The Life-Giving Word | 1 Peter 1:22-2:3
Andy Lindgren | July 26, 2026
My name is Andy Lindgren. I’ve served as an elder here at Redeemer in the past, and Pastor Brian asked me to fill in for him this morning. Do not fear, he will be back next week to continue this wonderful series that he started.
I would ask that you would turn to our text this morning, which is found in 1 Peter 1:22-2:3. So we continue in our series on the living word, and this morning we’re going to look at the life-giving word.
In 1831, Caleb Carman saw a man he never forgot. Caleb Carman owned a boarding house, and one day a flatboat worker walked in. This man he described as “gaunt and gangly.” He had incredibly long legs and long arms. When he walked, he didn’t walk heel to toe like most people do; he just plopped his whole foot down at a time with each step. And he was a unique-looking man. He had a really thick lower lip but a really thin upper lip, and parts of the left side of his face were actually smaller than parts of the right side, and one of his ears stuck out at a further angle than the other. This man, it was said, “When he walked, melancholy dripped from him as he walked.” He had a face “overspread with sadness.”
But it wasn’t those things that stood out most to Caleb and to many others who met this man. It was the change that came over him when he began to speak. They said when he began to speak, the entire countenance of his face would change, and a smile would often creep up in the corners of his lips like a curtain parting, and that when he spoke, it was obvious that he had true concern and affection for the person he was speaking to. When he would tell a funny story, when he would get to the punchline he would laugh louder than anyone else in the room, usually. When he was making a point, he was arguing with such conviction that people said it was like hearing your own thoughts being spoken out loud and tied up in a nice conclusion.
This man went on to hold various other jobs throughout the course of his life, in addition to being a flatboat worker, including a venture into politics; and his name, of course, was Abraham Lincoln.
If the voice of a man can have such power, what power must reside in the voice of the Creator of man? That’s what we’re going to be looking at this morning in our text. So once again, 1 Peter 1:22-2:3. We read,
“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, 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.
“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 into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
This is God’s word.
This morning we’re going to be looking at how the word creates life, how it sustains life, and how it animates life.
1. The Word Creates Life
First, the word creates life—a new birth. Peter is writing to suffering Christians in this letter, and he’s encouraging them in the midst of their exile in this world as strangers making their way through. He’s reminding them of who they are as believers and what has happened to them. Here he points to one of the most glorious and mysterious doctrines, regeneration, when he writes in verse 23, “You have been born again.”
“Born again.” What does that mean? Well, the first time we find this phrase in the New Testament is in John 3, in Jesus’ nighttime conversation with Nicodemus. Jesus talks about a change that has to happen to people that’s so radical that it’s actually like being born for a second time. Remember, he told Nicodemus, “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”
Jesus is most likely referring back to this passage in Ezekiel 36:25-27, which I think is one of the best definitions of the new birth in Scripture, which says (this is God speaking),
“I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and I will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”
Now this promise was made to Israel in exile, who was in the midst of experiencing a national disaster as a result of its sin. They had been taken over by a stronger kingdom, kicked out of their land. And this promise came to a people who knew very well how entrenched sin is in the human heart and how a radical solution is needed, and this radical solution is what God promised.
So what is the new birth? It’s a new heart, a new spirit given by God—a new disposition, if you will—along with purification and cleansing from God; a new life, enabling us to actually trust and obey him.
You know, Martin Luther, near the end of his life, he had written several volumes, but he said, “You know what? You can burn everything I wrote except for two books, my small catechism and my Bondage of the Will.” In The Bondage of the Will, Luther hammered this point home, that there is something wrong with the human will. It is bent away from God. We chase and we pursue with a lot of effort and a lot of energy anything and everything except the one thing that will give us true happiness, which is God himself. In regeneration, in new birth, God actually does something in our hearts to our very wills to enable us to desire him.
So simple human willpower and resolution to change won’t cut it. Israel knew that from their national experience. We need to be remade from the inside out.
The new birth affects change at the root of our beings and changes our very disposition, the very bent of our desires. As the theologian Fred Sanders puts it, “The Father accomplishes our salvation in the Son, then places his Spirit in us to place us in his Son so that we can have life.”
If you remember, in the writings of the apostle Paul, he’s always drawing this dichotomy: dead in sins, dead in your trespasses and sins, but alive in God.
