Spiritual Focus: Deliverance in
Adversity and Prosperity
1 Peter 1:7–9
Opening Prayer
“Father, it’s so wonderful
we have the opportunity to come before Your throne of
grace. As we watch the news every day, as we hear what goes on in and round our
homes in this large city and in and around the country and the world, we see a
world that seems to be more out of control and more chaotic than we’ve ever
seen. Yet we know that this presents opportunities for us, opportunities
perhaps to witness, opportunities to share the gospel and help others
understand it, opportunities not to go on the mission field because the mission
field is coming to us. We should be willing and available to talk to people and
be involved in communicating to these who are coming to this country the
gospel. We know that’s the only help. Father, we need to have a heart for
evangelism.
“Father we’re thankful that
we can trust You in this election time. We pray for
leaders who are insightful, who understand the truth of these issues, and leaders
who are willing to take the strong, accurate, and necessary steps to protect
this nation so we can be strong and secure.
“Without strong and secure
borders, you cannot have a strong, secure nation at all. The only way to secure
the nation is to stop the incoming traffic and to stand firm. Father, we pray
we would have leaders who recognize the importance of nationalism and national
identity.
“Father, we pray for us that
we might focus on our spiritual life when we hear these things. It’s easy to
become discouraged. There are some who become far more than discouraged. They
become depressed. They may give in to hopelessness but yet we know that You are the God of hope. You are the God who strengthens us
and You are the God who is going to provide the solution
to the problems.
“We need to keep our eyes on
You and not on circumstances. As we study tonight, we
pray that we might learn even more about how we should live our Christian life
from Peter. In Christ’s name. Amen.”
Peter is talking about the
spiritual life. This whole epistle is talking about how we live the spiritual
life in the midst of opposition, in the midst of oppression, and in the midst
of what may be just personal persecution, hostility, and animosity and that can
take a variety of different forms. It can be on the official level or it can be
on just the individual level. We not only face opposition from the world around
us but we face opposition from our culture. This is nothing new for Christians.
I think it’s a shock for a lot of evangelicals. They respond with depression
and discouragement.
Decisions
that are made by the Supreme Court. Decisions that are made by governors and presidents
and mayors are quite disheartening. They’re that way because for the last 400
years in this country we have a tradition of supporting Christianity and basing
our decisions on the Bible. That’s gone.
We don’t know what it is to
live in a world where the Bible is considered hostile to culture, hostile to
advance, and hostile to where civilization is going. Now we’re living in that
kind of a culture and most Christians haven’t adjusted to the fact that we’re
living not just in a post-Christian environment but an anti-Christian
environment.
It’s difficult for us to
make that adjustment but we need to. This has been the norm throughout 2,000
years of church history. We’ve lived in this kind of historical bubble for 400
years. That bubble has now burst. There are a lot of good lessons here in
Peter.
Not only do we face the
hostility and the animosity from the world around us but from our own sin
nature which has tendrils that go out into every aspect of our life and every
aspect of our thinking, our attitudes, and our emotions. One of the things that
people struggle with, I think today, or at least they’re diagnosed that way and
it’s depression.
My opinion is that it’s
highly over-medicated. There are articles that support that. There’s an article
I read just in the last month that suggested that over 90% of people who are
taking anti-depressant medication are not medically qualified to receive them.
Now that’s astounding. That has a significant impact on people’s thinking and
on their brain chemistry. It causes a re-wiring of things. A lot of people in
modern times, in the era of modern psychology and modern psychiatric
medication, have assumed that depression is something that might be just a mild
case of the blues. They think maybe the Bible can kind
of help.
But if you’re really
seriously depressed, you need to go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist to get
help. There may be some extreme cases that are related to certain biological
chemical realities that need to be addressed, but most people think that if
they’re just kind of down for two or three days that that’s not normal and they
need something to help that.
I want to read to you
something. I enjoy reading a book written by a guy named Robert J. Morgan. It’s
called “On This Day”.
It’s one of these little daily devotionals. It’s made up of different
historical events. I love reading it. He’s got several other books that he’s
written. He’s done a great job of this.
I just thought I would read
this. This was the entry for October 19th in that book. I thought it
opened up a lot of insights because a lot of people don’t talk about these
things. I’m sure that wasn’t something that was talked about from the pulpit at
the time. It’s about Charles Haddon Spurgeon.
Charles Spurgeon, if you
don’t know, was considered the greatest preacher in Victorian England. His
church was the largest church in London and in England from about the 1850s to
the 1880s. I believe he died in 1892. His church and his preaching provided a
good bit of the foundation for Victorian England and the tremendous spiritual
strength of that nation.
