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You can turn to 1 Peter 2, verse 1 to verse 3, and we'll read it once more and then pray and then dive into the text. So 1 Peter 2, verse 1, Peter writes, to put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander and like newborn infants Let's pray. Father, we ask this evening, as we open up the ancient Word of God, written down through the centuries by your Spirit, through the pen of the apostles here in 1 Peter, through the apostle Peter, we ask, Lord, that you would help us to taste your goodness, as Peter talked about, that we would see the sweetness of this pure spiritual milk set before us. And we pray, Father, that you would feed and nourish our souls, that we would be strengthened for the week to come to serve you with fullness of heart. And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. We're gonna look at tasting this evening, and if you were to think about the five senses that God designed and produced in you, you have sight, you can see through that sense, you have smell, you can use your nose and smell a pleasant aroma, you have a tongue to taste, you have ears to hear, and you have fingers to touch. And Peter here, he's gonna pick up on this taste bud, you could say, or the sense of tasting, And he says in verse 3 of 1 Peter 2 that there's something we ought to taste as Christians. And we can testify to it that if we're in Jesus Christ and we've been born again, we have tasted the goodness of God, Peter says. But when we've tasted the goodness of God, we're left with this longing that we wanna taste more of His goodness. If we have beheld His glory and have tasted something of His goodness, we're not content to say, well, that was a good sample last year, but I wanna taste more of His goodness and know more of its fullness. That's what Peter wants us to understand, that if we're Christians, we, by definition, are those who have tasted that the Lord is good. It's interesting if you were to look throughout the Bible, even in the Old Testament, that verb taste, it's often used to describe God as this gracious host who opens up this plethora, or you could say a plethora of resources for us to plunge into, or this pantry that we can feast upon, or this rich host that sets before us rich pastures for our soul to be nourished. Throughout the Bible you get this idea of God using the word taste to teach us something about spiritual disciplines. We see that in Psalm 23, that beautiful text of the Lord as our shepherd. He's the shepherd of the sheep and he feeds you. with green pastures. He leads you beside still waters so that you can go and drink from. And David says he prepares a table before you in the presence of your enemies, whatever circumstance you find yourself in. David says that God, He richly provides this feast for you, for you to taste upon. And this feast is fellowshipping with God Himself. To know that the shepherd is my shepherd, therefore I shall have no want. That's in Psalm 23. He's the shepherd who puts this wonderful host, wonderful hostess for his sheep, Psalm 34. talks about tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. And then in the New Testament, Luke 15, you can see that story of the prodigal son. He's off in the far country and he's in the pigsty and he's delighting in all the pleasures of the world and sin. What happens is, well, he comes to his senses, he comes to repentance and turns from his sin, and the father sees his son far off, and it's actually the father who runs after this prodigal son, and what we see there is that the father, he slaughters this fattened calf, and he says, let's celebrate and eat and rejoice, for my son has come home, he's repented, he's come back to the fold, and the father to the prodigal son, He opens up this feast for the Son to taste and eat and celebrate in, and that is essentially what God is teaching us in 1 Peter 2. The taste factor of the Christian life simply means, in terms of spiritual disciplines, that God, by His grace, opens up this door for us to come to Him and to taste and experience His goodness and love that has no bottom or no brim. Stephen Charnock says that God's this inexhaustible fountain of goodness that we must plunge into daily. And what Peter wants us to know is if we want to grow in our taste buds, you could say, or grow in our appetite, our spiritual appetite, there's something that you ought to do as a Christian. You ought to train your taste buds. And in verse 1 of 1 Peter 2, There's things that you must never drink down. Peter is essentially saying that if you drink down these things, verse 1 of chapter 2, it's just going to be a bitter taste of sin. If you drink down what you should put away, verse 1, if you drink down all malice, and all deceit, and hypocrisy, and envy, and slander, He says, you're just gonna get a bitter taste of sin. And if you give your life to these things, if you're not a believer here this evening, Thomas Watson appeared and says, why would you drink down the pleasures of sin? Why would you