lion rebel

1 Peter 1.13-21

Remembering that Jesus has been and always will be, understanding that our future life starts now with him, and that he has not forgotten us in the least should bring to our heads and our hands a call to action. “So roll up your sleeves, put your mind in gear, be totally ready to receive the gift that’s coming when Jesus arrives. Don’t lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. You didn’t know any better then; you do now.” This takes effort, it takes will – this is why we were created with free will, so that we would have the opportunity to choose to live for him.

But it’s not enough to just choose him once or twice or fifty times. It takes dedication to walk it out in humility and honesty. Our old life is constantly calling to us, drawing us, wanting us to live the way we used to. But the point is that we know better now than we did before. We’ve experienced the taste of true life and true living. To turn back now would be to abandon the hope of God that has been presented to us.

“As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, ‘I am holy; you be holy.” This is how obedience elongates our “choice” for God. It’s not just about us choosing God, but choosing every moment to be obedient. Every breath we take presents a new opportunity for a choice to either follow God or fulfill ourselves in our own meaningless ways. God is holy and is calling us to be holy. That’s a pretty stiff line in the sand. It’s a line in the sand created by Christ’s sacrifice: “You call out to God for help and he helps – he’s a good Father that way. But don’t forget, he’s also a responsible Father, and won’t let you get by with sloppy living. It cost God plenty to get you out of that dead-end, empty-headed life you grew up in. He paid with Christ’s sacred blood, you know. He died like an unblemished, sacrificial lamb. And this was no afterthought. Even though it has only lately – at the end of the ages – become public knowledge, God always knew he was going to do this for you. It’s because of this sacrificed Messiah, whom God then raised from the dead and glorified, that you trust God, that you know you have a future in God.“

That’s a large portion of verses that simply puts it this way: God sacrificed his Son and that’s why we choose to obey. It was no afterthought. And our choice to live for God should be no afterthought either. An afterthought turns into a forgotten thought, something that no longer comes to fruition. It’s like when you forgot to take out the garbage even though you momentarily remembered you were supposed to after you left the house. That does you, nor your wife, any good. In this case, it’s not the thought that counts. It’s the obedience.

1 Peter 1.8-12
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. 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!

For myself and many of my friends, the reality of Jesus Christ living in this world comes from stories we’ve heard as babies, children, and teenagers. As I am teaching my own daughters, there is no doubt that Jesus lived as a man and crafted miracles beyond the ordinary things of this world, and that he willingly sacrificed himself so that we can live forever with him and those who love him. This reality has been my reality for as long as I can remember, from flannel graph depictions to the deep vibrato story telling of my father to the soft and precious prayers my mother prayed for me before bed. No matter the number of disputes or claims or fictional oppositions – Jesus Christ has always been the Son of God who walked this earth two thousand years ago and counting.

If we think about it, it really is a pretty preposterous idea. Even starting with the fact that there is a God – one who crafted everything we can see and touch and feel (and everything we can’t see or touch or feel). The fact that this God who made our ever expanding universe also crafted a plan for a man to be born from another preposterous idea: the Holy Spirit and a teenage virgin. The fact that Jesus, who grew up as a carpenter’s son would abandon his obligated familial craft to craft the physical, mental, and spiritual restoration of human beings by healing them of sickness, ailment, and even death. The whole story is the grandest of fairy tales.

Yet there were women and men, who for thousands of years, eagerly anticipated the arrival of one like him – one who would bring healing and restoration and eternal salvation. They did not have the stories we have, they only had their own imaginations of what might happen. Yet they believed, perhaps more so than you or I. Instead of experiencing the joy and satisfaction of the now and coming salvation offered by Christ, they had to be satisfied with knowing that they were paving the way for men and women and children like us – ones who would come after him, who would get to hear of his miraculous deeds and passion.

And Peter, who lays this all our for us, simply asks, “Do you realize how fortunate you are?” And sadly, the majority of the time, I must confess that I do not. I must confess that many days I feel it a burden to know the stories of Christ that I know. Because I am so easily consumed with myself and making myself satisfied with the things of this world. We have much more than the prophets of the Old Testament had – yet we fritter it away with meaningless, loveless relationships, with throwing ourselves into putting on a show for everyone else so we can look pretty for them, with determining to never allow our hearts to be hurt like we had before.