He was a strong five-point
Calvinist and there were some other areas of his theology that we might have
some contentions with, but he did proclaim the gospel. According to this
article, a quote that probably comes from his book called “Lectures to my
Students”, he says, “Fits of depression probably come over most of us, Charles
Spurgeon once told his students. The strong are not always vigorous. The joyous
are not always happy.”
Spurgeon, himself, was
living proof for he often suffered agonizing periods of depression. He would go
into these bouts of depression that would last for weeks and months where his
life was just in a black cloud. Here’s one of the greatest pastors and
preachers and believers in England.
How did he handle it? He
handled it with the truth of God’s Word. This is one of the instances. This
author said this was one of the worst bouts he had. He was 22 years of age and
he was just an up-and-coming pastor. His congregation had outgrown its building
so they had rented the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall, which was the largest
and most beautiful building in London, for his Sunday night services.
Surrey Hall usually
accommodated all kinds of secular entertainment from carnivals, circuses, and
concerts, and it was quite a shock for a lot of Christians that they would use
that to meet for the worship of the Lord. But on Sunday morning, October 19,
1856, Spurgeon preached at his New Park Street Chapel saying, “I may be called
where the thunderbolts brew, where the lightnings play and the tempestuous
winds are howling in the mountaintop. Well then, amidst dangers He will inspire
me with courage, amidst toils he will make me strong. We shall be gathered
together tonight where an unprecedented mass of people will assemble, perhaps
from idle curiosity, to hear God’s Word and to see what God can do just when a
cloud is falling on the head of him whom God raised up to preach.” See he’s
talking about the fact he’s mired in this deep, dark depression.
That night 12,000 people
came to hear him at Surrey Hall and there were an additional 10,000 people
overflowing into the surrounding gardens. As Spurgeon got up to begin to
preach, someone in the audience yelled out, “Fire. The galleries are giving
way.”
There was no fire but the
crowd bolted in panic. In the resulting stampede, seven people were trampled to
death and 28 more people were hospitalized. He was so overcome with depression
that he was carried from the pulpit to a friend’s house where he remained in
seclusion for weeks afterwards, all because of this particular event.
He said it was like a box of
knives were cutting into his heart every day. His solution was to immerse
himself into the Word of God and to think about it every day. That is what
finally brought him out of his depression. That is what I’ve been talking about
the last few weeks.
Unfortunately in our busy
lives we rarely have the time to do what we need to do spiritually in terms of
our own immersion in the Word. We also have people say, “If I read it, but I
don’t understand it.” How many times have you heard people say that? Let me
guarantee you one thing. Pay attention to this. If you don’t read it, you will
never understand it. Okay? You have to start somewhere. Most of us didn’t
really understand it very much when we started but it’s one of those things you
have to grow through. You just have to read it and read it and read it. Over
time you will come to understand it. It’s God’s Word that has power. It’s the
Word of God that’s alive and powerful. It’s not the word of the pastor that’s
alive and power. It’s not the word of the theologian. It’s not Lewis Sperry
Chafer’s “Systematic Theology” that’s alive and powerful. It’s the Word of God
that’s alive and powerful.
God the Holy Spirit uses His
Word to challenge us. This is what people did, what Christians did, over the
centuries. This is how they learned to trust God to handle the situations in
their life.
This is what we’re talking
about, what I’ve been on in the last couple of lessons. Deliverance
in adversity and prosperity. So we’re going to wrap up this section here
in 1 Peter 1:7–9 tonight. Just a reminder of this long
section. It’s talking about testing, that we are to greatly rejoice, if
need be, when we’ve been grieved by various trials.
I’ll tell you that the
trials that grieve us the most are not the really big trials. They sometimes
do. It’s the little ones, the little aggravations that pile up. Yesterday
morning I woke up and said, “I’m going to quit teaching on testing and
adversity. I’m going to become a motivational speaker. Now we’re just going to
talk about the love of God every single week. That’s all we’re going to do. And
we’re going to talk about how wonderful God is and that we need to reach our
full potential? Right?” No, probably not.
Yesterday morning I had a
very busy day planned. I was going to come down and record a lesson on 1
Thessalonians. I had all kinds of things I needed to get done. It was one of
those days where every 15 minutes was regimented and segmented. The first thing
I heard from my wife before I even got out of bed or she got out of bed, “Oh, I
forgot to tell you last night. I turned the faucet on last night and it’s
leaking right where it joins the drain board, the countertop.”
