Open your Bibles with me, if you would, to 1 Peter. I began some time ago, as you may recall, in being asked to preach. And during times of Doug's illness, I began a series in 1 Peter. And now, some months later, we continue where I left off. And first Peter chapter one, I'll be commenting on verses six through nine, but I want to read verses three through nine in order to set the context for us. This is God's word. Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from from the dead to an inheritance, which is imperishable, undefiled and unfading kept in heaven for you who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this You rejoice, though now for a little while, as was necessary, you have been grieved by various trials so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. There are a few things in life we can expect as a sure thing. Now many of us expected or at least hoped that the stock market would continue to go up forever, that there would be no summit in sight for the value of our homes, that the economy would always boom, and that we would feel the warm presence of God's smiling providence upon us. Now the truth is, Not a one of us know what tomorrow will hold, much less next week or next year. Far from some hyped up hope and change we've been hearing so much about, the truth is that most Americans today are filled with fear, if not downright despair, about the future prospects of our nation. Now, for those of the world This is understandable because most people are both in the world and are of the world, and this present world is their only hope. It's all they have to wake up to every morning. But we who are followers of Christ, we know better, or at least we ought to know better. And in this whole section, Peter reminds us why we ought to know better. and what genuine faith in Christ produces in us and what it ought to look like. As we just read in verses three through five, in the context of this passage, we were reminded of the basis of our hope. The basis of our hope is that all of the work of salvation is the work of God alone. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Peter said, who, according to his great mercy, has caused us to be born again. To a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And this is our hope that God accomplishes his purpose. In redeeming a people for his own name. that God has caused us to be born again, that God preserves us through faith for the day of our final salvation. And as he causes us to persevere, to receive that inheritance, which was won by Christ alone through his death and resurrection from the dead. And now in verses six through nine, Peter focuses our attention upon four aspects of this great faith that God has been pleased to grant to us for the benefit of his son, to whom we have been given in the first place. I want you to notice that in verse six, God has given faith to us. In Christ, even if notice with me in this verse, in this You greatly rejoice, even if, though now, for a little while, as was necessary. In this, you rejoice. In what? In this great salvation that Peter just finished talking about, this salvation which has been bestowed to us by God. In this, you greatly rejoice. in the work of God through his son, Jesus Christ. Now, during this time of year, all you need to do is tune your radio in for a few minutes. And within a very short time span, you'll probably hear joy to the world being sung on numerous occasions, even on secular stations. It doesn't take a genius to look around you, however, and realize that, in fact, there is not much joy going on. People are being laid off. ripped off, ticked off, and in general, there's not a surplus of joy going around. But for we who have faith alone in Christ alone, there is a cause of great joy. And so Peter says, in this you rejoice. And in fact, when that clause, in this you rejoice, is raised up against the next phrase, the emphasis is probably captured better in the New American Standard Version. In this, you greatly rejoice, even if, and that's where the juxtaposition is, in this you greatly rejoice, even if, for a short time. Though now for a little while, as was necessary, you've been grieved by various trials. Now to the world, this whole notion seems completely backwards. When prosperity and freedom go down, misery is supposed to go up. The best that people can hope for when they have no hope in Christ is that maybe someday, at least in their lifetime or maybe their children's lifetime, that peace and prosperity and freedom will be restored. And so that's what they hope for. I hope the economy comes back. I hope that these difficult times are relieved. I hope, I hope, I hope so. And that's the hope of the world. It's an I hope so kind of hope. But Peter says that's not the kind of hope that characterizes those who have genuine faith in Christ. Our hope is not focused on the future of what might happen. Our hope is focused only on the future of what God will do and what he's declared in his word. And it is chiefly and securely anchored in the past. Our hope is focused on what God will accomplish when he brings us to glorification, but it is eternally anchored in what he has already done. For as Paul put it in Colossians 1, he has rescued us. past tense, he has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Now, that's something to rejoice in, friends, that we who are dead in our trespasses and sins, that we who were alienated from God and haters of God, We who were outside of God's special grace have been given new life. We've been caused, as Peter says, to be born again. To what? To a living hope. We've been given a hope that is not just an empty hope. I hope that these things happen, but rather it is a living hope which is predicated upon the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ has overcome sin and death, and that is the anchor of our hope. We've been raised up together with Christ, and so we have