Truth For Life

Announcer: Welcome to Truth For Life, and before we begin today's message, I want to encourage you to keep listening after Alistair finishes today. We have some special offers I want to tell you about as you look ahead to sharing the hope of Jesus during the holiday season. You know, sometimes new believers are so eager to launch into their new Christian lifestyle that they quickly become exhausted and discouraged because they failed to understand some vital truths about who they are now in Christ. Today on Truth For Life, Alistair Begg outlines what we need to understand about our identity in Christ in order to live out our Christian lives.

Alistair Begg: Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners. Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise, that among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Well, Luther on one occasion said of this letter, “This little letter contains virtually everything that a Christian needs to know.” And I don't think we would want to argue against that in any way. And even in talking with a few people in the last day or two, it's interesting how often the letter of 1 Peter is used in the encouragement of young Christians.

And as I mentioned last night, that has been part of my background. In verses 1 to 12, which we struggled through last evening, you will have noticed, I hope, that there are no exhortations, there are no commands, there are no imperatives at all. Peter is not calling for his readers to do anything, at least not until he tells them what they need to know. We understand from school that an imperative is an exhortation to do a certain thing, and the indicatives in New Testament or in biblical context are the reminder to us of what God has done for us in Jesus. So that he has taken the opening part of his letter to remind us all of who we are in the Lord Jesus Christ.

He doesn't begin, as many a young pastor will often begin. I say it to my own shame, as I think back on the early years of life in pulpit ministry, there was about my approach something that was far more hortatory, or hortatory, exhorting, like, come on, let's get going, get moving, what are you people doing? That kind of thing, which took me a long time in listening to my wife to realize that that's not actually the way to see things moving ahead. And Peter, if I'd learned from him, I would have understood this, that Peter hasn't begun his letter by directing the reader's activity, but rather he begins the letter by defining the reader's identity.

And that's why these opening verses are so important, that they understand that they've been chosen by God the Father, that they have been cleansed by the blood of Jesus, and that they are being sanctified by the Holy Spirit. So it is vital for us, vital for them and vital for us, to know who we are, and to know at the same time whose we are. The question of identity is a fairly topical subject in sociological terms and in different ways. young people are often wondering what their identity really is, where they fit, and so on. And it's a wonderfully liberating thing when somebody comes to an understanding of the gospel, just as we heard earlier from the lady that she went to the church and she heard the truth, and she discovered that her identity was not something that she was going to have to establish for herself or would be discovered on a performance basis, but rather her identity was to be found in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And it is a wonderfully liberating truth, vital to know not only who we are, but whose we are, and at the same time, vital to understand what it is that God is doing with us. Why has he redeemed us? Why have these people scattered throughout this region in modern Turkey been placed where they are? And what is God doing with them while they're there? if you recall, in C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, he mentions this notion when he says, and I quote, Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild the house. At first, perhaps you can understand what he’s doing. He’s making basic repairs.

But then, the stones start to be broken, and pieces of furniture are moved around in a way that hurts abominably and doesn’t make any sense. What is the explanation? Well, he says, “You thought that you were going to be made into a decent little cottage, but he is building a palace in which he intends to come and live by himself. And so, what Peter is reminding us of is something that runs the whole way through the Bible, and particularly through the New Testament. We could actually say to one another this morning with great confidence, turn to the person to your right or on your left and say, “I know exactly what God is doing with you.” And they could say, “And I know what he’s doing with you, because whatever else he's doing, he's doing the same thing in every one of us.

And what is that? Romans chapter 8 and verse 29, those he predestined, they were chosen in order that they might be conformed to the image of his Son. In other words, he's making us like Jesus. When Paul writes to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 3, he talks about the amazing glory in all of this, and he says, “And we are being transformed into his likeness.” So God’s eternal purpose is to make us like his Son. The existential reality of it in the journey of our lives is in the fulfillment of that. And if you like, eschatologically, it will be completed, as John says in 1 John 3, when we see him, we will be like him.

Now, it is to these gospel truths that Peter turns, and he does so in such a way that these gospel truths may galvanize the thinking of those who are reading his letter. you will notice that although I put, although it appears in the outline as an imperative about prepare your mind, in actual fact, you will notice that the verb in verse 13, preparing your mind and being sober-minded, is a present participle. So, in other words, the framework in which all of this is going now to be worked out is in the context of the fact that he’s assuming that those to whom he writes are, in the King James Version, girding up the loins of their minds.

Don’t you miss the King James Version? I remember as a boy wondering, I wonder if I have those things to do that with them. I told my dad, what do we do with this? But anyway, it’s a Middle Eastern picture, isn’t it? All those robes and things like Scottish kilts. And if you’re going to make any progress at all, you have to pull them up and tuck them into your belt, because otherwise they will impede your progress. And so Peter is encouraging these folks to take action along this line, and he says it is vitally important that we think things out in this way. It has been costly for Peter to think in those terms, I'm sure, because after all, he had been told to watch and pray, to prepare his mind, to be ready for action, and he had floundered in that.

