Hello, this is Terry Cheek, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Marion, North Carolina. I want to thank you for choosing our broadcast, and my prayer is that it will be an encouragement to your walk with the Lord. Comments or questions can be directed to me via the link on our sermon audio page. Now, on to your selection. As I shared with the children this morning, there is a thirst that our bodies have, a thirst that can only be quenched by water. But there's a thirst that our souls have as well. And that thirst can only be quenched by Jesus Christ. We can look in many different areas. We can look in a lot of different places for it. But in the end, we're only going to find quenching for that thirst in the Lord Jesus Christ. There's no hope in anything else. There's no hope in anything around us. There's no hope in the world as a whole. There's no hope in money or gold or riches or influence or anything like that. There is only hope in Jesus. So this morning, as we look into God's Word, let's go to chapter 2, verse 1 of 1 Peter. The Bible says, Wherefore, laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings, as newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby, if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. As I was putting this message together, I saw some interesting patterns. But I'm going to begin from the end of the passage from verse 3, we see the phrase, if we have tasted that the Lord is gracious. Another way to say that is that if we have been saved, if we are saved, if we are born again, if we have experienced the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, That's something we need to really think about this morning. And we need to know deep down in our heart, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we have truly experienced the saving grace of Jesus Christ. That we have not had a religious experience. That we've not had an emotional experience. that we've not had just a train of thought that says, well, just because I have grown up in church, or just because my parents are this, or just because I have given that, that I've got to be saved. There's no other way around it. I've got to be saved. Don't fool yourself, friend. The Bible tells us plainly this morning that if we have not bowed and asked Jesus Christ into our heart and into our life, we're not saved. That is the only manner there is for salvation. The Holy Spirit of God has to call you, has to touch your heart, and has to touch your life. And in doing that, then you have to come and make yourself, to take yourself to Jesus Christ, ask Him to forgive your sin, and ask Him to save you, and He will do that. But that is salvation. That is being born again in a nutshell this morning. It isn't complicated. It isn't a process. It is something that is promised of God through the work of the Holy Spirit. Sadly today, there are many people who feel that heaven is earned or is purchased or it is even inherited. And as I've said, don't fool yourself into getting into that rut because it just isn't true. And if you find yourself thinking that this morning, I want to tell you, you're badly mistaken. Jesus tells us no one comes to the Father except by Him. No one. We can be religious. We can be moral. We can be ethical. We can be kind. We can be all of those things. We can have every one of those things working in our life. But if we are not saved, we do not have the hope of eternal life. So asking Jesus into your heart and asking Him to forgive your sin, and yes, you have sinned. We all have sin in our lives. As a matter of fact, we are all conceived in sin. We are all born in sin. We all have a sin nature. We all have a tendency to gravitate towards sin. Our flesh, our bodies are drawn to sin. It's just the way that we are. We can thank Adam and Eve for that. They put us in that spot. We inherited it from them. But praise God this morning, we can inherit eternal life through Jesus Christ if we will just be born again. Because being born again is a change and it is a hope that's fulfilled through Christ. We live in a culture that is marked with hopelessness and despair this morning. If you don't believe that, just spend a little bit of time in front of your television set and watch what's going on around the world. It's enough to depress anyone today. And our passage this morning is divided into two opposite experiences of life. And they're very necessary. We have the opportunity for both of those. As a matter of fact, we're guaranteed of the first one. And we're guaranteed a second one if we get it through Jesus Christ. First we're going to see a life of despair. Then we're going to see a life of desire. So notice with me first the despair that salvation removes. Looking at verse 1, wherefore? We are here because, that's what wherefore means. If you go back and if you review chapter 1, and you look over chapter 1, it will talk about the power and the permanence of God's Word. It will talk about the foreordained plan of God, the cost of redemption, the exhortation to be holy, the messianic hope of the prophets and what they preached. The believer's hopes and trials and joys. Chapter 1 will talk all about those things, those topics and those subjects. And then we come down and Peter mentions, wherefore, because of all of that that we saw in chapter 1, we need to lay aside. Now