drink down malice and deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander? Why would you live for those things and drink down that bitter taste when it only brings a sea of wrath once you die in your sins, if you die in your sins? So for the unbeliever, Peter, he warns us, if you see your life enslaved to these things, there's one that you ought to run to. Don't run to these things. Flee from them and flee to the goodness of the Lord. But for the Christian here, there's things we must put away, verse 1. And then there's things that we must drink down, verse 2 to verse 3. Our taste buds must reject and spit out any of the things in verse 1, essentially. And then in verse 2 to verse 3, there's things that we must drink down. So that's what I want us to look at this evening. What must we never drink down? and what we must always drink down. So number one, verse one, what must we never drink down? Put away, he's speaking to believers, those who've been born again, chapter one. He says, put away, don't drink down all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander. Essentially what he's saying is if you remember what it's like to taste something bad, I had a coffee this afternoon, and it had some coffee grinds in the bottom, and you're drinking it down, and then you taste something bad, and you spit it out. Well, that's what sin does in the Christian life. We think it's gonna be okay, and then we get to the bottom of it, and we get burned. It's like, as Proverbs says, you can't play with fire and put it close to your chest without getting burned. Peter's saying, if you've been born again, and you're playing with malice, and deceit, and hypocrisy, and envy, and slander, That's going to bring about this bitter taste of sin. And what it does in the Christian life, if it is ignored, if it's not repented of, if you don't see God's restoring grace, not to earn your salvation, but to no longer grief Him and have His fatherly pleasure upon you again. Peter's saying there's five things you ought to put away, believers in Asia Minor. These are things that these believers are facing in their context as the world presses in upon them. You could think of the tyranny that they're facing in the Roman Empire with Nero. You could imagine the hypocrisy of the leaders of the day, and the deceit, and the malice, and the envy of others, and the slander coming at Christians, and one temptation is this, that if the world is using these means, or these sins, and they're drinking it down, the temptation for the believers is to say, well, I want to use the same tactics that the world is using against me, and I want to respond in the same way of malice, or slander, or deceit, or hypocrisy, or envy, because that's what That's what Nero's using to these believers in Asia Minor and the temptations to walk in the flesh and respond the same way to the world as the world responds to us. And Peter's saying, if you don't take these sins seriously, you're not going to experience God's goodness. You're not going to have, in one sense, His smiling face upon you. You'll fall under His fatherly displeasure and discipline, and if you want to taste his goodness and see it tangibly and walk in a close fellowship with him, don't drink these things down. What must we not drink down? I'll just briefly highlight this by definition. The number one thing in verse 1 he begins with is, do not drink down all Malice, any kind of malice. And that word malice means bad intent against someone, wanting to get revenge against someone. And you can think of their context here. They've suffered unjustly for righteousness. They've suffered for their allegiance to Jesus Christ. And we'll see later in the chapter that our ultimate example, our Lord Jesus Christ, when he suffered unjustly, what did he do? Peter will say he entrusted his soul to God and he endured and he He pressed on and honored God regardless of the opposition. And Peter's saying there's this temptation for us when there is unjust bad intent. Well, he reminds us and Paul will remind us in Romans 12, vengeance is the Lord and trust your soul to the one who will bring vengeance and justice. But sometimes we don't experience justice in our world when wronged. Peter says we don't respond that way. We don't respond with all malice or any kind of malice when someone wrongs us and has bad intents or wants to take revenge on us. Our response as Christians is not to say, well, I want to take revenge on them. And we all know what that's like. We feel it in our heart. Someone wrongs us and we say, well, I want them to have a greater wrong done to them, or I want them to experience a greater suffering than what I experience from their sin against me. And Peter is reminding us that that is not what the gospel teaches us. That if we've been wronged by someone in this world, we realize that we deserve to be wronged, or we deserve something far greater, rather. We don't deserve that kind of kindness. I believe it was D.A. Carson who said, if we have the mark of God upon us, the seer