And now, having been gloriously restored at that wonderful barbecue on the beach, he now writes to them to encourage them not to go down that same path. When we think of this, and we think about it in terms of progress and in terms of runners, it's interesting, when you meet a runner, they run. There are other people who pretend to run. They are more what I call stragglers, stumblers. I speak out of personal experience concerning this. Every so often you see somebody going along and say, “Oh, that's what I was trying to do.” And years ago, in the YMCA building in Kowloon in Hong Kong, I had gone upstairs in a momentary act of self-abnegation to try and do some exercise.

And I was on a treadmill. It was high up in the building. You could see right over the harbor. And as I got on the treadmill, I was immediately far more concerned about the beautiful view than the progress on the treadmill. Very quickly, somebody came along beside me, a young lady who looked like she really meant business, and she began to make noises with a thing that I never even knew could be made. And so, seeking to be congenial, I started to say things to her like, “That’s quite a harbor.” Zero response. I said, “I love those little ferries.” Zero response. “Is this a regular activity for you?” No response.

And then, out of the blue, she just said one word: “Concentrate. Concentrate. Act like you mean business. Are you playing with this machinery here, or are you concerned to make progress? It all matters in the mind, for as a man thinketh, as a person thinketh, so they are. Proverbs 23. Our minds matter. We remember that from the good book by John Stott. If we went to the right kind of Sunday school, then our teachers made this clear as well. It's all going to start in the very core of your thinking. Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.

But it all starts in the mind. Preparing your minds for action, being sober-minded in your thinking. Now comes the first imperative. Set your hope fully. Fully. Not casually, not intermittently, not haphazardly, but completely, entirely. In other words, and I was thinking this morning as I was going over this, if you create an imaginary conversation between the apostle Paul and the apostle Peter, that they were talking about, what have you been writing lately, the way people do, and he said, well, I was writing, I'm writing a letter at the moment. And he explains, I wanted to make sure that people understood their identity, and so I wanted to exhort them in this way.

And Paul said, well, that's very similar, because I actually took a long time with the indicatives, and I got to chapter 12 of a letter that I wrote to Rome, and I actually was applying it in much the same way as yourself. In fact, when on another occasion, says Paul in this imaginary conversation, I was writing to my young lieutenant Timothy, I said to him, “Is it imperative, Timothy, that you aim for God’s approval, that you study to show yourself approved to God, approved to God, a workman that doesn’t need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth?” And that is the recurring emphasis as Peter continues through this.

Another way of thinking about it, perhaps, is this: I have a mechanism on my iPad that I travel with. It's called ForeFlight, and it's the same mechanism that is used by the pilots up front in the plane. Some of you will know this. It doesn't let me interfere with anything, you should be... but it does tell me that when we're entering such and such a runway and when we're transitioning and so on. It gives me altitude, climb, it gives me speed, it gives me all kinds of things. But it doesn't allow me clock in to the various points along the way. Because in the process from wherever it is to wherever it is, it's not just one long line.

There is a constant moment where they check in. Checking in with you now in Chicago Center, checking in with you now in Des Moines, or checking in with you en route to Perth, whatever it might be. And all those points along the way are in order to safeguard that the progress that is being made is identifiable and is safe. When you think about the journey of the Christian life, the journey of a life under God, you realize how vitally important those pinpoint places are, the checkpoint places and the checkpoint people. Peter understood it for himself, and when you read of the stories of the Old Testament, you read it's perfectly obvious.

For example, when we are introduced to the whiz kid Uzziah in 2 Chronicles, he can do just about everything, it would seem. And the chronicler tells us that at the beginning of his life as a young man, he set himself to seek God in the days of Zechariah, who introduced him to the fear of the Lord. Now, the phraseology is important. He set himself to it. He decided, presumably, Zechariah must have said to him, you know, maybe we could have coffee on a Tuesday morning at 10 o'clock, and we could talk about things. He said that would be tremendously helpful. But there became a day when he decided he'd move beyond that.

This was no longer a check-in point for him. And you know how the story ends. He was gloriously helped until he became strong, but when he became strong, he grew proud to his own destruction. So that the great beginnings of life need to be followed on as we continually set our hopes fully. I think, as I listened to the Bible being read, the Lord's Prayer being said, concerning the Belgian Congo, it made me think there, just for a moment, of Helen Roseveare. And I think Helen perhaps came to this conference or something like it in Australia here. And I remember her speaking, in a Scottish conference, and she said, “I want to talk about one thing.” And then she gave this little talk, said, “One thing I know, once I was blind, but now I can see.

One thing I desire, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord amongst the community of God's people to the very end of my life. And one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God is calling me heavenward in Christ Jesus. Now, all of that under that first or second heading, I've forgotten. Set your hope fully. Next to notice, be holy in all your conduct. Holy in all your conduct. Now, again, let's not forget that the indicatives underlie this imperative call. We are to become holy because we are holy, in the sense that, in verse 2 at the very beginning, we are sanctified, that we have been in Christ immediately set apart, that our justification is not helped by our sanctification.

