My name is Lars. I'm one of the pastors here. It's so good to have you with us this morning. This is our preaching service. And if you're a guest with us, I especially want to welcome you. We'd love to get to know you better, answer any questions you have about who we are as a church. And you can contact the pastors directly by either emailing us at pastors at orchardbible.org, or you can fill out one of the cards that's in the back there by the sound booth and put it in the offering, and it will make its way to us. Also, if you are a regular attender and you have a confidential prayer request or need to communicate with the elders or ask us a question or need more information about anything, you can also use these two means of communication to do so. Our scripture passage from this morning is from 1 Peter chapter four. We will continue our series in 1 Peter. If you need a Bible, if you don't have one, you can use one under the chair in front of you somewhere. And on that Bible, we're gonna be on page 1016. There's also, importantly, an outline of today's message in your bulletin I invite you to reference. And while you find the passage, Just a couple of announcements. First, our Sunday nights at Orchard continues tonight with Rick Carmichael at 6.30 as we consider the measure of our spiritual growth, how it's directly tied as Christians proportionally to our understanding of our new position in Christ, our old life exchanged for our new life in Christ. So please join us at 6.30 in the high school room. If you need childcare for this event, you can contact Brian at Orchard. Brian at OrchardBible.org, Brian Payne. Secondly, if you are not in a home group, we invite you to find out more about home groups. This is how we do church at Orchard, small groups, meet in homes. This is where we care for one another and connect with one another and grow in God's grace with one another. If you're interested in learning more, please contact Ben Lewis, who's right here in front, and you can also email him at Ben at OrchardBible.org. At this point, if you are willing, if you are able, please stand for the reading of God's word. We don't stand out of empty tradition. We truly believe these are the words of God, and we do so with reverence. Before Rick comes for the message this morning, this is the word of the Lord. 1 Peter chapter four, starting in verse one. Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions, but for the will of God. For the time that has passed suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this, they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery and they malign you. but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does. Let's pray. Our fathers, we come before you this day. We thank you for your wonderful word. And we ask, Lord, that we would each consider these great words of Peter. May they have their impact on our hearts and minds, as you intend, and may they change our lives in such a way that we reflect to greater measure the glory that is you. For it's in Christ's name we pray. Amen. If you went with Peter back into the ancient world, you would find that the people to whom Peter writes is a very diverse group of people. Remember, he's writing to those believers that are scattered throughout various regions of Asia Minor, Pontus, Bithynia, Galatia. And if you went to build churches in those areas, the people that you'd be meeting would be people raised as either adherents to Greek religions, Roman religions, perhaps Jewish religion as well, maybe even those raised in an Egyptian religion. And so the religious culture and world of the first century was rather unique, very diverse. And you would have to, as Peter would, deal with them from the worldview that they came from. And so, real quickly, to put Peter's words in a context and get a better feel as to how Peter is approaching his audience here, I want to just briefly kind of review some of the religious thoughts and thinkings of the first century. And I think if we do this, we'll see that it's not really very different from the thought patterns of our modern world. So let's begin with the people that Peter may be speaking to, perhaps the Jewish people. Undoubtedly, as we know from the book of Acts, as we saw that a few years ago, many of the new believers within the Christian church were raised as Jewish believers. And so they had as their ethical system and their religion, Basically, first the Torah, we know the first five books of Moses, the Torah, and so that's the law that they had. And so even in the first century, that was very clearly in the Jewish mind, the law and the regulations, the Ten Commandments, and 613 additional commandments that they had to regulate their life and the things that they did in their life. And of course, the prophets would come along, the writings and other books that they had, what they call the Tanakh, the books of Moses, the Old Testament. And so as Jewish believers, you might think that they would be pretty well behaved in their life. But in fact, if you look closer at the world of the Jewish culture at the time, you see that there was in fact many people who rebelled against what God said. You don't even have to leave the book of Acts, right? Even the book of Acts is Moses on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments. What are the people doing below? building a golden idol, the golden calf, an idol. So very early on, even as God is moving them out of Egypt into the Promised Land, they're rebelling with their idolatry. And it continues on. In the ancient world, there's what's called the Testament of Judah, which is a book that describes how the Jewish patrons of the synagogues would put within the synagogues even the