I said, “Okay, I’ll go look
at it.” After doing that and sending a little video of that to Brice and having
a little discussion it was determined that this was a serious problem that was
going to have to go away. Wednesdays are busy days so I just immediately
cancelled everything and rescheduled it to other days and blew it off.
Fortunately Brice was coming
over yesterday morning. He took the faucet off and I learned how to take it off
so I could learn to put one on. Then we had to find time in the afternoon to go
buy a new one. Husbands, never go buy a new faucet without your wife. Let her
pick it out. That’s just a lesson you learn in life. It’s wisdom. Don’t do it
yourself. That’s foolish. Take your wife and let her pick it out.
By the time we had time to
do that, it’s already late and we had some other things we had to do, so it was
this morning before I got a chance to crawl under the sink and put that thing
back together. It just dominoed. There were about
three or four other things that happened yesterday that were all just piled out
like that. You have to learn to just sort of roll with that and trust the Lord
that this is the way it’s going to be.
Whatever it was, obviously,
it wasn’t that important, perhaps. So we’re going to start learning positive
things now. Right? No. We go through tests and they demonstrate the quality of
our faith or the lack of it, sometimes. Think about some of the tests.
When I went through Abraham,
one of the ways I structured that was that Abraham went through ten or eleven
tests that God took him through to teach him to mature. The very first one that
comes after God’s promise that He’s going to give him the land, when he came
down to Shechem and he built an altar, the Lord said, “Abraham, I’m going to
give you this land.” God made a promise and He was going to test Abraham to see
if Abraham was going to obey Him. He said, “This is the land I’m going to give
you. This is where you are to live.” So then a famine came and what did Abraham
do? Instead of trusting God to provide for him in the land, he went off to
Egypt.
Abraham got into trouble
there because he picked up a slave girl that later became his concubine, Hagar,
and through Hagar, he gave birth to Ishmael at the insistence of his wife,
Sarai. So now throughout all of history we’ve had this battle between the Arabs
and the Jews, the descendants of Ishmael and the descendants of Isaac.
So Abraham failed that test.
That was a test and it exposed his failure because there wasn’t much quality
there. But the purpose of a test, based on the Greek word used here, is to
expose the quality of our faith unless there’s not any that’s there. As we
grow, the quality of that faith as it grows and matures, is more precious than
gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire. Its goal is to be found to the
praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
We’ve been talking about how
to rejoice and how to use the spiritual skills God has given us so that we can
rejoice in the midst of the present fiery trial. It’s based on the Word of God
and the Spirit of God. We went through this quite a bit. We went through the
doctrine of suffering for blessing.
I’m just going to go through
this fairly quick so that our thinking comes back to where we were. We looked
at the point that every believer goes through tests. Every day we go through
tests. We go through little tests. We go through big tests. We go through all
kinds of a variety of tests and some of the tests have tests within them. It’s
how God causes us to grow.
We hit these tests of
doctrine. This is our blueprint chart. We’re either going to go positive or
negative. When we’re walking by the Spirit we live in the midst of this cycle
where we experience the abundance of life. As we do our life gives evidence of
the quality and justice of a loving God and His plan. It leads to maturity.
But when we fail to apply
doctrine, it leads to sin, human good, and temporal death
which is a death-like existence. We’re living like we’re spiritually
dead, though we are spiritually alive. It leads to spiritual weakness and
instability and it can lead to spiritual regression and a hardened heart.
Eventually at the end of
life when we are face-to-face with the Lord and after the Rapture there will be
the Judgment Seat of Christ. We’ll either see rewards or inheritance at that
point or we’ll lose rewards and there will be shame at the Judgment Seat of
Christ. This is real.
God takes us through a
training program which utilizes adversity as well as
prosperity to teach us to use these spiritual skills. These are something we
need to practice and practice and practice. I talked about this last time.
These are the ten spiritual
skills here. We learn to implement them through practice. We drill ourselves.
We become disciplined. Last time I talked about the importance of being
mentally focused and studies that show that people who are mentally focused,
not counting the spiritual realities just in everyday life and learn to be
disciplined, to be focused, to meditate [whatever that means for the world,
it’s not biblical meditation], that has a positive benefit of stabilizing them.
It can even lead to overcoming depression.
I quoted from a book that
came out recently and the findings of their particular studies. When it comes
to the spiritual life we go far and above that. We go far beyond that because
our spiritual life is empowered by God the Holy Spirit who is producing a level
of maturity within us and stability which goes beyond any kind of normal
everyday happiness or joy or peace or stability.