But God does not justify those whom he doesn't sanctify. And in the past, our lives were marked by a certain way. He refers to it here in verse 14: “Don’t be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but now you are obedient children.” By nature, we’re the sons and daughters of disobedience, Ephesians 2. And once again, the exhortation here is absolutely clear, and it is comprehensive. But as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. We move in circles where we are quite happy to articulate what Peter has articulated concerning the doctrine of election. And rightly understood, the doctrine of election never, ever leads to moral carelessness.

That accusation is often leveled against it, but the logic of election, that God has loved us from eternity, has chosen us in Christ, the logic from election is not, I am elect, I've been chosen for salvation, so I can live any way I please, but I have been chosen for salvation, and therefore I will live in the way that pleases God. That the evidence, the ground of our salvation is in the work of Christ. Part of the evidence is in our continuance in the gospel itself. Strive for holiness, without which no one will see the Lord. Holiness is a big subject, isn't it? Most of the time when we think about holiness, we think immediately of separation, which of course is accurate. we think often about clothing, especially when we think immediately about conduct, and he is addressing conduct, holy in all your conduct.

So it's going to be expressed in a lifestyle. And devotion actually is at the heart of it all. Ferguson says, there is a love that flows within the being of God, among and between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, it is the sheer intensity of that devotion within the Godhead that causes the seraphim to veil their faces. What is happening here in this intrinsic, eternal love that is expressed in the absolute perfection of the Trinity itself, devoted to a special purpose, withheld from, in some senses, ordinary use, entrusted to be treated with special care. when Paul writes about marriage, he says it's really a metaphor of Christ and the church, and the covenant of marriage is very helpful in thinking about the way in which our conduct would be expressive of a genuine moral desire for orthodoxy and propensity for righteousness.

But at the heart of that has got to be devotion. A faithfulness to your husband or to your wife is not by means of a legal enactment. There is a legal dimension, but the thing that keeps you is devotion. Devotion. And if you don't do it here in Australia, then you can just do it by coming and taking in some of the country songs from the United States. They'll help you with this. Oh baby, oh baby, I'm gonna love you forever, forever and ever, amen. As long as old men sit and talk about the weather, as long as old women sit and talk about old men. Honey, honey, I'm gonna love you forever. If you wonder how long I'll be faithful, I'll be happy to tell you again, because I'm going to love you forever, forever and ever.

Amen. Beloved, what kind of love is this that exists within God himself and then is worked out by the Holy Spirit in us? You say, that was a silly song. I don't know why you brought that up. I just brought it up so that somebody could say that and you could mention it to me. Let's go from that silly song, or okay song, to my baptismal hymn. I'm 15 years old. I'm in Yorkshire, England, and it's now my turn to go forward. And the hymn that is being sung goes like this: O Jesus, I have promised to serve thee to the end. Be thou forever near me, my master and my friend. I need not fear the battle when you are by my side, nor wander from the pathway if you will be my guide.

Peter lived this reality, and if you are in Christ this morning, you are in process of living it as well.

Announcer: You're listening to a message titled New Life, New Lifestyle on Truth For Life with Alistair Begg. We'll hear the conclusion tomorrow. As I mentioned at the beginning of today's program, we have some special offers I want to tell you about. As you anticipate your Christmas shopping, we have carefully selected some high quality, biblically sound books that point people to Jesus and that make wonderful Christmas gifts. So when you visit our online holiday store, you'll find things like a large print Bible in a rich brown leather cover, a prayer book in the Puritan tradition, and a New Testament handbook that's a helpful companion for Bible study and teaching.

All of these books and many more are available at our cost while supplies last, and these are such great deals that they tend to go quickly. So browse the collection today at truthforlife.org/gifts. You should be able to find something for everybody on your gift list. And if you're shopping for children or grandchildren, be sure to check out the two book set titled God's Very Special Letters, Epistles for Kids. We were excited when we came across this set of books because there aren't many books that teach children from the New Testament letters. This set is a verse by verse translation of 1st Peter and Philippians, written in a language that children ages 7 years old and up can understand, and you can get both of the books for just $10.

We like these books so much that we packaged 18 sets together in a box so you can gift them to all of the kids on your list or give them to your church's children's ministry or a mission group you support. In fact, Alistair had this to say about the books. He said, when I was a boy, it was clear, accessible Bible material that led me to Jesus, and now as a grandparent, I covet the same for future generations. I strongly encourage you to support this project. Look for God's very special letters, along with many other books, in our online gift store at truthforlife.org/gifts, or you can place an order over the phone when you call 888-588-7884.

All of our teaching and these low-cost books are made possible by listeners like you, so we'd be grateful if you can add a donation as you complete the checkout process. Thanks for listening. Tomorrow we'll learn how the world's sense of hopelessness and chaos can actually be used for the benefit of God's purposes. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth For Life, where the learning is for living.