This message was given at Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. At the end, we will give information about how to contact us to receive a copy of this or other messages. If you have your scriptures, would you open up to 1 Peter, please? 1 Peter. We'll be picking up in verse 22. This is the reading of God's word. having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love. Love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, begotten again, 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 the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever. And this word is the good news that was preached to you. This is God's word. Would you pray with me? Father, we pray for your help again. Open our minds, open our hearts once more to your word and speak to us. We pray that the weak will be built up. We pray that the proud will be brought low. Pray that in all these things, you will be glorified. Give us strength now for one more sermon. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Now I wanna remind you of one thing that I think continually makes this book so rich, this letter so rich, and it's the suffering of our brothers and sisters. Peter is writing to a church, a church is, that are suffering It always brings to light the things he's saying when you realize these people are living it. They're going through it. And so the apostle is speaking into their suffering lives. And so I picture it like this, like a, like a captain navigating his ship and his crew through stormy seas. Peter begins giving orders, commands for how it is that they are to get through this. He's told them thus far, just a sample of what he said. He said, be holy because your God is holy. He's told them to set their hope on the grace that is to come, prepare their minds for action. He's told them to recognize who their father is, that he is the judge over all creation and to conduct themselves with fear. And then, in the middle of this storm and in the middle of the suffering. And he says, make sure this, that you love one another. For many of you, that command might feel like it lacks a little something. It feels like it lacks some of the importance, the gravitas that the other ones bring to the plate. But this command, love one another. It is every bit as important as all the rest. In the middle of their suffering, Peter tells these people to love one another. What it turns out is that our love is not some feel-good optional fluff. Our love is the marching orders that we have been given. Our love is our calling that we are to fulfill as Christians. Christians are called to love. And so what Peter tells them here is he says, love one another earnestly out of a pure heart. He says that in the second half of 22. Love, it is just so constantly present in the scriptures, is it not? We are reminded every time we see love that Christians are meant to be characterized by love. Christians should look no other way than loving, loving like their father. Living a Christian life is synonymous with living a loving life. Now we start here in the second half of this verse for a reason. This command doesn't come first in the verse, but it is the main thought. He specifies that they are to not just love one another, they are to love one another earnestly. Love one another earnestly, he says. What he's getting at with that earnestly part is a love that is persevering. A love that is constant. A love that lasts. A Sunday kind of love for all you older than me. A love that lasts. Peter likes doing this. He likes putting on the one hand the imperishable, enduring things of God, and then on the other hand, putting the things that don't last, the things that do not endure. Those are the things of the world. And he says we are to have a persevering, a constant love. More and more popular in the world is this idea that love is something that turns on and off just in a moment, right? And then, as nature would have it, just withers away. That is what love is in a lot of circles in the world. Just like you can't help getting old, you can't help that your love is just gonna fade away. God doesn't agree. God does not agree with the kind of love that is popular in the world. Christian love isn't what the world calls love. Christian love endures. Christian love endures. And it endures not because we are a more passionate people or something like that, a more affectionate people. It's nothing like that. Christian love endures because it is a choice. Christian love is not just some feeling of affection that you have for someone. Christian love is a disposition. Christian love is a very practical attitude. Christian love is a commitment to another's good. And this is not special Christianity. This is just what Christianity looks like. This is ordinary Christian life. By all means, it's ordinary Christian life empowered by the word of God, by the spirit of God, But the love that should be in our life, whether the world calls it extraordinary or not, it is just a mark of what a Christian looks like. Love is a mark of true faith. And so Peter now is going to explain, so what's behind that love? What is behind that earnest, persevering, enduring love? And he gives two causes, two causes in these scriptures for why we love one another. What is it that brought this love about? That's what he's going after. The first cause that he lists here, he says, because you have been purified, or because you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love. That's verse 22. There's two parts to that sentence, really. Two parts we're going to talk about. That you've purified your souls by your obedience to the truth, that's the first. And then the second, that you've done that for a sincere brotherly love. So when he says obedience to the truth, it's not how we normally talk. But when he says obedience to the truth, fundamentally, he's talking about believing in Christ. He's talking about conversion. He's talking about salvation. And he says that in believing, we were purified. We were made holy. If you just rewind just a touch back to verse 19, you remember we were ransomed by the precious blood of Christ. Christ, the perfect lamb without blemish or spot. That ransom didn't just make us free. That ransom made us holy. By that precious blood, we were cleansed. By that