Take your Bibles now and turn to 1st Peter chapter 4. We've been studying the book of 1st Peter for the last 8 or 9 weeks and we're just going to keep going and press through and finish this book of the Bible. 1st Peter chapter 4, our text is going to be verses 1 through 11. It is so good. to be able to worship the Lord with you and to see you when I'm speaking and when I'm preaching. It's, Nathan can tell you, it is, and so can Brandon, it is awkward trying to preach and sing and pray to a camera lens barely the size of a playing card or smaller, and to just have to imagine your faces, all smiling, of course, loving everything we're saying and doing. but just imagining you and then interacting with you on the chatting windows there. So I'm thankful that we don't have to do it that way today. Thank you for coming. Thank you for being here. It's so good to be back together with you. So 1 Peter 4, we're going to keep studying 1 Peter today because it's just really so helpful for for facing the conditions we find ourselves living under right now. I want you to remember that like us, Peter's original audience knew all about facing challenges and risks and hard trials. They knew all about it and really to degrees that none of us have quite faced yet. And Peter's been telling them and telling us that we have every reason to hope We have God on our side. Don't forget that. No matter what's going on in the world, no matter how it feels, no matter what you see happening or what you're afraid of out there in the world, we have God on our side. God is for us. And we not only have him on our side, we have him on the inside. Think about that for a second. That's phenomenal. We have Jesus's life in us. And we have eternal life ahead of us. So we have every reason to rejoice in spite of all the reasons to be cynical or pessimistic or afraid in the world. Peter is telling us, no, we are people of a different hope. We have every reason to rejoice. And so instead of, in spite of rather shaky times and stormy weather, Jesus is the rock of stability underneath our feet. in the middle of all this uncertainty. He is our cornerstone, our foundation. And we have the deepest, strongest foundation of all under us. Under us. Enabling us to go out in the world and to make Jesus look good to people living in a world that's gone terribly, terribly bad. And that causes That mess of the world causes all kinds of sorrow, all kinds of suffering, and we feel it. We experience it. We live under it. And Peter is saying, don't let the suffering shake your faith in Jesus. Don't let it happen. Because no matter what's happening to you, it cannot separate you from the love of God and Jesus for you. It can't happen. God is actually powerful enough to use our suffering to make us into what He wants us to be. He's powerful enough to do that. To take all that that we hate, that we're having to live through, that we feel, and He can take it and use that as the means, as the tool to make us what He wants us to be. In fact, what He saved us to be. The old hymn says God moves in a mysterious way. In fact, He moves in many mysterious ways. His ways are mysterious to us. We don't understand all of God's ways. We can't penetrate into the mystery and grasp it. But one of those mysterious ways that God works is that God uses suffering to cultivate us into the image of Jesus. That's a mysterious thing. God uses what's against us to learn, to teach us to learn how to have the heart of Jesus, to have His character, to have His mindset. And that work of God in us is what Peter discusses now in this section of his letter. That God is, listen, using our suffering to teach us to think like Christ. That's what God's doing in us. Suffering is God's tool to teach us to think like Jesus thinks. So the question is, are we learning it? Are we learning that way of thinking, that pattern of thinking? Well, Peter's gonna help us see what that means. What does that pattern of thinking look like? And so God is aiming in His work in the world, God is aiming at using suffering in our lives to cultivate in us the mind of Christ. the mind of Christ. And I hope that you will be drawn to that today, that to embrace and to receive more greater degrees of cultivation into the thinking and the mindset of Christ. So I want to draw some ideas from 1 Peter 4, verses 1 through 11, that will shape our perspective on this, shape our mindset. So here's the first one. I don't think we have slides for this, so just listen, it's okay. Faith comes by hearing, right? Here's the first one. Christ suffered to release us from the tyranny of always getting our own way. Christ suffered to release us from the tyranny of always getting our own way. Let me unpack that. I want you to think with me for a minute about the sufferings of Christ. When we think about all the suffering that Jesus faced in His death, and we can imagine so much about those final hours of Jesus' life and all that He endured. And when we think about the blood, and the whip, and the crown of thorns, and the nails, and them hitting Jesus with their fist, and smacking Him with the rod, we can think of all those things, and it can be easy to overlook a particular suffering that Jesus endured. in those hours. And what I'm referring to is how much Jesus suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane. In that garden, with deep wrestlings, and Hebrews says, with loud cries, Jesus is there in the garden kneeling, prayerfully struggling over the surrendering of his will to the Father's will. He said so. If it be your will, let this cup pass from me. And he prayed that several times. Please, no. Please, no, God, no. If it be your will, let this cup pass from me. Jesus is saying something like what we have said in prayer many times. At least I know I have. Lord, Father, He's saying, I don't want to have to go through this ordeal of suffering if I don't have to. It's too much