of God, well we don't have the wrath of the Lamb upon us. But if we have the mark of the beast, and if our allegiance is to Satan and his kingdom, well then we have the wrath of the Lamb upon us. If we're in Christ and we don't have the wrath of the Lamb, well, we're going to experience the wrath of the beast in this world, but we deserve much greater. We deserve the wrath of the Lamb. So Peter reminds us, don't have malice, don't have this bad intent kind of bent to you, wanting to take revenge on you, because we deserve something much greater. We've received mercy, something we don't deserve. Number two, don't have deceit. Don't drink this down. He says, put away all malice and all deceit. That means to mislead someone and Maybe we don't as Christians outrightly trying to mislead someone, but we can do it subtly. Even without thinking, we can buff up a story and we can tell what seems to be an innocent story and maybe exaggerate it to the point that someone is misled with a situation, or we actually hide part of the situation and story. You can think of the social media world. We could be sinning against our spouse the whole week of vacation, and then what do we do? Well, the temptation is maybe to go on social media and post a photo and say, this was the most wonderful vacation, and here's a photo of maybe we were reading the Bible together, and well, if that was the intention, then maybe hide something of the hardship and sin and saying, yeah, we had a hard week. We needed to grow in sanctification that week, and the Lord, he disciplined us, he taught us things. We're pursuing holiness in this area now. Instead of hiding that part, we're open and honest. Well, the temptation maybe for deceit in the Christian life is to hide part of our life or exaggerate a story and say, well, I try and witness to five people. Well, maybe it's one person that we witness to, whatever it is. It may be subtle, but we want to be honest and open and transparent. Peter says, don't mislead anyone in any matter of life, whether it seems significant or not. Tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. And then thirdly, he says also, verse one, put away hypocrisy. We know what that means. It means to fail to practice what we hold to or believe and teach. In other words, he's saying, Let your public life be the same as your private life. Have this consistency that whoever's bringing opposition against you, they can see this credible life of integrity wherever they press you or wherever they find you. They don't see this life that looks one way in the public and then looks something else in the private life. Don't play the hypocrite. Fourth, he says, don't be envious of others. Don't be jealous of others. You can imagine the believers suffering. And there's a group here in the church that all their goods have been plundered. And there's another where their goods aren't touched. And you can imagine the believers saying, well, why did God give them that? And why did he give me this? And why did they go through that and I didn't get to go through it? Or why have I gone through this? And subtly this, Spirit of envy, jealousy of others with the providence of God given to us, it can settle in, and Peter's aware of this. And then finally, verse one, he ends with slander. He says, do not slander anyone. Slandering, it's defined by the Greek lexicon as to diminish or harm someone's reputation with statements that are untrue and false, whether intentional or unintentional. You can imagine the temptation even of the Christians there to misrepresent Nero with statements that are untrue or false. That would be a genuine temptation if they're feeling the pressure of this tyrannical leader to misrepresent him or say something untrue about him. Peter says, no, we don't operate that way. Whatever we say is true. We can have true hard statements that are legitimate and maybe the world doesn't like it and maybe you suffer for it, but it ought to be utterly true about someone whether intentional or unintentional, Peter says, let all these things, let it not be your spiritual diet. If this is what we're drinking upon, it's going to harden our heart. It's going to cause bitterness of spirit. And the whole premise of this, for why we should put it all off, is really built on chapter 1 with that statement, if you look in verse 23. He says, it's all because you've been born again, chapter 123, 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 a flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever and then Peter says this word that Isaiah talked about is the good news that was preached to you. We saw a couple weeks ago Peter quotes Isaiah to show us that God's word accomplishes his purposes and here his word by the Spirit's work through regeneration has the power to produce or to form in fashion spiritual children, those born again, adopted into God's household. And Peter says that whoever's been born again by the living Word, by the Spirit's work through that Word, God will have his purposes accomplished in