lion rebel

Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. 1 Peter 3.8

Several years ago JoAnna and I had entered a season of our life together where we were bickering quite frequently. We had been married a few years and had settled in well together, but things were tense – we weren’t as easy easy going with each other as we had previously been. It was at that time I came across Peter’s instructions to be compassionate, like-minded, loving toward one another, sympathetic, and humble. Out of this I pulled an acronym, CLASH, and behind it, my goal was us learning to CLASH together better – instead of fighting, to be of one mind, to understand one another, to love with out hesitancy, to be empathetic, and to honor each other above ourselves.

This wasn’t about me – it was about our marriage. At the time my own parents were splitting up and I was faced with a sense of urgency for the preservation of my marriage. I didn’t (and I know JoAnna didn’t) want to allow any sense of a rift to start as a crack from that season of our lives. And it wasn’t a big deal – I wrote it out on a little yellow sticky note and tagged it to the fridge after JoAnna and I talked about it. But, in retrospect, it was probably one of the most important things we’ve agreed on and subconsciously pursued.

Individually it’s not about me. And it’s not about her. It’s about us and the testimony our lives present day in and day out. And it’s not like we don’t fight – we still do and it’s usually because one or the other or both of us are not being like-minded, compassionate, sympathetic, loving, or humble.

For me, the humility aspect is the biggest thing. If I take the time to deflate my ego I am more likely to be compassionate, sympathetic, like-minded, and loving. I adore my wife. But I am more in awe of God, that at just the right time, in the tiniest of ways, he would show up and point me in the right direction that would change our entire lifestyle.

It was the smallest of decisions, but it has made the largest impact in our lives.

1 Peter 2.11 – 12

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

It is plainly evident [if you can pull yourself from the muck and depravity of the world] that Christ followers are aliens. If you stop and search your heart, you should find an aching, sore spot – a hole where the things of this world are not able to satisfy. This is the plain and simple beauty of Christ and what he stirs in our hearts.

On one side you have the sinful desires of the world – the temptations that draw us in and away from the Lord. Often times we correlate these with pleasures of the body – lust, sex, drugs. But just as much as those are our temptations, the lust of the soul, of our emotions is just as strong. Some of us get off on being angry, manipulative, jealous, deprived, or self-infliction. All of these things [and more] battle with our soul, calling to us, winning us over for the temporary high or lows we have trained our bodies to seek.

At the same time, we denounce the very things to which we give our hearts. We proclaim their rancidness and denounce their pleasure battering those around us [believers and non-believers alike] into a bloody pulp. It’s a wonder anyone would take our faith seriously.

Peter, though, calls us to live so demonstratively different from the rest of the world that they would be so surprised they would tell us we were living our lives wrong. Think about that for a minute. By doing right, the rest of the world would tell us we were wrong. By being fully devoted to our spouses [even future spouses, for those who are single] and not wavering a step in our love for them, by loving the loveless, by offering forgiveness for “unforgivable” actions against us, by championing peace, not war, by acknowledging those who aren’t instead of demanding they become those who are…all of these things are so against the grain of our world that we would strike such a strange and different path the rest of the world would recognize in the flash of an instant that Jesus is Lord. It is in that moment that they will be able to acknowledge our good deeds as good and praise Jesus as God, Messiah, and Lord.

1 PETER 2.4-10

As you come to him, the living Stone–rejected by human beings but chosen by God and precious to him– you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe, ”The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” and, “A stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.” They stumble because they disobey the message–which is also what they were destined for. But you are a chosen people,a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.  Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Seeking Him out before anything else, desiring his milk, his kindness, grace, and peace – this is when we discover that Christ, like many men, yet different because he is God, our Messiah, is the source of rejection for many people. For those who abandon everything but pursuit of Him, there is relief and a firm place to stand. For those who abandon him to pursue everything else, there is fear, rejection, and emptiness.

But for those of us who choose to pursue him, who rely on him as our only hope, he is the very foundation that we, as his people, are built upon. I think it is an easy temptation for us believe that our pursuit of Christ is only about ourselves, only about living for God in singleness and making ourselves right before him. But that is a great lie – because Jesus’ death and coming to life again was to make a way for his people to unite together into one people, one nation, one priesthood. And there is no distinction between clergy and laity as has been defined throughout generations. No, these people of God are all created to serve all people. There is no Reverend and then his people – no Father and then his sheep, no mega-church Pastor and then his congregation. There is a holy priesthood, ordained to declare the praises of God who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light.

This priesthood is designed to meet the needs of the poor and needy, the fatherless, the loveless, the abandoned. We are called to meet the needs of those to whom Jesus is a stumbling block. Otherwise, we’re just a cult, a mission without a true cause, a religious group of bigots. And that is not what God has called us to.