Text: 1 Peter 1:17-23
Focus: Living by the Spirit
Function: to help us surrender our selfishness
17If you invoke as Father the one who judges impartially according to each person’s work, live in fear during the time of your exile. 18You know that you were ransomed from the futile conduct inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold 19but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. 20He was destined before the foundation of the world but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. 21Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your trust and hope are in God.
22Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual affection, love one another deeply from the heart. 23You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.
Good morning to God’s beloved family! You have been born from above to a new way of living that is full of grace and mercy. Mercy for you and for everyone we meet in the name of Jesus.
The focus of this passage leads us to part of the way that we live by the Spirit of God leading us in our lives.
Peter starts out the passage with an “If” and a response from us.
The “If” is the question of whether or not we trust the God the Father who will judge the world without partiality.
He speaks of God the Father who decides what is fair on behalf of those who were abused and mistreated here on earth.
And the command is for us to live in such a way that we take into account that God does indeed judge our actions, fairly.
Judgment is something with which we are uncomfortable. And I don’t like to preach it because I see God’s mercy in where they are full of instances where God’s mercy always triumphs the judgment of both God and humans.
That is why we are told in Romans that God will take our side if we refuse to seek our own revenge.
That is why Proverbs says that God is displeased when we are happy that an enemy of ours has a misfortune, or even gets a fair justice.
Now I am glad that Peter uses the family dynamic reference here when he refers to God as Father.
Hopefully that doesn’t evoke a negative image if you had an overbearing father.
But Peter is speaking of the God who is a loving Father. The God who wants the best for their children.
One of the biggest differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament is the way God commands justice to be done.
In the Old Testament, we see revenge against the enemies of the people of God. Except for the book of Jonah where Jonah is rebuked for being upset that God showed mercy to his enemies.
It might seem to many that the OT judgment was a system of retribution. We use it as a model for our own sense of justice when we incarcerate prisoners without helping them be rehabilitated.
Everyone deserves a second chance.
The NT system of Justice is the justice of a loving parent who wants the best for their children and when the child makes a mistake, the loving parent helps restore the child to wholeness.
God’s justice is restoration of the person who has erred. God’s system of justice is not retribution, but a way to restore that person to wholeness.
It is a father helping a child develop and mature.
It is Jesus the Savior bringing salvation, or healing, to his brothers and sisters.
When we trust Jesus, we open the door to the faith necessary for us to experience that healing that Jesus brings. We are saved in the sense that we are restored.
In the rest of the paragraph, Peter goes on to describe how we are restored spiritually to God through the precious blood of Christ.
He reminds us that it isn’t by religious practices, it isn’t something that we can buy with money, but it is a gift of God through Jesus’s death and resurrection.
And then there is a transition from the theology of how Christ’s blood saved us to how we respond.
We have been restored to God and that is healing us in our spirits, souls, emotions and even sometimes our bodies.
And he says that now that has happened, we are commanded to love others deeply.
Love, Peter will later say in this book, covers a multitude of sins.
Love wants people to be restored and made whole again. And love rejoices when they are made whole.
That is why baking cookies and sending me to the prison is so important to all of our spiritual development.
I know it is a burden on your time, but think about how you are being different than the worldly ways around you.
These guys are facing retribution for their failures.
We are showing them that they too are not enemies of God, but are children of God and worthy of God’s healing and restoration.
The word for love, Agape, is probably best translated in the King James in 1 Corinthians 13 when the translators used the word charity.
Charity is an act, not an emotion. It is practical. It is physical, It is tactile. It takes time and sacrifice. It is hands on in the midst of the mess of people’s lives. And many people are charitable without Christ, but we are driven by the Love of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.
So, this passage does give us some help in living by the Spirit in this corrupt and selfish world.
And it is as simple as loving others and wanting the best for them. Even when they are enemies.
That takes a surrender of our ego and a laying aside of our selfishness and pride, but we do that by faith believing that we too are part of God’s healing for this world and in the end, God will bless the suffering we might endure to love others.
Let us keep on loving.
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