I Peter 4:1-6
Armed – With Attitude
Turn with me if you would to I Peter chapter 4; the section in I Peter, once again, that that deals with the recurring theme of I Peter, and that is the theme of suffering.
Amen. May God bless to us the reading of His holy and inerrant word. Let’s pray together.
Our Father in heaven we ask now as we turn to the Scriptures and to this word which was written by the finger of God. We ask for your blessing for the help of your Spirit that you would write it upon our hearts, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.
Now in this fourth chapter, in these opening verses of the fourth chapter, Peter is expressing something foundational to these Christians in modern Turkey, as we would understand it, that our attitude is determinative of the whole of our Christian lives. Peter wants to address the fundamental attitude with which we approach the Christian life. And Peter is addressing that and recognizing that as fundamentally important because he is an experienced pastor of Christian souls, but he has also known how important that is in the context of his own Christian life because Peter had struggled in his own life with his attitude to Jesus Christ. I think that as we read I Peter that the fact of Peter’s own failure, in that moment when he was recognized, you remember, by that Galilean girl recognizing probably his northern accent and that catastrophic fall that Peter fell into, denying his Savior, not willing to take up the cross and to suffer on behalf of Jesus, when he was confronted by that choice, rather sin or suffering self or Christ, and choosing in that moment sin and self rather than suffering and Christ; I don’t think Peter ever forgot that. I think that lay upon Peter’s consciousness for the rest of his life and that’s why I think in this epistle you hear Peter returning to this theme again and again and again that it’s going to cost you something to follow Jesus Christ.
And we’ve seen Peter address that several times now in the course of this epistle in chapter 1. In verse 13 he says, “Gird up your minds for action. Keep sober in spirit. Fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ,” and all that because when the crisis comes, it will be too late for self-control. In other words, you need to arm yourselves with certain attitudes and certain motivations before the crisis comes because when the crisis comes, if you’re not already prepared, it’s going to be too late. And in chapters 2 and 3 we’ve found Peter returning again and again to that theme that we need to be prepared. We need to be prepared for suffering because it costs something to follow Jesus Christ. Christians need to be ready for the cross that is going to be laid across the path of following Jesus Christ. The question, I think, that Peter wants us to ask ourselves is, “Are we ready to face that crisis? Are we ready to face the cost of what it means to be a Christian?”
Now within this particular section in the opening 6 verses of chapter 4, Peter seems to give us 3 practical motives that we might yield ourselves to Jesus Christ. The first appears to be in the past, the second appears to be in the present, and the third appears to be in the future.
I. Don’t waste your time – we are cut off from the past.
The first one can be summarized by what Peter seems to say in verse
3. Now he’s already addressed the suffering of Jesus Christ and he’s already
addressed in verse 2 that we might live, therefore, the rest of our time in the
flesh no longer for the lusts of men but for the will of God and now he gives
the motive for that in verse 3, “For the time already past is sufficient for you
to have carried out the desire of the Gentiles.” In other words, he urges us to
suffer rather than to sin, to suffer rather than be unfaithful to the will of
God because we have cut loose our ties with our past lives. “Arm yourselves,”
Peter says, “as you are faced with the issues of living this life. Arm
yourselves with this thought that you have wasted enough of the most precious
commodity that God gives us, namely the time that God has given us to live for
Him.”
Now perhaps Peter speaks with a particular poignancy to those especially who are converted in later life. And I think those of you who were converted in later life and came to an assurance of your standing and position by the grace of God in fellowship with Jesus Christ in later life can perhaps identify readily with what Peter is saying here because Peter seems to be addressing Christians who, for the most part, weren’t converted early in their lifetime and lived as wonderful covenant children and obedient to their parents and went through college and went to RUF and all the rest of it and were model Christians from the earliest ages, no! Peter is addressing Christians whose former lives were lives that were lived for pleasure and lust and licentiousness.
Isn’t it interesting as we read in verse 3 how timely this passage might appear to be at this time of the year? Not for the holy remnant that is the prayer meeting at First Presbyterian Church, but those perhaps who are indeed engaging in sensuality and lusts and drunkenness and carousals and drinking parties and abominable idolatries. And I wonder how many of those may well be taking place and about to take place even as we are meeting here by the grace of God. Not because of anything within us but because of God’s grace at work in our lives that some of us can recall, can well recall when we ourselves lived like that, when we made the things of this world and we made pleasure and we made sensuality the gods that we bowed down to and worshiped and made as Gollum might say in The Lord of the Rings, “My precious!” Because those are the very things that people are living for. And Peter is saying, “You’ve wasted enough of your time living for those things, now devote yourselves for the rest of your lives for living for Almighty God.
Now it would be very easy, I think to become almost deviated by this list of things that Peter is giving in verse 3 but the point that Peter is trying to make is that as Christians, as believers, as those in union with Jesus Christ, our main motivation ought to be giving our lives entirely, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the glory of God. Every morning God gives us 24 golden hours free and if we had all the money in the world, we couldn’t buy one more hour. It’s the most precious thing that God gives us: time. And what Peter seems to be saying is, “Don’t waste your time.” Now apart from it being wrong and sinful and contrary to the will of God, Peter is also saying, “Why are you wasting your time doing those things that you once did by going back to those things?”
All to Jesus I surrender
All to Him I freely give
I will ever love and trust Him
In His presence daily live
That’s the motivation that Peter seems to be putting forward here. Because you are no longer what you once were, devote yourselves now to a life that is lived in holy abandonment to Almighty God and stop wasting your time in sensuality and lust and drunkenness and carousels and drinking parties and abominable idolatries. That’s the first motivation.
