1 Peter 2:11-12
Please turn in your copy of the
Bible to the New Testament book of 1 Peter. If you’re using the
Pew Bible, you can find that on page 1015. Our passage for
the day is 1 Peter 2, verses 11 and 12. Now begin reading
in verse nine. 1 Peter 2. verses 11 and 12, but we’ll back
up to verse 9. And Peter, the apostle of the
Lord Jesus, one of the 12, yes, the one who betrayed Jesus, now
an older man, an older apostle serving the church, writes these
words. And he writes them to Christians
who were scattered across Asia Minor towards the end of the
first century. He says, but you are a chosen
race. a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own
possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called
you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were
not a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not
received mercy, but now you have received mercy. And now to our
passage for this day. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners. Beloved, I urge you as exiles
to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war
against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles
honorable, so that when they speak against you as evil doers,
they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of
visitation. Amen, let us pray together. Our Lord and God, we pray now
that as we turn to your scripture for its reading and its preaching,
that you would give us. moments of quiet, moments of
rest, moments of peace, moments of clarity. Give us eyes that
see, ears that hear, hearts that understand. And most of all,
give us hands and feet that will leave this place this day to
go and do that which pleases you and brings the most glory
to your great name. Give us your help by your spirit.
We pray in Jesus name. Amen. Well, as a As a parent,
as a father, I want to, and a preacher, I want to flip the type of message
we usually give on Father’s Day. Usually on Father’s Day, on Mother’s
Day, we give a little sermon, a little message on what fathers
ought to hear. And I wanna tweak that a little
bit today and give us a message, a understanding of maybe something
different, but very important, what fathers ought to say to
their children. This is a passage where Peter
is speaking to the church. This is a passage that speaks
to the church. It speaks to Christians, but
it’s very apt as a parent, a father could speak this very well to
his children. We understand in the span of
the scriptures that God has put children into families. We just
read a few moments ago that God called Abram, who later became
Abraham. He went from father Abram to
father of many, Abraham. Uh, that was the name change,
but God promised to him, I will give you lots and lots and lots
of children. Your children will outnumber
the sand on the seashores. Your children were outnumber
the stars in the heavens. Generation after generation will
come from you and they will follow. Uh, they will follow you. And
as God blesses them, they will then bless the nations. And if
you continue to make your way through the Bible, you see that
children were put into families. Children were meant to be raised
by parents. And so you make your way to the
Proverbs, for example, we know lots of little Proverbs one by
one here and there. But if you read the Proverbs
as a whole, Proverbs begins and ends by a father saying to his
children, my son, my daughter, if you want to live life and
not die, live wisely. But if you want to live life,
a life which leads to death, then live wisely. foolishly. Now jump ahead to first Peter
here to chapter two and take Peter’s language and say we were
to take it and put it into the mouth, into the lips of a father,
a mother. What would a parent then teach
their children? Well, they would say to them,
beloved or dear children, I urge you to abstain from the passions
of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. And then finally,
to keep your conduct honorable, so that when others speak evil
against you, your life, in a sense, will prove them wrong. Well, what can we learn from
this passage today? Well, there’s several things
we can learn. And I wanna begin by taking the first phrase that
we find in chapter 11. He says, beloved, I urge you
as sojourners and exiles. And stop there for just a moment.
I urge you as sojourners and exiles, and if you back up to
verse 9 and 10, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy
nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim
the excellencies of him who has called you. This first point
we want to consider today is we are children of God. We are
not children of Satan. We are not children of this world.
We are not children of the spirit of the age. We are children of
the living God. And as such, God has called us
from darkness and into his marvelous light. God has called us from
death to life. God has named us with his name. We are a royal priesthood. We are a chosen people. We are
a nation, a church. And you’ll notice the language
that Peter uses. Peter uses, he steals, he borrows
the language of the Old Testament. He uses the language that the
people of old were called. You are a chosen people. You are a royal priesthood. You
are a nation gathered out of the world for God. And so as
God’s children, we are unique. We are called out of the world. We are set apart. We are different
from others. We have been redeemed by the
blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so as compared to others,
there’s a specific calling. We are, as he says in verse 11,
sojourners. and exiles. Those two particular
phrases ought to remind us of what we understand from the Old
Testament. Exiles were those who had been
taken away from their home and put in a foreign land. Well,
that happened to Israel. Remember when God, through his
prophets, told Judah, told Jerusalem, told the priest If you keep living
against my commandments, if you keep living the way you are,
which is contrary to my holy ways, a nation will come and
they will destroy your city. They will lay waste Jerusalem. and the temple and they will
carry you off. Well, that’s exactly what took place in the Babylonian
activity. And so they were exiles. They
were sojourners. They were living in a foreign
land. Go back a little bit more in Israelite history. They were
sojourners in Egypt. They were exiles. They were out
of the promised land. They were in Egypt. And in both
cases with Egypt and way back Old Testament history and And
later Old Testament history, when Israel was in Babylon, both
times the people cried out and said, Oh God, take us back home. And so we have Moses deliver
Israel from Egypt. We later have Ezra, Nehemiah
and others deliver Israel out of Babylon and they go back to
Jerusalem and they rebuild the temple and reestablish the kingdom
of God there in Israel. But dear friends, this is a reminder
for us, as the book of Hebrews teaches us who are Christians,
as Peter teaches us here in his little letter, we are still not
home. Heaven is our home. As Hebrews
chapter 11 teaches us, like our forebears, we are strangers and
aliens and we recognize we are just passing through this world.
