First Peter chapter two, I'm going to read verses one through three. So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants long for the pure spiritual milk that by it you may grow up to salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. One of the things about nearly all of the apostolic literature of the New Testament, all of the New Testament epistles, is that they contain really two forms of writing. The first is that of indicative. That which has been accomplished on our behalf by God through his son, Jesus Christ, and through the ministry of his spirit. But then we come to these passages, which also include the imperative. Now, knowing these things, knowing what is true, how ought we to live? How should we then live, as Francis Schaeffer put it? How should we live knowing the truths of the gospel? In 1 Peter chapter 1, Peter spent a tremendous amount of time talking about what God has accomplished on our behalf. 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 and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are kept by God's power, being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice." And then he talked about our experience of suffering and how we looked at that some time ago as I went through that passage. But Peter, here in the beginning of the first chapter, opens up our eyes to the glorious truths of the gospel, what God has accomplished on our behalf. But in verse one of chapter two, as we examined last week, he comes, as often Paul does, after giving us these great visions of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. He begins this section with a therefore, a so. If this is true, if God has accomplished this, if God has caused you to become born again, if you've been made regenerate by God's spirit, raised again with Christ, walking in the power of Christ, how should we live? And that's how he begins with this clause. So, or therefore, whenever you see a therefore in the New Testament, you ought to ask yourself, what is it therefore? What is this built upon? And it is typically, usually this in the Greek language, the indicative mood, that which God has done, and then the imperative mood. This is then how you ought to act. This is how you ought to live based on the truth. of what God has done on your behalf. So, he says, and last week we looked at, first of all, Peter says, these are the things that you need to put aside. These are the things that you need to destroy. You need to put aside and put away all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander, and so on. All of these things must be put aside in your thinking because this is not the way that you ought to act. being one who is made born again in the image of Christ, raised in the resurrection power of Christ. This is not how you ought to act. And as I mentioned last week, Peter's going to go on in this passage and talk about the this picture of the temple, that what the church is, is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Christ himself being the cornerstone, every one of us are living stones being built up in the temple for proper worship to God. And using that metaphor, using that picture of the temple, he talks about the unity of our faith, the unity of being built up together in the body of Christ, to use Paul's language. And he says, if we're going to do that, if we're going to be the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit, if we're going to rightly worship God, then first of all, we have to put aside all of these hindrances which keep us from properly building the body, building up the temple of God, because these things have no place in the temple of God. You can't envy your brother. You can't hate your brother and speak ill of your brother. You can't be jealous of your brothers and sisters in Christ. If these things are to be true, if we're to rightly come into the presence of God, then we have to put away all of these things, destroy these things. But then he turns it around and he says, now, having put away all of these things. Like newborn infants. Long. for pure spiritual milk that by it you may grow, grow up to salvation if you indeed have tasted that the Lord is good. Some children I've known seem to be bored with childhood. You've known kids like that who they're nine years old and they act like they're 39 years old. I have one or two of them like that. They want to be ahead of their time in their thinking. They want to grow up. They want to get past childhood. They want to get on with life. Others seem to relish the dependency that comes with their youthfulness, and they seem to have no desire to grow up at all. They're mommy's kids. They want to stay children as long as they can. Well, as we look around us at fellow believers, it doesn't take long to realize that the principle holds true for spiritual growth as much as it does for physical growth. Some Christians seem to have no desire, it seems, to grow up spiritually. They appear perfectly content to remain infants in their faith for the whole of their lives. But Peter reminds us here that as we as believers We have been born again by God's spirit. This is really not an option for the believer. It's not an option to remain a spiritual infant. The need of the hour is for we as disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ is to grow up in respect to the body of Christ. It is to grow up into this temple that Peter is going to paint for us this picture. We are being built up. The temple is an ongoing project, but you can see its progress. You can see the bricks being laid. If you've ever built a house or been involved in building something, you go one day and you see what they've got. And a few days later, you come back and you say, I can't believe how much progress they've made. It looks completely different than it did a few days ago. And what I want to argue is what Peter is presenting to us here in this passage is that it's exactly the paradigm that ought to be characteristic of individual believers. We all need to grow up in respect to one another. And Peter gives us the formula as to how we ought to do that. In verses two and three, he deals with four dimensions of our spiritual growth. In