precious blood, we were purified. By that precious blood, we are enabled to approach our God. But obedience to the truth. I tell you it's synonymous with our salvation, but it does sound differently, doesn't it? We don't normally say it this way. We normally say, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, something like that, right? So to say obedience to the truth, it just has a different feel. And I think it has a different feel because Peter is emphasizing something different about that one and the same salvation. He's bringing out the obedience in it, isn't he? Obedience is a valuable part of Christian life. It just is. Obedience provides motivation when we're lacking it. Let's just be honest. We don't always follow God because we feel like it, right? Yeah, amen, right? There are plenty of times when we do not feel like following God. And that might sound cold, but I'll give you a parallel. Why do you do anything that is the right thing to do when you don't feel like it? Why? I mean, sometimes we feel like lying because I don't want to keep talking about this. We feel like cheating because I don't feel like paying my taxes. We feel like stealing because, oh, I would like that. We feel like doing things that we know are not right. And in those times, there's still the ability to do what is right. Why? It's because we're recognizing something, that our feelings are not the most important thing going on. What is good? What is right? What is true? It is actually more important than how we feel about what is good, what is right, what is true. It turns out that when my feelings forsake me, my obedience to God can still stand strong. Obedience is a backbone to our Christian life. Now, obedience though, it sometimes seems less glamorous, right? Less glamorous compared to motivations like joy. Motivations like gratitude. When you hear me talk about obedience, I hope you're not hearing me say live an ungrateful and an unjoyful life. Joy will always have its part in the Christian life. Gratitude will always have its part in the Christian life, but obedience must also have its place in our lives. Obedience, it's like that friend that maybe isn't quite as fun as the other friends, but will never let you down. So let's not forsake a good friend called Christian obedience, just because we don't think he's as glamorous as our other friends, joy and gratitude. He's a good friend nonetheless. When we reflect on our obedience and our salvation, it also reinforces something that we need reinforced. God is God. We are not. As basic as it gets, but man, what fundamental problems we come up with just related to that. God is God and we are not. what theologians would talk about as the creator-creature distinction. There is a difference between you and God. God does not obey us. We obey God. Amen? We did not create God. He created us. We do not rule over truth. The truth rules over us. That is a fundamental of the fact that we are the creation, not the creator. The truth, because of that fact, the truth has moral obligations for us. Truth is just not something floating out there that we say, oh that's true, oh great, right? Truth demands something of us. We are responsible to live in a way in accordance with the truth. When Jesus says that I am the way and the truth and the life, he was not giving a kind suggestion. He did not view himself as optional. Take it or leave it, I'm the truth. No, he said he is the truth. And that is our requirement to live in light of, to obey. The creation, that's us. must follow where the creator, that's God, where he leads. And so our salvation must follow where the truth of God leads. It must. Your salvation, it turns out, this is the second part of that very first cause, right? Your salvation should result in something specific. And here he's pointing out that it should result in a sincere, brotherly love. All throughout the scriptures is the idea that our salvation is supposed to lead to something. It must lead to something. Used over and over is this picture of trees that bear fruit according to their nature. And we bear the fruit of our salvation, of our God's nature. And so the fruit that he's pointing to that we are supposed to bear as those who have been saved is brotherly love. Brotherly love. Sisters, don't feel any exclusion there. It's just how it's said. Brotherly love. You know what brotherly love implies? Someone else. Love actually implies that just fine as well. But brotherly love really makes that clear. Brotherly love requires someone else, someone who is not you, someone outside of yourself. Brotherly love reminds us that this love is within a family. This is a family love. This is not just having a loving attitude, right? If I held out an acorn to you and I said, hey, look at my tree, you'd say, that's not a tree, that's an acorn, right? The acorn might become a tree, but right now you just got an acorn. A loving attitude is not Christian love. A loving attitude might be the acorn that bears the tree that is your love to others, a love that is shown, but it's not Christian love until it's shown, just like that tree is not a tree until it's actually grown and developed. Your Christian love has to be shown. It has to be acted out. It is supposed to be truly manifested in Christian relationships. Relationships are required. To fulfill a call to brotherly love, you are called to enter into relationships. That's implied, it's a must. You cannot fulfill a call to brotherly love without showing love to a brother, to a sister. It's just what's required here. That is the only way. to obey this calling. That's just, that's it. See, I think we've gotten love wrong sometimes where we will put out love as if it's just this great idea. Oh, your life would be so much better if you just had more love in it. Yeah, that might be absolutely true, but that's not what he's saying here. You are commanded, commanded to go out and engage, hear that word, engage in loving others. Now there's no exact definition for what that must look like. It could be that act of service that no one ever saw. It could be kind words. It could be that midweek phone call. But I don't want to talk about the specific act right now. I want to talk about the basic idea. And the basic idea that you have to take to heart, that you have to