Brothers and sisters, open your copies of God's Word tonight to First Peter, Chapter 2. We'll be reading three brief verses this evening and meditating on the meaning of those verses from First Peter, Chapter 2. If you're reading along in your pew Bible, you're going to find this on page 1014. hear God's word. So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants long for the pure spiritual milk that by it you may grow up into salvation. If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good." Let's pray together. Our Father and our God, we come to you as empty vessels needing your filling. Would you fill us tonight with your word and fill us with your spirit. May we be full of the spirit. In fact, oh God, we would pray that we would be full of you and that we would overflow in our lives to others so that others would come to taste and see that the Lord is good. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. The Apostle Peter must have gone to Paul's school for letter writing. or maybe Paul went to Peter's school for letter writing, I'm not sure. The point being that in this first chapter of, or as we've seen, I'm sorry, in the first chapter of 1 Peter, one of the things that is in common between Peter and Paul is they typically begin, after opening greetings, with a series of indicatives, a series of things that we have by faith in Jesus Christ, the great indicatives of Christianity. And then and only then do they move into the imperatives of the faith, what we must do as believers in Jesus. In chapter 1 of 1 Peter, we see this pattern. Peter greets the churches of the dispersion with assurances that they are born again to a living hope, to an inheritance that can't be taken from them and that they are currently obtaining the very outcome of their faith, which is the salvation of their souls. But then fairly quickly, the apostle moves on to the imperatives, stating that we are all called to be holy, which is not attained, he says, through some conformity to elaborate ceremonial or ethical religious codes, but which we, as we heard last week, is found through brotherly love, generated by a soul purified by the implanted Word of God. As Chris said last week in his fine sermon, that Word implanted in our souls like a seed by the Holy Spirit enables us to go much deeper in our friendships with others than the drive-by relationships of social media, where we can do no better than drop one-directional truth bombs on those with whom we may disagree. That's quoting Chris. Our passage tonight begins with the word, so. And so, it is precisely because of that glorious spiritual rebirth that we read about previously in chapter one, enabled by the purifying word of God implanted in us, that we are exhorted here in chapter 2, verse 1, to put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander. And notice Peter's not telling the general public to do this. That would be like telling a statue to dance a jig. He is telling born-anew believers in God, animated by the implanted Word of God, to do these things. Thus we see again that personal holiness is intentional and it's relational and it is for the people of God. We must be new men and we must be new women. And we must be new to each other, relationally. And all that begins by putting off these ugly things in this list in verse 1. And then after that, in this letter, true to form, most of the letter continues with these various commands and exhortations and imperatives. You see, Peter knew what social scientists and psychologists are just beginning to understand about human nature. Recently in Europe there was a large study done to find out why certain countries in Europe had far higher organ donation patterns than other countries in Europe. Why were the people of certain nations, Spain for instance, far more likely to donate their organs to science or for transplants than people in other nations, like Germany for instance? The study looked at all kinds of possible explanations, including medical care systems, and historical differences, and climate, and geography, and religion, and economic prosperity, and public health education, and they could not find one thing that the high donor countries had in common over the low donor countries. It was quite baffling to them. And then they finally figured it out. The single most important reason that the people of some nations donated more of their organs than others per capita is that the people in those nations had an opt-out policy on their driver's license instead of an opt-in policy. While no one is forced to give up their organs, for those in opt-out countries, it was assumed if you didn't opt out that you intended to donate. So you don't actually have to do anything to donate. In the opt-in countries, on the other hand, you had to positively register your willingness to donate your organs. And no one would ever assume you would unless you did so. And those rates of donation in Europe and those countries that did that were much lower. Now what this speaks to, you see, is a kind of inertia. in people. There's a lethargy. There's a willingness to accept things as they are without initiating action, without even thinking about it quite often. Psychologically and in the realm of moral choices, we simply aren't very dynamic creatures. We humans tend to keep doing what we've always done, not initiating change in the status quo unless we're compelled to do so somehow. As the social scientists say, stasis rules. Peter knows that the churches in Asia Minor are not going to become more holy, more generous in love for one another by him just wishing it were so. Even with the implanted word of God in them, Even with spiritual rebirth by God's