verse two, he deals with the disposition of our spiritual growth and the means of our spiritual growth and the confirmation of our spiritual growth. And then lastly, in verse three, he addresses the condition of our spiritual growth. First, we see that he deals in the first part of verse two, the disposition of our spiritual growth, like newborn infants, he says, long for pure spiritual milk. First thing that he addresses here is our disposition as believers. As Peter says, when it comes to growing up together, our disposition ought to be like that of newborn babies. Now, as an adult, if you're hungry after the service and you wanted to go out with your family, maybe you'd go to an old country buffet or something like that, and you'd go to the buffet and All of that food is set before you there. And as adults, we have to admit that there's probably a certain amount of indifference which comes with that process. You look at the fried chicken and you say it looks really tasty, but then you look down at the Brussels sprouts and you say, I think I'm going to pass on those today. In fact, one of the things I've noticed is that the older a person gets, the older I get, In many respects, the less appetite I have, the more indifference I have towards food than when I was young and I could eat a whole pizza by myself. There's less appetite as our metabolism slows down and more indifference towards what we eat. Just give me some food. If it tastes good, fine, I'll eat it. It's no big deal. But that's not at all the case with a newborn baby. That's not the way a newborn baby behaves. With a newborn infant, there's no such thing as a take it or leave it attitude. In his miraculous architecture of a little infant, God has built in a hunger mechanism that alerts the baby's brain that it has to have nourishment in order to grow. When the little baby becomes hungry, He doesn't just want food. He wants it badly and he wants it right now. Mommy, feed me right now or I'll continue to scream with this high-pitched scream until you succumb and you give me what I want. There is in a baby a real longing for that food And a sense that if they don't get the nourishment that they need, that they're just going to shrivel up and die. Now a question that we ought to be asking ourselves continually, what is my appetite for spiritual growth? Am I more like a baby that is in a very real sense humbling itself in its mother's arms? and says, please, Mother, please, I beg of you, give me more of what I need. I know what I need because you've shown it to me, you've revealed it to me. You've given me the taste of that sweet milk and I want more of it. Please, Mother, feed me. Or have I become more like an adult that says, you know, I've really grown up as much as I'm going to grow. I don't need to grow anymore. I'm as tall as I'm going to be. I'm as big as I'm going to be. I'm an adult. I don't need to grow up anymore. So just give me what I want. A little bit of this and a little bit of that. Let me pick and choose. I want to suggest to you the danger of that kind of an attitude that says, We really don't need the sweetness of the mother's milk, this pure spiritual milk of God's Word that he gives to us. Remember what our Lord Jesus said, blessed are you, blessed this happy, satisfied disposition that we have, blessed are you who watch hunger and thirst after righteousness. You'll be filled, be filled up. I don't know about you, but when I look back to my youth, when I look back to the first days of regeneration, when God brought newness of life, I want to tell you, it's easy to become callous. It's Easy to lose that sense of newness, that sense of infantile longing and desire for God's Word. It's easy to become satisfied with the little that we get, rather than longing for the more that God wants to give us. Blessed are you, hunger and thirst for righteousness, you'll be satisfied. The psalmist said in 119.20, my soul is crushed with longing after your ordinances at all times. The psalmist said, Lord, I love your word. I want to hear your word at all times. Give me that kind of desire that my soul is day after day crushed unless I hear your word. I want your word. And this I suggest ought to be our prayer that God would give to us afresh each day, that kind of hunger, that kind of desire to know him and to know his word, to long for it, that we might be strengthened and built up. I want to ask you, are you able to say that from your heart this morning? I'm not. Not with the same zeal that I once knew. And I think it ought to be the prayer of our hearts daily that God would give back to us. Refresh our spirits anew with that kind of hunger and zeal for his word. Jesus said in Matthew 18, Truly I say to you, unless you're converted and become like children, you shall not enter the kingdom of God. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. I think Christ reflected there this disposition. This sense of awe and wonder and joy and newness and hunger and longing for his word. We see in little children. Thomas Watson once gave an illustration of a man that was invited to a feast. If a man was invited to a feast and music was being played at the feast and that man listened to the music and didn't pay any attention to the meat that was placed on his plate, you would say of that man, surely he's not hungry. Likewise, when men desire pretty sounding words and have no desire for the substance of spiritual things, it's a sure sign that they have misplaced affection and disease disposition. The problem is, says Baxter, is that our natural disposition in the flesh is to please the flesh rather than to seek hard after those things that are pleasing to God. Baxter says, to overvalue the pleasing of the flesh is itself a sin, and to prefer it before the pleasing of God and the holy preparations for heaven is the state of carnality and ungodliness and the common cause of the damnation of souls. But when this little natural good is preferred before the greater spiritual, moral, or eternal good, this is the sin of carnal minds, which is threatened with death. And then he quotes from Romans 8, 5 through 8, where Paul says, For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh. Those