We even see this death-life language in the parable of the prodigal son, at the very end: “This son of mine was dead, but he is alive again.” A new birth.
But it’s also of imperishable seed. It’s different from our natural birth, because we are born again, as he writes in verse 23, “not of perishable seed, but of imperishable.”
Okay, this side of the fall, our biological life as we know it will not last. It will perish. And Peter, in 1 Peter 1:24-25, quotes Isaiah 40:6-8 to make this point. It says, “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.”
This imagery is used multiple times in the Old Testament, that human life is like grass. It’s green—and you’ve probably seen this in your own yard this summer, I’m sure. It’s all green, and then all of a sudden you see patches of brown and brittle start showing up; it died. The human life is like that. You know, we’re in the vibrancy of life, we’re living our lives with zeal. And before we know it, years, decades have passed, and we’re gone.
A Christian apologist named Stephen Meyer experienced that. Before he was a Christian, when he was fourteen years old he broke his leg. As he was lying in the hospital, he was reading through baseball statistics. He was a big baseball fan. And he’s lying there with a broken leg, reading through and noticing that after a certain age these players didn’t play anymore. It got him thinking, you know, “and eventually they all die.” Then it got him thinking about the human race—eventually the whole human race is going to die. And he looked down at his broken leg and he said, “Yes, this is going to get healed and they’re going to fix it, but what’s the point? In eighty, ninety years from now, my body’s going to be broken and there’s going to be no coming back from that.”
This led him into a years-long deep dive into philosophy, into reading science, and eventually he became a Christian, because he knew that was the only place where he could find something that was imperishable, something that would last. This imperishable word from the imperishable God in regeneration creates an imperishable life that lasts, that doesn’t end.
You know, the theologian Francis Turretin said it’s so fitting that Scripture uses this language of a new heart, because our biological heart is given us to last our entire life; and our new heart in the new birth is given us to last all into eternity.
But this new birth also comes through the word, as Peter says in verse 24, “through the living and abiding word of God.” How does it come through the word? How does this actually work? Well, it’s in two senses.
First, as Peter says here, it’s through the actual word of the gospel. It’s the good news, verse 25. And this word is what? It’s the good news that was preached to you. It was the gospel. Or in James 1:18 we read, “Of his own will he brought us forth—” how? “—by the word of truth.”
We see this in the broader context of Isaiah 40:6-8 that Peter quotes. That was in the context of God’s address to Israel, telling them this good news that the nations keeping them in exile were like grass that withers and doesn’t last; that he had a promise, and his word was going to stand and endure far after these nations were gone, his promise of bringing them out of the exile.
We don’t have time this morning to go into all the nuances of this exile theme in Scripture. It’s a large one. But remember, in exile, they’re out of their land, and their temple is in ashes, and their hope was as good as dead. They couldn’t just go back and start rebuilding their temple without permission; they’d be killed! All the promises God made that they were going to be a light to the nations and he was going to bless all of the earth through the seed of Abraham—they were like, “It’s gone, our hope is gone, we have no hope.”
But God stirred the heart of a ruler named Cyrus, and he said, “You know what? I’m going to let them go back to the land, and I’m going to let them rebuild the temple.” And centuries later, that prepared the way for the coming of Christ.
This harkens back to the first exodus. Israel was in bondage to Egypt. They were slaves; they couldn’t get out. They couldn’t go anywhere else. If they would have tried to lead a slave revolt on their own, many would have died, and they would have still remained in slavery. But what did God do? He did something they could not do on their own. While they were in slavery—powerless, good as dead—he sent a mediator named Moses, who did miraculous signs that attested to him being sent by God. And he instructed them to spread the blood of this lamb on the doorposts so that they would not fall under the judgment of God while he judged the sin of the Egyptians. This mediator named Moses led them through the waters of death, if you will, into life on the other side.
Peter, writing this, realized after he witnessed the events and the life of Jesus that he had actually witnessed with his own eyes the new exodus happening, even though he didn’t realize it at the time. Listen to what he wrote earlier in his letter. He says Christians were “ransomed with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” Like the Israelites, we experienced blood that covered our wrath, and it was the blood of this human who was also God. Jesus Christ shed his blood for us!
Then later on, Peter writes, “He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” that Jesus coming out of his tomb was like Moses leading all of the people through the Red Sea and coming out of death safely on the other side. There was this good news that in Christ we have freedom from the ultimate slavemaster of all, which is our sin.