Spirit, even with all the glorious promises of the faith in their minds, they still needed a prod. They needed imperatives. They needed chapter two. We too need a prod, you and I. We need an exhortation. We need an imperative. We need to be told. put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Now what the Lord is calling us to do here is a systematic intentional reorientation of life and relationships. In order to put on love and holiness, which we read about in chapter 1, we have to put away some things listed here in chapter 2. Now this language of putting away or putting off is often used in the original language to describe the putting off or taking off of clothes, as in Acts chapter 7 when the crowd stoning Stephen cast their coats down at Saul's feet. And then what happens is this physical image of taking or casting off clothing becomes a spiritual metaphor in places like Romans 13, 12, where Paul says, let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. I've done some counseling with Nancy Armstrong in One of the helpful things that Nancy does is to help folks walk through their days with the put-off, put-on dynamic of New Testament obedience, where you chart all the times every day where you have to be careful and intentional to put off and to put on. Put off and put on. And put off and put on. In some of the later baptismal liturgies of the early church, when an unbeliever was converted to the faith, they would ceremonially disrobe and then be baptized and then put on new clothing. That really is a picture of the Christian life in some, because the putting off and the putting on continues every day of our lives past our baptisms. As the Apostle Paul so memorably said in Ephesians chapter 4, we are to put off, he said, put off your old self which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Put off and put on. You see, living the Christian life is not so much some one big decision. It's about innumerable decisions. Every day, every hour, sometimes it seems every minute, put off, put on, put off, and put on. Put away, put off all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Put them away, Peter says. Take them off. Cast them down. You do it and you keep doing it over and over and over again until it becomes second nature to you to do this. Now this list we see here in 1 Peter 2, verse 1. is not a complete list of sins, of course, but it is a kind of representative list and you'll notice that each item on this list deals with relationships to others. Malice, ill will toward others. Deceit, the willingness to lie to others. Hypocrisy, living a double life in front of others. Envy, which is Not intending another's harm, that's more like malice, but instead begrudging another person's good. And then there's all slander. The Greek word literally means to talk down others, or as we would say today, running them down with what you say. We've got to put away all this stuff by intentional daily decisions. Now what the Lord is calling us to do here is not easy. You know these first century believers whom Peter wrote to were being persecuted, at least we believe they're beginning to be persecuted by authorities, much more persecution soon to come. And no doubt they had already been shunned by family members and others. To not return evil for evil. To not bad mouth them when they're bad mouthing you. To remain free of soul-corrupting resentment was a huge challenge in that time, as it is in ours. Let's be honest. This is not a challenge that many of our fellow American evangelicals seem up to at the moment. When secularists are malicious and slandering toward us and toward the church, too often what happens is we respond in like kind. by being malicious or slandering toward them. I loathe reading the internet debates between believers and unbelievers today. They often argue in the same mutually insulting ways toward each other. I mean, we fight fire with fire and we're proud of it. We give as well as we take. The Bible calls this returning evil for evil. Instead of humbly Standing on principle and truth and standing with those who oppose us in our shared humanity and our need, our common need for divine grace, we tend to go light on the principles and the truth and very hard on the people. We forget that we too would believe exactly as they do apart from God's gracious intervention in our lives, there but for the grace of God. As I say, it's a huge challenge to live in this put-off, put-on way every day, all days. This is the hard stuff of Scripture in many respects. I remember Mark Twain once said, most people are bothered by those passages in the Bible which they cannot understand, but as for me, I always notice that the passages in the Scripture which trouble me are those which I do understand." Pretty straightforward, isn't it? We're to live a life of holy love by putting away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. And if that's troubling for you because you thought being saved by grace and by grace alone meant not having to be prodded and commanded by such passages anymore, and if you assume that the Christian life was about personal freedom in your way of defining it, and it wasn't this hard, then I would simply say to you, before you actually do give up on the true Christian faith, as Mark Twain eventually did, I believe, consider this next verse, verse 2. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk of the gospel, that by it you may grow up into salvation. Peter's saying something very significant here. God does not call us to this hard path of daily transformation, this rigorous discipline of putting off and putting on continually, without also giving us strength and spiritual nourishment to do it. He doesn't call us to grow up into salvation, that is, you might say today, to become spiritual grown-ups, without also providing us with the nourishment we need, the pure spiritual super milk of God's Word. Now the word spiritual here in verse 2 is the Greek term logikos, from which we get the word logos or word in the English. So this word milk we are talking about here, the Bible preached, the Bible displayed in the sacraments, that is spiritual nutrition for the people of God. Now the image of milk is used in a number of places in the New Testament to describe God's word. And in some places it's used in a way that implies that you should move on beyond the milk, you know, like a child eventually moves on beyond our mother's milk. But that's not the meaning here. I mean, this is not, Peter's not describing just preliminary teaching, basic teaching, early teaching. No, in fact, this word milk is what nourishes us our whole spiritual lives. Ninety-year-olds need this word milk as much as nine-year-olds need it. Theologians need this word milk as much as the newly converted do. Elders need this word milk as much as their own children need it. Indeed, according to Peter, we all need to desire it and to recognize our need to be like little infants craving their mother's milk. That's the image he's using. This week, Rob and I were able to go together and visit the Bajans, and Greg and Tracy and little Charlie, the newborn boy there. I told Rob as we arrived, we're the God squad closing in on this family here. We came in and sat down apart from them with little Charlie there. It was a wonderful visit with this family and this little boy, only about five pounds, born prematurely a bit. And Greg was holding Charlie, and one of the things he did, he took his little pinky finger and put it to Charlie's mouth, and Charlie just locked in on it, you know. See, Charlie's nature, his very nature, is to crave his mother's milk. It's, in a sense, Charlie's whole mission in life right now. Do you crave the word of God like Charlie craves what he craves? That's the real meaning of this phrase, long for pure spiritual milk in verse 2. It's the same word that Paul uses to tell Timothy he longs to see him so that he might be filled with joy. But your new nature, long, long for. and crave the Word of God. You know, it's interesting, the way we grow up into salvation, as Peter says here, and by the way, just as an aside, this refers not so much to our conversion and our justification and our adoption into the family of God, those tremendous initial lasting blessings of our redemption, but more, in fact, to our sanctification, to our growth in grace over time, our maturing into the stature of the fullness of Christ as the apostle Paul speaks of in Ephesians 4. It is this that Peter is speaking about when he says, grow up into salvation. He's speaking of sanctification and eventually our glorification. But the way that we become such spiritual grown-ups, ironically, you might say, is by becoming childlike, even infant-like in our total unapologetic dependence on the Word of God. We never outgrow the ministry of the Word. You and me, we never do. In that sense, we are like little dependent children all our lives. It doesn't mean we're childish. It shouldn't mean that. It doesn't mean we're childish in our thinking. It doesn't mean we're immature in wisdom and in righteousness, just the opposite. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14.20, brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking, be mature. Be mature. But what Peter does mean here is that we have to be infant-like and are happy, free, dependents on another, namely Jesus Christ and his word. And surely attaining this humbled, you might say deconstructed personality, this letting go of all pretense, of all pride, of all pretense to self-sufficiency in life, to all concern about credentials. Surely this is what Christ was referring to when he said to his disciples who were arguing amongst themselves about who would be greatest in the kingdom of God. And Christ said to them, truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you'll never enter the kingdom of heaven. And he said, whoever humbles himself is like this child. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Brothers and sisters, this spiritual childlikeness is the only antidote. only antidote to what John Calvin memorably called the ancientness of our flesh. That ancient, inescapable sin nature. That original sin that began in our first parent's paradise and ruined it and arced down to us through all the years, through all the centuries. through all the millennia and among all the people, one generation after another, skipping none. That curse, that ancient disease of the soul has a 100% mortality rate unless counteracted by the newness of the heavenly nature of the children of God. We all have ancient flesh, flesh nature. And so we must have this childlike humility to remain with a lifelong desire for the Word of God and in a position of happy dependence upon the Word. For you see, in this way, you and I can get younger as we get older. Yes we can. I love to see elderly folk who may not have a lot of time left here passionately studying their Bibles as that light in them actually grows brighter than it did 10 years ago. I've seen in my own wife, not that she's elderly or I am quite yet, but I've seen in my own wife a deepening, deepening, deepening love of the Word of God and interest in the Word of God. And Peter says that it is not the Bible plus something else that we crave. It is the pure and unadulterated spiritual milk that grows us up in holiness and Christian maturity. What that means is we need