who are according to the spirit, the things of the spirit, for the mindset on the flesh is death. But the mindset on the spirit is life and peace, because the mindset on the flesh is hostile toward God. It does not subject itself to the law of God. It's not even able to do so. And those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Thanks be to God, we have been saved from spiritual death and brought into the new life of Christ. Paul continues and says, however, you're not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if indeed the spirit of God dwells in you. We have been truly born of God through the preaching of God's word, as Peter says, we've been given a new spiritual disposition. We have been given a new birth by the regeneration of the spirit of God. And along with that new birth, we have been given a new desire to grow as a newborn infant. But a newborn baby can have all the desire in the world. But if you don't feed that newborn baby, what's going to happen to it? It's going to die. And so, Peter says, Like newborn infants, that's how we ought to think of ourselves in the church. Like newborn infants, long for pure spiritual milk. Now that leads us to pure spiritual milk, the means of our spiritual growth. What are the means? Peter says it's the pure milk of God's Word. The word that's used here for pure It means unadulterated. In other words, it's not milk that's been watered down. Now, some of you may like skim milk, but I presume it's only because you've gotten used to it. It's just watered down and there's hardly anything to it. Myself, I like a glass of milk full of the fat. I like the taste of that milk with the substance still in it. And that's the idea here. He says, pure spiritual milk is the milk that comes from the mother. It still has the substance of it, the colostrum of the mother. It's not adulterated. It's not watered down. There has perhaps never been an age when the scriptures were more watered down and adulterated than they are today. Now, the greatest thing I've come to love about Reformed theology It's not afraid to accept and obey what Scripture actually says, including the difficult passages of Scripture. As I was thinking about this, I counted off in my mind three ways that so many in the modern church are adulterating the Word of God. There are many more besides these, but I think that There are many errors that fall into these three categories. Number one, viewing the Bible as a manual for happiness, two, philosophizing the text of scripture, and three, bringing our cultural baggage to the scripture. So many today want to view the Bible as a manual for happiness. The vast majority of preaching today, as well as popular Christian literature, Gives us the sense that the Bible is not much more than just an instruction manual to make us happy. Your life now, your best life now. It's all about you. It's all about your happiness, your contentment and your marriage, your job or whatever it might be. Now, this is where so much topical preaching comes from. In this view of the Bible, the audience is sovereign rather than God. And so the preacher or the writer begins with what he or she thinks the audience wants to hear. Rather than standing in the stead of the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles and staying with them, thus saith the Lord. In the context of speaking of the last days before the final judgment by Christ and the increase of ungodliness that will accompany these days, Paul exhorts the young pastor Timothy in 1 Timothy 4, and he says, for the time will come, they won't endure sound doctrine. They won't endure the meat of the milk. They don't want the substance of the pure, unadulterated milk of God's Word. But wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires." Turn away their ears from the truth. They'll turn aside to myths. But you, Paul says to Timothy, this young pastor, you be sober in all things. Endure hardship. Do the work of an evangelist. Fulfill your ministry. In summary, Paul says to Timothy, do the work of God's Word. Because it is the work of God's Word which will bring regeneration. It is the work of God's Gospel that will transform lives. It is the work of God's Word which will bring true spiritual growth to God's people and to your life as a believer. Another way that the Bible is being adulterated is what I'm calling the philosophizing of the text of scripture. What do I mean by that? I mean, interpreting the scripture through our own reasoning because we don't understand or possibly we don't even like what the scripture says. We come to hard passages of scripture. We don't like what we read. And so we interpret it through our own lens. It's a classic error in approaching the scripture. Rather than dealing with what the text actually says in its context, grammatically, linguistically, and contextually, which is reading it alongside of other passages of scripture, as well as the opinions of godly men in history, a person will come to the text and then run in every direction, rather than dealing with what the text actually says. I was a pastor of a church in Texas for a number of years, and I remember when we first began, there was a man who came, and many of us have heard stories very similar to this, who heard me preaching and talking about the sovereignty of God in a passage that I was dealing with. And that's the first time that he'd heard me say anything about that, I suppose. He hadn't been coming very long. And he came to my home that week, and he sat across my kitchen table. And he said, how can you preach that God is sovereign in salvation when clearly it's man who makes the decision to follow Christ? And all I did was just open the Bible to Romans chapter 9, which of course is a very classic text in dealing with the sovereignty of God. And Paul in that passage deals with the difficult doctrine of the sovereignty of God and essentially answers the question by saying, Who are you, O man, who answers back to God? All I did was open the Bible to Romans 9, pushed it across the table and said, Here, read this to me out loud. He read the passage out loud and after reading it, closed the Bible, pushed it back across the