It is not our home. And so we do not set up shop.
We do not put our tent pegs deep in the ground. We do not plant
our roots so deep because one day Christ will come and he will
take us home to heaven, which is our home. Remember, Paul,
when he writes his letter to the Philippians, the Philippians
were very proud of their Philippian citizenship in the Roman empire. And Paul says to those Philippians
who loved Philippi, they flew their Philippian flag as it were. He says to them, your citizenship
is in heaven. And we must remember that today.
And we must teach our children that, you know, it is so easy
It is so easy to look around the world and say, what a wonderful
world this is. And it is. It’s beautiful. God
made it. And even though it is marred
by sin and under the curses of sin from Adam, as we understand
from Romans chapter eight, that all creation eagerly awaits the
adoption of the sons and daughters of God, because it too has been
subjected to the futility because of Adam’s first Sin, even though
this is a cursed world, it is a beautiful world. It is a wonderful
world. And where else but in America
can you live and earn and save? And you can build a wonderful
house. You can live in a beautiful treeline street. You can have
it all as it were. And then to come into church
and be told it’s just temporary. It’s what our children need to
hear, isn’t it? It’s so tempting with all this world offers to
love it and to plant our lives here. and to have no view at
all of heaven. And so one of the wonderful tasks
we have as parents, especially as fathers, is to teach our children,
this world is not all there is. There is a world to come, a new
heavens and a new earth. There is a heavenly city, and
one day when Jesus returns, that heaven will come down, and all
that we think is shiny and beautiful and wonderful, it will pass and
fade away, but the everlasting city The everlasting city is
to be ours. And so we must teach our children
not only that truth, but the way to become a citizen of heaven. And that way is to repent of
our sin and to come to Jesus by faith and to receive him as
our savior and to rest in him alone for our salvation, not
putting our trust in ourselves or other things, but simply to
trust in him as the savior of sinners. And so we want our citizenship
to be in heaven. He says, beloved, I urge you
as sojourners and as exiles. And so we’re the children of
God. The second thing this passage teaches us though, is that we
are in the midst of a war. Notice what he says as he continues
on in verse 11, as sojourners, as exiles, He urges us to abstain
from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. So as children of God, as strangers
and aliens and sojourners, one of the one of the tasks that
we will be engaged in as Christians is a war between the passions
of the flesh and our soul. And I think this is such an important
thing for us to learn as Christians, but especially to teach our children. You know, very often, and you
hear me say this a lot, you’re probably maybe worn out with
the little saying. I’ve come up with a new one though, so
don’t worry. But we say sometimes our evangelism boils down to
this. You don’t want to go to hell now, do you? And the answer,
of course, is no. And so, this is the new one,
we give people a get out of hell free card. And we tell them,
you just trust Jesus, all your problems will go away, and when
the chariot swings low someday, you whip out that get out of
hell free card, and you’re in heaven. And we speak nothing
to them of the Christian life. Well, Peter, the apostle, speaks
to us here of the Christian life. And he says, to abstain from
the passions of the flesh which wage war, against your soul. Why does he give this command?