Greek art that they loved so much, the gods of Dionysus and others. So in a Jewish synagogue, you would find the Greek gods even being represented. And so the first century rule with the Jews, you would find people that were not very good Jews, frankly. You might also have those who were raised with the Greek religions. Now, the Greek religions go back in time and kind of get lost in the mystery, in the mists of time as they go back. But basically the Greek religion comes from the writings first of Homer and Hesiod in their poems, the history of Herodotus, and then you've got the Greek playwrights like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. And then the comedian. They've got a comedian named Aristophanes. Now here's the thing about Greek religion is it's the most bizarre religion of the ancient world. The Greeks got together to laugh at and to mock their own gods. And so they looked at their gods and mocked them. So Aristophanes writes a play called The Frogs in which he describes a god Dionysus going down into Hades and as Dionysus goes into Hades, he's so terrified by what he sees in Hades that he comes down with a bad case of diarrhea. And so on the stage, they act this out in play. The people are laughing and mocking their god Dionysus. And so that's the way they thought. Now if you want to understand sort of the pantheon of Greek religion that Peter's dealing with, you have these multiple gods. You might think first of Zeus, right? We know of Zeus, the primary god of the Greeks, but that was really just the current dynasty that the Greeks had. Because Zeus himself was the son of Kronos, his father. Kronos was told when he was, his wife was giving birth that that she would give birth to a usurper that would take him from being a king. And so Cronus said, I want to kill the child when he's born. And so when he was born, he said, give me the child so I can eat him. And so his wife instead wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes and gave it to Cronus and he ate the stone instead and Zeus survived and would eventually usurp Cronus and become the great god of the Greeks. Even Cronus himself usurped it from his father Uranus. by taking a sickle and emasculating his own father. And so this is the way that people were thinking and believing and reacting. And so if you think about the way the religion works, it's kind of like envisioning a mafia. The gods had power over you. The gods controlled every aspect of your life. But the gods were not there to serve you or to help you. The gods were not there to comfort you in times of need. The gods were there to extract from you and you would pay tribute to them, whether through offerings or in other ways, you'd pay tribute to them, hoping to gain the favor of the gods so they would do good things for you. And so in Peter's congregations, we've got all these people who were thinking about this multiplicity of gods who have power over you and you just appease the gods, but in times of need, you've got nowhere to go. No God to pray to, no God to seek hope in, no afterlife with the gods. The gods are jealous of each other, they're envious, they kill one another. And so that's the way they perceived of the gods. And you can't imagine living in a world where those are your gods. Then we come to the Romans. So much of the Roman culture and world is derivative of the Greeks. They swipe from the Greeks, the great philosophy, the great thought, even architecture. People think the Romans built the aqueducts. They just swipe that from the Greeks also. But the Romans had their gods. Now, for the Greeks, the gods were like superhuman character beings. So they had personalities and this sort of thing. But for the Romans, they come from more what's called an animistic world where spirits inhabit everything. Spirits inhabit the physical world, the nature, the trees, the oceans, the seas, the rivers, the seeds you plant in the ground. And so for the Romans, you would pray to the spirit, the numina, the spirit of the seed when you planted it. You would hope that that spirit would give you a good crop. And when the crop came, you'd pray to the numina of the crop, giving you good grain. And so for every Roman, they would have in their own household, a little sanctuary for their own household gods. And so they had their own gods that they worshiped. And so they would offer oblations to the gods every morning. Before decisions were made, they would offer something to the gods. They never engaged in business transactions without offering something to the god of that. And so if you were to travel on the sea, you would offer something to the Neptune god, the god of the sea. If you are engaging in business, you'd offer something to Mercury, the god of business. And so this is how they thought. and how they lived. And so with the Romans, there was also no God to seek peace from, no God to seek hope from. And so this is the pagan world, the pagan culture into which Peter's writing and dealing. And as he writes to these people and deals with these people, they're bringing into the congregations these lifestyles. Now, what's unique about both the Greek and the Roman religions is they don't really have holy books. There's no sacred writings that you can go to. And there's no writings which give you any sort of ethical way of thinking or living. They don't have any writings that say, don't get drunk, don't commit adultery, don't revelry, orgies, all these things that Peter talks about. The Greek and Roman people were raised in a world where those were the pleasures of life. It was not immoral to commit adultery. Now you may not want your spouse to find out, but the gods didn't care. That's what the gods did. And so in their