table and said, I don't really know what that says, but I know that's not my God. I want to say how easy it is to bring our baggage, to bring our philosophy to Scripture, rather than allowing God's Word to speak for itself, rather than allowing what we perceive to be contradictions in God's Word to stand. And allowing God to be God, as Paul said in Romans 9, who are you, O man? Does the thing made say to its maker, why did you make me like this? The adulterating of God's Word by reading our preferred philosophy into Scripture will stunt our growth as a believer. Furthermore, in the context of 1 Peter, it's clear that a church will be stunted in its spiritual growth if it does not maintain a commitment and a longing after the pure and adulterated Word of God. Another way that we can water down Scripture is by bringing cultural baggage to the Scriptures. Not long ago, I listened to two sermons by Alistair Begg, and he was preaching on the subject of man and woman from a biblical perspective from First Corinthians 11. His question was essentially, why do so many people have a difficult time with believing what the scripture actually says about the God ordained order that God has created in the home and in the church? His answer was essentially that so many people have difficulty with this because they interpret the Bible through the lens of modern feminism. He gave a wonderful example of this and pointed out that in the literature that deals with this question of leadership in the home and in the church, In many books that have been written by university professors and seminary professors and so on that deals with this issue, the most often quoted text in the argument for the feminist position is Galatians 3.28, where Paul says, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free man, male nor female, for you're all one in Jesus Christ. Begg points out how remarkable it is that this text would be used to justify women in leadership in the church, when in fact, in the context, if you just read the passage, Paul is discussing our common justification, that is, Jew, Gentile, male, female, we're all justified the same way by faith in Christ alone. That's exactly what Paul is talking about. has nothing to do with leadership in the home or in the church. But he points out how remarkable it is that this is the most common text used in supporting a feminist argument. It's amazing that a verse like this one is ripped from its context and used to trump every other passage in scripture. that speaks to the subject such as First Corinthians chapter 11 where the order of creation is the model rather than a cultural application. This is just one example of how we bring our cultural baggage to the Bible and in the process we water down the pure milk of God's Word. The church today is suffering as a result of it. The church's bones today are weak. They're crumbling so that the body of Christ no longer even resembles a body, but an emaciated skeleton that's hardly perceivable as a body. The body of Christ is falling apart. precisely because it no longer longs for the pure, unadulterated, pure milk of God's Word. Well, not only does Peter deal with the disposition of our spiritual growth, that ardent desire that is given to us by God's Spirit, the means of our spiritual growth, the pure milk of God's Word, but thirdly, he mentions the confirmation of our spiritual growth in the last part of verse two that by it you may grow up to salvation or you may grow in respect to salvation. Now, this is one of those points that sort of redundant. How do you know that a child is actually coming of age? The obvious answer is that he's growing up physically and emotionally. The lines on the wall keep moving up. The conversation keeps becoming more complex and in depth. No longer are we talking about just army men and kung fu and dolls. Now we're talking about things that matter in life, how we live in the world and how we date and how we think about others and how we respond to our elders and all of those kinds of issues which are more indicative of becoming grown up than they were just a few years ago. In many societies, a dwarf was considered to be a devil, at least one that was cursed because of something that his or her parents did. Even in the Bible, Leviticus 26, a dwarf was not allowed to serve as a priest because the law of the service of worship, it was a picture of the perfection of Christ. And so imperfections and defects were to be excluded. Nevertheless, we realize that because of modern medicine, that a dwarf is not a dwarf because he's a devil or because of something he did, but rather it's a medical condition, a hormone secretion in his brain or lack thereof. Nevertheless, we recognize it's not normal. When we see a child not long ago on television, they were showing this child in the news that was 16 years old, still looked like he was an infant, he was two years old. And everywhere they went, the parents had to explain, my child is 16, but is really an infant. It's not normal, it's strange, it shouldn't be this way. It's not the normal condition of human growth. God designed our bodies to grow in such a way. that with the right conditions and proper nutrition, you're supposed to grow up. If you're becoming stunted in your spiritual growth, there's clearly something wrong. Clearly, something inhibiting your growth, according to Peter, you're not receiving the nutrition that you need, the pure milk of God's word. He says that by it, by the spiritual milk of God's word, you should grow up to what? To salvation. You should grow in the knowledge of God's word. Hebrews, the author says, you're accustomed to drinking only milk. But you need the meat of God's word, you need to grow up in respect to your salvation. It's normal to grow up when you meet a believer who doesn't want to talk about the things of the faith, who says, I don't want to talk about theology. I don't want to talk about those things because they're too hard for me to understand. And that same believer goes to their work the next day and executes very complex formulas in their work on a computer or in medicine or some other thing because they spent years studying their profession. You