for me. It's too frightening. But if I have to, then I will. Not my will, but yours be done, Father." And in that, Jesus submits not only to the will of the Father, He submits to the horrors of crucifixion in order to save us from the horrors of hell. And Peter points us to Christ's suffering for us in order to focus our attention, to really focus our attention on Jesus' way of thinking about His own suffering. Verse 1, 1 Peter 4, verse 1. He says, Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with what? The same way of thinking So he's pointing us to Jesus' way of thinking in his sufferings. For whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin. Go back to that idea in a minute. So as to live for the rest of his life, for the rest of the time in the flesh, no longer under human passions, but live for the will of God. So through suffering, God is teaching us something. Here's what He's teaching us. He's teaching us, through suffering, you can't always get what you want. That's what He's teaching us. See, through suffering, what God, Peter is saying this, through suffering, God is growing us in a particular way. He's growing us beyond an immature way of thinking. Now, none of us in this room, none of us want to be considered to be immature. No matter how old or how young you are, you don't want to be considered immature. But we're all immature in some way or another, to some degree or another. We're all pressing toward completion, toward maturity. in Christ. And what God is doing is using suffering to grow us beyond an immature way of thinking. God is using suffering to wean us off of that old sinful habit of always expecting to get our own way. That's an old sinful habit. Always thinking we're gonna get our own way. Now listen, God knows what you and I feel, that suffering hurts. and not getting your own way, it's really frustrating. Well, let's be honest, it's downright infuriating to not get your own way. See, it doesn't feel like it, but what God is doing is He's actually setting you free. Free to pursue what God wants instead of being tyrannized by what you always want. Your own will is a tyrant. We're under bondage to our desires, our passions. Our will always chooses what we desire. And when God is setting us free from his desires that run counter to his desires. There's a freedom happening here. This is a liberation moment. This is what God is doing. He's setting us free from the bondage of our own selfish desires and our own sinful impulses that otherwise control us. liberating us to live in the spacious freedom of life lived in His favor. It's like taming a wild horse. That's what you and I are like. We're like taming a wild horse. God is using suffering to break us. That's even the language that the horse trainers use. We've got to break the horse, break the colt. breaking its will. That's what God is doing. God is using it to break us and to train us like a horse and to make us finally into something useful and happy. Because God knows we're not happy in our sins. But sometimes we're too dumb to realize that. Until we come to the freedom, I mean, how many of you, when you came to Christ, you didn't realize, when the burden of sin rolled off of you, you didn't realize the oppression of sin and the sorrow you were under until you felt the freedom and the joy in Jesus. Anybody outside of me, amen? That's what God is doing still in our lives. He's setting us free from that sin we keep choosing because we want pleasure, and God is breaking that to set us free for His pleasure where real happiness is found, real joy. Listen to the words of Hebrews 5.8. This goes right back to Jesus, this pattern. It says, although Jesus was God's Son, Jesus learned obedience through what He suffered, just like we do. And Peter here in this text is saying that God uses suffering to get us to cease from sin. That's the ending of verse one. He uses suffering to get us to cease from sin. So through suffering, we learn to think like Christ. And here's what that thinking involves, thinking like Christ, that God's will must always reign over my will. That's the thinking God's training us to have through our suffering. God's will must reign over my will. And His will is always good. I will never, ever forget to my dying breath the words I read as a very young man written by A.W. Tozer, you've heard me say this many times, where he once said, God never uses a person greatly until he hurts them deeply. Now, maybe you hear that and you're thinking, well, if deep suffering is what's required to be used greatly by God, then maybe I'd rather not be used. I think if we're being honest, most of us probably feel that way. I mean, we want to be used by, if we're a believer, we want to be used by God, amen? And we might be willing to suffer some, but you know, we'd really like to determine the timing of our suffering and the intensity of our suffering and the method of our suffering, wouldn't we? We'd love to determine those things. So we can be in control, so it doesn't hurt too much. We don't lose too much. And the truth is, we wanna be used by God, but deep down what we really want, we kind of expect, is that we want our exceptional abilities and our keen insights to make us usable to God. We're not so much interested in our broken hearts and our crippling weaknesses being used by God. And A. David Tozer in his book, The Root of the Righteous, he draws this picture that helps us to see the sense in his hard-hitting statement where he said, God never uses a man greatly until he hurts him deeply. Here's what he says, I'm going to read a quote to you from his book. This is Tozer. The flaming desire in us to be rid of every unholy thing and to put on the likeness of Christ at any cost is not often found among us. We expect to enter the everlasting kingdom of our Father and to sit down around the table with sages and saints and martyrs, and through the grace of