And when I write it like that, that is an even greater preposterous idea than the thought that God crafted a plan to bring you and me and everyone else into a permanent relationship with him.

I remember it first from about the 3rd grade on, but I know it existed long before that. I see it nearly every day in both of my daughters. I can see it in older family members and I see it in friends my current age. In the 3rd grade I couldn’t wait to be in the 4th grade. 4th graders were way cooler than me, they got to play recorders! By the time 4th grade came around, I was ready for the 5th grade – they had the coolest teacher. By the time I had that coolest teacher, 6th grade was where it was at, and everyone knows why, because 6th graders rule the roost of Elementary school. And it progressively got worse, each year yearning for something the next age had. With that longing also came this idea about what it must be like to be that next age. And from day one I always imagined that Seniors were the coolest cats and that they had it all figured out.

Sooner or later I became a senior, and let me put it this way, I still don’t have it all figured out – on the outside I may have pretended to know what was happening, but truthfully I still felt like a 3rd grader. All of the joys that I imagined would come with the next age were not nearly as satisfactory as I imagined them to be, with two exceptions: marriage and kids – and even those beautiful things have come with struggle and frustration.

Yesterday, I finished my writing by mentioning how Peter hopes that we would all experience the good things God has to offer. He continues in the first chapter of his letter by saying, “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!”

We basically have three opportunities – to live in the now and for the future, or to live for the future and abandon everything of now, or to live for the now and not maintain our sight on the future. Peter goes on to say, “God is keeping careful watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you’ll have it all – life healed and whole. 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.”

At the end of the day, if we choose to live in the future now realm, we’re proving our trust in God and our faith in his plan and heart for us. On the other side, if we live for the future only, we’re abandoning any hope of God’s work in us, drawing us closer to him. And finally, if we live only in the now and not for the future, we’re placing our trust whole-heartedly in ourselves to pull us through the demons we face every day. As Peter says when he wraps this section up, “When Jesus wraps this all up, it’s your faith, not your gold, that God will have on display as evidence of his victory.”

I have exerted a lot of energy in living only in the now or only in the future – but both ventures have only proved my inability to be God. It is only in living in the future now realm that we experience God at his greatest peak – instilling his Spirit in us, helping us prove our faith genuine in every current moment as we move toward that time where all saints will join together in his presence.

FIRST PETER
CHAPTER ONE: VERSES 1 – 2

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. 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! 

In these two opening verses, two things stick to me: Peter knows who he is without a doubt, and he knows God’s heart for everyone else. These two things should be central to the faith of every follower of Christ.

I say this because I know what it means to struggle with knowing who you are in Christ and living that out whole heartedly. Peter, at this stage, had no doubt. He was an apostle, one of those personally commissioned by Jesus the Christ to take the word of testimony to the nations. In this letter he is fulfilling part of that commission. And, it’s not without doubt that Peter has reached this status of knowledge about himself in Christ. Without too much detail provided, you can draw into your mind the reality of Peter in the days during and after Jesus as man was crucified. First the denial of his personal relationship which followed so closely his sworn allegiance – then his return to the old way of living for him: fishing as if he had never known Christ and the magnificent things he had done.

I want to respond with ridicule at this point: who would go back to just fishing as a way of life when you had experienced the power of the resurrection of the dead (multiple times!)and the instantaneous healing of people without even a touch (and those who had been touched)?!? Peter most definitely experienced a stage of deep grief in wondering who he was in Christ. But, thankfully for us, we need to go through a crisis of identity to be able to stand firm in our knowledge of who we are in Christ. Some of us do not have to go through the drastic state that Peter went through – complete denial and utter retrograde of living. But it manifests in everyone’s life at some point.

And Peter knows that too, because the first thing he mentions about those he is writing his letter to is that they are exiles spread throughout the earth, but that they are not missing or forgotten. That God, the Father of all, is watching every single one of us, keeping a careful eye and willing his Spirit to work in us.