have to ask yourself, what is wrong with this picture? How much more important, how much more desire should we have for the things of God than the things of even our vocation? You have to long to grow up in respect to salvation, Peter says. It's a normal thing. And yet today we're surrounded by a culture, even the Christian culture, where they say, I don't want it. It's abnormal to grow up in respect to salvation. And yet, Peter says, for you are truly regenerate, born again by the Spirit of God. This is a normal thing. You ought to keep growing in respect to your salvation. Does that mean you're going to be a theologian next week, seminary trained, can answer all of the difficult questions of biblical and systematic theology? No, it's not what it means. But Peter says you ought to have a hunger, you ought to have a desire to just keep growing, to keep longing, to know more of the Savior, to know more of his word and how we ought to grow up in respect to it. OK. Finally, he gives us the condition of our spiritual growth. Notice in verse three that you may grow up to salvation. Notice in many of your Bibles there's a hyphen between the end of verse two and verse three. If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. Now, it's obvious that some of the translators of some of the modern translations didn't like what they thought the implications were. of this phrase. They didn't like it because it sounds like a conditional clause. If you indeed have tasted of the goodness of the Lord. In fact, for example, the NIV translates this as now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. Now that softens that quite a bit. If you change the if to a now, that by it you may grow up to salvation now that you have tasted that the Lord is good, rather than if you have tasted that the Lord is good. Now, I'm not going to bore you with all of the grammatical reasons for this, but let me assure you that's a very bad translation of this text. This is a conditional clause. We do damage to the text if we attempt to remove the force of what Peter is trying to say here. To sum it up, what Peter is saying here in the context, if you have truly and savingly been born by God's spirit through the means of the proclamation of God's word, specifically the gospel of God's grace through Jesus Christ, you are going to be growing in your love of the brethren and your longing for the pure spiritual milk of God's word. If God has really done a work of new birth, Then you're going to grow up in salvation. In his second letter, Peter writes, if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For he who lacks these qualities is blind or short sighted. Having forgotten his purification from his former sins, therefore, brethren, Be all the more diligent to make certain about his calling and choosing you. I want to say. Not just the young people, old and young alike, if there's a lack of spiritual interest in your heart for the things of God, if you love the things of this world more than the things of God, if you want the world more than the church, if you want the things of this life more than Christ himself, And to become like Christ. There may be a good reason to ask yourself, have I truly been born again? There's nothing wrong. With considering that question, you should not become comfortable. In your longing for things. Of this world. We should not dismiss the ifs of scripture because we're uncomfortable with them, but rather they ought to stir us up by way of reminder. They have to stir us up, as Peter says, to be certain of God's calling and choosing us. Seek the Lord with all our heart. Oh, God, have I become complacent in my faith? Give to me this longing, this crushing, this psalmist book of Give to me a desire for the things of Christ. Give to me a desire to grow up in my salvation. If you've been truly born again by the Spirit of God through the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross and in his resurrection, you're going to grow up in your maturity in Christ. You're going to do so, Peter argues, in the midst of the body of Christ. Because you are a brick. being laid in a wall. It's not an individualistic journey. It is a one another work of God's Spirit to make us to be one body. If you're not growing in respect to your salvation, if you're not growing in relation to your brothers and sisters in Christ, there's a real warning that needs to be heeded in Scripture. God's design for us as believers is that we would not be stunted in our growth, but like Christ, we would grow up in stature and wisdom and in favor with God and men. Praise be to God. By His favor, we've been reconciled to Him through the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ. Through His blood, we've been reconciled to one another, brothers and sisters. And now the scriptures exhort us grow up in your faith. Don't be afraid to grow. Keep longing. Keep hungry. Keep crying out to God. Give me that hunger. I don't have it. I don't have what I need because of my sinfulness, because of my worldliness. Give to me such crushing of my soul. Heavenly Father, I thank you, Father, that I may preach your word this day, not only to this congregation, but to myself. And I thank you that for the conviction of your spirit. And I pray, God, that you would give to each one of us that hunger and thirst Christ spoke of for your righteousness. For we know God, having read the law and heard the law, how full of idolatry we are, how easily we construct idols in our mind of silver and gold and all of the things of this world, how easy it is to be torn away by the temptation of the devil. Just say to these rocks, become bread. I'll give you the glories of the kingdoms of this world. Oh, we thank you for Christ's love and hunger. Man doesn't live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Thank you for the hunger of Christ, our Savior, for your word. Oh, God, may we have such hunger, we pray. We see, Lord, in your word that how normal it is for regenerated believers to hunger and thirst. We pray, God, that you would restore unto us such a sense of normality. such a sense of joy and peace in the Holy Spirit. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.