this is where a lot of people today struggle. A lot of people today struggle thinking that, well, as God grows and as God moves me through life, He will remove all of these things out of my life. He will just get them and He'll just push them aside and they'll just fall away and they'll be done. That's not what the Bible says. The Bible says that we are to be aware of things in our life and we are to lay them down. We are to lay them aside. And there are some very specific things given. This is not an exclusive list. But this list does cover many other things. It covers a whole broad range. For instance, all malice. If you look closely at chapter 2 verse 1, you'll see all is mentioned three times. Peter is telling us intentionally that everything in our life that is ungodly needs to be laid aside. Everything. Malice. What is malice? What does it really mean to have malice? It is ill will toward another person. It is ill will with a desire to inflict injury. Have you ever been so aggravated at someone, so ill, so frustrated that you wanted to go after, you wanted revenge? You wanted revenge. You weren't interested in praying for them. You weren't interested in talking to them about anything. You weren't interested in clearing up a problem. You wanted revenge. That's malice. You have an ill will stored up inside of your life, inside of your heart towards someone else, and you want to see them injured. Now I'm being very, very blunt about this this morning because we don't need to be mixing words because I do believe as many do today that there's malice in churches. There is malice among the families of God, among the households of God, where people are quietly and peacefully holding it within, but they're going around and they're moving about in a very quiet type of a way, trying to injure and harm someone. That's where we get into guile. That's exactly what guile is. Guile is a decoy. Guile is putting a decoy or a distraction in front of what our intentions are. We have malice, we have ill will towards someone, and we're hiding behind it. We're hiding that ill will behind something, and we're saying that, oh my, look, it's not about me, but if this hadn't have happened, if that hadn't have happened, I wouldn't be feeling this way. It's all something else's fault. It's someone else's fault. If someone hadn't have said this, or if someone hadn't have done that, then I wouldn't feel the way I did. It's not my fault, it's someone else's fault. That is guile. That is hiding behind a decoy to prevent us from dealing with our own problems. Then that leads to hypocrisy. Pretending to be something You're not. We can think of that a couple of different ways today. One way when it comes to the church who Peter is writing to, we can talk about playing church. What is playing church? Playing church is not having your heart in it. Playing church is coming to church for some other reason, but there to make it look real good. The first hypocrites in the church were Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts. And they were there. They were hypocrites. They had malice. They had guile. We're going to move into some other things that they were dealing with as well such as envy and evil speaking. But Ananias and Sapphira had this all figured out. They saw Barnabas. And Barnabas came and he gave his gift to the church. He had sold a piece of property that he had. And he sold it with intentions of giving it to the church. He wanted to help the church. The church needed the money. The church was having to take care of a lot of people. So he sold this piece of property that he had. He didn't have any need for it. He sold it and he gave the money to the church. God's work. And the church took it and they were thankful for it. Well, here Ananias and Sapphira were and they wanted that same prestige. See, they didn't see God's work. They didn't have a heart for serving the Lord. They didn't have a heart for loving people. All they saw was Barnabas. He got thanked publicly. And they wanted some of that. So here they come up, they sold a piece of property too. And they brought part of that money and they gave part of that money to the church and that was fine. There was nothing wrong with that until they got hypocritical with it. Until they said this is all of it. This is all. This is all that we got. Just like Barnabas. The Holy Spirit got hold. The Holy Spirit revealed them and told on them. They both had an opportunity to repent and they didn't. And because they lied to God and made hypocrites out of themselves, God killed them. You don't think God takes hypocrisy Seriously? You think that God thinks it's just some little giggly silly something that doesn't amount to anything? It destroys and it hurts and it cripples the testimony of the church. All of this stuff does. But from hypocrisy we move to envy. Do you see the trend building? You have an ill will that is suppressed and not dealt with. And you hide that ill will behind a decoy to make it look like it's not yours, but it's somebody else's problem. And then because of the hiding of that ill will, you become hypocritical because your heart's not in the church. Your heart's not into serving God. You're there for some other reason. And then you go from there to envy, whereas the people that are serving God and the people that are moving forward with ministry and