1 Peter 5, I'm reading from verse
8. Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary
the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he
may devour. whom resist steadfast in the
faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished
in your brethren that are in the world. But the Lord of all
grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus,
after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, establish,
strengthen, settle you. To him be glory and dominion
forever and ever. Amen. And amen. May God bless to us
this reading from his word. I want to, if I may, speak personally
for a moment. And perhaps you will be able
to identify with what I have to say. I feel frequently when I come
to the word of God that I fail to believe it. and I fail to
grasp it and I fail to trust it. Frequently, I feel that. I feel that I fail to live in
the sweet assurance that the gracious gifts of God supply
to me. The guarantees that the Father
has given me, I pass them over without giving them their proper
thought or consideration. I read the Scriptures like I
read a textbook, when I ought to hang upon every word. as if it was a love letter from
my wife or my fiancé. I glide over precious promises,
ever so matter-of-fact, when the sheer magnitude of the statements
of the Word of God ought to quicken my pulse, and cause my heart
to thrill. And becoming familiar with the
phrases and the verses, I imagine that I know what they mean. When the truth is, I know I have
hardly, barely scratched the surface of the significance of
the message of this book or its value to my soul. God has given me 66 books in this Bible compiled
together. Wonderful books of divine revelation. Hear that. Divine revelation. God has spoken. And I pick it up like it's a
novel. And I read it like a machine. and I don't hear what it is saying
to my heart and my soul. I have in my hand, in my language,
at my daily disposal, scriptures that men have died for. Spanning thousands of years of
faithful witness, countless instances of grace and mercy to individuals. I've got 66 books here. If God had only given us one
verse out of that whole Bible, that would have been amazing
enough that God had deigned to speak at all. If he'd only given
us one word, Imagine there was only one word
ever came from God. That would have been enough to
tell us that God existed. That would have been enough to
show us that there was a demand upon us. And he has given us
all of this. One word from God is enough to
damn my soul. And it is enough to condemn my
soul to everlasting hell. And it is enough to open up a
door to eternal glory. Why am I so cold with this book? Why am I so dull to the message
of the gospel? And I'll tell you what I think.
I believe it is sheer ignorance. That's all it is, ignorance.
Dullness, incapacity, inability to grasp it, to hear it, to learn
it. Ignorance of God. Ignorance of
myself. Ignorance of sin, ignorance of
the devil, ignorance of the fleshy passions that are stronger than
I like to imagine that they are, and ignorance of the spiritual
blindness that still afflicts me despite what I truly believe
to be God's grace to me in the Lord Jesus Christ. And therefore I take Peter's
admonition in these verses very personally. I take them personally. And I
hope that you will too. I take them personally for myself
and I take them personally for you. For I have a responsibility
for you. And I say, Lord, keep me sober. and keep me vigilant. Keep me
sober and vigilant. Keep me attentive to danger. These two things go together.
You can't be vigilant and not be sober. If you're not sober,
you're not vigilant. These two things go together.
This is the need for awareness, the need for attentiveness in
this life, day by day, all the time, constantly. Keep me alert
to temptation, to my flesh, to the wiles of
the devil and his deceptiveness. Keep me alert, vigilant to the
weakness and frailty that is in me. And help me not to forget that
I have an adversary out there who wants to eat me. To eat me. The devil is a lion who wants
to eat you. The devil's a real creature.