But secondly, we’re born again through God’s word in another sense; not just the word of the gospel, not just the actual message, but God’s word of decree. And Peter doesn’t go into detail here in this passage, but if we look at the broader New Testament context, it’s all over the place. For regeneration to happen, there must be a word behind the word, so to speak, God’s word of decree. When the word of the gospel says “Believe,” God’s word says, “Let there be light” for that individual.
In 2 Corinthians 4:6 Paul writes, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
In Acts 14, Luke tells us about Lydia, a woman who was listening to Paul preach—so she was hearing the word of the gospel—but listen to what God did. “The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.” And in 1 Thessalonians 1:4-5, Paul wrote, “For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.”
When someone is born again, that means that general outward call of the gospel, where the preacher says “Believe,” was accompanied by God by an effectual inward call. Now, there’s mystery here. I know people ask, “How does that work with people’s free will and whatnot?” But at some point, we do have to admit there is mystery here, and as Jesus said in John 3, “the wind blows wherever it wishes, and so it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” This is a miracle produced by God himself.
And it is characterized by faith. In verse 22, Peter wrote, “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth…” So he’s saying, “If you’re a Christian, you’ve purified your soul by obedience to the truth.” Obedience to the truth—that’s kind of a strange phrase, and it means—and John Piper puts it well, I think—he says, “To obey the truth means to do what it says.” The truth says Christ is offering forgiveness of sin, he has been resurrected and exalted by God; by faith in him you can be joined to him and have all the benefits and have a reconciled relationship with God. That is done by faith.
When we do what the gospel says, our souls are purified. We are justified. Christ’s righteousness becomes ours, and we begin the process of sanctification and working out that righteousness in our actual behavior throughout our life. Those who are born again believe. The new birth is characterized by faith.
Note that Peter says, earlier in chapter 1, both that we’re born again through Christ’s resurrection and, in this text, that we’re born again through the word of God. Christ’s work is the grounds—it was his death, burial, resurrection that accomplished what was needed for the new birth, but that doesn’t become active for anyone until God enables faith in their heart, and it’s faith that is the instrument that applies that work to them.
So, in our response to this, application, we need to recognize the miracle of the new birth, firstly by obeying the truth and doing what it says, by recognizing that we all are born into spiritual death; that we are helpless, that no self-help book, no moralistic religion is going to get us out of this. We need God’s grace.
Secondly, don’t underestimate who the word can change. Remember, as Jesus said, “the wind blows wherever it wishes,” and it can be so discouraging year after year, decade after decade, praying for someone, sharing the word with them, and seeing no change, no movement at all. But listen, you never know when God will activate that word that’s been planted. It happened to a man hanging next to Jesus, moments away from death on a cross, a criminal undergoing capital punishment. It happened to the apostle Paul as he was on his way to Damascus to arrest Christians. It happened to Lydia by a river when she was hearing Paul preach. It happened to St. Augustine when he was walking in a garden. It happened to C.S. Lewis when he was riding in the sidecar of a motorcycle on the way to the zoo. Don’t underestimate what God can do, and don’t give up praying for others.
Thirdly, place your hope in what will last. This is an imperishable seed that the Christian has been implanted with. You have hope! There can be so much sorrow throughout life, especially the older we get, just seeing change and experiencing loss after loss. But listen, there is something imperishable that will last, that won’t fade, that won’t break, and it’s that seed we’ve been born of, so take hope in that as a Christian.
2. The Word Sustains Life
But the word not only creates life, we find out it also sustains life. Look at 1 Peter 2:2-3.
“Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
So the word makes us grow up, and that’s why we should long for it. Peter says this word is like pure spiritual milk. It’s like an infant—that infant needs good milk, nourishing milk. It needs it right off the bat; and we Christians, we’re like that infant. We are in desperate need of this nourishment. Why? Because it’s the word that makes us grow.
The new birth in ways is parallel to our natural birth. At the moment of conception, the genetic code is decided. The DNA is there for how that child is going to look when they’re twenty, when they’re thirty, when they’re forty. It’s right there; it’s implanted. And in our new birth as believers, we are encoded with the image of Christ, so to speak. That’s where our growth is headed. That’s the likeness we’re going to have eventually as a perfect conformity to the righteousness of Christ, though refracted through our own individual personalities.