own lives, there's this way of living that has no control over by the gods. The gods don't give them any ethical basis for living. And so you live as you want, you do as you please. So in the ancient world, there were other philosophers that would come along. Marcus Aurelius the Roman would come along and help develop sort of a Stoic philosophy, which was basically you bear up under the troubles of life, and they had many of those in those centuries. You just stood there and took it. Epicurus was another philosopher who developed what's called the Epicurean philosophy, which we often conceive of being, you know, just seeking pleasure all the time. But for Epicurus, it was a pleasure of the mind, not simply fine wine and good dining. And so there were other philosophical systems being developed that are sort of filling the gaps of the way people thought and how people dealt with life. And so those are the believers that Peter is writing to. That's where they came from. And in this first century church, These believers were first generation Christians, many of them, of course. They came out of Greek and Roman, pagan religions, maybe second generation, but they knew about all this. It was all around them. Now, in those religions, they didn't care if you had your own god. There's a multiplicity of gods. You can have your own god. But what made the Greeks and Romans upset was the exclusive claims that Christianity made, that Jesus Christ is the own god. Even the Jews themselves didn't crucify Jesus because he claimed to be Messiah. There have been many prior messiahs before Jesus that would come and go and might die and be crucified by the Romans in other ways. but would upset the Jews about Jesus' claims, not that he's a Messiah, but that he's Lord. And so for the Jews, the Lordship of Christ was their stumbling stone, their block that caused them to reject Christ. And so that's the world that Peter's writing to. And as he writes to them, Peter now has to deal with where they're at, their thinking and how they're living their lives and what's going on. So let's take a quick look at some of what Peter has to say and what he does. Because again, he's writing to people that have not been trained with any sort of moral restrictions. The sins that you commit, they didn't view them as sins. They viewed them as simply enjoying the pleasures of life. There was no restrictions. There's no conscience. So he's now got to deal with them. Now as we read verses 1 and 2 again, verse 1, since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking. For whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh, no longer for human passions, but for the will of God. So let's talk about Peter's biblical response. What is the Christian way of life? And the first thing he does in verse one is to lay the foundation for Christian behavior. And he does that by the first word that we might read here is the word therefore. Now it's the second word in the English text we have, but it's also the second word in the Greek because the Greek word therefore has to be the second word of a sentence. It can never be the first. It's just a unique quirk of Greek grammar. But the word therefore is where I want to start. The word therefore. Therefore, now we've often heard it said that when you see the word, therefore, you want to see what it's there for. And what it does is it sort of demarcates a mark here between what has been said before and what comes after. And so what Peter is doing is he's saying, based on all that I've told you before, and we'll go back and review this in just a moment, but on what I've told you before, therefore, this is how you're supposed to live. And so the great thing about the integrated life that we have with Christian theology and practice is that there is a basis before the word therefore. There's a theology, there's a doctrine before the word therefore that gives the basis for the word therefore. And so we see therefore since Christ suffered in the flesh. Now, we have to think about, again, these worlds in which Peter's writing. The Protestant philosopher, theologian Peter Berger writes about what he calls plausibility structures. Plausibility structures are the way you think. In your plausibility structure, in your mind, the way you think as a Christian, as a believer, It's plausible that Jesus was raised from the dead. In fact, you see it as likely. Therefore, it's plausible there's a God that answers prayer, that performs miracles. And so we see that as plausible. But in the plausibility structure of an unbeliever, of somebody who says there is no God, that there is nothing, we're nothing here but a collections of atoms that have been created from nothing, and now we're here, it's nothing but matter and energy, and that life evolved from nothing, and so now we're here as humans, which are nothing more than the last link on a chain of evolution that goes back for three billion years. If that's all we are, then there's no basis for their therefore. You see, they have no basis for ethics, because if we're nothing but the last highest piece of animal evolution, then they don't have any basis for it now so we as believers say that the word therefore for us is based on the ultimate reality the ultimate reality which is that there's a god that god has created us in his image that in his image we bear this image before others and so we have value we have meaning in life And so as believers, we see this as the reason the way things are. Ultimate reality, there's a God and there's a human being that's created in God's image. And so with that, we see things different from the secularist, from the non-believer. And so Peter's dealing with people who have to now change their own