Satan is a real creature. He is a created, fallen spirit. And he is vile. And he is awful. He is called our adversary. He is called frequently our accuser. Now, it is true that any power
that Satan has is delegated power, and I'm not going to talk him
up this morning. That would be quite wrong. He
can do only what he is permitted to do by God, and he serves God's
purpose. But the devil has a kingdom in
this world. He has a kingdom in the hearts
of unregenerated men. And he is, as the Lord himself
described him, the ruler of the darkness of this world. He governs men in their flesh
and he opposes the kingdom of Christ and the people of Christ. This word adversary has a legal
connotation. It has a reference to what a
lawyer might do in a court before a judge. What the devil is doing as our
adversary and as our accuser is he makes a case at law against
the elect of God. He calls attention to our sin
before God. That's what the devil does. He
calls attention to your sin and mine before God. Gehazi thought
that nobody knew what he was doing. God knew. And Satan knew. And Satan took
Gehazi's sin before God, and he says, this man is culpable. This man is a sinner, and that's
what he does with us. He takes your sin and mine. See, we try to do things secretly,
don't we? We try to do things in the darkness. And he takes our sin, and he
prays it before God. And he says, look, look at what
he's done now. Look at what she said now. He makes a case at law for your
punishment and for mine. And he says that it is his right to have the fleshy, sinful bodies
of Christ's people, and to punish them for the sin that we commit. And the old serpent, it's interesting,
these phrases that describe him. He's called a roaring lion, but
he's also an old serpent, speaking about his subtlety as well as
his violence. The old serpent is likened to
a pacing lion. I don't know whether you've ever
seen pictures or maybe in real life of a lion pacing up and
down. It's looking for an opportunity.
It's looking in hunger at what it may consume, seeking whom
he may devour. I am so pleased that that's the
way that Peter expressed this. He is seeking whom he may devour. He may not devour the elect of
God. He is prohibited and prevented
from doing that, but he is looking all the time with a ravenous
eye, seeking occasion and opportunity to do hurt and damage to the
church of Jesus Christ and the name and reputation of Jesus
Christ. He is watching for occasion to
accuse. And our sin provides the devil
with opportunity to accuse us and to accuse God. This is the
seriousness of our sin. The devil accuses God of injustice
because he doesn't have the right over our bodies that he believes
he deserves under the law of God. because of our sin and our
iniquity. And Satan is always probing the
depth of the love and the grace and the forgiveness and the patience
of God and the extent and nature of the cleansing blood of Christ. Did you know that? The devil
is probing those graces constantly because of your sin and because
of mine. He says, surely not. Surely your
forgiveness doesn't extend to that. Surely the blood doesn't
cleanse that. Surely you can't say, you just
God, you holy God, that you're prepared to overlook that. And Satan is the accuser of the
brethren before the very face of God. Read the early chapters
of Job and you'll find a fine example of that, and again in
Zechariah. But though he accuses, He cannot
destroy. He cannot destroy God's redeemed
people. And yet he will do all that he
can to frighten and to distress us. Often the devil uses those things
which we fear the most to cause us strife, and hardship. He will use our mortality, the
fact that we're going to die, on he loves to play with that.
He loves to play with that in our minds and in our hearts and
he loves to make us frightened because of our mortality. The
fear of death and illness and the weakness of this body Satan
loves to toy with that. And he loves to deny God's promises
to his people. He loves to make us cold and
dismissive of the promises and assurances of God towards us.
And he loves to rob the elect of their calmness and their peace
and their assurance under the promises and the grace of God. That's what he's about every
day, like a roaring lion pacing about, seeking opportunity to
devour us. In 1 John 3, verse 8, we read,
He that commiteth sin is of the devil, for the devil sinneth
from the beginning. Listen to this. For this purpose,
the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works
of the devil. And in Hebrews 2, 15, we see
an example of what those works are. and to deliver them who
through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. See that's what the devil does,
that's how he plays, that's how he draws us and troubles us. We sang a little bit earlier
the hymn, Up from the Grave He Arose. That was a hymn that was
written by a man called Robert Lowry. He was an American, I
think, from back east, Philadelphia or something like that. And he
wrote that hymn in the middle of the 1800s. He wrote of Christ
and he wrote He rose a victor from the dark domain and he lives
forever with his saints to reign. The Lord Jesus Christ's resurrection
demonstrated the defeat of Satan. And we, as believers in the Lord
Jesus Christ, are always to remember, in the face of the doubts and
the trials and the difficulties that the temptations of Satan
bring to us, that the Lord Jesus Christ died and rose again. and that the demonstration of
his resurrection is in order that we might have confidence
in the face of the accusations of our adversary to know that
God is true to his promises. And that is where our confidence
is to be drawn from. I mentioned Robert Lowry, the
writer of that hymn. I think I would have liked him
