LOVING WHAT IS ETERNAL IN EACH OTHER

Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on October 24, 2018 under AM Bible Study |

AM Bible Study Group: October 24, 2018 from Peter 1:22-25

Theme: We are to hope fully in future glory so that we will live holy lives in the present.

(All Scripture is taken from The New King James Version, unless otherwise indicated).

If we have placed our faith in Jesus Christ and are sincerely seeking to follow Him, then there are a lot of aspects of the old life that are largely cleared-up in us. We’re far from perfect, of course; but most likely, we’re no longer struggling with major life-style issues of sin. Praise God for that! But there’s at least one area of life with which even the most mature Christians among us may still tend to struggle. We typically do not classify it as a ‘major’ sin; but we should.

What is that sin? It’s our failure to obey Jesus’ command to love one another as He has loved us (John 13:34-35). We might have almost everything else in our lives in order; and yet be falling short of obedience by the fact that we harbor an attitude of bitterness or resentment or animosity toward some other brother or sister in Christ, and do not sincerely love them as we should.

In the first chapter of 1 Peter–as Peter had been writing to his brothers and sisters some of the basics of sound Christian living, he included this command as a key part of the gospel that we have believed:

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).

We often find it easy to forgive our brothers and sisters for the horribly big sins of their past. But we also often struggle to overlook the little irritations we find in each other—little personality quarks or habits; little stylistic differences 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. Someone once referred to such things as ‘spiritual bad breath’. They can’t be labeled “sinful”; but they, nevertheless, rub us the wrong way. Peter’s words in this passage help us to learn the nature of that struggle—and what to do about it.

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Look 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 …” This verse highlights certain spiritual realities that Peter assumed to be true of his brothers and sisters.

First, he assumed that they had ‘purified their souls in obeying the truth’. This speaks of more than simply a ‘cleansing’ as an end unto itself. Rather, it speaks of having been cleansed for a purpose—to be cleansed for ‘ceremonial’ use; 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. Peter is assuming that we have deliberately, intentionally “purified our souls” for God’s holy purposes.

Second, he assumed that the means by which this cleansing occurred was ‘in obeying the truth’. That’s just another way of saying that they believed the gospel. They “obeyed” the truth in that they heard it, believed what it declared to them, submitted themselves to it wholeheartedly, and identified themselves with it by being baptized in the name of Jesus—thus ‘purifying their entire being’ for God’s holy use. (Some translations say that this was done “through the Spirit”; but not all ancient texts have those words. And yet, 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 third, he assumed that this purification was for ‘sincere love of the brethren’. 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. This is what Jesus prayed for just before He went to the cross for us. He spoke 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).

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. One of the reasons He did what He did for us is so that we might, as redeemed people, become reconciled in our relationship with one another; and so that we might truly love one another as He loved us. It would radically change our attitude toward one another if we would remember 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!

Now; that’s the assumption that Peter had toward his readers—that they had ‘purified their souls in obeying the truth in the sincere love of the brethren’. And it was in the context of that we then find …

2. WHAT IS COMMANDED OF US (v. 22b).

It’s that we “love one another fervently with a pure heart …” To appreciate what Peter said, we need to know something from the original language of the letter that isn’t always evident in the English translation. It’s something that we 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 the word philadelphia. It’s the one word from which we get the two words “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 latter half of verse 22 to have a feeling of affection—philadelphia. The latter half of verse two—in which we find the command—uses a completely different word in the original language than the word for love. That second word is agapao; 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 agapao 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.

This shows us why we have a hard time having feelings of “love” for certain brothers or sisters in Christ who sometimes ‘get on our nerves’ a little. It’s because we’re trying to work up a feeling of brotherly affection for them directly—as if that feeling was the means to an end. That feeling of brotherly affection, however, is meant to come at the end of a process of obedience to the command of active, sacrificial self-giving toward them. We too often try to have the feelings of affection first to motivate ourselves to the active sacrifice of love; when the Bible is telling us to first practice the command of the active sacrifice of love that leads to the feelings of affection.

Peter wrote that we are to love one another in this self-sacrificial way “fervently”. It’s a command to actively love one another in a way that takes hard work and sacrifice of self; to love in a way that is contrary to 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. Until we love our brother or sister in the way Jesus loved us—that is, to the point of being willing to lay down our lives for that hard-to-love brother or sister—then we’re not yet loving them as we should. Until we love them in the active, sacrificial way that Jesus has loved us, then we will not grow to have the ‘brotherly affection’ for them that Jesus died on the cross to bring about between us. 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).

Note further that we’re commanded to do this “with a pure heart”. We are not to ‘love’ with a hidden agenda—and not try, by means of a display of love, 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 our own self-exalting 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 those attitudes from us; so that we are more in conformity with His own word in our relationship with that brother or sister. With that in mind, it’s interesting to notice what Peter wrote in the first few verses of Chapter 2;

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).

Now; all of this requires a complete overhaul in our thinking. Perhaps one of the great hindrances in doing this is our tendency to think of our brother or sister in terms of external matters—as if those external and imperfect matters are the only thing that is true of them, or as if they were the most important things about them. This passage from Peter calls us to, instead, think of them in terms of what God has saved them to ultimately be—to love them on the basis of the “eternal realities” of their salvation, instead of the “external liabilities” from which they are being saved. This leads us, finally, to consider …

3. WHAT IS AFFIRMED ABOUT US ALL IN CHRIST (vv. 23-25a).

Peter 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 Adam’s guilt, we inherited Adam’s sinful nature, and we piled up condemnation from our own sins. But we have now been born again—this time not of the corruptible seed of Adam, but of ‘incorruptible seed’. We are new creations with a new nature. And this was done by the preaching of His word—which, as the Bible itself tells us, is “living and powerful”. Therefore, we should no longer look upon 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 (2 Corinthians 5:17) who are constantly being changed for the better by the power of God’s word.

We should also cease focusing on, or measuring one another on the basis of, the fallible and fading external things that we see in one another—those irritating little matters of the flesh—the personality quirks and pesky habits that we 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, the very best aspects 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 temporal, fading, sometimes-irritating external matters of the flesh.

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Dear brothers and sisters; we all have a lot of growing to do in this. 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 by that love that we are His.

EA