Then I developed this little
diagram where we talk about the human soul which is
comprised about four areas: our self-consciousness (S/C), our
mentality (M), our conscience (C), and our volition (V). This was
a new diagram so I wanted to go through this again. That soul
is the real you. It doesn’t ever exist without a body.
Isn’t that interesting? In
the Middle Ages, through the influence of Aristotelian philosophy, there were a
lot of things written and discussed about how the soul interacts with the body.
It was all philosophical and doesn’t give us a whole
lot of illumination because their concept of science was so Aristotelian at the
time and it was flawed in terms of a lot of its presuppositions but the
Christian theologians understood that the soul was immortal. It will always
exist. It doesn’t go out of existence.
The soul functions, although
it is immaterial, within a material frame and that we can never understand that
which is immaterial interacts and interfaces with the matter of the brain. But
it does. It’s what goes on in the soul that affects the chemistry of the brain.
Later on the chemistry of the brain may have a backwash effect but ultimately,
the ultimate determiner in our lives is our volition and how we’re going to
focus our thinking.
Just looking at a couple of
verses where we ended. Philippians 4:8 where Paul tells us what to mentally
focus on every day. Things that are true. You focus on
the truth. I look around at this congregation and I know a lot of people, not
everybody, because we have thousands who live-stream and listen, but I know
from looking at y’all, a lot of you are news junkies. You are in the image of
your pastor.
You like to get up in the
morning. You like to go to the “Drudge Report”. We go to Breitbart and we go to
Politico and we go to all these different sites. We go to the Jerusalem Report.
We want to know what’s going on in the world. But if you take that time and you
focus your thinking on the Word of God every morning, then what happens, then
that begins to impact how you look at the world every day, rather than waking
up and seeing all that garbage and all that bad news and letting that shape
your thinking.
You need to focus on things
that are true. Not on all the garbage in the current events. Whatever things
are noble. Let me suggest that about 99.9% of what we look at on the news and
keeping up to date on the current events has nothing to do with either truth or
nobility. Yet we spend way too much time focusing on that rather than the truth
of God’s Word.
Whatever things are just,
that is consistent with God’s integrity, His righteousness [DIKAIOS].
Whatever things are pure. That is morally unstained. That means you’re not
going to spend your time watching all those little gossip shows, sitting around
and seeing what the girls on “The View” have to think this week. Or some of those other talk shows in the morning. They
gossip about whoever was married, not married, or living with whoever,
whatever.
Whatever things are lovely.
That is things that are acceptable and pleasing to
God. Whatever things are of good report, if there’s any virtue [moral
excellence] and if there is anything praiseworthy, meditate on these things.
That word for meditate is the verb LOGIZOMAI which means to reason, to think through,
to mentally take something apart and put it back together. Really
to focus on those particular things.
In Romans 8:5 Paul said, “For those who
live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but
those who live according to the Spirit, set their minds on the things of the
Spirit.” That should be true of us. This is just basic mental attitude
dynamics, if that phrase means anything to some of you.
Colossians 3:2, “Set your mind on
things above, not on things on the earth.” That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
keep up with those things because they impact and relate to our professions,
our jobs, and our careers, but we need to make sure that what wraps around
everything else we’re doing is being immersed in the Word of God. So that’s just review.
I pointed out that of those
spiritual skills joy is emphasized in 1 Peter 1:6–9. Faith is in terms of what
we believe. Our doctrinal orientation is emphasized here. Our love for Christ,
our focus on Him and at the end we see it’s translated believing but it should
be an instrumental participle there, by believing. The key to the Christian
life is trust. It is the Faith-Rest Drill. We are believing
what the Word of God says. We’re trusting it. We’re
claiming those promises and we are mixing our faith with Christ.
Verse 8 says, “Whom having not
seen you love, though now you do not see Him, yet by believing, you rejoice.”
Rejoice is a result of the Faith-Rest Drill. That’s why when I structured this
logically the first thing we have to learn to do is trust God, the Faith-Rest
Drill, because everything else gets built on that, mastering that particular
skill.
We looked at the third point which is that God trains us through various situations
which teach us to respond biblically. We can respond to the training or not.
It’s our choice.
Fourth, a skill is something
that is mastered through constant repetition and practice, but only perfect
practice makes perfect. I covered this two lessons
back. We went through the first seven points so I’m just reviewing this
briefly. A skill is something that is practiced and we have to practice and
discipline ourselves to do this over and over again. That’s part of our
volition.
Fifth, we have two options,
either we walk by the Spirit and apply the teaching of Scripture or opt for the
sin nature. This is lost in most teaching of spirituality today. Most people
teach that you can be a little bit of both. The Scripture is clear. You either
walk by the Spirit or you walk by the flesh.