He was a man who wrote hundreds and hundreds of hymns and we
remember him now for his hymn writing. We sing a number of
them there in our hymn book. But he believed that his hymn
writing was a mere pastime. He recognised that he was first
and foremost a preacher. And he said this, I would rather
preach a gospel sermon to an appreciative, receptive congregation
than to write a hymn. He would rather preach a sermon
to an appreciative congregation than to write a hymn. Well, we
only remember Robert Lowry for his hymns today, but it was lovely
to know that he had that priority in his own heart and in his own
mind at the time of his ministry. Because preaching the gospel
to needy sinners and telling them about the resurrected Jesus
who has defeated their enemy and their adversary is the best
comfort that can be given to a needy soul. I want you to note
what Peter says here in these verses regarding the resisting
of the devil. He says that it is done by faith
Resisting the devil is done by faith. Verse nine, whom resist
steadfast in the faith. Now I want you to notice that
because resisting the devil doesn't come by works. You know what? You don't understand that. You
don't understand that. I don't understand that. Resisting
the devil doesn't come by what we do. It comes by faith. Let me explain. And I'm going
to take a few moments to spell this out. The flesh imagines that it can
resist the devil. The flesh imagines that it can
do things differently. that it can act better and that
it can improve itself. So the devil comes along like
a roaring lion, pacing, seeking whom he may devour. And he tempts
us to sin. Maybe he tempts us to tell a
lie like Gehazi. Maybe he tempts us to get angry
or to do something that we know to be wrong, we know to be inappropriate
behaviour. So what happens? Well, we think to ourself, I'm
not going to do that. I can see that that's the devil
tempting me. I've fallen for that trick too
often. I'm not going to let that happen
and I'm going to keep my calm. I'm not going to tell any lies. And we think that we can resist
the devil by what we do and what we don't do. So what happens? The proportion of lies diminishes. It starts to dip. And the self deception starts
to rise. The cursing and the swearing
goes down and the pride goes up. The temper tantrums diminish
but the pent-up urge for revenge increases. We cannot win by works. We cannot resist the devil by
what we do. The elect resist the devil by
faith. That's what Peter says. The elect
resist the devil by knowing what Christ has done for us, by knowing
that he died on the cross and he rose again. In Revelation
chapter 12 verse, 10, we read about a song that is the testimony
of the Lord's people in heaven. Listen to the words that the
Lord's people sing in heaven. This is nice. Here's what they
sing. The accuser of the brethren is
cast down. which accused them before our
God day and night. And they overcame him by the
blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony. Not by their works. They overcame
the accuser. They overcame the devil who accused
them day after day before the very face of God. They overcame
him by the blood of the lamb. So here's what you need to do.
When temptation comes, turn your mind upon Jesus. When temptation
comes, think about the blood. When you find yourself under
the attack of the devil, think about the cross, go to the cross
of Christ. Don't imagine that you're going
to be able to resist the devil by switching off a knob or by
taking a different road or by doing something that takes you
immediately out of that moment of temptation. That's not going
to resist him. He will not flee from you until
you draw in the power of Christ. And that's the blood of the cross
of the Lord Jesus Christ. The testimony of saving grace
is the testimony the word of the testimony that causes the
devil to flee from us. The testimony of the fact that
we are saved by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, that we
have received mercy from God, that you don't have any hold
on us, Satan, anymore because the Lord Jesus Christ has died
and is risen again and you're defeated. and our peace is secured. If you want peace from the devil
and his temptations and the trials that he brings and the fear that
he brings into your life, then you go to the cross of Christ. 1 Corinthians 10, verse 13, the
apostle Paul says, there hath no temptation taken you, but
such as is common to man. But God is faithful. who will
not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will
with the temptation also make a way of escape that ye may be
able to bear it. The same afflictions are in your
life that have been accomplished and experienced and born in the
lives of men and women through all ages. That's just the way
of it. These temptations, these trials
that we face, they're common to all men and they are particularly
common to the people of God because the devil has been at large from
the very beginning. He was a liar from the beginning. But soon they will be over. These
afflictions are afflictions of this world, not of the world
to come. And the grace of God the blessings of God and the
riches of God, they will provide for us the promises and the helps
in this life as we seek to serve our Saviour. Look at verse 10
with me please. Here is God giving us, or the
apostle Peter, giving us a message of God's grace towards us. And look at the opening of this
verse. Here's the verse to note for today. This is a tremendous
verse. The God of all grace hath called
us unto his eternal glory. What a phrase that is. The God
of all grace hath called us unto his eternal glory. We have been called by God to
eternal glory. I think that's extraordinary.
