LOVING WHAT’S ETERNAL IN ONE ANOTHER – 1 Peter 1:22-25
Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on March 3, 2013 under 2013 |
Preached Sunday, March 3, 2013 from 1 Peter 1:22-25
Theme: This passage teaches us to love each other in Christ by focusing less on the “externals” and more on the “eternals”.
(Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references are taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version; copyright 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc.)
You see; if we have placed our faith in Jesus Christ and are sincerely seeking to follow Him—if we’re reading our Bible’s regularly, if we’re deeply involved in church life, if we’re praying and witnessing and doing the things we should be doing—I would take it for granted that there are a lot of aspects of the old life that are largely cleared-up in us. Most likely, we’re not struggling with the “biggies” of sinfulness—theft, or murder, or promiscuity, or drunkenness, or chronic lying. Most likely—if we are genuine about our faith, and are going in the right direction with the Lord—most of those old sinful practices are in the rear-view mirror. Praise God!
But I believe there’s at least one area of life with which even the most mature, most seasoned, most church-going Christians among us will still tend to struggle. We don’t typically put it in the same category as we place those other ‘major’ sins. But it’s still a grievous sin nevertheless—and one what that we usually have a hard time getting past. It also happens to be a very serious matter; because a persistent failure in this particular area of obedience is a sin that causes the unbelieving people of this world to turn away from us and reject our message.
This great sin is our failure to obey Jesus’ command to love one another as He has loved us. We may have almost everything else in our lives in order; and yet be failing in our obedience to God by the fact that we harbor an attitude of bitterness or resentment or hostility toward another brother or sister in Christ, and do not sincerely love them as we should.
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Now; that matter of obedience is—when you think about it—higher on our Lord’s priority list than we’re usually willing to admit. We like to think that we’re doing very well if we aren’t committing any of those ‘big’ sins; but we don’t realize that our neglect of this command is—itself—a very big sin before God.
Do you remember what Jesus said was the greatest commandment? He said,
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).
To neglect to love one another as we should is to neglect one of the two commandments upon which our Lord said all the others depend. Similarly, the apostle Paul wrote;
Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not bear false witness,” “You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:8-10).
Jesus Himself made our love for one another in the Body of Christ absolutely mandatory! Just before He went to the cross, during his last supper with His disciples, He told them;
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35).
And the apostle John—who was there at that supper and heard those words—later wrote in his first New Testament letter;
If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also (1 John 4:20-21).
So; when we come to this morning’s passage in 1 Peter, we can understand the importance of what the apostle Peter tells us. He is dealing with something very serious; and to refuse to do what he urges us to do in this passage is a very great sin indeed!
In 1 Peter 1, he had been writing to a group of his Christian brothers and sisters about some of the basics of sound Christian living; and at the end of that chapter, we find these words:
Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever, because
“All flesh is as grass,
And all the glory of man as the flower of the grass.
The grass withers,
And its flower falls away,
But the word of the Lord endures forever.”
Now this is the word which by the gospel was preached to you (1 Peter 1:22-25).
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Now; may I make a confession? Perhaps, as I make it, you’ll recognize something of yourself in it.
I don’t find that I have such a hard time loving people who have sinned in big ways, and who have confessed their sins and have turned in repentance to the Savior. In my years of following Jesus, and in my involvement in a few different church families, I’ve known and have have enjoyed Christian fellowship with such people as convicted murderers who served time in prison, promiscuous persons who had been staggeringly immoral, and folks that had been terrible liars and thieves. In some cases, they repented of their past lives decisively; and in other cases, they struggled, and fell a few times, and went through a long struggle in going through the process of repenting. But they had been forgiven and washed clean by the blood of Jesus; and I didn’t have any problem loving them in spite of great sins they had committed.
But for some reason, I have a hard time loving people past the little things that irritate me. I’m not talking about great, earth-shaking “sins” here. There are ways in the Scripture that we are told to deal with such big sins. Rather, I’m talking about things that I’m not sure can even really be considered “sins” at all. They’re more like little irritating things that just rub my fir the wrong way—little personality quarks or habits; little stylistic issues or ways of doing things; thoughtless little inconsiderations; little areas of immaturity or rudeness—the little ‘fender-benders’ we inflict on one another as a result of just being human. I heard one preacher refer to such things as ‘spiritual bad breath’. It may be a bit harsh to label such things “sinful”; but they, nevertheless, really offend us in some way. Those little things can grow very big in our thinking after a while, and cause us to deeply resent—or even cease to love—someone else who is our brother or sister in Christ. I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one who struggles in that way—finding it easy to forgive the big sins, but hard to overlook the little pesky habits and personality quirks. In fact, God is dealing with me about this struggle; and perhaps He’s also dealing with you too.
Well; I truly want God to change this in me, because it has kept me from loving some of my brothers and sisters as I should. And as I have studied this morning’s passage, I have found that it is helping me learn the nature of that struggle within me—and what to do about it. I’m learning to let it change my focus—so that I cease trying to love my brothers and sisters on the basis of what we might call the “externals”, and love them instead on the basis of the “eternals”.