Galatians 5:16 and
following. And Romans chapter 8. If you remember I
went through all of these passages connecting these things together. Walking
according to the sin nature in Galatians 5:16. It’s called walking according to
the sin nature in Romans 8:4. It’s called walking in darkness in 1 John 1:6,
2:11. Walking according to our lusts in 2 Peter 3:3 and Jude 16.
In contrast to that we have
all those passages that talk about walking in the light, abiding in Christ,
abiding in the light, walking in truth, walking by the Spirit, walking
according to the Spirit, and living according to the Spirit. Those phrases are surrounded
by synonyms that connect all those concepts together so they’re virtually
synonymous.
Getting into new territory.
Now, a test is a test of doctrine in our soul. If you’re not spending time in
the Word, then there’s no doctrine in your soul. Then you’re going to be like
Abraham in Genesis 12 when God takes him through that first test and he just
blows it completely because he hasn’t learned to trust God and he hasn’t
focused on who God is. He doesn’t believe that it’s
God who has given him a promise and is going to carry it out and is able to
sustain him. It took him from that time when he was about 70 years of age until
about Genesis chapter 22 for him to really get what God meant by those
promises.
Over that period of time,
it’s 30 years before he and Sarah have Isaac so it’s probably another 30 years
before that event in Genesis 22 when he takes Isaac to Mount Moriah to
sacrifice him. So 40 or 50 years go by before he gets it more and more. But it
takes time.
The eighth point is that
tests are not designed to expose our flaws, but primarily to reveal our
obedience. God is more concerned about developing us and presenting what’s
positive than the negative. That’s what comes across in so much legalism today.
We have to point out sin because we live in a world of licentiousness that
wants to relativize morality and relativize sin so people minimize it and
dismiss it.
What we see in the Scripture
is that God really doesn’t want to just expose where we fail but to expose
where we succeed and reveal our obedience. That’s what comes out in the
Judgment Seat of Christ. The gold, silver, and precious stones survive. That’s
what goes on into eternity. The garbage in our lives that we do in our own
power, the wood, hay, and straw, that’s what disappears. No one sees it. It
just burns up and it’s destroyed.
Now we come to point nine
and we see an important principle taking us back to James 1:3 as we come to
understand that process of how we grow. He says to count it all joy [that’s the
command] but how do you do that? I really think, having studied James a lot and
having taught James a lot over the course of my life and career, that when
James says count it all joy that’s the chief command of this whole epistle.
What he’s trying to do in
the rest of the epistle is to teach his readers how they can count it all joy.
That’s not simple. It doesn’t come naturally. It doesn’t come immediately. In
fact, joy is part of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23. He says
count it all joy my brethren when you fall into various trials because you know
that the testing of your faith produces patience.
It’s not really patience.
It’s endurance, HUPOMONE. Patience is a totally different concept.
I’ve got a handle on endurance but I don’t have much of a handle on patience.
Endurance is continuing to be obedient even when it’s difficult. It’s hanging
in there when times get tough and it’s easier to bail out than it is to keep a
path of obedience.
James 1:3 says
that the testing of our faith produces endurance. Endurance is what’s critical
to develop maturity. That comes out in verse 4. Verse 4 says, “Let endurance
have its perfect work.” The word there is TELEIOS, growing to its intended conclusion, which
is maturity.
When we fail we confess sin
so that we reboot. The way John writes is as if the normative Christian walks
in the light and he doesn’t need to use 1 John a lot. He’s trying to talk about
what should be normal in the Christian life, not what should be abnormal, which
is spending a lot of time out of fellowship.
From there I want to go into
the next little subsection when we talk about why we suffer. Suffering is
related to testing, one aspect of testing. We have testing in adversity and we
have testing in prosperity but we have to understand why we suffer.
It’s really simple. There
are basically three points for us to understand in terms of why we have
adversity. The first is because we lived in a fallen world. We live in a world
that is corrupted from the very core of the subatomic structure and the
sub-molecular structure into the DNA of every creature. In every living thing
there’s corruption because of sin.
It is profound. It’s
invasive and it is very quiet. It appears to us to be normal. The reality is
that up until Adam ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil there was perfect environment. That’s what is supposed to be normal.
Everything since then is abnormal. It’s below what God intended.
We live in a fallen world.
As long as we live in a fallen world bad things are going to happen to
relatively good people. That’s what Job and his friends needed to understand.
It didn’t have anything to do with what Job did, Job’s loss of his sons, Job’s
loss of his property, Job’s loss of his wealth, and Job’s loss of his health.