plausibility structures. What makes sense within the worldview in which they live? And so when you're engaging with non-believers or those who are questioning the faith, One thing you always have to do is try and understand what is their plausibility structure. What is their mind? What is their worldview? How are they thinking? Because it's not until you understand how they're thinking that you're going to be able to communicate. Francis Schaeffer would say that, and he wrote a variety of books in the early 70s and after, but that when you told a little girl to be good, She knew what this meant. Now in the 60s, they knew what that meant, what it meant to be a good girl. They may not be a good little girl, but at least they knew what it meant. But what Schaeffer said by the time the 60s come along and after, no longer did your child understand what it meant to be good, because no longer was the world living on fundamentally borrowing from Christian morality and principles. The world had rejected that. And so while for many centuries they had based their lives on that, even rejecting it, they still knew that there were things that are good, there were things that are right. Now they've rejected all that, and now your little girl doesn't know what that means anymore. Because when they're raised in a secular world where there is no ultimate human value, there is no basis for ethics, so they can reject that. And so Peter's writing to these people, he says, therefore, what he does is based upon who they are and you can actually illustrate it this way in the news in recent well we go back decades we go back recent days racism has often hit the press and it seems to be in the press more frequently all the time and so as believers if we were to say why racism is evil our answer would be because God created humans who bear his image. And so we're created in God's image. And because other human beings are equally created in God's image, we treat them with respect for who they are. They really are the image bearers of God. And so what's a non-believer say? Well, if you really are nothing more than the end product of evolution, which is where we get the survival of the fittest and all this, we've ultimately end up with those who just make it, then why isn't there still this sort of war going on between each other. They have no basis for not being racist, you see. Now, they may say that they do. In fact, I was reading an article from the atheist webpage, and they criticize this very point I'm trying to make, that they say that there is a reason they're not racist, there is a reason for the morality, and they say it's basically a socialization that comes out of their many decades or many hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Even they said, go look at the apes. They have a social structure. Therefore, evolution is wrong because by nature, we're a social being. Well, that's no basis to be against racism. So for the believer, we say it's because they're creating the image of God. If you walked into somebody's house and on their mantle was a picture of their mother, and you walked up with a black marker and drew a mustache on her face and blocked out her teeth and all, you'd be offended if somebody did that to you, right? Why? Well, you see, it's just a picture. It's just a picture. No, I'll reimburse you for it. I'll pay you for the damage. No problem. It's not the point. The point is, is that picture bears the image of your mother and you'd be offended by the offense against the image. That's why as believers, we would say racism is wrong because of these theological reasons. And so Paul develops it later when he talks about in Christ, there's neither Jew nor Greek or male or female. We're all equally image bearers of God with equal value. And so we treat each other that way. So the basis of Christian ethics is always built on what goes before the word therefore. And so Peter has given us much in what he said about the word therefore. And it's a matter of like measuring reality, understanding reality. The reality is that we have these certain things that God has taught us and told us about ourselves, about him. And so the ethics of Christianity grows out of that. And it's when you deny reality that injury happens. It's like many years ago when I was a kid. I remember I took out a bobby pin. I brought it from my mom, I guess. I pulled a bobby pin, and I wanted to see what would happen if I shoved it in an electrical outlet. And so what I did at that very moment is I learned the physics of electricity and the physiology of your fingers. And they don't come together very well. And so I remember burning marks on my index finger and a V on my thumb where I held that bobby pin where I shoved it in. And so that's the nature of reality. And if we don't live and think according to what reality is, then it's like shoving bobby pins into electrical outlets or forks into toasters. Bad things happen. And it's a secularist that denies the reality of what is God and who we are. And that's why their ethics has no basis. And that's why it can seem and be so arbitrary, even concerning racism. the governor of Virginia you've seen in the news this past week or so, couple weeks, being accused of being a racist because of a picture in his yearbook 30 years ago. Now, as ugly and as horrible as that picture is, and why people ever put blackface on, I saw Judy Garland and all these other actors do that for decades. I never thought it looked interesting or funny, never understood that. But the picture this governor has is of wearing, either he's wearing the blackface, or the other hand, he's the one in the KKK outfit. Either way, that's racist. And so, actually, the liberal side went