But listen, you don’t grow if you don’t eat, in the biological world and in the spiritual world. That’s why we need the word. It is one of the primary means God has appointed for us to grow spiritually.
Well, how does this work? Well, it’s because the word not only makes us grow up, it makes us perk up. Okay, what do I mean by that? Peter references Psalm 34 in 1 Peter 2:3 when he says, “If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” He’s referencing the truth we find throughout both the Old and the New Testaments, that along with a new life, a believer is actually given new senses, an ability to taste that the Lord is good.
St. Augustine was a very great theologian in the history of the church. Before he was a Christian, he was really deep into philosophy, and he was already on his way to becoming quite a brilliant philosopher, and he actually looked at the Bible. He read it, and he was repelled by it, and he’s like, “Are you kidding me? This text is so barbaric and simple and silly and ridiculous.” He had no taste for it; spit it out of his mouth; didn’t want it.
But after he was born again, listen to how he describes his spiritual life. Note especially the sensory imagery.
“You called, shouted, broke through my deafness. You flared, blazed, banished my blindness. You lavished your fragrance. I gasped, and now I pant for you. I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
He discovered this truth that there is a fundamental difference between someone who is a Christian and someone who is not, and that is that the one who is a Christian is unable to taste the goodness of God in his word. They’re giving a sense of taste they did not have before.
One of my favorite illustrations of this is in C.S. Lewis’s last Chronicles of Narnia book, The Last Battle. There’s this big tumult, and Aslan, of course, represents the Christ figure in the story. And in the midst of this battle, these dwarves who are the enemies of Aslan—they don’t like him, they don’t believe in him—get sucked into the borderlands of Aslan’s country, which in the book stands for heaven. And listen to this passage.
“Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly, a glorious feast appeared on the dwarves’ knees, and each dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand, but it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sorts of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay, and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip, and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. ‘You see,’ said Aslan, ‘they will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison, and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.’”
We’ve been given the ability to taste God’s word as believers, and that is a privilege we should not squander.
You know, John Owen, a theologian looking at Colossians 1:12, which says, “...giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in life,” talked about how this qualification is this giving of this new nature, that it’s an ability to actually experience God, and that without it, we’re like a fish cast upon the shore. The nature of the fish is not made fit to live on the shore; its nature is for the ocean. But as believers, our nature is changed so we can actually live in God’s country and enjoy what’s there, and this truth helps us to avoid low thoughts about eternal destiny.
You know, sometimes we Christians, we can have a very shallow way of thinking about eternal judgment and heaven and hell and who’s let in, almost like coming to faith is like saying a magic passcode, and there’s a bouncer at the door. He’s saying, “You didn’t say the magic passcode before you died, so you can’t be in here. You know, you have to go to the other place.”
But what that view ignores is that the very nature of the unbeliever is literally incapable of enjoying heaven and enjoying God’s presence. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus said that when the angels carried Lazarus to Abraham’s bosom and the rich man found himself in Hades, all the angels were doing was putting natures where they belonged.
That’s the glory of the Christian life, that we are actually given a nature that is fit for glory, and we have this ability to taste things in Scripture that unbelievers can’t. Even if they’re Ph.D.s in Greek and Hebrew, and even if they have theological degrees and know all these ins and outs that you don’t know, there is one thing they will never know unless they become a believer, and that is the glory and the goodness of God, the actual taste of it in his word.
This is also one of the means God uses to preserve a believer’s faith to the end. Listen to what John Owen writes. He says,
“We have this, then, by the Spirit: he teaches us of the love of God in Christ. He makes every gospel truth as wine, well refined to our souls, and the good things of it to be a feast of fat things; gives us joy and gladness of heart with all that we know of God, which is the great preservative of the soul to keep it close to truth. Indeed, to know any truth in the power, sweetness, joy, and gladness of it is that great security of the soul’s constancy and the preservation and retaining of it. They will readily change truth for error who find no more sweetness in one than in the other.”
As humans made in God’s image, our souls crave delight, and if we don’t find it in God, we will go elsewhere, and God in his mercy enables us to taste the sweetness and the goodness of truth so that we don’t. But he does that in his word, which is why it’s so important to stay in his word.