In other words, God is helping me to learn to love what is eternal in my brother or sister in Christ.
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Let me show you how I have found that this works. Look with me, first, at verse 22 and see . . .
1. WHAT IS ASSUMED ABOUT US (v. 22a).
Peter writes, “Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren . . .” And here, he’s letting us know the spiritual realities that he assumes to be true about his believing friends.
First, he assumes that they have ‘purified their souls in obeying the truth’. The word that he uses—the one that’s here translated ‘purified’—means more than simply a matter of ‘cleansing’. It refers to the idea of being cleansed for a purpose—to be cleansed ‘ceremonially’; somewhat like how the priests of the Old Testament would undergo a series of washings in preparation for the fulfillment of their ceremonial duties in the temple. Some New Testament scholars have even suggested that Peter is thinking of baptism; and it’s certainly possible that this was a part of what he was thinking. In any event, he is assuming that we have deliberately, intentionally “purified our souls” for God’s holy purposes.
How did his readers do this? He said it was ‘in obeying the truth’. That’s just another way of saying that they believed the gospel and identified themselves by faith with all that Jesus had done for them. He had died on the cross for their sins; and they believed themselves to have died with Him. He was raised from the dead; and they believed themselves to have been raised into newness of life with Him. They “obeyed” the truth in the sense that they heard the gospel, believed what it declared to them, submitted themselves to it whole-heartedly, and identified themselves forever with it by being baptized in the name of Jesus—thus ‘purifying their entire being’ for God’s holy use. The translation that I’m using this morning has it that this was done “through the Spirit”. Not all ancient texts have the words “through the Spirit”; but the idea is certainly there. There certainly couldn’t have been any other way that we would have obeyed the truth of the gospel—and thus be purified in our souls—except by the gracious work of the Holy Spirit.
And what was this purification heading to? It was heading in the direction of “sincere love of the brethren”. Forgive me for the grammar lesson; but in the original language, the preposition that Peter uses is one that means “with a view to” or “unto”. So, we have been ‘purified in our souls’ through ‘obedience to the truth’ unto sincere and genuine brotherly affection for one another in Christ.
And may I just suggest to you, dear brothers and sisters, that it makes a big difference in our obedience to the command of love if we recognize that ‘brotherly affection’ is a very big part of the goal that God had in mind for us when our Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross for us? The whole story of the gospel—Jesus’ death for us, His burial for us, His resurrection for us, His washing away all our sins, His bringing us into fellowship with Himself, His ascension to the Father, His intercession for us at the Father’s right hand, His promise to one day return for us and bring us into eternal glory with Himself—was told to us, in part at least, in order that we might be redeemed through Jesus in our relationship with one another; and that we might truly love one another as He loved us!
This is exactly what Jesus prayed for just before He went to the cross for us! He prayed to the Father for His apostles and said;
“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:20-21).
Oh, that we would realize that! Oh, that it would sink deeply into our thinking that ‘sincere brotherly affection for one another’ is one of the things that Jesus gave Himself to the death on the cross in order to bring about!
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So; when Peter wrote this letter, that’s what he was assuming was true of his readers—that they had ‘purified their souls in obeying the truth in sincere love of the brethren’. And it was in the context of that assumption that he issued a command. Look at the later part of verse 22 and see . . .
2. WHAT IS COMMANDED OF US (v. 22b).
It’s that we “love one another fervently with a pure heart . . .”
Now; that probably sounds a little obvious; doesn’t it—’since you have been purified unto love for one another, then love one another’? But you need to know that there’s something important that’s revealed in the original language of the letter that you can’t really see in the English translation—something that you need to know in order to obey this command correctly. When Peter wrote in the beginning of verse 22 that we are purified in our souls unto “a sincere love of the brethren”, he used a particular word. That word is one that might be somewhat familiar to you. It’s the word philadelphia. It’s the one word from which we get the two words “brotherly love”. That’s what the city in Pennsylvania is known for, isn’t it? It’s “the city of brotherly love”. And this word—philadelphia—is speaking primarily of an emotion. It’s speaking of the warm feeling of brotherly affection that we have been ‘purified’ to have for one another.
But we aren’t being commanded in the later half of verse 22 to have a feeling of affection—philadelphia. In fact the word that’s translated “love” in the later half of verse 22 is a completely different word in the original language than the word for love at the beginning of verse 22. That second word is another word that you might be familiar with—the word agapaō. And in this context, it doesn’t refer to an emotional feeling as much as to a sacrificial act. To “love” each other in the agapaō sense is to actively give-up ourselves in order to serve the needs of one another; and to place one another’s interests on the same level as our own.
I believe that this is a tremendously important thing for us to know. It shows us why we sometimes have a hard time having feelings of “love” certain brothers or sisters in Christ who sometimes—shall we say it?—get on our nerves a little. It’s because we’re trying to work up a “feeling of brotherly affection” for them directly—as a thing in itself. That feeling of brotherly affection for another brother or sister, however, is meant to come at the end of a process of obedience to the command of active, sacrificial action toward them. We too often try to have the feelings of affection first to motivate ourselves to active sacrifice of love; when the Bible is telling us to first practice the command of active sacrifice of love that leads to the feelings of affection! That’s pretty revolutionary, isn’t it?