a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. I know it always doesn't feel this way, that Christ is the anchor of our soul and that God will preserve us to the very end in order that we might persevere. And I think this is why Peter says what he does next to give us some perspective. It doesn't always seem like this is the case. We ourselves are given to doubts. We ourselves are given to some level of misery in our own thinking as we think of the mess that the world is in and maybe even our own circumstances. So that in our human frailty and even doubt, we might be mindful of how greatly we must rejoice, even if we are the ones being cast into the fiery furnace on account of our faith. as we read about in Daniel three. Now, this word that Peter uses here in verse six, notice in this you greatly rejoice, even if now notice he says for a little while this word that Peter uses here for a little while is alternately translated throughout the New Testament as little, simply little. as it is here, but it really ought to be translated and thought of as a comparative adjective. Let me give you an example of this. In Matthew 7, 14, Jesus uses the word as follows. For the gate is small and the way is narrow. And here's where Jesus uses the word that leads to life. And few are those who find it. Now, in this context, the word few is the same word that Peter uses in our text for little while. In this instance, we can clearly see that it is used in a comparative sense. In Matthew's case, it is the few who are contrasted with the many. Few are those who find the way to eternal life, but many are those who go on the way of destruction. So Christ uses it to compare the few and the many. And Peter uses it the same way. Now, if you've ever been in extreme pain, either emotionally or physically, you've watched a loved one suffer. You know that this is an extremely difficult point to believe. When a person, when yourself, when you're going through a particularly difficult and arduous time, it almost seems like every moment is going to last an eternity. So when you're faced with the reality of trials and tribulation, it is important to keep in mind that in the context of the short life that God has given us on earth, our pain is not going to continue indefinitely. Peter says, even if now for this little while, this very short time that we have on earth, we are grieved, deeply grieved by various trials. That is when we need to remember this in the context of God's eternal plan and purpose. In John 16, there's a wonderful little exchange between Jesus and the disciples as Jesus is preparing them for his departure. Let me read this to you from John 16, 16, and also verses 20 through 22. Jesus says a little while and you'll see me no longer and again a little while and you'll see me now down in verse 20. Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come. When she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy from you. In this exchange, Christ assures his disciples that we are sitting here today along with them. While he may not be the object of our senses, we don't see Christ in front of us. He's not here in the flesh as he was with his disciples, as we'll see in just a moment. We cannot see him. We cannot feel him physically with us in our present experience. He is most certainly the object of our hope. And in light of that, it's no trouble to view our trials. As they are, they're temporary. They're not forever. They last but a night, but in the morning comes greatness of joy. They're going to be replaced, in Paul's words, by a weight of glory that is incomparable to the weight that we feel and might feel right now. Luther observed that the supreme blessing in which one can truly know the goodness of God is not in temporal possessions, but the eternal blessing that God has called us to his holy gospel. In this gospel, we hear that God will be gracious to us for the sake of his son. He will forgive and eternally save us, and he will protect us in this life against the tyranny of the devil and the world. To someone who properly appreciates this blessing, said Luther, everything else is a trifle. Though he is poor, sick, despised, and burdened with adversities, he sees that he keeps more than he has lost. If he has no money and goods, he knows nevertheless that he has a gracious God. If his body is sick, he knows that he is called to eternal life. His heart has this constant consolation. It's only a short time. And everything will be better. We also need to note that Peter says that trials and tribulations are a necessary part of God's bringing us to completion. in our salvation. Notice with me in verse seven, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. This verse begins with this word proof. The analogy that Peter draws upon here is that of gold or a precious metal that is put to the test of fire so that in the end it may be pure. The word for proof here means that which has been tested and has now passed the test of purity. It has been tested through the fire. that burns away all of the impurities, all of the draws, all that doesn't belong there. And so Peter tells us this is the way it is for the Christian life, that God applies the heat of his divine wrath, if you will, against sin so that we might be purified to become like his son. In his book, The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis wrote, I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contented condition when suddenly a stab of pain threatens serious disease or a newspaper headline threatens us all with destruction. At first, I'm overwhelmed and all my little happiness looks like broken toy. Perhaps by God's grace, I succeed and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment that threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to its toys. Thus, the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but 48 hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let him but sheathe the