them. There will be this life of growth and holiness, of putting off these things. The more we grow in holiness, we also grow in our distaste for sin, and we actually see more of our sin. We see more of these things mark in our life, but that's a sign of life. When I look at my own life, I see the bitterness of sin more, and I see how unlike Christ I am in many ways. That is a sign of life. If we don't see that bitter taste when we fall into these things, or we don't see a growing need for holiness, Peter says, There's a dietary issue. There's some malnourishment. And a doctor would say, well, you've got to drink something else down. You've got to have this protein shake. You've got to get your diet up to what it should be. And that's what Peter gets into now in verse 2 to verse 3. Don't think about this, what you must not do, but now think about This, what you must do, what you must drink down. The old man in which you drunk the pleasures of sin down without any conviction, that man's dead. You're alive in Christ now. You're a child of God. Here's what children of God drink down, he says. Verse two to verse three of 2 Peter 1. He says, like newborn infants, long Don't long for malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander, but 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. Peter's saying, here's this recipe. If you've been born again, if you're a child of God, here's what your diet should look like. This diet is not like a diet of infants that are on their mother's milk for some time, but the diet of the Christian is always on this pure spiritual milk. We never outgrow drinking down this It's pure spiritual milk that Peter talks about and he says here's the recipe for growing daily. You need this diet. This is what you drink down. This is what your taste buds must cling to and grow an appetite for. this pure spiritual milk. And we already know what he's talking about from chapter one. It's the milk of the word, the milk of this gospel that Peter and the apostles preached to them. And I want you to look again just at the nature of this word. If you look back in verse 23, this milk of the word is not perishable. You don't have to store it in a freezer or put it in a fridge so that it doesn't go sour. This pure spiritual milk of the Word is imperishable. It never fades away. It is, as one man says, it is sufficient that the Word of God is pure spiritual milk, is sufficient, able to produce everything in which God designed it to produce. It's sufficient to take a new convert and train him or her in all the ways of the Lord and produce this man or this woman who's mighty in faith and holy in life, it's sufficient. That's this imperishable word. It's sufficient for your own Christian life. If you look for a moment at 2 Timothy 3, we see the sufficiency of God's Word, this pure spiritual milk, it's used by God to lead us to Christ, and then it's also used by God to grow us in the grace and knowledge of Christ. So we never grow this pure spiritual milk. If we're having our taste buds growing, it's a growth in this drink, this spiritual drink that Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3, 14 to Timothy, he says, but as for you, Verse 14 of 2 Timothy 3, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. The whole context here, if you look back in chapter 3 verse 1, It's the perilous times, these days of persecution and evil days. Paul says, understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. Paul says, in times of difficulty, you don't change your spiritual diet. Continue is the next verb in chapter 3. Understand that there will be times of difficulty, but also verse 14, understand that your spiritual diet never changes. You continue in what you've learned and firmly believed. From where? Verse 15 he talks about the sacred writings here, the Old Testament. But in verse 16 and 17, the whole Bible, Timothy here from childhood was taught this pure spiritual milk of the word from his mother and grandmother. And this word, Paul says, is able to make you wise. for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. That's the point of the Scriptures. Jesus said in John 5 verse 37 to the Pharisees, you search the Scriptures thinking that in them you have life, but it's they that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you have life. That's what Paul's saying to Timothy. The Scriptures and the purpose of this pure spiritual milk is given to us by God's revelation to point us to Jesus Christ, that we'd see Jesus in the Scriptures and run to Him for salvation. But that milk diet doesn't stop there. If you look in verse 16 to verse 17, the nature of this pure spiritual milk is God-inspired, God-breathed, without error. All Scripture, Genesis to Revelation, the whole Bible, is breathed out by God. Every word is written down to us by God himself. Everything was intentionally written without error, without spot or blemish. That's why Peter says it's pure. It's the holy word of God. It's breathed out by God, and what is it used for in the Christian