It wasn’t because of anything Job did. It was because he was living in a fallen
world. Because we live in a fallen world God allows that corruption to work its
way out for us.
Second reason we have
adversity is because we live with fallen, corrupt, and sinful creatures. They
inhabit places of power in corporations and in universities and in the
government. The decisions they make impact millions of people who have no say
whatsoever. It’s getting to where we have less and less say as time goes on.
These people who are the
politically elite who are operating on totally fallacious ideas make decisions
that impact our retirement plans, impact our hopes, impact our medical care,
and they impact how much it costs when we have children. It impacts how much we
take home in a paycheck and all of these things are impacted because we live in
a fallen world with sinful creatures.
We associate more intimately
with sinful creatures. We’re married to them. We are the children of sinful
creatures and we have babies and children who are sinful, corrupt creatures. As
such they are going to make bad decisions. They’re going to make awful
decisions because they’re really giving into their sin nature and other times
they just make awful decisions because it’s part of being a corrupt, sinful
creature. We sometimes just make really, really bad decisions that are
devastating, not only to ourselves but to those around
us.
When we live in close
proximity then we have those problems. Someone once asked me; twice I’ve had
this conversation this week, so that’s why I’m bringing this up. They asked me
if I believe there’s a right person for every person to marry. One right person. The Bible doesn’t teach that anywhere at
all.
When you are living in close
intimacy with someone who is walking by the Spirit and you’re walking by the
Spirit, I’ve found you can get along with anyone. You can have incredible
rapport. With some people you can have better rapport than with others. There
are some people with whom I have had great rapport but because of their sin
nature, they’re living in carnality, I can’t have rapport with those people at
all. But if they were walking with the Lord I would have a closer friendship
with them than I might have with anyone else.
So the problem that happens
in marriage is a problem of sin. You get two people who are walking and living
with the Lord and you can see incredible things that happens.
The other day I had lunch at one of my favorite restaurants here in Houston. I
went over to Christie’s Seafood.
I’ve been going to
Christie’s Seafood since I was a little kid and Christie’s used to be down on
Main Street. Then in the mid-70s it moved out on Westheimer. During the time I
was in the seminary in the 70s and the time I was later pastoring in Dallas,
pastoring different places, I would frequently come to Houston and could always
find my parents at Christie’s.
I remember when my Dad
turned 60, I surprised him and drove down from Dallas [I won’t tell you how
short a time I drove from Dallas] in order to meet him and surprise him at
Christie’s one night. In fact, my parents were such regular customers that when
my mother died, Mr. and Mrs. Christie both came to the service. They didn’t
come to my dad’s because they were out of town at the time. Mr. Christie died a
couple of years ago.
They have this little table,
this little section, inside the restaurant with articles about the history of
the restaurant and the family. There’s this wonderful article there about how
Mr. and Mrs. Christie met. There are some of you know them because you know
their kids and some of you have kids who went through St. Thomas. Some of the
people in this congregation taught their kids when they went through St. Thomas
High School here in Houston.
Anyway, this story is
telling about how they met. This is a great story because this is a story of
integrity at the human level, although they’re possibly both believers but I’m
not absolutely sure. Mr. Christie was 33 years old. It was 1968 and he wanted a
wife. He had originally immigrated here from Greece so
he went back to the homeland to find a wife. He spotted her on a bus. He didn’t
know her. He spotted her and he said, “That’s the woman I want to marry.”
He found out who she was and
he went and asked her parents if he could court her. Three months later they
got married. Mrs. Christie said she had no idea who this guy was she was
marrying but she married him. When she was younger she had prayed to God that
He would give her a man who was stable and faithful and would provide for the
family and would be faithful to her and to God. She said that’s what she got.
They came back here and they
worked hard. They built that restaurant. They had five children and what I’m
saying is that we get this romantic idea that comes out of platonic idealism
that we’ve got to find this one right person. As long as we live in a fallen
world, when people are living according to the sin nature, they’re not right
for anybody. It comes down to integrity.
There is human integrity and
there is spiritual integrity. People with integrity can have a profound, loving
relationship and they may not know each other until the day they get married.
I’m not just talking about knowing each other in the biblical sense of the
word. They may not know anything about the other person until they get married.
That’s how it was in most of
the Bible. People met not long before they got married and that was it. They
spent a lifetime together. The Christies spent 45 years together. They were
deeply devoted to each other. It’s just a challenge. What I’m saying is that we
live with sinful creatures and so there’s going to be a lot of difficult times
because of suffering by association. There are also wonderful times from
blessing by association, as well.