We're not called to observe God's eternal glory. We're called to
partake in it. We're not called to witness it,
but to enjoy it. And this speaks of our election.
It speaks of that which God has purposed from before time began. We are called to His glory by
Christ Jesus, by the cross work of the Lord Jesus Christ, by
the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, by the shed blood of Jesus Christ.
We are called to partake and enjoy the glory of the eternal
God. The cross is the means and the
method by which these privileges are bestowed upon us. And that's
how it's effected for the redemption of his people. How is it to be
applied? How is it to be experienced?
By God's grace to us in the preaching of the gospel. He says, the God
of all grace make you perfect, establish, strengthen and settle
you. These are God's promises and
privileges to us today. We are enabled by grace. We are called to the glory of
God by grace. And it is the God of all grace
that has done these things for us. And yes, there is an element
of suffering. Yes, there is an element of trial
in this life. But here is the promise that
we are perfected in Christ. We are perfected, already perfected
in Him. This isn't Peter saying, I wish
it were this way. It's Peter saying, this is how
it is. We have been called to the glory
of God and soon we will enter into it. Soon we will see it
as it is. Now we have to suffer a little.
But God, he has perfected us. He has established us. He strengthens
us and he settles us. Justification is our perfection
in Christ. It is complete atonement. Atonement means at one with God. Complete reconciliation with
God because of the death of Jesus Christ. He took our sins away
and his blood has cleansed us just as surely as Naaman's leprosy
was cleansed in the waters of Jordan. We're perfect in Him
and God sees us perfect in Christ. And He establishes us. We're
established. Established safe in the arms
of everlasting love. Nothing can hurt us, nothing
can harm us. Even the devil who seeks to devour
us can do no more than God permits him to do. Because we are in
the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are established. We are on
a firm foundation. And he strengthens us. He gives
us daily grace to face the challenges of this life. Work begins tomorrow
morning for many of you. And you may find that daunting,
you may find that challenging, you may find the troubles of
your relationships a problem, you may find the weariness of
the flesh a problem, the temptations of Satan a problem, but here's
the thing, God, the God of all grace, strengthens us, strengthens
us. Oh, we put in a lot of effort
to strengthening our legs and our shoulders and our arms. And then, see when you get old,
see you young ones, you don't know about this yet, but when
you get old, you find that just disappears. Everything you've
gained and everything you've built up, it just seeps away. But in our spirit, the Lord strengthens
us. Strengthens us. And he settles
us. He settles us. He calms us down. He gives us confidence. He gives us peace. He gives us
assurance. He gives us a contented trust
in Him. In what? In the efficacy of the
work of Christ. In the power of the blood of
Christ. in the accomplishments of our
Savior upon the cross. And when we look to that cross,
we find our strength. We find our justification and
our perfection. We find our stability. We find our foundation. We find
peace in our hearts because he settles us. May we be persuaded of the truth. May the Lord God the Holy Spirit
come and settle us in gospel doctrine and in the ministry. May we be a people believing
in the finished work of God. May we come to the scriptures
with a heart that takes these things not as some cold textbook
but as the vital lively warm love letter of God, the God of
all grace, to his church and to his people. The Father, the
Son, and the Holy Spirit are engaged in this matter for your
eternal well-being. And God himself has called us
unto his eternal glory. This is the full salvation of
grace. Brothers and sisters in Christ,
what shall we say to this? What shall we say to all this? Believe it. Believe it. It's the truth. I speak to myself. God grant more faith to take
it, to take him at his word. And what shall we say? To him
be the glory. He has accomplished it all. What
shall we say? To him be dominion. We bow before his majesty. What shall we say? Amen. Let it be. Let it be so, God,
forever and ever. Peter says, the God of all grace,
who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after
that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, establish,
strengthen, settle you. To him be glory and dominion
for ever and ever. Amen. And amen.