life? Profitable for four things. For teaching us as believers, for reproving us, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete. That you'd be a whole Christian, Paul is saying, equipped for every good work. That's why A.W. Tozer says that it takes a whole Bible to take a whole Christian. We need to read from Genesis to Revelation to see all the glory and beauty of our great God. So this word, it's sufficient. Peter's talked about. It's also everlasting. It's firmly fixed in the heavens. It's effective. It accomplishes His purpose. Ryle says that no time's wasted when it's given to the Word of God. You don't waste your time if you fully have a diet based on this spiritual milk. But what's this diet like? That's the second question. If you look back in our text of 1 Peter 2 verse 2, what is this pure spiritual milk like? What is its design in the plan and purpose of God for the Christian? He says, like newborn infants long for the pure spiritual milk. We see its nature, but what's its use in our life? Why should we have a growing taste for it? He says that, verse 2, by this pure spiritual milk, the Word of God, that by drinking it down, putting away the bitter taste of sin and drinking down the pure spiritual milk, by it, Peter says, you may grow up. into salvation. He's not saying that you earn salvation, but sometimes words here in the New Testament are used in different contexts. That's why context here always is king, determining the meaning. The salvation Peter's talking about is holiness, your growth in Christlikeness, your sanctification. He's talking about that part of salvation. He's not talking about justification, being made right with God. That's solely by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, But for the Christian, how do we grow into purity to reflect the purity of the God of the pure milk of the Word? Peter says it's through drinking down this Word that you grow up into sanctification, that you grow in holiness, in purity, in likeness to the God who redeemed you. That's the function of the Word. That's why the Word is so important. That's why the Word has to be our pure spiritual diet. Because God's design in our Christian life is to use His Word by His Spirit to grow us in Christ's likeness. That's what Paul says. This Word in 2 Timothy 3 equips you for every good work, every circumstance. This Word, if it's your diet, spiritually speaking, it will equip you for the week to come. It will equip you for whatever circumstance. When you're slandered, and when someone has malice against you, or deceit against you, or lives a hypocritical life before you, or envies you, and wrongs you. That word can so soften your heart that you can obey the command to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, not perfectly, but grow in that, and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus is the greatest example, the one who lived that out perfectly on behalf of sinners. On the cross, he hung there in the stead of ruined sinners, and he said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Now, what does the life of Christ do in a man, if you've been reading through Robert Murray McShane, you get to Acts 6 and 7 and 8, and you see this Christ-like man, Stephen, who's preaching this sermon, and he's being stoned to death at the feet of Saul, the apostle Paul approved of the first martyr in the church. And Stephen, it says that he was a man full of the Holy Spirit with grace and truth, and his face shone like an angel. And as he fell to the ground and breathed his last, he said, Father, What did he say? It was a Christ-like prayer. He said, forgive them. He prayed this forgiveness for his enemies who stoned him. That's something of this power from the pure spiritual milk that equips God's people for any situation to have a Christ-like life. It's what we must devour and grow in. It takes work though, this pure spiritual milk. You have to work at this diet. Paul says in 1 Timothy 4 verse 7, you ought to train yourselves for godliness. It doesn't come, you could say, naturally. We have the fallen nature still, and we have the flesh within us still, so we need to train ourselves for godliness. We need to train ourselves to drink down the pure spiritual milk more and more so that we can have something of Christ in us. Ryle puts it this way. And then we'll get to the consumption. How do we drink it down? We see its nature, we see its purpose. J.C. Riles says, our God is a God who works by means, and God will never bless the soul of a man who pretends to be so high and so spiritual that he can get on in his day without God. That's what Peter's essentially saying. He's saying we ought not to fool ourselves by pretending we're so high and spiritual before God when we think we can get on with our day without drinking down this pure spiritual milk of His Word. If we think that we don't need fresh supplies of beholding God's glory by faith in His Word, And we fooled ourselves. If we think we can get by each day without a promise of God nourishing our souls, we