God's working in their life, you want to be like them. So you begin to envy them. which does what? Which fuels the malice and makes it worse. It makes the guile worse. It makes the hypocrisies worse. And it just keeps throwing fuel on this fire when envy starts coming up. When envy starts creeping into our lives. And what does it end with? Evil speech. Talking down, talking bad about, being slanderous, gossiping. The evil speakings that come out of it. We start looking for a way to justify ourselves. And when we start trying to justify ourselves, we do so by trying to tear down someone else. Peter put those in there as a purpose. He says, lay this stuff aside. Put it down. There's no room for it in the household of God. There's no room for it in the family of God. Hey, folks, I'll be the first one to tell you we're all different and we all have differences and we all have things that we have to be on the same page with each other, but we may disagree on a few things that are insignificant in life. We may disagree on the color of a carpet. We may disagree on how soft the pews need to be or how hard they need to be. We may disagree on whether the music's going to be traditional or whether it's going to be contemporary. We may disagree on many things like that, but there's no reason in developing this type of a mentality where we have to put things in our lives where God's Word has to tell us to lay them aside. But we have them. And this morning I hope you realize that you are just as vulnerable to having those as I am. I am just as vulnerable to having these things as you are. Peter tells us to lay them aside. Why? Because if we can find it in our heart to lay these things aside, if we can find it in our life to say, okay God, you're right, I know I have some of this or I have a lot of this in my life, it humbles us. It humbles us because it brings us out of a despairing situation. Because that's where we find ourselves. Christians can find themselves in a despairing situation. Christians can find themselves in a situation where they're looking for answers in all the wrong places. Verse 2 takes us to the right place. It begins with as newborn babes. That's a picture of humanity. We've all had infants. Newborn babies. They're home born. They can't do anything for themselves. Nothing. Nothing. other than what their natural body functions are? They are dependent on someone else for everything else in their life. That's how the Christian is supposed to be with God. Other than the natural functions that He has given us, we are to be dependent upon Him everything in our life. Now that doesn't mean we wait on God to put groceries at the front step. I'm not saying He can't do that. I believe He can if He chose to. But God gives us a natural function to be able to know when we don't have any food in the house to take the blessings of the income He's given us and to go to the grocery store and get that food. The spiritual things in our life is the food and the water and the growth. It is the milk that we need. And that milk comes down to sincerity, which is the basics. The basics. Let me illustrate that like this. When you open your Bible to read it, and I hope you open your Bible and read it. As a matter of fact, I'm assuming that you do. I'm going to say that with an assumption that you do. If you don't, I want to encourage you to start doing it. But I want you to do it in the right way. You see, if you open your Bible and if you set it down in front of you with the attitude that is, oh well, I've already read this so many times. I've been through it X number of times. I already know what it's going to say. I can repeat it upside down and backwards again. There's nothing in there that I haven't already covered. You're not going after sincere milk. You're arrogant and you're self-righteous and you're self-centered and you're not going to allow God's Word to teach you anything. If you come back into God's Word and you open it up as sincere milk, always able to feed me with something. God is always able to teach me to grow, for me to grow and develop as a Christian, knowing and realizing that I have never gotten there. Jesus is the hope that I have for understanding God's Word and giving me the spiritual growth that I need to be what God wants me to be. If we want to understand how the How all of these things in verse 1 that we need to lay aside, how they apply in our life, we have to come down and we have to humble ourselves into the Word of God and we have to let it speak to our heart and speak to our life. And what an amazing thing it is when we do that. What a blessing it is when we let God's Word bring us to Him. instead of us trying to bring God to me. If I come to Him and I say, God, let Your Word bring me closer to You, then I know that I'm closer than I've ever been to my Lord and my Savior. And that's such an identifying thing as a Christian, as a child of God, to know that we're closer every day with Him. That's what He wants from us. He wants you to be closer. He wants me to be closer. If we're closer to God, we're further away from all of these other things that He's asking us to lay down. He doesn't want us wallowing in or tripping over all of these things in verse 1. He doesn't want that in your life. He doesn't want it in my life. He wants us to lay down those things. And may I say the best