after him for a few days. Why? Well, because they needed to kind of clear him off the stage. They thought the lieutenant governor would become the governor, so it didn't matter. In fact, he's got his own problems, so they stopped talking about the governor's racism. He's going to stay there, right? But here's what's ugly about the way the liberal left handled their own governor. What he did was a sin in his life 30 years ago. And so there is no place for forgiveness in this ethic that they have. There is no place for redemption in the ethic that they have. It's only evil go after it, even though there's no basis for them saying it's evil. And so they go after him. Now, what was evil? It's what the governor said the days before this story broke. And that's that you could have an infant who's delivered by its mother and then you take that infant and you set it aside and you have a conversation with the parents, the doctor, and you decide if they should let that baby live. That's what he said before this all happened. Now that's where the evil really was, and you see this in the state of New York where they've now permitted abortion clear up to the ninth month, that there is no limitation on that as long as the law says it's in the best health of the mother. And as the abortion doctors will tell you, The doctors say, I'll make that mean whatever I want it to mean. If the mother doesn't want it, then it's in her health to let the baby die. And it's in fact what the Roman gods, the Romans lived the way they lived in their ethic. When a baby was born, they'd bring the baby to the foot of the Roman father, laid at his feet. If it was a boy, he may pick it up, and that means he kept it. If it looked deformed in some way, then he would let it lie there and the maids would come and take it out and set it on the porch and let it die. And so the world today that we live in is not much different than the way the Romans handled it. If you're a Roman father and laid a daughter before you, you may or may not pick it up because daughters were costly, they're expensive, so you may not even want it. And so we don't know exactly how many fathers did that, but that's the Roman way of thinking. And in our modern world, ethically, we're back to the same sort of thinking also, that life doesn't matter, that it doesn't have any value. And so we've kind of come full circle from the first century. So what Peter writes really has absolute bearing and value to what we're doing in our lives today. We have to see all this as one sort of integrated whole. And so we look at this. And so what he says continuing on, he shows us how we can use scripture in our life. He writes again, since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, the same thought, the attitudes and knowledge that Christ had, arm yourself with the same way of thinking. So think about this idea of arming yourself. If you are afraid of being kidnapped from your home, you may have at your bedside a baseball bat or even a firearm to protect yourself. But that bat and that firearm does you no good if you leave them locked in your bedroom somewhere when the kidnapper comes to get you. And so they come after you, they take you. And so what Peter is saying here is to arm yourself with the same knowledge that Christ had when he suffered. So think about the suffering of Christ. What was in the mind of Christ? We have to understand that. And then we take what was in the mind of Christ and we make that our mind. We make that our way of thinking. We put that into our filter when we decide what we're going to do, how we're gonna act, how we're gonna behave, whether or not we choose to sin or not. And so what he's saying here is think about that. So he talks about arming himself. Now you can think about what Christ did when he armed himself. He suffered, right? And as he faced suffering beginning even in his life, his public ministry, but intensifying as he approaches Jerusalem in the Garden of Gethsemane on the cross itself, Christ suffers. And what does he do? He's always doing what? thinking about you. He's thinking about his own love for those who would trust in him. And so Christ in his suffering is suffering on your behalf. And so what's the mind were to have to be thinking about the same kind of love that Christ had for us? And so in our life, what Peter is saying here, since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourself with the same way of thinking. That's the way of thinking we're supposed to have. Now, if we were to go back just a couple of pages and see a few verses, and we even read some of these in the first chapter, let me just read a couple of these verses because I want to just bring right now everything Peter said These are the words that go before the word therefore, you understand? So we have the word therefore, this is the way of thinking that Peter wants us to have. In 1 Peter, again, chapter one, verses three and four, he writes, 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 the dead. to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, unfading. What he's doing right from the beginning is Peter is basing all of his discussion, explanation, exhortation to us on an eschatological understanding of reality. It's to say that you are born again and that you have an imperishable inheritance that's undefiled and unfading. You have an inheritance in Christ, he says to these readers, that is the basis for your living. Keep that in the front of your mind before you think about sinning. Again, verses 13 to 15. Therefore, preparing your minds for action. at being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Again, it's eschatological. Looking forward to that time when Christ comes. Verse 14, as obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. And so he, again, his exhortation to be holy, to be obedient, is based on what Christ has done for us. So it's not simply a list of, do this because I say so. I know as parents, sometimes we tell kids, do this because I say so. And at times that's all we can say, that's all we need to say and must say. But you only grow your child when you give them the basis for it. When you tell your kids why to abstain from immoral sexual behavior, it's not just because I say so. It's because of what it does to you, how it corrupts you, how it corrupts others. And so it's about that. There's a reason for it. Again, looking at verses 18 and 19, chapter one, knowing that you were ransomed from the feudal ways inherited from your forefathers. That's the Greek religion, the Roman religion. That's what you inherited. that you inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver and gold, which is what the world sought, but with the precious blood of Christ, like a lamb, without blemish or spot. And so what he says there is what you inherit, which you are, is not something perishable like you knew in your former way of life, but it's what's imperishable, what you know in this current way of life. Chapter two, verse one and two. So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, you should long for the pure spiritual milk that you may grow by it up into a salvation. If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. And so what we see is we put away malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander, as he talks about in chapter four. Again, we see these other sins, you put it away. Why? Because you've been born again. You're a new infant in a new life in Christ. Again, chapter two, verse nine. Who are we as believers? He says again, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who calls you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. You see what he's saying here? You don't act that way anymore because you're no longer a slave to the Greek religion, the Roman religion, the ways of those gods, but now you are a born-again believer in Christ. You're part of God's family. That's the reason you act differently. It's because of who you are. Go over to chapter 2, verse 21. For this you have been called, and again, watch the suffering here, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. You see the power of his argument is again based on what Christ did in his suffering. We now have to live differently. And so ethics is built all out of that. And then finally go to chapter three in verse 18. which we saw last week, for Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit. When he writes these words, Peter is reminding us again that Christ in His suffering took care of sin. Not simply the penalty for sin, but its presence also in our life. And so we can see that in every way we arm ourselves with doctrine. The Christian ethic has something before the word therefore, and the word that follows the therefore grows out of it. It is this understanding of who we are in Christ, what it means to be a believer, what Christ has done for us. And so the challenge we have in living in this world, the abuse we might suffer and endure, as we'll see shortly, from others in this world, should be of no consequence to us. Think about it this way. When people criticize you, how do you respond? When people challenge you, if somebody criticizes you in some way, whatever they may say, right? So when they do that, your response might be anger. It might be rebellion. It might be wanting to fight. It might be any of these. It may be turning you to depression. It may all of these emotions grow out of it. And even what more modern understanding of psychology has, which is helpful biblically even, is this cognitive behavioral therapy which says, You don't respond based on what people say. All right? That's not your response. Instead, you should respond based on what you believe about what people say about you. So what do you really believe about yourself as a Christian, as a believer? If people challenge you for walking away from that life of debauchery and becoming instead a believer who wastes their time on Sunday mornings, they would say, by coming to church, by giving money and help to churches and things like that, they challenge you on that. You don't care anymore. You don't care they challenge you because you no longer think about yourself that way. If instead you understand who you are, you don't respond with anger to them, but instead you respond knowing that I know who I am in Christ. And so our response must always grow out of our own self-knowledge as to who we are as believers. And so we're not simply responding like we used to in our former way of life, but we have to arm ourselves, as the words Peter uses, prepare ourselves in such a way that we're ready for whatever circumstance comes in our life, and we will then respond appropriately, as a Christian should and would. When we face a temptation in life, somebody, an old friend, encourages you to kind of fall back into the life of sin you may have had before, you know how to say no. because you no longer see their temptation to you as the temptation you have to face. You now understand more about who you are. And so you say, no, I'm a believer in Christ. I've been redeemed from that. And so I don't need to yield to that temptation any longer. I can walk away from it. And that's the ethic that Peter is building here. And so he talks about suffering, but as believers, we no longer suffer thoughtlessly. We don't suffer thoughtlessly, but we suffer armed with the knowledge of who we are as believers, as Christians. And that's the point that