fooled ourselves. If we think we can get on with the day without having a growing intimacy with our Creator and our God, We fooled ourselves, and just one more plug with, I forgot to mention this morning, but this McShane plan, the goal's not to just check off boxes and say, well, I've done four choppers every day for the whole year, but the goal is to drink down the spiritual milk that we can say with Peter in verse three, that I've tasted the Lord's goodness. You may just get through a couple verses through this plan, and you ought not to feel guilty of, oh, I only got through the family portion today, or the private portion, maybe God just draws your attention to a portion of the milk of his word. I was reading Nehemiah this morning, chapter 1 and chapter 2, and you see Nehemiah, it says that the hand of God was upon him for good. And that's all I read, and I prayed that God's hand would be upon you and I for good, for blessing, for usefulness in this day. Maybe you're just drinking one portion of his word, and that's okay. Maybe just try and master that one column of private devotions through the McShane plan. You ought not to think that you have to digest it entirely, but the goal is to not be content with that. If I'm reading one chapter a day this year, I want that appetite, my taste buds to grow to a greater degree. If I can only digest this amount of bread, I want to, maybe you say, I love bread so much, I want to digest a lot of bread. Well, you have to slowly, incrementally expand your taste buds, and eat more food, and then you have a greater appetite. The same is with the Word of God. If you're here today, meditating on a few verses, well, you want to grow, and how do you grow? Well, you grow by consuming more and more milk of the Word. And what does this consumption look like? If you look in verse 2 of 1 Peter 2, Peter says it's like newborn infants. How do we drink down this word that grows us in Christ likeness? We ought to act like an infant, Peter says, like newborn infants. Long, he says, crave, desire for the pure spiritual milk. Pant, delight for this word that's set before us. And you could think of the imagery that Peter's using here. He's taking what's known in creation, it's phenomenal, thinking of God's design and how he's created a mother and an infant to function in this human realm, you could say, or physical realm. And Peter's saying that reality of an infant nursing at their mother's side, well, that actually speaks of a spiritual reality for the consumption of God's Word. So we have this imagery that we understand we ought to be like a newborn infant. You could think of a newborn infant on a feeding schedule. And if they don't meet that schedule and it goes too long without having that consumption of their mother's milk, what happens? There's a cry. There's this longing that I can't go for this amount of time without tasting the milk of His Word. That's what Peter's getting at. We ought to be on a feeding schedule. We ought to have a plan and a purpose and a place to feed, because sometimes we don't realize that we're actually starving and craving spiritually. And we ought to long like this child, this infant, who's not satisfied till their stomach's filled, and longing to grow by that means that God's designed the world. Peter says there's no difference spiritually speaking. We're just infants in Christ in that sense. We never outgrow that feeding schedule of needing a feast on his word, but there needs to be a growing longing. And how do we know that we should have a growing longing for this word? Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 8 verse 3 to tell us about this longing. When we realize this, we'll long like newborn infants for the word. Jesus says, that we live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. If we understand what Jesus is saying, he's talking about the spiritual realm. If we live, spiritually speaking, by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, then we cannot live, spiritually speaking, in a healthy state if we're neglecting this word. So if we long for it, What do we know? We know we live by this Word. Psalm 119, if you want your heart stirred to long for His Word more, read what the psalmist says about God's Word. He says, it's sweeter than honey. He says, I've stored up Your Word in my heart that I might not sin against You. Open my eyes that I may behold the wondrous things out of Your law. Take that Word and all its sweetness and its purity and pray it back to God that He'd give you that longing and craving that this psalmist has. Why? Because Peter is saying that when you dive into this word and you grow in your hatred for tasting down the bitterness of sin, that which we should not drink down, and you drink down the goodness of this milk, What's the goal? It's to taste the goodness of the Lord. That's what he's ending with in verse 3 of 2 Peter 2. The whole aim of this word is to taste and see that the Lord is good. How do you do that very quickly as you read the Bible? You can think of it