And I would ask you to turn to 1 Peter 1, and we'll consider verses 22-25 this morning. The Word of God is powerful. It is sharper than any two-edged sword. The Bible ought to come with a warning label, because it is powerful stuff. When we mix with faith, The truth of the Word of God. The world changes. We change, and the world changes. This is the God who wrote these words, or had them written. He spoke the universe into existence by the power of His Word. And we are going to be speaking this Word today. We're going to be hearing this Word today. And we ought to be a little bit trembling in fear as we come to the Word of God. So with that as an ominous introduction, 1 Peter 1, 22-25. Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth, for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again. not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and abiding Word of God. For all flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls. But the Word of the Lord remains forever, and this Word is the good news that was preached to you. Dear Heavenly Father, we ask that you would write your word upon our hearts and minds, that it would do your work, that it would not return to you empty or void, but it would transform us by its truth, by its power, but Lord, also me, ultimately by your love. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. When God comes to us and transforms us by the power of His Word, by the Gospel, when we, through His enabling, when we confess our sins and when we embrace Christ as He is offered to us in the Gospel, as we embrace Him as our forgiveness, our atonement, as we embrace Him as our righteousness, we become citizens of heaven. We become instantly citizens of heaven from that very moment. But what does that mean? Well, one thing that it means is that we have the life of the world to come planted within us. We have something of the life of heaven, the life of perfection, life as it was meant to be, planted within us. experienced divine life or heavenly life, and in scripture it's often called eternal life. A little bit of heaven comes to take root within us when we first believe. What Peter calls it in this passage is, you have been born again by an imperishable seed. God has implanted something within us in our hearts and our minds so that we Through His transforming power and through His love, we become great lovers. We are transformed and we begin to walk this new heavenly life, this new eternal life. Jonathan Edwards preached about heaven one time, and it's a very well-known sermon. In fact, I have his conclusion of it for us as our meditation today. He called it, Heaven is a World of Love. And there is something about that world of love that is implanted within us the moment we first believe. And from that moment forward, we begin to be transformed by the power of His Word, by the power of that imperishable seed. Now, it needs to be watered. It needs to be nurtured. It needs to be encouraged. We need to hear the Word of God over and over again. We need to embrace it by faith. But this imperishable seed, this Word of the Gospel continues its transforming power within us. We are born again, and we now live a whole new kind of life. We become new creations. And that new creation is evidenced in the love that we have and the love that we share. Now, I know how to make breakfast. All you need is a little milk and some frosted flakes. A bowl and a spoon helps, but those are not actually required. Breakfast can also be toast and peanut butter and jelly. It can be eggs and cheese and ham and peppers. It could be all kinds of things. But when we finish breakfast, we know what it is and we enjoy breakfast. I recognize this as breakfast, and I just eat it, but we don't always know everything that goes into the breakfast. You know, if you have an omelet, you just enjoy the omelet, but you don't always parse it out, well, there's eggs, and there's butter, and there's salt, and there's pepper, and there's peppers. We don't always look to the ingredients that go into it, we just enjoy the whole. I think that's the way that we experience love. whether it's divine love or the love in the family, we just experience it, we just eat the omelet, but we don't know everything that goes into it. What goes into this love that Peter is calling us to? This sincere brotherly love, this earnest love from a pure heart. What are the ingredients for it? How can we break it down into its parts? How is this love produced? I think it is produced by this imperishable seed that is implanted within us. It is produced by understanding the love of God in Christ and having that word, having that truth, having that gospel transform us. It is the secret ingredient. It is the essential ingredient to this kind of Christian love. We're at right now in the passage. This is the third in a list of four different exhortations that Peter has been giving. And let me just review a few of them. The first was, set your hope fully on the grace that will be given to you. The second was, be holy for God Himself is holy. And now this one is, love one another earnestly for you were born of an imperishable seed. And then later we'll talk about you need to grow in Christ by hungering for pure spiritual milk. But this time we are to love one another earnestly from a pure heart because we have been born again of an imperishable seed. And we are reminded of this imperishable seed in the gospel that we hear week after week after week. It continues its transforming power in us, and it makes us