Well, he gives this command based on verses 9 and 10. You’re a
chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his
own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of
him who called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light. this week at General Synod, we
had a discussion about whether or not men of the church of the
Associate Reform Presbyterian denomination should be members
of secret societies or not. And the discussion was, well,
some of these secret societies, they believe in a great deity,
a great light, a great whatever. And in our Canadian Presbyteries,
some of these secret societies are the real deal. They believe
these things, they practice these things. And so it is not at all
proper for a person to be in a Christian church and in one
of those secret societies. It’s like a, it’s like a pagan
religion. But one man stood up and he said, oh, down in the
South, secret societies, all we do is cook hot dogs and help
the poor. And what the reality of that was is what their society
once started out to be, which had everybody up in arms and
alarmed. It has digressed. It is no longer what it once
was. And so the alarm about secret societies, at least in South
Carolina, was argued. Oh, it’s nothing. It’s digressed. So put that in. the ways of the
church. Do the things that we believe
in practice as Christians matter? Does it matter so much that when
the world looks in, they look in on the church and say, look
at those people, they’re serious about what they believe and how
they live. And one of the ways that we can
witness that we believe what we believe to be true and we
live it is. What verse 11 teaches us, we
abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against
your soul. This is the most serious thing
that I could teach you as a church and that you parents could teach
your children is that in the Christian life. No, it is not
a bus ticket to heaven. It is not a get out of hell free
card in this game of Christian monopoly. The real challenge,
the real battle as a Christian, as a child, is that sin wages
a war against your soul for the rest of your life until Jesus
comes. And one of the greatest talks,
as it were, you could have with your children is to teach them,
is to teach them that because of Adam’s original sin, we’re
born with original sin. And from that original sin proceed
actual sins. And if we don’t yet have faith
in Jesus Christ, those sins condemn us. They condemn us to an eternity
without God. They condemn us to God’s eternal
punishment. But if we believe in Jesus and
receive him and rest in him alone for our salvation and receive
the forgiveness of sin, which he so freely offers all throughout
the scriptures and in his gospels. We can be forgiven. And we can
hear those words of Romans chapter eight. There is therefore now
no condemnation for those who in Christ Jesus. But dear friends,
the thing we need to learn is, yes, we have been made new in
Jesus. If anyone is in Christ, he’s
a new creation. The old has come and the old
is gone. The new has come. But there are
remnants of sin still in your lives. Sin still knows your address. Sin still comes knocking. And
so like the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter seven, we say with him,
I know the good I ought to do. And that is the thing I do not
do. And I know the evil I ought not
to do. And that is the very thing I
do. With the Apostle Paul, we say,
Oh, wretched man that I am who can deliver me from this body
of death. Thanks be to God for Christ. But dear friends, there
is as our catechism and as our confession teaches us a perpetual
and irreconcilable war between the flesh remaining sin and the
spirit. It’s what the Apostle Paul speaks
of in Galatians chapter five, where he says, therefore, live
by the spirit and not the flesh. Don’t live by the remaining sin
in you, but live by the spirit. And you know, this perpetual
ongoing war in your life, you know, the good you ought to do.
And that is not the thing you do. You know, the evil you ought
not to do. And that is the thing you do. The Apostle Paul explained
it. Well, you’ve experienced it in your life. And so what
are we to Christians is do just say, well, that’s just the way
it is. I’ll just ask for forgiveness on Sunday. Well, God calls us
here in this passage, through the words of the apostle Peter,
to abstain from the passions of the flesh. Notice he says,
beloved children of God, beloved those bought with his blood.
I urge you, it’s a pastoral urge. Maybe some of you were brought
up on the King James. He beseeches you. He pleads with
you. He begs with you. Abstain from
the passions of the flesh. And you know how this is. You
get away from church a little. You quit reading your Bible a
little. You’re engrossed in TV. You’re, what do we call it, binge
watching. And we put away our devotions
and then we travel a little, we get away from church. And
then next thing you know, we love the world more than we love
the word. And then we begin to examine
our lives and we say, I really don’t look like much of a Christian.
I’m loving things I shouldn’t love. I’m living the way I shouldn’t
live. And the apostle here is saying, abstain from those things. And so what does that look like
practically? Maybe you need to check who your friends are. Maybe
you need to look at your date book. Maybe you need to see where
you’ve been in a month of Sundays. Maybe you need to see where your
Bible is and how much dust it has been gathering. Maybe your
prayer life has been suffering. Maybe you need the encouragement
of the church to help you and to say, where is your love? Is
it your first love? Is it Jesus? Or are your eyes
on the shiny things of this world? and have the things of God grown
strangely dim. This is a real battle we face.