think about is this. Are you engaged? in loving your Christian brothers and sisters? Are you actively loving your brothers and sisters? Are you devoted to loving your brothers and sisters? I'm not that concerned with what that specifically looks like, not now. What I'm concerned about is if this is actually a reality in our lives. If you have to ask yourself the question, you don't have to say it out loud, but you have to look at your own heart. Can you honestly say that you are actively engaged in loving your brothers and sisters? Now I know a lot of you can faithfully say yes, and I rejoice in that. But my fear is that there's actually a lot of us, a lot of us, who are not actively engaged in loving our brothers and sisters. Somehow we've gotten it into our minds that we can actually live the Christian life, obeying God's commandments, in what is essentially just a solitary and non-relational life. I don't know how we got that in our heads, but it's everywhere. The idea that you can live a solitary Christian life is totally illegitimate. And let me be clear, the Christian who is alone by God's providence, meaning they did not have control over it, that's a different thing. The Christian who will not engage in God's family, well, that's a very different thing altogether. And that you know is all over the place, isn't it? I mean, if you want a real world example, picture the difference of someone who eats alone because they live alone, that's not a problem, compared to someone who refuses to come to the table when everyone else is eating and insists on eating by themselves. You see the difference, don't you? The Christian life is subverted and it is distorted by the belief that you can somehow honor Christ while at the same time neglecting his body. We are messing up what we were supposed to have, what God intended for us. I think the example that screams out to me most, my Christian life, it's just my Bible and me. I'm glad you've got your Bible. But if you're reading your Bible, you know where your Bible tells you to go? To go be a part of God's family. You cannot have a Christian life that is just you and your Bible. Your Christian life is meant to be a part of the family of God. Our salvation was meant to produce in us a brotherly, family, relational love. That is what the Christian life looks like. We love one another because it was the intended result of our salvation. You hear that? We are intended by our salvation to go and love one another. The second cause behind this love that Peter gives is this love one another. because you have been begotten by God by his word. That's verses 23 and 24. And you heard me slightly change the wording there about the difference of being, having been born again versus begotten. The reason we say begotten is just because the father is the active one in this. He is fathering children. It's not just the process of us being born, but Peter is emphasizing that God is the one who fathered us. That's why we said that differently. but we have been begotten by God's imperishable word. We were begotten into his own family. This is reasoning you're going to see throughout the scriptures. Our God and father of love made us as children, right? And like children take after parents, see, we've said this before, right? We take after him. We take after his love. This was the same reasoning used in holiness. We are holy because we are God's children and God is holy. We inherit that characteristic and we aspire to that characteristic at the same time. So likewise, the God of love, the God who loves, when he begets children, when he fathers children, he has children who love. That's the reasoning here. It follows naturally when God becomes our father. You know, some of you might remember about like, what, 10, 15 years ago, there were two tennis champions who married each other. Andre Agassi, yeah. and Steffi Graf. Like the number one and number three players respectively in their divisions, they marry each other. What do you think their kids are going to be good at? Tennis. They're going to have some, whether they're champions or not, they're going to be good at tennis. They just will, right? It's in their blood. It's in the way they're going to be nurtured the same way. By the nature we've been given by God, namely we are his children, we belong to him, right? We're going to love. And by the nurture he shows us every day, the ongoing love poured out to us in the gospel. We are going to be children of love. We are going to be loving people. And this word that caused us to be born again, to be begotten again into God's family, Peter describes it as the living and abiding word of God. And that's when you get this famous passage here, right? Verse 24, for all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass, but the grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever. Peter's saying, in comparison to that word of God, the flesh, the worldly things, and all their glories, no matter how great and enduring they seem like they are, they're temporary. Think about these people, where they lived. They lived in Rome. Rome was the greatest nation of its time. And up to that point in history, they lived in a glorious nation, we. We live in the greatest country of our time, in might and in power and in achievements. In either case, the glories of men fade like flowers in the field. Tom Schreiner described it something like this. In the spring, the flowers may be beautiful, but once the fall comes around, you have a hard time finding a flower anywhere. This is challenging for us to believe. We're so small. We're so bound to our time. We can't see far. We can barely remember 10 years ago, much less a hundred, much less a thousand. And so we're being told that the power and the glory of our nations is fleeting. That's hard for us to believe, yet God calls us not to look through our eyes, but to look through his, to look from his vantage point, from his perspective. All of human civilization is a fading flower in the hand of God. All of it. And remember the suffering that these people are going through in part. It's not yet government-wide, but across their society. Do you think it makes a difference to them to think that the society, the God, the society that rejects them is fading away? Yeah, you bet it