great lovers of all mankind. That's what the gospel does in us. So what is the necessary foundation for this love? Have you, I have anyway, and I'm sure you have, you have seen other people extend this kind of love to other people. You have perhaps been the recipient of this kind of love from other people, from other Christians. They have loved you, and you have eaten the omelet, and you've enjoyed it. You have benefited from the love that other people have had for you. There have been people who have been great lovers of you. You've experienced it. Perhaps you've extended it, but the reason, I think, is because they have purified their souls. That's the way Peter begins. You have purified your souls. What does that mean? Most people think it has to include conversion, especially because of the way this whole passage is. He's talking about being born again and having been implanted with an imperishable seed, so it is conversion. But sometimes we look upon conversion only as a one-time experience in the past, and we can sort of pinpoint it, well, that's when I was converted. But in a very real sense, the moment we were converted, we also began converting. The work that began there didn't end there, it continues. And we are continually benefiting from the implantation of this imperishable seed. this divine life that has been given to us and is continually being nurtured and drawn out and encouraged. So I think it is, yes, our conversion, but it is also everything that our conversion implies or everything that our conversion leads to. Once we embrace the love of God in Christ, we can't help but be changed and transformed ourselves. So, in one sense, to purify your souls is to have obeyed this earlier command, these earlier exhortations to set your hope fully upon future grace and to be holy for God is holy. That's all part of the process. One person sort of translated this whole passage this way. Having purified your souls by obedience to these true commands to holiness, We are to love one another earnestly. So it's a both-and kind of thing. It's my conversion and my converting. It is the moment when I became a Christian, and it is the life that I now live as a Christian that he's talking about. We are purifying our souls by obeying the truth, by embracing the gospel. It sort of goes like this. If you are converted, if the Spirit of God has really come to you, you will obey. He doesn't come to you because you obey, but because He comes, you will obey. If His transforming work begins in you, we will see it. It will be evident. If you have Jesus as Savior, you will obey Him as Lord. I think Peter was referring to not just initial conversion, but everything that is its necessary consequence, so the life of the Christian. He says we've purified our souls by obedience to the truth, by embracing the gospel, by obeying the truth. Our culture has portrayed faith in very poor light. They say that what faith really is, is a blind leap into the dark. Whoa. See, I almost did that, right? That was an illustration. I knew that was there. But that's the way people picture faith. It's like putting a blindfold on and just walking. And you're going to get hurt sometime because it isn't scientific or it isn't true. It's just a blind leap into the dark. That's not how Scripture defines faith. Faith is a knowing leap or a step, a conscious step, into the light and into the truth because we know it is true. It isn't something that we do because we hope it's true. It's because we know it's true. That's why we believe. Our faith isn't based upon fantasy. It's based upon fact. It's based upon truth. And he says we purify our souls by obedience to the truth. That's what faith is. We are submitting to both the love of God, but also the wisdom of God. And this is the same God that created everything. So we are leaping into the light, into His gospel, into His truth. And it is as we submit to God, His love, His gospel, His truth, that we begin to be great lovers of all mankind. We begin to learn to be like our God, the one who is transforming us, and we are enabled to love others. I think I've said this before, but I want this in your heads. The greatest theologians are the greatest lovers. They're lovers of all mankind because they have been transformed by the love of God in Christ. That's what knowing God, that's what theology is. It is knowing God. It is knowing Him as He really is and knowing Him we begin to be transformed by Him. We begin to love others in the way that we have first been loved. So the people who genuinely understand theology, in its small dead-end streets even, they begin to exhibit love. If they really understand God and who He is and what He said and His truth, they themselves are transformed by the very presence of God or by the presence of this imperishable seed, by the seed of the heavenly life to come that has already been implanted within us. We begin to be great lovers of all mankind. And because of this, because great theologians are great lovers, or if they understand the truth, they will love other people, the Christian life cannot be lived in isolation. It's not just a me and God thing. It's an us and God thing. And we are part of a family of God. And this love has transformed not just you, but other people. And we're all sort of a work in progress. None of us have fully arrived. And we genuinely need each other's gifts and graces. That's the confession that we made earlier today. That we benefit from, that we require, that we need the gifts and the benefit, the love of other