May 30, 2004
Service Theme - "Our God Saves Us"
1 Peter 1:1-12
How Can God Be Saving Me When I Hurt so Bad?
I. Introduction
A. Illustration - John Hamby writes, One day, when Vice-President Calvin Coolidge was presiding over the Senate, one senator angrily told another to go "straight to hell." The offended Senator complained to Coolidge as presiding officer, and Coolidge looked up from the book he had been leafing through while listening to the debate and wittily replied. "I've looked through the rule book," he said, "You don't have to go." [Crossroads. Issue 7, p. 16] (as cited on SermonCentral.com).
B. Context - The normally silent Cal spoke some very true words in that situation, words that we can take a great deal of comfort in, especially when life is good. But so often we struggle to remember this truth when life is tough. God gave to Peter some truths that will help us to remember that we are being saved even when life is tough. So let's read 1 Peter 1:1-12, and I'm reading from The Message.
II. Scripture Passage
A. 1 Peter 1:1-12 (from The Message) - (NEW SLIDE) I, Peter, am an apostle on assignment by Jesus, the Messiah, writing to exiles scattered to the four winds. Not one is missing, not one forgotten. (NEW SLIDE) God the Father has his eye on each of you, and has determined by the work of the Spirit to keep you obedient through the sacrifice of Jesus. May everything good from God be yours! 3 (NEW SLIDE) What a God we have! And how fortunate we are to have him, this Father of our Master Jesus! Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we've been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven - and the future starts now! (NEW SLIDE) God is keeping careful watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you'll have it all - life healed and whole. 6 I know how great this makes you feel, even though you have to put up with every kind of aggravation in the meantime. (NEW SLIDE) Pure gold put in the fire comes out of it proved pure; genuine faith put through this suffering comes out proved genuine. When Jesus wraps this all up, it's your faith, not your gold, that God will have on display as evidence of his victory. 8 (NEW SLIDE) You never saw him, yet you love him. You still don't see him, yet you trust him - with laughter and singing. Because you kept on believing, you'll get what you're looking forward to: total salvation. 10 (NEW SLIDE) The prophets who told us this was coming asked a lot of questions about this gift of life God was preparing. The Messiah's Spirit let them in on some of it - that the Messiah would experience suffering, followed by glory. (NEW SLIDE) They clamored to know who and when. All they were told was that they were serving you, you who by orders from heaven have now heard for yourselves - through the Holy Spirit - the Message of those prophecies fulfilled. Do you realize how fortunate you are? Angels would have given anything to be in on this!
III. Hard Times Don't Mean God Isn't Here
A. Peter starts out by giving us some powerful affirming truths. He reminds us that God has His eye on every single last Christian on the face of the earth. He is helping us to become like Christ through walking in obedience by the power of the Holy Spirit. That's good news, because it means we don't have to try to walk in obedience in our own strength. Then the news gets even better. We've been given a brand-new life in Jesus Christ and an eternal future with Him, one where we will experience all of the healing and wholeness we've longed for all of our lives! That's excellent news, truth that can strengthen and encourage us. It's what we call life at its best. Living for Jesus is what we were created for, and we find great fulfillment in that!
B. But every coin has two sides, doesn't it? And the flip side of this coin is that life at its best most often takes place in the middle of life at its worst. Let me explain. We all want life to be easy. We all want life to be good. And there are a number of Christian teachers and preachers and authors that will tell us that life will always be materially good if we just cling to and claim all the promises of God in the Bible. That message sounds really good, especially when many of these folks back up their talk with fancy cars and houses and multimillion-dollar ministries. But as good as it sounds, and as much as we'd like to believe it, the Bible simply does not back up their position. We could all read verses or passages out of context and come up with similar conclusions, but that wouldn't make them true. Peter tells us right here in this passage that life is going to be tough. Verse six: I know how great this makes you feel, even though you have to put up with every kind of aggravation in the meantime. Pure gold put in the fire comes out of it proved pure; genuine faith put through this suffering comes out proved genuine. When Jesus wraps this all up, it's your faith, not your gold, that God will have on display as evidence of his victory. What is it that Peter writes that is the most important? Our faith. What is it that Peter writes that will refine and purify our faith and bring it to maturity? Aggravation and suffering.
C. Now if I were going to set up an advertising campaign for Christianity I definitely would not use something like: "Be all you can be through aggravation and suffering!" It's not a popular truth with Christians, so it certainly wouldn't fly with non-believers. (NEW SLIDE) But what Peter is trying to get us to understand is that having our faith in Christ purified and refined and matured is far more important than any troubles or trials or tribulations on this world could ever be. That purifying process isn't easy. Have you ever wondered how gold is refined? I did a little research and in a nutshell this is what I found. (NEW SLIDE - GOLD ORE PICTURE) Lime and steel balls are added to gold ore mined from the earth, and it's run through a series of grinders. (NEW SLIDE - GRINDER PICTURE) Magnets are used to take out the steel balls, and then the ore is ground to particles about the size of grains of fine sand. Chemicals are used to leach the gold out of the slurry, and then carbon heated to 600 degrees Celsius is run through it to get the gold out. The gold is then rinsed off the carbon using superheated water, and electromagnets removed the gold from the water. (NEW SLIDE - GOLD MOLD CASCADE PICTURE) The magnets are rinsed, and the sludge that remains is heated to 1200 degrees Celsius and pours down a cascade of molds that removes the final impurities. (NEW SLIDE - GOLD BAR PICTURE) The remaining gold bars are 99% pure. Then, of course, the gold bars undergo further working to become something of use and beauty.