he's making. Therefore, since Christ suffered the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking. So think about the thinking of Christ, how he thought. Now look at verses three and four, how we are transformed. For he writes, For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this, they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you. So the people to whom Peter's writing live these lives. Now, if you look at this list of things, again, sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties. That wasn't sin in the Roman or the Greek world. That was simply seeking the pleasures that you're gonna get in this life. And so you sought those pleasures. You sought after those things because that was living. That was how you lived in the ancient world. The gods didn't condemn you for living in such a way. They encouraged it. They were examples of it for the people. And so when Peter writes, he says, no, we don't live that way anymore for different reasons. And then the fifth thing he speaks about is lawless idolatry. In the ancient world, there was no such thing as idolatry. Everybody had idols to your own gods, whatever it may be, and so you had your own idols. And so they didn't care. Again, what upset the Greek and Roman people of that age was the exclusive claims made by Christ. that he is not an idol, that he's the only God. So the Romans didn't care if you had your own gods, as long as you paid obeisance to their god, that's all that mattered. And that's where Christians got into some difficulty. So think about these believers now, who have come out of this lifestyle, this world, whose friends are perhaps even still in it. Living lives of sensuality sexual sins and and debauchery and food and drink and orgies and all these things you can imagine I mean, this is like animal house. That was the world in which they lived. That's how they thought you come out of that now Now when Peter writes you've got a problem You know what the initials the the abbreviation BFF stands for BFF Best friends forever. And I actually looked this up last night and found out that it may have been coined by the TV show, Friends, where one of the characters, and I didn't watch the show, but characters used it and explained it means we're best friends forever. Well, a lot of you, before you were a believer, had BFS, best friends forever, in a debauched lifestyle. And now you're faced with a question. You have before conversion friends and after conversion friends. So let's talk about your BCFs. Your before conversion friends, how do you deal with them? A lot of believers would tell you, you need to walk away from all of those people, walk away from all of that and separate yourselves from them in every way. And there's some times when you have to do that. If a before conversion friend is of such a temptation, that it may drag you back into it, then you need to separate entirely from that world. If it's a temptation to alcohol, it's going to drag you back, then you have to get away from that, whatever it may be. But we also want to make sure we understand that our after conversion friends may include those who are themselves not believers. The most effective way of evangelism is working with people you know and people who are your friends. And I think probably all of us here today have friends of one degree or another that are not believers. And so we have ACFs, after conversion friends, that are not believers themselves. But what Peter wants these people to know is that we are our own family now. When you, in the ancient world, rebelled against your gods by not doing these things we talked about earlier, the community in which you lived would blame you if there was a drought, would blame you if there was an earthquake, because you were the one who didn't pay homage to the God of the earthquake, or the God of rain, or the God of whatever. If the seeds failed, it would be your fault. So you see, the problem that they would have in becoming a believer in the first century is, the bad things that happen in life, and they're very frequent, those bad things may be blamed on you, because you're the reason these things happen to us. And so there was a temptation for even believers now to not break with their family and their life and their community beforehand because in some way they had to maintain their life in that world. And so that was a temptation to stay with that. But Peter says you have to come away from that even if you suffer because of it. And the suffering that many early Christians endured was because They were blamed for things, even the suffering that Peter talks about under Nero. Nero blamed the Christians for the fire of Rome, and that's why the persecution intensified under Nero, and greater under Diocletian and others, but it intensified because they were easy targets. It was easy to blame this new sect growing out of Galilee, this Jewish sect that's now kind of grown into its own. It was easy to blame them for the evils of life in the ancient world. And so when Peter writes, he's saying, you got to watch out for that. That's who these people are. But he says, verse five, they will give an account to him, to God, who is ready to judge the living and the dead. So God is a judge. And that's the point he makes. Now, verse six, we see the promise of eternal life. For this is why the gospel is preached, even to those who are dead. And this is one of those verses that has multiple of interpretations, but let me just say it this way. This is why the gospel is preached to even those believers who've already died, though they were judged in the flesh and died because they were human, they might live in the spirit the way God does. He's saying that there's believers