sword for a minute and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over. I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness in the nearest flowerbed. And that is why tribulation cannot cease until God sees us remade. God has chosen in his sovereign purpose that even though we are redeemed by Christ, we are not exempt from the evils in this world that are common to all men. In the case of the believer, there is that which we must recognize as a right and positive dimension to our suffering. God uses our suffering. He uses the hate of our trials. He uses our being cast into the fiery furnace by those who hate God and who hate us. He uses these things in order to bring about our holiness. This is exactly what we see in the book of Hebrews in chapter 12, verses 10 through 12, where the author there says, for our fathers, they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them. But he disciplines us for our good that, and there's the purpose clause, he disciplines us for our good so that we may share in his holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful. Yet to those who have been trained by it, might I say, brethren, those who have been trained to think rightly about the purpose of the distresses that bring grief to our souls in this life. By the very things that the world looks at and grieves that there's no hope for tomorrow, Peter says, we look at these same headlines. We look at these same losses in our lives, these same burdens, these same sicknesses, these same temptations. We look at them in an entirely different lens. We look at them for what they are, God's gracious provision to make us in the image of His Son. He brings us through these trials so that we might become like Jesus Christ. We have been trained by it. Afterwards, it says it yields a peaceful fruit of righteousness. Can you imagine? what Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego must have sensed in their faith, must have known in their faith, in their confidence, after being thrown into a fire that killed the very men that brought them to that fire, to be standing in that fire with the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, pre-incarnate, walking with them, comforting them, and to be delivered by their Savior. through that fire so that not even a hair on their body was singed. There was not even the smell of smoke on their persons. What confidence, what peace, what joy they must have known. And this is exactly what Peter says. This is exactly the analogy that he says we Fellow believers are being brought through that same fire by the Lord Jesus Christ because he himself endured the fire and escaped its flames unharmed. And he himself will bring us to the very end. And so it yields in us this peaceful fruit of righteousness, the ability to obey the Lord Jesus Christ without regret. because of what he has accomplished. Now, beyond this proof of our faith, one of the most striking things about Peter's analogy is not the comparison of our faith to purified gold, but the contrast of our faith to purified gold. Peter reminds us that gold is a material thing. Along with all other material things, he says it's destined to perish. It's not going to last forever. It's going to be burned up. with God's hot wrath the day when he cleanses this earth. As Peter reminds us later in his second letter, but our faith, he says, will not perish because our hope is placed in Christ. Who has borne the burdens. Who has endured the trials and yet without sin. It will be found, he says, to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Not only will our own faith be rewarded by God, but the highest expression of our faith will be to give praise and glory and honor to Jesus Christ, because he is the author and the finisher of our faith. And it is to Christ with unbending attention and devotion that we ought to look in the midst of our trials. As Peter points out in verse eight, because our faith has one object, one object alone, and it is the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ, though you have not seen him. You love him, though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible. And I love this filled with glory. We often talk about heaven as our hope and the great joy we'll know when we're released from this body so prone to temptation and sin and death, and indeed that will be a great joy. It will be a great joy in that day when we are physically raised up together with Christ. But brethren, we need to be reminded that even heaven, even heaven with all of its beauty, the new heaven and the new earth and all of their splendor is not the object of our faith. In verse eight, we see that the object of our faith is the Lord Jesus Christ himself. God gives us faith that looks only to Christ. Peter was called by Christ. He walked with Christ. He learned from Christ, served Christ, loved Christ. He saw the glory of Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration. He had a meal with Christ in his resurrected body. But now, years later, as Peter is penning this letter, Peter is mindful that the readers of this letter are those who are scattered about through the empire. Most of them, if not all of them, have never seen Christ. They weren't there when Christ walked on the earth. They didn't live there or they had been scattered and had children and so forth. And so they didn't know Christ in the flesh, just as we do not know Christ in the flesh. But Peter says that doesn't matter. Why? I'm reminded of Jesus' words to Thomas. After Thomas saw Jesus, along with the other disciples, in his resurrected body, and he placed his fingers in Jesus' wounds, he cried out, my Lord and my God, to which Jesus responded, because you have seen me, you believed, blessed are those who did not see and yet believe. This is why I think Peter says that faith in Christ, for those of us who have not seen him, is inexpressible. And think of this phrase, full of glory. Our faith