God, maybe we will. Yes, maybe we will. But for most of us, that could prove at first to be an embarrassing experience. Ours might be the silence of the untried soldier in the presence of the battle-hardened heroes who have fought the fight and won the victory and who have the scars to prove that they were present when the battles joined. And I can tell you that is exactly how I have felt teaching the pastors from Bhutan who were the veterans of persecution in their country. I remember these conversations, Byron and I would talk about this and some of the other brothers, we would just wonder out loud, what business do we have teaching them? We need to sit at their feet. It was a bit awkward and embarrassing. Peter is saying the same thing as Tozer here about this. It's necessary for God to use suffering in His holy work of preparing His saints for a holy life of usefulness to Him. Now, I don't think this means we've got to go out and look for experiences of suffering if we want to be used by God. I mean, living in this broken world, we don't have to look for it. It's going to find us. But when it finds us, when suffering finds us, then we have a choice. Will we see this as God being unkind and uncaring toward us? Or will we see in our suffering the loving hand of God preparing us for usefulness in this world and purifying us for an eternity in His presence. Will we see it that way? And when we, listen, when we can begin to look for God's good purposes in our suffering, that's when we're starting to learn to think like Him. So Peter says, number two, now's the time to live differently. Now's the time to live differently. Look at verse three. For the time that is past, he's talking about in our lives, suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, unbelievers, outsiders. Living in sensuality and passions and drunkenness and orgies and drinking parties and lawless idolatry, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Whatever your sins were before coming to know Jesus, put them in there. In other words, Peter is saying, we've already lived long enough in a self-indulgent way of life. We've already lived long enough this way. Come on. You and I have already spent too much time, we've wasted so much time, wasted our lives on sinful, evil, dark, selfish desires and pursuits, doing what pagan, God-ignoring people choose to do all day long. We've spent enough time in living this way, Peter says. Now it's time to be done with all that for good and do the will of God. Live the way He calls us to live through the witness of His Son's suffering and dying and rising again. That's calling us to a different way of life. That's the gospel. And he says here, then your old friends, listen, your old friends won't understand why you don't join with them anymore in doing the things they do. But Peter says, don't worry about that because you're not going to give an account to them. They're going to be called on the carpet by God one day. and give an account for themselves. Look at verses four and five. Here's how he says it. With respect to this change in your life, this leaving behind your old life, he says, they, the old friends, those Gentiles, those unbelievers you hung out with, they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they will malign you, but they will give an account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. So instead of continuing in that old, self-destructive, sinful life, now through the message of the gospel, we get in on the new life that God has given us in Jesus. So live the new life. Verse six, for this is why the gospel was preached, even to those who are now dead. that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God is. By the way, being judged in the flesh the way people are is simply a reference to death. Even if we're born again, we're gonna die. Okay, that curse, that part of the judgment and the curse remains. So even though that they have lived in the spirit the way God does. And so anyway, what Peter is saying here is this, that instead of worrying about what your old friends say about you, You need to look further back in time than just your old friends. Look back to those believers who are now dead. Look to those people. Abraham, Sarah, Joseph, Moses, Elijah, Mary, Ruth, Martha, Peter, Paul. Look at those. Even though they died, They got in on the life of God through the message of the hope that we've been given in Jesus. And they got in on the way of life that's now aligned with God through His Spirit. So because Christ suffered for us, he says we now live in the day of salvation. And so now it's time to live in the way of salvation. The sufferings of Christ call us to live differently now. Number three, suffering teaches us to stay awake through prayer and love. Suffering teaches us to stay awake, stay alert spiritually through prayer and love. God word, neighbor word. 1 Peter 4 verse 7. The end of all things is at hand. Therefore, be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers." What Peter is saying is this. It's time to live differently now because time is of the essence. Everything is coming to an end. God is wrapping things up. So don't take anything for granted. Don't take any day for granted. Stay alert. Wide awake in prayer. Keep the conversation going with God. Because he's there for you, suffering saints. So when trials are hard, pray. When life is uncertain, pray. When suffering is severe, pray. When you're feeling afraid, pray. Cultivating a life of prayer is cultivating a life of dependence on God. That's how we learn to live by faith and not by sight and not by feelings. We learn to live by faith by cultivating a life of prayer, prayerfulness. So talk to God all the time. Keep talking. He keeps listening. Talk to God as your loving Father and trust Him. Trusting that He's working for your good in your suffering. Trust Him for that. And so, as Paul would say in Philippians 