II. We are strangers in this present life.
The second motivation, if the first is that we have cut ourselves
off from the past, the second motivation is that we have become strangers in
this present life. As I told you before, and I actually quite like telling you,
that legally within this great country of the United States of America, I am a
resident alien. And every time I look at that passport and I look at that little
card and it’s like a credit card, my green card, it has this expression
“resident alien.” It makes me sound like a Martian, like someone from outer
space but it’s a wonderful expression. I think about it, I don’t think I think
about it every day, but I think about it several days of every week because it
reminds me of my status, not just in the United States of America, but it
reminds me of my status to this world. Look at what Peter says in verse 4, “and
in all this, they are surprised” the ones who are still carousing and engaging
in their drunken parties, “they are surprised that you do not run with them into
the same excess of dissipation and they malign you.” They treat you as aliens;
they treat you as strangers. Actually Peter has already made that point in the
very opening verse of I Peter: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ to those who
reside as aliens, scattered through Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and
Bithynia” and so on what we would call now modern Turkey. That’s your status as
a Christian, you are an alien in this world; you don’t really belong here.
Don’t be putting down too deep roots, roots that are too deep in this world
because you don’t belong to this world. You belong to another world; you belong
to a better country, you belong to a city which has foundations and whose
Builder and Maker is God. That’s what Peter is saying.
Don’t let it surprise you if certain unbelievers will think you strange. I remember when I was converted in 1971 as a first-year, first semester student at college; I’d lived that first semester in a way and a lifestyle that now brings me shame as I think about it. It probably wasn’t as bad as some of your imaginations might imagine it to be but I do remember coming back in January for the second semester and telling my roommate who had asked me if I would go to a drinking party with him saying, “No, I can’t do it now because I’m a Christian,” and I can remember almost 30 years later, I can remember the look of absolute astonishment and disbelief on his face that there was anything at all about Jesus Christ that would want to change my lifestyle. And Peter is saying, “Here’s the motivation that ought to change your lifestyle: you don’t belong to this world and this world will regard you as strange. They may even malign you.”
I wonder if there’s anything at all about us this evening that the world would regard as strange? You know, that’s a very pertinent question, I think, to ask in Jackson, Mississippi. Our lifestyle here - if we were living in California or New York - it would appear strange that you would come on a Wednesday night the week before Christmas instead of being in the mall or instead of being at some drunken party, but you’re in a church prayer meeting listening to the people of God praying, listening to a young boy praying. Now that might not appear all that strange in Jackson, Mississippi and I think it behooves us all the more to ask is there enough evidence, if we were brought before a court to be accused of being a Christian, is there enough evidence to convict, that the world in its hostility to God and the things of God would find you and your behavior strange?
You cannot live the Christian life, you see, without identifying with Jesus and Peter’s point as it has been right from the very start of this epistle is that if you identify yourself with Jesus, don’t be surprised that the world will treat you like they treated Him. Don’t be surprised if the cross and the shadow of the cross falls across your life. I couldn’t help but think as one of our brethren here led in prayer this evening, I couldn’t help but think of the words of a sermon that I heard preached on this passage some time ago by John Piper and in that sermon he began with the words that the great commission cannot be fulfilled without suffering, without the people of God identifying themselves with Jesus and His cross.
III. We must give account of ourselves in the future.
But if that is the second motivation, there is a third
motivation and I want to look at it very quickly. If we have cut ourselves off
from the past as the first motivation, if we have become strangers in the
present, the third motivation is that we must give an account of ourselves in
the future and in verses 5 and 6, that’s what Peter alludes to, “But they shall
give account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. For the
gospel has for this purpose been preached even to those who are” as the NIV
interprets this, “who are now dead,” spiritually dead, that is, dead to their
past, dead to their old way of life “that though they are judged in the flesh as
men, they may live in the spirit according to the will of God.” Isn’t it
interesting and very sobering that Peter should introduce as a motivation of
Christian living, as a motivation for holiness, as a motivation for
consecration, judgment, the judgment of Almighty God? That there is a great
white throne before whom all men and all women will be brought to give an
account of every deed, of every word, of every thought that has transpired in
the course of their lives.
There are many motivations for holiness in the New Testament and there are motivations of grace, of course for holiness but isn’t it interesting here that the motivation that Peter seems to want these Christians to know is that one day we must give an account, and there’s nothing more sobering than that. If you really stop to think tonight that one day you have to account for that thought, and you have to account for that deed, and you have to account for that gesture, and you have to account for that motivation. I know I can think of nothing that is more sobering than that.
Are you armed with this attitude? Because our attitude to the Christian life, Peter says, is what builds Christian character.
But I need to say a word in closing to those who have fallen, to those this evening who are conscious of sins. Remember, my friends who it is who writes here. Remember that it is Peter who is writing these words. If you are conscious tonight of failure, then remember it is Peter who is writing these words, Peter who failed, Peter who denied his Lord, who found grace in the eyes of the Lord, whose life was transformed and made bold by the power of the Holy Spirit. There’s a way of repentance and there’s a way of faith and there’s a way of forgiveness and there’s a way of new beginning, is what Peter wants us to see. Don’t be surprised, Peter wants us to understand, don’t be surprised if there’s a cost to following Jesus. And if tonight we find ourselves devoid of some of the suffering that Peter seems to be addressing, maybe it’s because we are not following our Savior in the way that we should. May God write His word upon our hearts and give us grace to look to Him. Let’s pray together.
Our Father in heaven, we thank you for your word. We thank you especially for this mighty apostle Peter. We thank you that you forgave him his failures, enabled him to grow and prosper and be useful and mighty in the kingdom of God. We pray for one another this evening; give us grace we pray to live out and out for Jesus Christ no matter what the cost. And cover us with the shed blood of Christ and make us clean again for Jesus’ sake, Amen.