in two ways. Jeff Thomas puts it this way, to drink down the pure spiritual milk, think of it as soap. And you say, well, what do you mean by soap? Breaking down each letter, S-O-A-P, he says study the word. You're not going to drink down the word if you're not studying it, if you're not reading it. The next one is observe. Deliberately observe. Look at the words that God has written down to tell you about yourself and Him and His glory and the salvation we've received. Read it, observe, look for words and repetitions. And then Jeff Thomas says, A, apply it. Simply ask yourself, what have I learned in this passage about God? What have I learned about myself and how I ought to respond to God in light of this text? What has Jesus Christ done for my soul? What are His promises? We study through it. We observe the content. We apply it personally. And then the P of SOAP is we pray. Just ask the Lord to do what he said in what you've read or to help you grow in what you've read. And you can take our example. of this text. You can read this text and say, Lord, I feel hypocrisy at times. I feel envious at times. I need to put that away. Help me. I'm reading your word that you want that put away in my life. I can't do it apart from your spirit. Do that which you've required of me and do it by your grace and help me like this newborn infant. I don't crave your word as I ought. I don't long for it as I ought. Help me see its purity. Help me see its richness and its sweetness. Instill in me that longing like a newborn child to thirst and pant for you. Why? So that I would taste. I'd use my senses. I'd use my eyes to see. Then I'd use my ears to hear your word proclaimed. And then I'd taste it with my spiritual tongue and see something of your goodness and your glory. You can read the Bible that way. Soap. study, observe, apply, pray. And then you can do it this way. You can think of it in three ways. You read it systematically. It's good to read through the whole Bible cover to cover to see the whole plan of God. But you also ought to meditate. You ought to take one verse or two verses and just suck out all the juice. That's what the psalmist does in Psalm 1, meditates. The word there in Hebrew is like a cow chewing over grass, just sucking out every juice. What does it mean, like a newborn infant? What does it mean to long? What does it mean to have the pure spiritual milk? Suck it up. Think about one verse at a time. And then finally, memorize Scripture, something I'm trying to work on in this new year. Take a book of the Bible, one verse a day, and then add on a verse, and try and memorize Scripture. Because if God's Word is imperishable, the greatest investment is to memorize and then Still, in your mind and in your heart, the imperishable Word of God, that can do wonders on your deathbed. Or there's cases where believers have dementia one day, but they have the Word stirred in their heart to get them through that crazy sea of the storm and valley of the shadow of death and bring them on to Canaan's shores. God's Word It never returns void. It should never be forgotten. What Peter reminds us this evening then, as we wrap this up, is that God calls us to use our senses, to see in His Word, to taste in His Word, goodness. And Jesus says, open your mouth wide and I'll fill it. If you drink down the living waters, out of your heart will flow rivers of living water. That's what God wants to do among his people. Not only in this year, but all of our days to be men and women in who thirst and pant and long to see His goodness, that we wouldn't get the glory, but that we would abound in praise and gladness to our great God this year. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your Word, Lord. We get so accustomed in this day and age to be around your Word, to have multiple copies of your Word, to have access in every hour of the day to your Word, Lord. We pray that at times this overconsumption would not be to our detriment, Lord, that we wouldn't lose the significance and the preciousness and the purity of your Word. We think of that A hymn we've sung, ancient words, ever true that martyr's blood was shed to get this word into our own language. And even missionaries that we support in our day, translating their whole life, the Word of God into native tongues, Lord, we pray. that we would never take the English Bible for granted, but that you would light a fire in our hearts, use the light of your word to be a guide to our feet this week, to be nourishment to our souls, and to be the power of God for salvation to all who believe, that all those we walk and rub shoulders with this week would see the power of God and taste the goodness of God. that they would join in with us and sing the praises of God. And we ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.
Tasting The Goodness of God
Series 1 Peter - Mills
Sermon ID | 1102511773960 |
Duration | 39:58 |
Date | |
Category | Sunday - PM |
Bible Text | 1 Peter 2:1-3 |
Language | English |
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