4, turn your worries into prayer. Turn your anxieties into prayer. Turn your fears into prayer. Turn them into prayer. Talk to God about what you're going through. Do you know that He wants to hear from you? You ever heard somebody say, hey, call your mom. She needs to hear from you. Call your daddy. He needs to hear from you. Talk to God. He wants to hear from you. He says, well, I'm not a good prayer. He's not measuring that. He doesn't care. He knows you. He knows your heart. He knows even how to take your difficult-to-express feelings. The Spirit can even take that and turn it into prayers for you. Go for it. Talk to Him. It's safe. His arms are open. He's inviting you. Talk to God. Let me ask you a question. When Jesus was facing His end, what did He do? He went to Gethsemane and He prayed. He prayed and He loved. He loved us to the very end. And so Peter says in verses 8 through 10 these words. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly. Keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace. And so what he's saying here is this, I know you're hurting. I know you're struggling. And like a hurt animal, the last thing, one of the hardest things to do is to let someone near you or move towards someone else to care for them. You're so concerned about your own hurt, your own needs. And Peter is saying above all, love each other earnestly, move toward one another because you're all hurting. Listen, there's one thing, there's two things you can know about anybody who ever walks into your life or walks into this church. Two things you can automatically know about them. They're a sinner and they're a sufferer just like you. So above all, keep loving one another earnestly. Because listen, think about it. As people who have been loved so incredibly and so undeservedly, And we've been loved by a holy God and a loving Savior. Love each other like your life depends on it. Forgive each other like you've been forgiven of something big. Okay? Forgive other people like you've been forgiven of something really, really big because you've been forgiven of everything you've ever done. Hallelujah. All your sins forgotten, forgiven, covered, remembered no more, condemned no more, embraced by God as His highly loved child. God's been so generous to us. Every one of us, God's been so generous to us. And now we've been liberated from our deep self-centeredness through suffering and through the gospel to now live generously toward each other. And so all that God has poured on us, we now get to pass around. That's what Peter's saying. These very, God's very grace, graces, charis, gifts, God's very gifts to us, we get to give out to each other. And so God has done that in generous love and in generous help and assistance and hospitality and through generous, encouraging words. That's how we serve one another and love one another. Look at verse 11 and we'll finish this up. Whoever speaks, He's talking about a manner of loving one another here. Whoever speaks as a way of loving others, speak as one who speaks the oracles of God. In other words, let me translate that for you. Speak as though God himself were speaking through you. What would Jesus say to each other in here? What would Jesus say to you? That's what I should be asking. How would Jesus say this? What would Jesus say to you to encourage you, to bless you, to edify you? Let your words be seasoned with grace and truth, right? Speak the truth in love. And whoever speaks, speak as though God were speaking through you Himself. And then He says, they shift gears, whoever serves. So we move from words to actions. Serve as one who serves by the strength that God supplies. God serving through you. God serving them through you. Listen, this is how Jesus lived. This is how Jesus lived. It's how Jesus thought. And it's how we're being trained to think and to live. To think like Him and to learn to live like Him. I mean, you could sum Jesus' ministry up just in those first few lines of verse 11. Jesus' words and Jesus' serving. Like God was doing it through Him. It wasn't like, it was God doing it through Him. And we learn to do it too, all for a bigger purpose than ourselves. Remember this, remember this, this is all for a bigger purpose than you. You getting the credit and people loving you and thinking you're the best thing in the world. No, no, no, we're not doing it for that, are we? We're not doing it for our own attention. We wanted to make Jesus look good, right? The end of verse 11. We do this in order that in everything, God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To Him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Say it with me, church. Amen. Truly. So when we learn to think and live and speak and serve other people like Jesus did, God's bright presence will be evident in that spot where you're standing doing that. And you'll make Jesus look good. Let's pray. Father, thank You, thank You, thank You that we could gather together in person but in Your name today. Thank You that You have called us through the sufferings and the death-conquering resurrection of Jesus into a new life, not only to receive new life but to walk in a new way of life. Thank You for Peter's clarity today, pointing us to the sufferings of Jesus as a way to learn the mindset of Jesus about our sufferings. And so Lord, I pray that today you would train us to think like you. And that you would train us to look for your good purposes for what you're doing for us through the hard times and through the pain and through the struggle. Help us to look for the ways you're working. and to believe that you are working for our good because you said so. So I pray, Father, you would give us grace for our trials, mercy for our sins, and then fill us with grace and mercy to give away to others, both in the things we say and the ways we serve. Help us to move toward others like this. I ask it in Jesus' name, Amen. Amen.