people. And we need their love as well. It is a growing, godly community that the gospel was after. It is a transformed humanity that the gospel was producing. It is this heavenly seed that has been planted in you, and in you, and in you, that comes to fruition in a godly, growing, righteous, loving community. So we are saved. by the love of God in order to love. But this love needs to be defined. I mean, you're often told as Christians that you are to love one another, but what does that mean? It doesn't merely mean being nice. It doesn't mean less than that, but it doesn't only mean just be nice and smile. It doesn't mean a romantic love like Hollywood portrays it, but it is a It is a righteous living kind of love. It is a love that can include confrontation and correction even. In fact, when I... When I do premarital counseling and I speak to the young star-eyed lovers, I tell them that when you make your vows, one of the things that you should say is hold your spouse's hands and look deeply into their eyes, and this is the commitment of love that you're going to make. I am going to keep the law of God with you. No one ever puts that in their vows. I don't know why. It doesn't sound very romantic. But that's really what love is. It is keeping the law of God together. Or it is walking in biblical truth together. Sometimes that's easier to understand. But it is keeping the law of God together. That's what defines love. It is the law of God. God Himself is love. He knows what love is, and He has written it out for us. This is what love is. And we are to walk in righteousness with one another. Not just in marriage, but in the church and even outside the church to other people. We are to love them. It is honoring God and it is honoring truth together. And when we do that as the church, as we begin to love one another, as we begin to be great theologians together, as we begin to walk in love, the world around us notices. Say, what is that? I want to be part of that. How do they develop that? And then we can share with them the ingredients where this love came from. This love comes from the imperishable seed which we have received when we heard the word of God, the gospel of Christ, and believed it. And it transformed us. And it can transform you. This community of righteous living, this godly community, can grow. In fact, ultimately, that's why That's why we're not all in heaven yet. Because God wants us to grow godly community here. He wants us to extend this love of God in Christ to other people. He wants us to show other people a little taste, a little sample of the heavenly love or the heavenly life that has been planted within us. We are here to be on display for other people. Look at what the love of God transforming a person can be. You can have this too. That's what we exist for, both individually and as the church. We are born again with this heavenly seed, this imperishable seed. And this obedience, this purifying our souls, this beginning to love others, is a necessary consequence of our being born again. Well, I haven't experienced that. Well, maybe you haven't. But it is a necessary consequence of being born again. We begin to be great lovers of other people. Because being born again is a radical change of character from the inside out. Scripture calls that we become new creations. We're born again. We're born anew. We're a different order of being in some sense. We are now Christians. We have been implanted with an imperishable seed. With a heavenly seed. And we are entirely different now. By their fruit, you shall know them. So as the Word of God takes root within you, you will grow in your capacity to love others, to notice their needs, to take an interest in them, to meet their needs, and sometimes that great personal sacrifice. Now, I always compare this to taking out the trash. What? I'm supposed to take out the trash. It's my one job. It's the only job I have in the entire house. But I don't always notice that the trash needs to be taken out. In fact, this week I told my wife, it was like four inches above the top, and I said, honey, I took the trash out. You know, I want brownie points when I do it one to ten times. But we, I tell her, you know, well, I didn't take out the trash because it wasn't on my radar. What does that mean? I didn't notice it. I didn't see it. And I think that's one of the reasons why we don't love other people more because they're not on our radar. We don't see them. We don't know what their needs really are. So we don't really know how to love them because we don't know them. Because they're not on our radar. And we don't really notice until the trash is four inches above the top. And sometimes that's too late. We need to, as the imperishable seed is growing within us, we will grow in our ability to notice how to love other people. We will begin to see what their needs really are. Because God in heaven, he looked down upon us and he identified what our needs were. And he met them in the cross. And that's what we are as Christians to do to other people. We are to recognize their needs and to understand how we are to love them. So the necessary foundation or the prerequisite for showing this kind of love is having a purified soul by obeying the gospel and being born again. But faith isn't merely an assent to certain abstract propositional truths. It is that. