. So before you
crucify me, I'm like a prophet of the Bible. Get over it. Loving others. And the last thing
we'll talk about today is confidence in times of trials. James chapter
1 verse 2, 3, and 4. Count it all joy, my brothers,
when you meet various trials of various kinds. For you know
that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and steadfastness
needs to have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete,
lacking in nothing. See, our confidence during trials
is rooted in the knowledge that they are not pointless, but they
are used by God to grow us in our faith. And the image to me, and I love
art, I love art of antiquity, and more recently in the last
year or so, I have really began to just press into the sculpting
world. I think that is fascinating.
Looking at these sculptors of antiquity who all they had was
just like, they didn't have sandblasters and roto zips and I mean, just
tools, just hammers and chisels and how many blows and hard knocks
and breaking off big chunks of things, but that's sort of how
it is in life with the Lord. We have confidence in our times
of trials. And every hard blow, every chip, every big chunk,
we go, that'll never heal. God is molding it to something
better. When I was 13, 14, my mom gave
me this puzzle, 500 pieces of an Oreo cookie stack with some
milk. And I finish it, and there's
a piece missing. I'm like, what the? This is trash. We found the piece. We framed the thing, and now
I don't even know where it is. So I've been looking at eBay to
buy another one. Why? Just because that's what I do.
Nostalgia. I just started to think about
that and think that sometimes when things fall apart, sometimes
when we experience pain and the pieces break off, we think we've
got to keep those pieces for the future. We've got to find
a way to make it something as good as it was, but an ultimate
reality in the economy of grace is that God is chipping those
things away in a sense that even if we do put them back together,
there's going to be pieces that are missing or pieces that are
broken. There's going to be something that's not perfect. And that
is part of the joy of the perfection of the love of God with us in
every season of life. We don't have to have it perfect.
We don't need to go back the way things were. God is creating
something new out of the chaos. And I know that sounds weird,
I know that sounds deeply mystical, because it is deeply mystical.
But if we believe the truths of the Bible, and we subject
ourselves to the doctrine taught therein, and we know that these
things are true, and the Spirit of God has awakened us to these
things, then we can carry that awakening, we can carry that
illumination, we can carry that revelation to every aspect of
our lives. And we can have confidence to know that no matter what we
see with our physical eyes, and I'm ahead because this is what
Peter's going to talk about next week. Listen to this. Let me
just read three through nine and then we're going to pray.
Here we go. Let the Word of God be done.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According
to His great love and mercy, He has caused us to be born alive
again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead unto an inheritance that is ours, that is imperishable,
that is unfading, that is undefiled, and it's kept in heaven, guarded.
That is you who are guarded by God's power through faith for
salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this, you
have joy. In this, you have confidence.
In this, you have assurance. But for a little while, if necessary,
you are going to be grieved by various trials. You're going
to have some chips knocked off. You're going to have some problems.
So that the tested genuineness of your faith, and faith, faith
is more precious than gold. Gold in and of itself, as precious
as it is, it melts into nothing with the right heat. It perishes,
but faith does not. to test the genuineness of your
faith that it may be found to result in the praise and the glory and
the honor of the revelation of Christ. Though you have not seen
Him, you love Him. Though you do not see Him now,
you believe in Him and you rejoice with a joy that is inexpressible,
filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, which
is the salvation of your souls." And he goes on to say, and this
salvation, the prophets and the angels longed to see it. And
now you have it. So look at yourself. through
the love of God in the eyes of Christ, and be who you are. Let's pray. Father, I have no
words, and I don't know what you will do in each individual
life with the teaching of 1 Peter, but I know what you're doing
in mine, and I'm thankful. So as we take the table today,
Lord, let us remember this love and let us remember our love
for one another because of it. In Christ's name.