And you see why this is important for fathers to teach their children,
because the habits you develop in the home are the habits you
will probably continue in the life to come. It is a difficult
battle to walk with God. and to abstain from the lust
and the passions of the flesh. And notice the danger. Which
wage war against your soul? Sounds a lot like Proverbs, doesn’t
it? My son, if you go the way of the adulterous, Proverbs says,
it leads to death’s door. The Proverbs shows the way of
living wisely, the way of living foolishly. foolishly, the way
of living foolishly always leads to death’s door. But the way
of living wisely always leads to life. And so it’s good for
children to be in church. It’s good for children to be
in the home. It’s good for children to be in the word. It’s good
for children to have their parents protect them from the things
of this world, which will destroy them. Now, there’s the reality,
right? We’re all going to have to see
something at some point. There’s those realities. But
sometimes we do too much too soon. We don’t protect innocence
or we don’t protect our little ones from things which they don’t
have the nerves and the mind and the capacity to even begin
to comprehend. But if we prepare them in the
Lord, they will be able to see with eyes of wisdom and make
good judgments for themselves one day. Beloved, I urge you. Your children of God, your sojourners,
your exiles. I urge you to abstain from the
passions of the flesh. But the third thing we want to
look at from this passage is the witness we can have on the
watching world. He says in verse 12, keep your
conduct among the Gentiles honorable. So that when they speak against
you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God
on the day of visitation. Early church Christians were
called cannibals. Why was that? It’s because they
ate and they drank the body and blood of the Lord Jesus at the
Lord’s supper. Now I don’t think anybody in Burlington is calling
the ARPs a bunch of cannibals. People kind of understand communion,
but you get it in the first century. It was new. They get around the
table and they eat bread and call it Jesus, their great prophets
body. They drink a cup of wine and
they swear they’re drinking his blood. You understand that was
weird in the Roman culture. It’s a little more accepted today.
Church people have communion. But they were called cannibals,
they were misunderstood. And on and on down the list you
could go, ways the Roman Empire, the citizens around them misunderstood
them. And so what does the Apostle
Peter say? He says, the accusations will
come. They’re going to call you things, accuse you of things,
and name you things. You just keep living consistently. And as you keep living consistently,
your life will prove who you are and what you are. And in
the end, they will have nothing to say. Some wonderful words
of wisdom were given to me many years ago in a significant church
misunderstanding. There were things said about
this person and that person. And some of us had to walk away
from the situation. And the advice given was this,
you know, you can spend the next two or three or four years defending
yourself and telling how untrue these accusations are or these
stories, or you can keep walking with God Loving your wife and
raising your children and being a pastor or an elder in the case
of the elders and give it four or five years, six years, seven
years, 10 years while your accusers are falling apart, you’ll continue
on and God will bless you. And that’s what Peter’s saying
here, friends. He’s saying your godly life. Because of your calling,
you’re the beloved of God. You’re the chosen race, the royal
priesthood, the holy nation. Because of your godly living,
abstaining from the passions of the flesh. When the world
says you’re a bunch of wackos, a bunch of weirdos, you just
give it a little time. And the life you live will prove
itself to be true. And we’ve said over and over
in our congregation this to be true. We don’t have to have the
biggest evangelism program. We don’t have to have the biggest
jumping house to attract all the children of town to come
to our church. What’s the best way? It’s simply
for each of you as you walk with Christ to go to work. and to
be faithful, to go to the doctor’s office and be kind, to show kindness
to your neighbors, for your house, your home, to be a city set upon
a hill, and on and on. You just live a simple God-fearing
life, and you let the chips fall where they may because God blesses
you. And the world has to look in your windows. They have to
listen to your voice, and they have to look at your life and
say, there’s something different about you. And you say, why,
yes, there is. I’m not from around here. I’m from heaven. This week, my friend Joel, who’s
a pastor nearby, we went up to the Synod meeting at Pennsylvania,
North Pittsburgh. We walked into a pizza parlor
on Monday night. We were hungry and we were soaked
from the rain. And we said, hey, how y’all doing? We’re hungry. And they looked at us. And I’m
not kidding. I’m not exaggerating. They all
started walking out and looking at us. And they said, where are
you from? And Joel, who speaks a little more North Carolina
than I do. He said, we’re from North Carolina.
And they looked at us like we were the eighth wonder of the
world. And it was obvious to them, you’re not from around
here. But here’s the question for you today. Is it obvious
to the world that you’re not from around here, but that you’re
from heaven? You’re a citizen from the kingship
of the kingdom that is above and you live a different way. Let’s pray together. Our Lord
and God, we thank you. Thank you for calling us out
of darkness. We thank you for calling us into your marvelous
kingdom of light, for forgiving us of our sins and giving us
your spirit and your word and your church to grow us and to
nurture us and to shape us. And we thank you that week after
week we can gather. And though the world has made
us weary, though many voices have screamed into our ears for
our allegiance, we can come into your house. We can hear again
what is good and right and true. We can be blessed. with your
wondrous grace to live a life faithful to the word, a witness
and marvel to the world, and that brings honor and glory to
you. And we pray this special day,
this Father’s Day, as we think on the family, as we think on
the duties of parents, that we might teach our children not
only to love Jesus, and have the hope of heaven, but to help
them, help them live in this dark and dying world, the Christian
way, so that they might be a wonderful witness to others of the power
of the gospel and the glories that can be theirs in Jesus. Help us in this great endeavor,
for we are weak. We are not fit for the task,
but by your spirit’s help, we can do what you ask. And so we
pray in Jesus’ name for this to be so.