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and I believe it. I'm a sinner, and I need a Savior, and I believe that He died on the cross for me. And I can't stand the rigors of the law of God, so I need someone to obey in my place and give me a perfect righteousness. Those are all objective truths of the gospel that we believe, but it isn't only that. It isn't only a mental assent to historical propositions or facts. When we believe, it is like embracing electricity. There is a transforming power that the Word of God produces within us when we genuinely believe and we begin to be transformed because we are embracing truth that is life transforming, that is eternity impacting. The Word of God is being spoken into our lives and we are being gradually transformed into perfection. That's what happens when the Word of God first comes to us. So we are to respond to the gospel. We are to understand it, that yes, I am a sinner, and my sins are now forgiven. And I now believe in Christ, and now it makes me a saint. And God has set his love upon me, and I believe it, and my life is not my own. I have been purchased with the blood of Christ, and I understand that. But in understanding and embracing these things by faith, it is like plugging yourself into the wall. You have access to divine power, to divine transforming power. And it will change you. And one of the ways that Peter says that it will change us is this urgent exhortation to love. This great salvation that we have received and this call to holiness that we are given is all for the purpose of sincere, earnest, brotherly love. This is the direction that it is all shoving us into. We begin to love other people, especially, it says, this brotherly love, other brothers and sisters who have tasted the electricity. We are saved so that we will become great lovers of other people, so that we will serve them. So love in the church is a sign of our salvation. It is a validation or proof that we have been saved because we love. And we live in an increasingly impersonal society. For most people, it is enough for them to wake up, get ready in the morning, go to work and come back and pay the bills. and have a little fun on the weekends, and that's their life. They don't have any time for anything else. They can't go beyond that. But we live in a time of tremendous family breakdown, marital breakdown. We live in an atomistic society. We have been separated and compartmentalized, and we are now all specialists, and we live just with our little specialty, and we don't know how to build community anymore. And we live more in the virtual world than in the real world. But people are not made to live in a virtual world. We're not content to live with the breakdown of community. There's something in us that cries out for love and for acceptance and for community and that's the thing that Christians or that the church presents to the world. Here is a real community of love with real people with real needs and you can join us. I was talking to somebody recently, and this is sort of my excuse too when I first became a Christian, is, well, when you first became a Christian, why didn't you join the church? He says, personally, I didn't join the church because you're all a bunch of hypocrites. And it took me five years to realize that I was one too. That I was broken, that I needed help, and that this was the community that God was beginning to transform everybody in. And that transformation sort of implies that everyone in the church is still broken and none of them have fully arrived. So it can appear on the outside that we're all hypocrites because we're not consistent. We don't consistently do the right thing. We don't consistently honor God. And other people outside the church can look at that and say, I don't want to join them. But they do need to look a little longer. Yes, we are broken people, and yes, we all bear our scars and wounds, and no, we don't do everything right, but we have received the transforming power of the gospel, and we are beginning to be better. We're a hospital, and we're all in recovery, and you can join us too, because you have problems too. Everybody does. So we are appealing to the brokenness of the world around us, not saying that we in the church are perfect, But we in the church are beginning to heal, and you can join us too. It is a bold, honest recognition of our own weaknesses that will sometimes transform people outside the walls. We haven't arrived, and we're not portraying perfection here, but God has begun a tremendous work in us, and He can begin a tremendous work in you too. So come join us, broken brother or sister, and you will experience something of this sincere, brotherly love. You will experience something of this devoted, righteous community. You will experience something of this love from a pure heart. My son Matthew, sometimes he asks me, he says, he says, Dad, do you know why I love you? I says, why? Why do you love me? He says, because I love you. And that doesn't sound very profound, but if you think about it, it really is. I love you because I love you. In fact, why did God love us? Why did God single us out to receive His grace and His mercy? Was there something in us that drew His love out to us? No, He loved us because He loved us. And that's the kind of love that we are to have for other people. Not because they're somehow qualified or worthy of the love that we offer them. Because we weren't qualified and we weren't worthy of the love that was given to us. And we are to give that kind of love to other people, even though they don't deserve it. And sometimes, even though they don't ask for it, we are to give ourselves away in love. We are to sacrificially love