Then we have our own fallen,
corrupt nature that we have to deal with. I don’t know about you but that’s not
my most pleasant thing to talk about because of my own sin nature. We struggle
with that. We’re to put to death the deeds of the flesh.
I put this chart together a
while back. What happens is we hit adversity and we may think it’s unfair and
unjust. We may go through areas of people testing because we have to deal with
in-laws and out-laws and we have to deal with teachers and professors and employers
that are horrible. Sometimes they will target you.
So we have people testing,
system testing, and health testing. All kinds of things can happen. I am more
and more aware of how many people I hear about who are in their teens or their
twenties or their thirties who are facing serious and significant health
problems. And the cost of trying to solve those health problems is growing
astronomically. I’ve heard so many stories in the last few weeks of people
working for a company who are seeing the fruit of Obama care now and that
what’s happening to their health insurance costs.
I see a lot of people nodding
their heads. What’s going to happen and how that’s
going to eat away at their income is just profound. We have weather testing. We
just had some flooding here in the Houston area not long ago. We had a bad
flood back in May on Memorial Day that flooded lots of these neighborhoods back
of the church.
We have financial problems that
plague everybody. We live in a world where some people are trying to tell us
that the economy has improved and yet the purchasing power of peoples’ dollars
in the last eight years, which coincides with this presidency but it goes back
to the end of Bush’s time as well, has eroded so that people have much, much
less available spending money than they did eight or nine years ago.
In all of this we experience a
loss of freedom. The issue is always volition and we either trust the Lord and
look at life from divine viewpoint and use the ten
problem-solving devices or we react and we don’t trust God. We try to trust in
something in the creation which is a form of idolatry,
and we develop all of our own little self-protective strategies to somehow make
life work apart from God. That is idolatry.
We let the sin nature dominate
through mental attitude sins, sins of the tongue, personal sins, and our
arrogance skills. This is what this testing is designed to do, to get us to
learn to trust God.
When we get into suffering we have
to realize there are two categories of suffering. There’s deserved suffering
and there’s undeserved suffering. The reason we have deserved suffering is
fairly simple. We understand that. We know we did something wrong and we’re
reaping the consequences of it. God is either taking us through some sort of intensified
suffering or He’s just letting us reap the natural consequences of it.
In Hosea 8:7, God is indicting
Israel and said, “They sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.” Sowing the wind is
socialism and progressivism. Reaping the whirlwind is the eventual collapse
that comes because of that. Socialism and progressivism have never worked and
it’s not going to work now just because we’re another generation and we think
we’re smarter. It’s amazing the arrogance of the human heart. Socialism and
progressivism are as much a part of the devil’s thinking as atheism and as
materialism, Marxism, and so many other things. What happens is we’re going to
make bad decisions and we’re going to reap the consequences.
Galatians 6:7 says, “Don’t be
deceived, God’s not mocked; for whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.”
Now when there’s deserved
suffering for the unbeliever lots of time it’s a wake-up call for the need for
salvation. God is trying to get their attention saying they need to find a
solution to the miseries and problems of life. For the believer, deserved
suffering is often God’s rebuke. He uses it to rebuke us and correct us and to
remind us that we need to confess sin and return to Him, and that we need to
use the problem-solving skills.
Often it’s a witness to
others: both human and angels as to how we handle suffering. Our lives are on
display before the angelic hosts.
Another chart. We have direct
testing and indirect testing. We’re talking about deserved suffering here.
There’s direct testing which is the result of sinful choices and actions that
we take. We just bring it on ourselves. We make foolish choices because we’re
operating on human viewpoint and human good.
Then God sometimes
intensifies the natural consequences of our bad decisions with divine
discipline. That’s when it really gets bad. We call that suffering for
discipline.
Then there’s indirect
testing because we live in Satan’s world, the kosmic system. There’s suffering
by association with fallen creatures and then there’s also suffering for
growth. God takes us through a certain amount of adversity in order to teach
us. This suffering provides evidence to angels, to believers, and to
unbelievers. We become an example for them. If we are responding to that
indirect testing correctly then it leads to suffering for blessing.
Now let’s look at the last verse
in this section. “Receiving the end of your faith—the salvation of your souls.” This
is an important verse because this transitions us at the end of this long
sentence going from 1 Peter 1:6 down through verse 9, it comes to this
conclusion. Verse 9 says, “Receiving the end of your faith—the salvation of your souls.”
How does verse 10 begin? It
says “Of this
salvation”. We better understand what the salvation in verse 9 is because
that’s going to be the topic, the starting point for verse 10. If we get past
that into the meat of verses 10 and 11, talking about the prophets we can let
that shape our understanding of the verse and we may miss the point.