place to lay them down is at an altar. Whether it's at this altar or whether it's at a family altar. And I hope you have a family altar. I hope you have a place and a time where you and your children and your grandchildren, where you get together and where you call out to God and you pray to Him. That's where you can lay down these things on a daily basis. Where you can lay them down at a moment's notice with Him. where you can humble yourself before Him, hungry, hungry for His Word. And that hunger is going to stay with you throughout life. Because I believe with all my heart this morning, I believe that every true, born again child of God, deep in their heart they have a desire for His Word. They have a desire to be closer to Him. They have a desire to walk closer. They have a desire to know more about Him. They have a desire to be one of His disciples. But at the same time, we have a vulnerability. We have a vulnerability to fall into malice and guile and hypocrisies and envies and evil speakings. And if we're not careful when we fall into that trap and we get into those stumbling blocks, we'll stumble and fumble around in them for years and even decades at a time trying to get out of that trap, trying to get out of that maze that we're running through when all we have to do is just stop Just stop. And just lay all that stuff down. Give it to God. Walk out of it. Humble ourselves before Him. Get in His Word. Get in His Word. And have a heart and a desire to get closer to Him. So this morning, where is your heart? Are you wallowing in the despair of sin and ungodliness this morning? Whether you're saved or not, are you there in that state of despair? If you are, you don't have to stay there. There's a new life. There's a better life. There's a better start. Something that's more peaceful. There is hope. There is hope. There's hope for a wonderful life. Even in all of this misery that the world has to offer, there's hope for a wonderful life in Jesus Christ. There's hope for a new beginning. There's hope for things to be healed and things to be repaired. There's hope. There's hope for those that are lost and undone without Christ out there in the world. and hope is going to have struggles and it's going to have valleys and it's going to have challenges. Christianity has never been a cakewalk. And it's never going to be a cakewalk. With that desire of knowing Jesus and that desire of knowing God and getting closer to God, it comes with an encouragement that gets us through those difficulties. It comes with an encouragement and with a strength that we cannot find anywhere. So ask God to examine your heart. And be honest. Be honest. Ask Him to examine it and ask Him to show you how close you're walking with Him. Ask Him to show you. Do you have any of this stuff in your heart or in your life? Do you have any malice, any guile, any hypocrisy, any envy or any evil speakings? Do you have any of that stuff that's separating you? Do you need to have a humble approach to God and His Word Do you have that desire that God wants you to have this morning? And if you find yourself lacking, if you find yourself needing things, if you find yourself in a spot where you need to come to God, do so. Do so this morning. Whether it is in a repentant state, in a reviving state, in salvation itself, If you're saved today and you find yourself not in a spot where you're celebrating your salvation, where you have that joyful walk, if you find yourself in despair for anything, Jesus is here. He is here to help you get that desire for Him in place of the despair that the devil has in your life. Every head bowed, every eye closed, please. Is there someone that would just slip up their hand and say, pray for me. Pray for me this morning that I can be where God wants me to be. Maybe you know that you're not right. Maybe you know that you're not quite there. Maybe you know that there's problems and there's difficulties. There's something there that's separating you. God's willing, God's able, God is there to take care of you today. Will you let Him have His way in your life where you desire the sincere milk of the Word? That it will grow you into that relationship that He so desires. Heavenly Father and Lord God, thank You. Thank You for everything that You do in our lives. Thank You for Your Word. Thank You, Heavenly Father, for the sternness, for the reality that You put into life for us. God, I pray this morning that if You find anything in my life that's amiss between You and Your Word, I pray that you would let me know. I pray, Heavenly Father, there would be no malice in my life. I pray there would be no guile. I pray there would be no hypocrisy. I pray there would be no envy. I pray there would be no evil speaking. God has an example before this congregation. If there is any, I repent of it now and I lay it on this altar. I lay it all down. God, I pray others would do likewise. I pray, Heavenly Father, that as I move through Your Word, as I move through study, I pray that it would be a sincere milk nourishing me and growing me. And I pray that others would do likewise. I pray others would have that same desire in their lives. God, would You draw us closer to You so that we can be drawn closer to one another. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. God bless you is my prayer. Remember our services this evening.