others from the heart. Why? Because we love them. We already love them. I said this before, too, that God's love is a self-generated love. It doesn't need something to draw it out from our side, and that's the kind of love that we as Christians can begin to share to other people. It doesn't need something in them to draw it out, perhaps just the need, and that draws it out. But we love them because we love them, and we love them earnestly. from the heart in a way that sometimes takes time and sacrifice and personal involvement. And sometimes it will require confrontation and forgiveness, but it is loving them and loving them earnestly. I know people who hear this message and they'll say, yeah, Christians ought to love me. And why don't Christians love me? It's all their fault for not loving me, but this call to love comes to you as well. It comes to everybody. And it's true that Christians ought to love you better, but you as a Christian, you too, you ought to love others better, sincerely or earnestly and from the heart. And I think this really begins in the family. It doesn't end there, but it begins there. That's the kind of love that we are to show in the home first, and teach that kind of love, and then it sort of spills over from the family into everything else. And you can say the same thing about the church family. We have an inexhaustible source of love. We have an imperishable seed. So I'm not asking you, even though it may sound like it, I'm asking you to try harder. But rather, I am asking you to be who you are in Christ. You have received the imperishable seed. You have received divine love. You have received a taste of a heavenly life in the love of God in Christ. And that love can show through you now. And it shows through, and it's nurtured by, it is transmitted by the living and abiding Word of God. For the Word of God is powerful. Then Peter, he quotes from Isaiah 40. And we quote this often, but we don't often go back to the context. Isaiah was speaking that to people who were about to go into exile. And he was seeking to comfort them through the long years of exile. And he did it how? The Word of God. You know, all the glory of this life, all the glory of the Babylonian kingdom is going to fail, but the Word of God will continue. And that's what you need to embrace is the Word of God, the transforming power of the Word of God. That's going to sustain you even through the exile. And that's who Peter is speaking to in a sense as well, those who are in exile in a Roman world that is beginning to persecute them. What is going to sustain them? Well, it is the living and abiding Word of God. They are to embrace the truth of the Word of God and to live distinctively in the midst of their culture. In their culture, it was the Roman culture. Earlier with Isaiah, it was the Babylonian culture. But for us, it is the American culture. We are to live distinctively from it because we have Embrace the living and abiding Word of God. Our mind, our reactions to the world are shaped by the living and abiding Word of God. And when we have the living and abiding Word of God living and abiding within us, we begin to love other people. We begin to speak truth into the world. Truth and love at the same time. And all of this comes to us through the living and abiding Word of God. And he even says that this is the good news that was preached to you. One sense I could say the electricity is all around you because you are hearing the Word of God spoken to you. You are hearing the imperishable seed planted within you. And as you embrace the Gospel, as you purify your souls, you will begin to love earnestly and sincerely and from the heart because it is God's love implanted in you and peeking through the windows. It is the love of God in Christ that is showing through us. So as we believe and as we obey, godliness develops within us and godly community develops around us as we love one another earnestly, sincerely from a pure, or we even say from a purified heart. So do you really, really understand doctrine? Well, do you really, really love your brothers and sisters in Christ? It's the same question. It's the same question. We have been born again. We have had heaven placed within us. And we are to let that life to come show through us because we have received an imperishable seed. And that is the secret ingredient to loving one another sincerely, earnestly, and from the heart. It is the love of God in Christ that you have embraced by faith. So because the love of God in Christ dwells within you, open the windows and let others in. Amen. Let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have included us in your family. that you have made us one of your people. Lord, we thank you that you have placed us among your people. Though at times we are weak and wounded and we have not fully arrived, but we can see the imperishable seed in the love of others. And we thank you, Lord, for the times that we have been on the receiving end of that kind of love, not only from you, but from others. And we pray, Lord, that we embracing the imperishable seed, that we would show that kind of love to others as well. So bless us, Lord, as we are renewed again and again by hearing the gospel preached to us, hearing the love of God in Christ given to us freely. Help us, Lord, to embrace that transforming light and that transforming power, that others may see Christ living in us. that we might love them sincerely and earnestly and from a pure heart. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.