D. Now think about it: gold that is refined has a stamp of purity on it, even though it had to go through incredible amounts of heat and pressure to get there. (NEW SLIDE) Likewise, Peter is telling us that these incredibly tough times will be worth it, because when we have gone through all pressure and heat our faith will have God's stamp of purity and approval on it. We will be living proof of God's work in us and His victory over sin and death! What better reward could we have than receiving that stamp of approval from our heavenly Father? But then once again, the struggles of everyday living slap us in the face. How can we remember that God is saving us when we hurt so incredibly badly, when life is so incredibly tough?
E. Hebrews 11:1 says, (NEW SLIDE) What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see. That's the perspective Peter has in verse eight, when he reminds Christians of what they have in Christ: You never saw him, yet you love him. You still don't see him, yet you trust him - with laughter and singing. Because you kept on believing, you'll get what you're looking forward to: total salvation. Nobody in this room has ever seen God. But we who are Christians love Him and trust Him and can find great joy in Him. And when we keep on believing in Him and His goodness even during those tough times, we will receive that promised prize - salvation from our sins and eternal life with God in heaven. Again, that's great news! But we have to keep an eternal perspective to order to reach that goal. (NEW SLIDE) We have to stay focused on Jesus and following and serving and obeying Him even in the midst of incredibly difficult suffering and trials.
F. Peter, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, knew that those few words wouldn't be enough, so he added verses ten through twelve: The prophets who told us this was coming asked a lot of questions about this gift of life God was preparing. The Messiah's Spirit let them in on some of it - that the Messiah would experience suffering, followed by glory. They clamored to know who and when. All they were told was that they were serving you, you who by orders from heaven have now heard for yourselves - through the Holy Spirit - the Message of those prophecies fulfilled. Do you realize how fortunate you are? Angels would have given anything to be in on this! Peter's saying that what we have experienced and what we have to look forward to is so awesome that ancient prophets and even angels wanted to know about it. They knew something incredible was coming down the pike, and they knew it was so wonderful that they longed to get in on a piece of it. (NEW SLIDE) He's telling us, "I know that what you're going through is tough, but hang in there because eternity is worth it. You'll receive everything you've longed for on this earth when your earthly life is over. Hang in there, because it's worth the wait!"
G. For some folks here in this room that can be a difficult pill to swallow. You've been wounded deeply. You're going through things you wouldn't put your worst enemy through. The pain you bear screams for healing. "What about now? What does God have for me now? There's got to be more to life than I'm experiencing!" Jesus offers us healing now. Not the kind we will receive in heaven, when those terrible memories will be wiped clean and all of our tears will be dried away for all eternity. That's the kind of healing heaven will bring. But for life on earth, Jesus is offering another kind of healing. (NEW SLIDE) He is offering freedom from the need for revenge. He is offering freedom from having our pain run our lives. He is offering the comfort of His Spirit and the strength to stand in the midst of trouble. Jesus is offering release of the pain, restored emotions, restored relationships, restored souls. That's what Jesus is offering now. He allows, as Peter put it, "every kind of aggravation" and suffering to refine us, to show us our need for His healing and hope and an eternal perspective.
H. Someone once said, "Jesus came to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted." That's why we feel the Spirit's conviction in those areas of our lives where we think we've got our act together. And that's also why Jesus is here to help us as we're going through those trials. That's why He came to heal us, both now and when we get to heaven. He has His eye on each and every one of us, and He wants to use our circumstances to drive us to Himself. (NEW SLIDE) He wants to create in us a desire to be a people of purified faith. He wants to create in us a desire for Himself that is greater than anything else. And when He has created that desire within us, He wants to heal us.
I. Illustration - John K. Bergland writes, Trevor Beeson stood at the high altar of Westminster Abbey to celebrate the marriage of his daughter, Catharine, to Anthony, aged twenty-three. Nine months later he stood before the same altar for Anthony's funeral, who was killed when his car ran into a wall in East London. Four months later, Trevor returned to the altar beside the coffin of his friend and hero Earl Mountbatten, who died when his fishing boat was blown to pieces by Irish terrorists. Reflecting on the experience, he said he could not blame God for these senseless tragedies. He wrote: "I should find it impossible to believe in, and worship, a God who arranged for the great servants of the community to be blown up on their holidays and who deliberately turned a young man's car into a brick wall� This is not the God of love whose ways are revealed in the Bible and supremely in the life of Jesus Christ." Beeson found two insights that helped him to cope with his tragedy and to look beyond it: "The first is that, (NEW SLIDE) although God is not responsible for causing tragedy, he is not a detached observer of our suffering. On the contrary, he is immersed in it with us, sharing to the full our particular grief and pain. This is the fundamental significance of the cross." Second, although we naturally ask, "Why did it happen?" Beeson discovered that the more important question is "What are we going to make of it?"; "Every tragedy contains within it the seeds of resurrection." �Are those who experience innocent suffering worse than anyone else? Of course not. It can happen to any of us. But is there a connection between innocent suffering and human action? Of course there is, and unless we change our way of living, we may all experience the same suffering. (NEW SLIDE) What does Jesus offer us when we experience this kind of suffering? The power of God to hold us firm, to give us strength, and to see us through (as cited by eSermons.com). Even though we are being refined just like gold, God is with us to help us, strengthen us, enable us to make it through, and heal us.
IV. Conclusion
A. Are there any areas of your life where you need God's healing touch? He is holding His arms out to you, just waiting for you to accept His invitation to start that healing process in your life. If you need healing, and you would like to be prayed for, please come forward and kneel at the altars and you will be anointed and prayed for. Don't worry about how it's going to work out or what others might think, come forward and begin to receive the healing that God has for you.
B. Let's pray.