We’re going through a process here
where we’re going through suffering. We’re going through adversity and we’re trusting the Lord. Then what happens? We’re growing
and we’re maturing. We’re using the Word of God and the principles of Scripture
and we’re applying that to adversity in our life. Eventually we come out the
other end.
Some people think, “I sure
wish I could even see the light at the end of the tunnel.” Someday, one day,
somehow we do come out the end of the tunnel. Maybe we just go from stage one
to stage two but we come out the end of the tunnel. We receive the end result which this passage is talking about.
The word KOMIZO here is a participle and the translators don’t
translate the nuance of the participle but its best understood as a temporal
participle and should be translated “when you receive the end of your faith”.
It happens at some point, eventually, when you receive the end of your faith.
The word there for receiving
is a word that means to bring something to someone else, to convey something
from one point to another, to recover something that is owed, or to get
something that is owed, to come into possession of something or receive
something. That’s the idea here. You’re finally going to come into possession
of something so it’s when you receive the end of your faith.
“Receiving the end of your faith.” This
is the word TELOS which is where we get our word for God,
the teleological argument. Today they usually use a different word. They talk
about the argument for design but that’s part of the teleological argument that
everything has a purpose. So we come to the purpose or the end or the goal or
the conclusion.
So we’re receiving the
conclusion of our period of trusting God. What we receive after we go through
this testing phase is the salvation of our souls.
It’s real easy to bring a lot of
bad theology to that phrase because we come out of an American institution of evangelicalism which uses the phrase saving your souls to be
a synonym for justification. “Brother, are you saved?” What we mean by that is
whether you’re going to go to Heaven. Have you trusted in Christ? But the Bible
doesn’t always use the word “saved” that way. In many places it doesn’t as
we’ve learned so many times in this congregation.
It talks about deliverance. In a
lot of ways it’s just deliverance of temporal adversity. So what do we receive
at the end of our faith? The faith in context is trusting
God, believing Him, believing His promises in the midst of adversity and we
receive as the result of the conclusion of our trusting Him, deliverance from
the problem. Deliverance through the adversity.
The word soul there isn’t
really talking about soul. Many times the word soul just means life.
Now here are some examples. Romans
11:3 which is Paul talking here related to Israel. He’s expressing the view of
Elijah. It says, “Lord, they have killed Your prophets and torn
down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.” Literally in
the Greek it says that they seek his soul. Soul is used just to refer to our
earthly life.
Matthew 2:20, “Arise, take the
young Child and His mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought
the young Child’s life are dead.” That should be soul [instead of life].
John 10:11, Jesus said, “I am the good
shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life [soul] for the sheep.” This is a universal
principle that the shepherd gives his life for his sheep.
Philippians 2:30, “Because for the
work of Christ he [Epaphroditus] came close to death, not regarding his life
[soul].” Now he was regarding his soul in ministry. He was growing spiritually.
But he didn’t regard his life. He was willing to lose his life for the sake of
the ministry. So that’s the meaning of the word soul, life.
In 1 Peter 1:9 it should be
understood this is the deliverance of your life in the midst of temporal
adversity.
It’s the same thing James talks
about in James 1:21, “Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and
receive with meekness the implanted word.” He’s not talking about getting
saved here. He goes on to say, “which is able to save your souls.” He’s not
talking about getting justified because he’s already said these people are
going to go to Heaven.
In James 1:18 he says, “Of His own will
He brought us forth by the word of truth, that we might be a kind of first
fruits of His creatures.” That’s regeneration and all through the epistle
he calls them “my brethren” and “my beloved brethren”. So when he says to “receive with
meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls”, he’s not
talking about getting justified. They’re already justified. He’s talking about
this is going to be able to deliver your life in the midst of trials which is
what James is talking about.
So it’s using saving your
souls in relation to deliverance from trials in your spiritual life, Phase Two.
What we’ve seen here is that these verses from 6 to 9 really sets the stage for
understanding the next section of how this relates to our spiritual life and
it’s going to connect it in a very interesting way to the Messianic prophecies
of the Old Testament and we’ll get into that next time.
All of this, by the way, is
really setting us up for some great material in the rest of this chapter.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this
time we’ve had to be reminded that we’re really to be in Your Word. We’re to
let it just soak into our souls, immerse ourselves in Your Word that we need to
think and focus and let Your Word just be the dynamic of our mentality. Therein
we have the ability to survive the adversities of life.
“Father, we pray You will challenge us with these truths. In
Christ’s name. Amen.”