When Peter wrote this command, he said that we’re to love one another “fervently”. Some translations have that word as “deeply”; but that really doesn’t do justice to the idea. Peter is calling us to do something that requires ‘earnestness’ and—as it were—with ‘straining’. It’s a command to actively love one another in a sacrificial way that takes hard work and sacrifice of self—to love in a way that sometimes goes against our natural inclination. It’s an active love that seeks the good and edification of our brother or sister in Christ—even when we would just as soon not have to deal with them at all; or when they have a tendency to rub us the wrong way.
That certainly models the love of our Lord Jesus for us. We can’t actually think that Jesus came into this world of sin, took all our guilt upon Himself, and died on the cross for us because we were delightful! Far from it! We were His enemies when He gave Himself for us and died on the cross for us. And I’m taking it that, until I’m to the point that I’m willing to lay down my life for that hard-to-love brother or sister in Christ just as He did for me, then I’m not yet loving them as I should—and I will not have the affection for them that Jesus died on the cross to bring about between us.
It’s as the apostle John put it;
In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another (1 John 4:9-11).
We’re commanded to do this “with a pure heart”; and I believe this means that we are not to try to change that brother or sister that we find irritating to us. Rather, we’re to work hard at changing ourselves and get rid of the attitudes and behaviors that stand in the way. We’re to allow God to search our hearts, point out the sinful attitudes in us toward that brother or sister, and allow Him to remove them from us; so that we are more in conformity with His own word in our relationship with that brother or sister. I notice that, in the first three verses of chapter two, we’re told,
Therefore, laying aside all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all evil speaking, as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious (1 Peter 2:1-3).
May God help us to work our way toward sincere brotherly affection toward one another by obeying His command to actively love them as we should!
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Now; all of this will require a complete overhaul in my thinking toward my brother or sister. I find that one of the great hindrances in doing this is that I tend to think of my brother or sister in terms of external matters—as if those external matters are the only thing that is true of them, or as if they are the most important things about them.
What Peter says next, I believe, calls us to repent of that kind of “externals-only” thinking. It calls us to cease thinking of our genuine brother or sister in Christ only in terms of imperfections and fallibilities that will eventually be taken away from them when we are all fully glorified in Christ. It calls us instead to think of them in terms of what God has saved them to ultimately be. It calls us to love them on the basis of the “eternal realities” of their salvation, instead of focusing on the “external liabilities” from which they are being saved.
In the next few verses, with respect to all our genuine brothers or sisters in Christ—including that one that may particularly be hard for us to love—Peter stresses . . .
3. WHAT IS AFFIRMED ABOUT US (vv. 23-25a).
He points to the word of God itself; and says that we are to love one another fervently with a pure heart, “having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever . . .” (v. 23.) When we were born the first time, we were born of Adam. And because of his sin, we were born of “corruptible seed”. We were imputed with Adams guilt, we inherited Adam’s sinful nature, and we piled up condemnation for our own sins. No wonder there are a lot of things about us that rub each other the wrong way!
But we have been born again—this time not of the corruptible seed of Adam, but of ‘incorruptible seed’. God has given us a new nature. We are new creations. And this was done by His word—which, as the Bible itself tells us, is “living and powerful”. It doesn’t change; and so, it can change us. Therefore, we shouldn’t be focusing on each other as if we were born of the old corruptible seed—as if nothing about us will ever change. Instead, we should look upon each other as new creations in Christ who are constantly being changed for the better by the power of God’s word.
Nor should we be focusing on, or measuring one another on the basis of, the fallible and fading external things that we see in one another. Now remember; we’re not talking here about things that the Bible calls “sin”. Sin is something that needs to be dealt with and repented of. Instead, I’m talking about those irritating little matters of the flesh—the personality quirks and pesky habits that you can’t really call “sin”. Those things won’t last. They will be gone when we are glorified.
Peter goes on to quote from Isaiah 40; and writes that we should keep all those things in proper perspective; “because ‘All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and its flower falls away, but the word of the Lord endures forever’” (vv. 24-25a). Even if we were continually ‘outwardly’ appealing to one another, and were constantly at our most humanly ‘un-irritating’ best toward one another, the very best of the flesh that may be attractive will still nevertheless fade away. Only what is accomplished in us by the eternal word of God will last.
Peter writes; “Now this is the word which by the gospel was preached to you” (v. 25b). And so, if two fellow believers have both been born again by this word, and if both are being transformed by it into the image of Jesus day by day, and if both are destined to be glorified in heaven with Him, and if both have believed a gospel that is meant to lead them to a sincere brotherly affection toward one another, then that’s what should be the priority—and not the fading external matters of the flesh.
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Dear brothers and sisters; I have a lot of growing to do in this. And I’m sure that you do to. But let’s work at it together. May God help us to learn—most of all—to love what’s eternal about one another in Christ! And may the world see it, and know that we are His.