does. However much you feel marginalized by the United States of America and however much we're going to feel marginalized as time goes on, it's fading away. It's just a flower in the field to God. It matters that the societies that reject God, that reject our savior, are not the end all and the be all. They're fading like flowers in the field. Human glories will fade, but the word of the Lord endures forever. It's just glorious to say that. The word of the Lord endures forever. Only the God of eternity can build what lasts forever. Societies do not build things that last forever. God alone builds things that last forever. We are a people not just of words, we are a people of God's word. We store his word in our heart because it will last forever. We study it, we devote ourselves to it because it will be his word alone that remains forever. Humanity's monuments will crumble while God's words yet remain. This is the word of our God. And this living and abiding word is the gospel, Peter says. It is the gospel, the good news that was preached to you. That's what you get in verse five when he says, but the word of the Lord remains forever. And if you see in your Bibles, the verse before was probably indented, showing that we're quoting something else. Peter was quoting Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah, some 700 years before. That's Isaiah 40, if you want to look it up later. The prophet that was saying these things 700 years before, 700 plus. Peter says, you know what he was talking about? He was talking about the gospel. I mean, that's cool. These people who might've thought that the gospel was, you know, 30 years old, says, no, no, no. Isaiah was talking about this. The prophet Isaiah that you've read since you were a child, he was talking about the gospel. The good news of our redemption, of our reconciliation to God, it has been echoing across history. Because God has been weaving it all throughout history with his dealings with mankind and what he says. The gospel was always there. The gospel that saved you, the gospel that you believe in, is the unfading, enduring, living word of God. The gospel that saved you is no recent invention. It is woven across history. The gospel that saved you will not expire. It will not wear out. It will stand throughout all eternity. The living and abiding word of God. To come back to Peter's point, We are commanded to love one another because our salvation produces a family love for one another. And because we have been begotten by God, we are his children. So we are to love like our father loves. So let's end with the main point of this passage. Love one another. love one another. Just think about the prominence of this command throughout the scriptures. This exact phrase, love one another, a dozen times in the New Testament. You take just the teachings on love, the word love appears hundreds of times just in the New Testament. Why should love receive such emphasis in the Lord's words? Well, he must value love a great deal. Why else would he talk so much about it? Why else would he teach us so much about it? And if he values love this much, you know who else should value it? We should. If he values it, we better value it. If he values it, we should prioritize it. We should pursue it. If He values love, then let love be the constant subject of my prayers. We pray for things like, Lord, make me more merciful. Lord, make me more pure. Make me stronger. Make me more self-controlled. Good prayers, but make sure this is on your prayer list. Father, make me more loving. Make me more loving like you are loving. Instead of measuring our lives by the world's standards and by the world's stuff, let's measure ourselves by the extent that we know and show the love of God. Knowing God's love means understanding our God of love. And particularly, it means understanding that chief act of love that was shown to us in our Lord Jesus Christ coming and dying for us. That was love. Do you understand that love? And knowing that love must lead to showing God's love. Brothers and sisters, love must be put into action. We have been loved in order to love one another, in order to love our brothers and our sisters in the Lord. Ask yourself, Do you live a loving life? Is your time devoted to the love of God? Is your budget devoted to the love of God? Is your energy devoted to the love of God? Actionless love, passive love, it's not Christian love and it's not to be found in the gospel. If Christ had an actionless love, if he just said, eh, I really like them, but I'm going to stay here in heaven, we would be dead in our sins because he never would have come and accomplished the plan of rescue. If your love is just some attitude in you and it is not bearing fruit, it's not being manifested, if it's not taking action, then your brothers and your sisters are deprived. and your call before your God is going unfulfilled. We look so often in our lives, like we're reading tea leaves, looking for the mysterious call of God in our life. What am I supposed to do? What's my big picture? I can't tell you everything you're supposed to do, but I can tell you your call of God is absolutely to be loving your brothers and sisters. That's your call. So brothers and sisters, from this moment on, for the rest of this day, for the rest of this week, and for the rest of your life, go and love one another like only a child of God could. Let's pray. Our Father, help us to do what feels unnatural. Help us to love one another. Help us to put aside our busy schedules Our favorite preferences, our awkwardness, our weakness, help us put them all aside so that we can love the brothers and sisters you've given us in the family of God. Forgive us for being an actionless people, for being a people who thinks we can just have loving hearts without having loving lives. May we be a people whose love takes action. May our brothers and sisters know it, feel it and be able to count on it. And may this world see in us a love that they cannot explain and a love that must only be coming from you. We pray these things in Jesus's name. Amen. We hope you've enjoyed this message from Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. To receive a copy of this or other messages, call us at area code 775-782-6516 or visit our website gracenevada.com.