If you’ve gone through or are going through what I am experiencing, you know how important this is for your life’s breath. The distance, the ache, the emptiness you feel when you do the things you’ve always done that have gotten you close to God. Strangely enough, I have intense moments of intimacy with God – but in an instant they vanish and my heart remains longing, wishing for a longer embrace, praying for a revitalization of my spirit with the Spirit.

And that is exactly what God is at work doing: by the Spirit, keeping us obedient through the sacrifice of Christ, the Messiah. This takes patience from God, the great Patient One; and this takes discipline from us, the Undisciplined Ones. Listening to the Spirit takes great effort – you won’t grow by going through the motions and not paying attention; but we will grow by being attentive and allowing for a greater measure of his breath in our spirits.

And finally, Peter wishes that all would experience the good things God has to offer. This isn’t riches or worry-less freedom; this is the life and breath of God. Knowing who you are and who everyone else is, is one of the keys to maintaining a firm balance of life in the chaotic balance beam world in which we live. God’s heart is for us, the extended, the lost, the depraved.

For years now I have strived to be more structured in the way I live my life. What time I get up in the morning, what I do first, second, third before going to work. I have even planned out my evenings after work. For a time, when I worked for a church, I had the “freedom” to structure my entire day according to what I needed to do on a consistent basis. This resulted in lavish spread sheets or three page lists, whichever my creative brain decided to try and format itself in for the time period.

And I’ve failed miserably. The harder I try to assign myself a schedule of waking up, reading, homework, working out, eating breakfast, the harder I’ve found it to maintain over the long term [and by long term I mean more than 8 days]. Inevitably I flounder around day 5 and then regain the gumption for another two days only to completely abandon all sense of structure for several weeks, sometimes months.

My good friend Matt brought up this idea in a talk he gave at College Age Movement. Ultimately he was talking about money, but first he outlined the four ways people are convinced to do something. The first two, information and emotion, have never done anything for me. You can present a hundred million reasons why I shouldn’t do something, but I will never give in. You could present me with an emotional plea via song or video and I might cry, I might consider changing, but at the end of the day, it’s not enough to push me over the brink long-term. He spoke about the Spirit of God at work, which is the first area of my life in which I willingly confess I do not allow enough input. And finally, he brought up structure. And I was cut to the core by those last two. I am not a disciplined man – yet in some ways I am quite disciplined in my un-discipline.

But as I reflect on it, I quickly get overwhelmed thinking about the immensity it would take to discipline every aspect of my life – daily, spiritually, financially, creatively, educationally…the more I think about it, the more systems I could come up with. Overwhelmed, my response is to fold up and return to my disciplined un-discipline, which only creates in me a lazy sense of depravity.

But this, I suppose, is the first step to regaining some sense of stability and structure.

What makes someone believe they have something to say to the rest of the world?

Everywhere you look you find people twittering about what they ate for lunch, blogging about the moral justification for any sort of political expanse, or commenting on someone else’s blogging refuting or praising their meager attempt to provide insight.

I ask this question because, as I stared at the blank page before me with nothing to say, I realised that I no longer felt like I had anything worthwhile to say. Why did I write all the words I’ve written or speak aloud all the words I’ve spoken in the past? Did I think I had something better to say? Out of all of history, with men like Napoleon, Emerson, Moses, Jesus, and Obama, how did I suppose that I had a clearer vision or a higher insight?

Why did I speak in front of people? Because it’s easy. Why did I write? Because it’s far easier than speaking, with no immediate audience to impress, no posture to maintain, no constant pressure breathing down your neck causing you to sweat.

I have always loved music, but for whatever reason, have never pegged what I loved about different artists. The other day as I was listening to The Civil Wars I was trying to figure out why they could use a steel guitar to stir my emotions [if you really know me, you know that the steel guitar is not usually associated with music I like]. When suddenly it hit me – I like The Civil Wars because of the passion they convey. I like Mumford and Sons because of the desperation with which they sing and play and perform. Sure, I like good music for the sake of good music; but the artists I cherish are those with passion.

You can find passionate speakers and writers, but they’re not quite conveyed the same as passionate musicians.

And that is what I have lost. Passion. Passion which gives me energy. Passion which enlightens me. Passion which propels me forward rather than dragging me along for the ride. Passion for living. Passion.

For me, it is as simple as that. [Which is also extremely difficult].