not try to jazz up or supercharge our ministries by adding something to the Word of God. I mean anything to the Word of God. Extra liturgies, mystical teachings on prayer, Jewish messianic reconstruction of the church, social justice causes, entertainment in worship, obsession with family life and parenting strategies, extra biblical teaching about the end times or speculations about the modern state of Israel or survivalist lifestyle advocacy or immersion in politics. I mean anything added to the ministry of the Word of God adulterates the ministry of the Word of God. It doesn't improve by addition. We are too long, Peter says, for the pure spiritual milk of God's all-sufficient word. Pure and unadulterated. The word milk of the gospel. That's how we grow up into salvation. Brothers and sisters, we need grown-ups in the church today, don't we? How we need grown-ups in the body of Christ today People who've been matured and seasoned by God's Word and Spirit through many years and have become as dependent as children upon it. These dark days require nothing less of us. And so that should be the word from all our pulpits. Grow up in Christ. Grow up in Christ. Everyone needs to be getting younger as they get older because that is indeed one good definition of Christian maturity. And here's the good news. Everyone can become a spiritual grown-up. We need to affirm that. This is not an elite group of super saints within the church. Everyone can become a mature Christian. It doesn't matter if you come from an old Charlotte family or if you were born in another state or another continent or don't even know who your parents were. It doesn't matter if you attained notoriety in your work or you were hardly ever noticed. It doesn't matter if you have a family everyone admires or one everyone prays for. It doesn't matter if you're a celebrity or if you've never once been in the presence of a celebrity. It doesn't matter what you were before you came here. It doesn't matter whether you're so healthy psychologically you'd be considered boring by a therapist. or whether you're so mentally troubled you struggle to sleep nights and struggle with dark depression. None of that matters when it comes to becoming grown up in Jesus Christ. Here is what matters. You have come under the ministry of God's unadulterated word, this spiritual milk, and here you may grow up into your salvation. And all that is required of you as you sit under the word administered is that you understand and you believe and indeed you treasure the fact that Jesus Christ himself is dealing with you, blessing you, loving you, teaching for you, teaching you and making you more like himself. That's really what it means to be saved, isn't it? Peter says, we will grow up into our salvation if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. Verse 3. You see, what we first learn by hearing scripture read and doctrine taught in a kind of line by line and precept by precept manner, it finally becomes a living thing to us. A living relationship to a living God. I love what John Stott said about this final verse, verse three. He said, the word of the Lord constantly presents us with the Lord of the word. Coming to the word is coming to the Lord. This central truth cuts both ways. We cannot detach the word from the Lord and like the scribes and Pharisees profess to cling to the scriptures while refusing the Lord himself. On the other hand, neither can we profess obedience to the Lord while rejecting his word. They can't be separated. Another way of saying what Stodd is saying here is to simply say God truly gives himself to us in the word and sacraments received by faith. We reformed folk teach that we all have a personal union and communion with our Lord Jesus Christ. And no one, I do mean no one, who has known him in this saving way would ever deny that he is good. I've never heard that said by a Christian, that he's not good. The Lord is good. He is so good. One of our elders' wives, Laura Cooper, has a wonderful habit of saying, and I've heard her say this in good times and in very hard times, and she simply says, the Lord is good. And sometimes she says, the Lord is so good. Have you tasted that in your own experience? That's what Peter says is your birthright. Actually, he says it's your rebirthright. Have you tasted that the Lord is good? You know, a taste, just a taste is often enough to keep us seeking more of the same. In the grocery store that Nancy and I frequent, they often give out these little free samples, mere tastes of what they're selling. And you know, I'm the kind of guy that calls his stores to do this because I'll often run right over there and buy some of that that I just tasted. What a sweet program. for spiritual growth and Christian maturity our God has ordained for us, his people. We become grownups in the kingdom of God by humbling ourselves like dependent children and tasting that the Lord our God is good. So, put away all malice and deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander like newborn infants long for the pure spiritual milk that by it you may grow up into salvation if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. Amen. Let's pray together. Oh Lord you are indeed so, so good. Like a good and loving parent, You give us what we need to be sustained and to grow, the word milk of the gospel. How we thank you for that continuing gift, given not impersonally but personally by you, by the Spirit of God himself. Help us, O Lord, as we depend upon this spiritual milk to lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely to us. and to put on our Lord Jesus Christ that we may day by day all grow up in him. For we pray in him this night. Amen.