who've now died. They've now been separated, but they still enjoy the benefits of eternal life, the promise of eternal life. And so the world in which Peter writes is a world where this is sort of the struggle he's dealing with. The Christian ethic is now having to be built separate from the ethic of the world. Now, there's a lot of overlap. And in the ancient world, they would talk about Aristotle who wrote what's called the Nicomachean Ethics, a way of living, pursuing virtues. And there are certain virtues, the four cardinal virtues that the Greeks talked about. And people would live that way. Christianity comes along and says there's a lot of overlap, but there's differences as well. And the main difference is this, that in Christianity, humility is a great virtue. That's not a virtue in the ancient world. There was a pride, not a hubris, they would say, but a pride you would have in yourself. In Christianity, our pride is not in ourself, but it's a humility that we have in ourselves. We look to ourselves with humility. There's a patience. In the ancient world, the ethic did not have one of patience. You lived your life getting what you could right now, because this is all the life you're gonna get. In our world, in the Christian world, we can be patient knowing that What God has promised to us is so much more than what we have in this life, in this world. And so we can look for a reward beyond this life, knowing that God will judge us fairly based on the good works we do in His name. And so we can have a patience. There's humility, there's patience. There's chastity. In the Christian world, there's this ethic of chastity, behaving in a certain way. In the ancient world, that wasn't a virtue. The ancient Greeks and Romans didn't teach chastity. You just didn't want to get caught by your spouse, but do what you wanted to anyway. Drink, sleep around, whatever it was, that was your life. Do it anyway. The final ethic that's unique to Christianity is that of love, is that of love. And that's the final ethic that really grows out of everything because it's a love not only of each other, but it's a love of God. And so what Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 13, verse 13, there's faith, hope, and love, right? But the greatest is what? The greatest is love. Well, why? Well, faith is something that we have today. Faith is a confident expectation of what God has given us. It's a promise we trust and place our confidence in God. There's a faith there in things that are not seen. A hope, faith, there's hope. There's a hope, he says, that this is the belief that what God has promised will happen to us. So it's not wishful thinking, it's a confidence in God. But love is the greatest because love is one thing that will always last. In heaven, there's not a need for faith because it's all seen. In heaven, there's not the same need for hope because it's all realized. But in heaven, the greatest thing is love because that's the one thing that lasts. And for believers, we live and grow and think in those terms. That's what motivates our ethic, the way we think. It's an ethic of love, knowing that God first loved us. And because of that, we demonstrate that love to others, show that love to others. That wasn't the way people thought in the first century. Love didn't matter. When you look at the love that Christ shows to us, you think about what he did, arming himself with, when we arm our own selves, we think about what Christ did. He dies for us on a cross. He makes this great sacrifice. He does this on our own behalf. And so as we look to what Christ does, we know that there's something more for us. when we take the Lord's supper, it's a remembrance of what Christ did for us. And so the reason we don't sin is because to sin willfully against God is to like poke a stick in God's eye. It's like to bloody Christ again with our own hand. It's to say that even though you paid for my sin out of your love, still I wanna pursue it and stay in it. What we do out of our full understanding of what Christ did for us is to develop that sense that we really are a chosen people, that we really are unique in God's eyes and especially blessed, we all will still sin, but we don't do it in the same way. It's a separation from that lifestyle. Instead, it's a separation towards God. And so love is what matters. And what Peter's getting at in this turn he makes beginning in chapter four and following is ethics matters. It matters how we live in this world because that's what the world sees. And so as we close, let's think about how we live our own lives. How do unbelievers see us? If you go to work and you live a sinful lifestyle, but then you tell them, yeah, I got to go to church on Sunday, so I can't go out with you. They're going to wonder what kind of Christian is this anyway. Our testimony, our evidence before the world has to be one that demonstrates our understanding that we have been forgiven by the sacrifice Christ made. And so let's not reject that again. Let's stand as we pray. Our Father, as we consider these words of Peter, We again thank you so much for the great sacrifice that Christ made on our behalf. And so Lord, we ask only that you would encourage us and enlighten us each day so that we might, in a greater measure, understand the great sacrifice made on our behalf so that we might live lives that are more holy, more separated unto you, more of an illustration before the world that we have been changed in you, And so Lord, as we ask again for your blessing in our lives, may we show you to the people in our lives this week. We ask that you'll bring us back safely next week as we again consider these great words of Peter for it's in Christ and we pray, amen.