in Christ is full of glory. What does that mean? When we think of where Christ is now, where is he? He's in glory. He is seated at the right hand of the Father. from which He will return in great power and glory. And He will raise us up together with Him. Paul says that presently we are where? We are seated with Christ in heavenly places. We have received an inheritance which has been already granted to us in Christ. We are presently reigning with Him in His Kingdom. This is gospel spreads throughout this Oh, friends, our faith in Christ is a faith full of the glory of Christ. This is what he means. We have this faith that has been given to us that's inexpressible because it is filled with the glory of Christ. We can only imagine it. We can only see it with the eye of faith. God gives to us. So Peter says, you don't see him now in the midst of the fire like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego did. He was there with him, them walking physically with them and delivered them from the fire. But Peter intends, I believe here to say that this is true, though you do not see him physically with your eyes, he is here in your midst. He is walking with you. And he will deliver you just the same. It is a glorious faith that God has granted to us. Finally, in verse 9, we see that God gives to us a faith that results in salvation. He says this faith in Christ is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. Now, the word that Peter uses here for obtaining is a middle participle, which puts it in the present tense. It's completely dependent upon someone outside of ourselves. That's the middle part. It's not something we do to ourselves, but rather it is dependent upon something that is Christ who is outside of ourselves. Nevertheless, it is a present tense. And that is the remarkable part of this, Peter says, we are being saved. How are we being saved? We are being saved as we put our hope and trust alone in God and His Son, Jesus Christ. There is this sense which we recognize as we even spoke of in Sunday school this morning, that there is a past tense to our salvation, a present tense to our salvation, and a future tense. The past is what God has already accomplished. Because Christ died on the cross, we have been declared by God once and for all to be just, justified before a holy God. But we are also presently being saved, as Paul puts it to the Thessalonians, that we are present tense being delivered from the wrath of God. This is such tremendous joy and hope that we receive from that, to know that God is delivering us, that he is giving to us in the present tense salvation of our souls. That we are being saved by faith, having been saved by faith, exercised in Christ alone. We recognize that we are being made like Christ through the trials and the tribulations of this earth, through the fiery trials that God brings into our lives. We are being saved from God's wrath. What a tremendous picture scripture paints of this for us. God's wrath is portrayed how? Like fire. We read that this morning in Leviticus. God poured out His wrath as a consuming fire and destroyed those who raised their fist against Him. But as we read in Daniel and as we read here again in 1 Peter, God uses that same fire of His wrath to deliver us through and out of His wrath. God displays his wrath against our sin as we exercise faith in Christ. We recognize there's no hope. There's no escape from God's wrath apart from the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is precisely what I believe Peter means, that when we have faith in Christ, it results in the salvation of our souls. Brethren, there's no other hope. Men will tell you hope in the president, hope in an administration, hope in what the future has, hope in technology, hope in all of these things, hope, hope, hope. It's useless. It's hopeless because it's all destined to perish. Peter says we have hope even if we're in the middle of it. We have hope because we know what Christ has done. And we know what Christ is doing. Christ is delivering us through this fire. And the day will come when we'll be fully baptized, raised up out of the fire, and we will be delivered over into the hands of our Savior, who will protect us from the wrath of God forever and ever. Let me close with this few verses of this great hymn written by Robert Murray McShane, who said, Even on earth as though a glass darkly let thy glory pass, make forgiveness feel so sweet, make thy spirits help so meet. Even on earth, Lord, make me know something of how much I owe. Chosen not for good in me, Wakened up from wrath to flee, Hidden in the Savior's side, By the Spirit sanctified, Teach me, Lord, on earth to show By my love how much I owe. Oft I walk beneath the cloud, Dark as midnight's gloomy shroud, But when fear is at the height, Jesus comes and all is light. Blessed Jesus, bid me show Doubting saints, How much I owe. Off the nights of sorrow reign, weeping, sickness, sighing, pain. But a night thine anger burns, morning comes, and joy returns. God of comforts, bid me show to thy poor how much I owe. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word which displays before us your hot wrath, the wrath against sin and death. But we thank you, God, that you have delivered us in Christ Jesus. You have caused us to be born again to a living hope through his resurrection. And that hope, God, sustains us, our hope in Christ, even if in the middle of this world, in all of the difficulties which you allow and bring into our lives, O God, all of the sorrows and even the deepest grief that we can feel, the deepest pain that we might know. Thank you, God, that we can have hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, who has already delivered us from your wrath, who is currently right now delivering us from your wrath, and will finally and fully and completely at that glorious day deliver us from your wrath forever and ever. We thank you in Jesus name. Amen.