This brings us to our application. We are to cultivate a craving for the word. How? Well, first, fight back against the war on your attention span by honoring the mode of God’s revelation, which is reading a written text. There was a survey done that says fewer than half of all adults read a book in 2022, only 38 percent read a novel or short story, and reading for pleasure fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.
Now listen, I know not everyone is going to love reading as much as everyone else; there are some people who are just more bookish than others. But this is a concerning trend, because God has given us his revelation in word, and if reading a text—sitting down and reading through something—is a laborious activity that you dread, when you come to your Bible reading, you’re going to struggle. You’re going to struggle in what God has for you.
I would recommend something John Piper once issued as a challenge, a fifteen-minute challenge. Five days a week for fifteen minutes, set a timer on your phone where all you’re doing is reading. This is aside from your Bible reading, okay? This is in addition to that. The purpose of this is to just get you enjoying the act of reading itself. And with the advent of technology and social media and short videos and just little short paragraphs under photos, it’s hindered our ability to read well.
So I encourage you to do that, to rediscover the delight of reading and to exercise your mind, get it back into gear. When you start a new exercise, it’s often difficult, but if you stick with it and persevere, it actually can become enjoyable.
Secondly, pray for a Psalm 119 appetite. Listen, God already knows if you’re not enjoying his word very much. He already knows if it’s a chore for you, if it’s a drudgery. So tell him in prayer and ask for him to change it. Read through Psalm 119 and look at the passages where whoever wrote Psalm 119 really liked the word of God. He talked about how the taste of it was sweet and how he actually wanted it more than gold, more than riches. He actually said, “Give me the word of God more than money.” If you don’t feel that way, just tell God and ask him for help to get you there. Pray over Psalm 119.
Third, look over the shoulder of others. What do I mean by that? Well, for over two thousand years Christians have been writing down the glory they’ve been seeing in Scripture. Guess what? A lot of it’s been translated into English, and we have these books available for us. By reading books of other believers who have lived throughout the history of the church, and also believers writing today, we can look over their shoulders and they will actually point out what they’re seeing in Scripture. It can encourage us so that when we next read that Scripture, we can remember, “Oh yeah, I remember that guy said that really amazing thing about that text I never noticed before, but now I remember it when I’m reading Scripture.” So look over the shoulder of others.
Also give your eyes time to adjust. What do I mean by that? John Owen had an illustration where he said the Bible is kind of like the night sky, and God in his mercy didn’t just concentrate the glory of Christ into one short text, because it would have burned our retinas out. We wouldn’t have been able to handle it. So what he did is he took the glory of Christ and he spread it like stars in the night sky from Genesis to Revelation.
But here’s the thing with looking at the stars. When you go out to look at the stars, scientists say it takes about thirty minutes for your eyes to fully adjust to see everything that’s there. So often with our Scripture reading, we don’t do that. We rush. We might treat it like eating our vegetables, like it’s something healthy and you’re supposed to do, but, “Okay, get it off, check it off the list, done for the day, don’t think about it for the rest of the day.” But we need to read looking for the glory, looking for the glory of Christ there, and work meditation into our Scripture reading, where we’re not just reading a text and running through the rest of the day but finding a way to retrieve what we read at later points in the day. So give your eyes time to adjust when reading Scripture.
3. The Word Animates Life
Lastly, Peter also tells us that the word animates life. It not only creates life and sustains it, but animates it. It animates us to love earnestly.
This is actually the application that Peter himself makes in this passage. This is the main takeaway he’s driving for his readers to get from it. He writes in 1 Peter 1:22-23, “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.”
The Greek word that’s translated “earnestly” there means “with every muscle strained.” Remember, we learn in Scripture that the entire law—all the commands in the Old Testament—the whole moral law can be summed up as loving God and loving others. That’s the essence of the action of the Christian life; it’s loving God and loving others.
Love is the way that this new life walks and talks. It’s the way it moves. The more we taste God’s goodness in his word, the more we’re nourishing this new life in us through the word, the more love will work out in our actual actions.
You know, it’s kind of like if you’ve ever been in a room or been around someone who’s wearing headphones or earbuds and listening to music, and you’re not hearing any music and you’re just standing or sitting, but they’re going like this [moving to music]. You know, they’re moving! Why are they moving? Well, their senses are picking up a rhythm that your senses aren’t picking up, and it’s causing them to act differently, it’s causing them to move differently.
Or it’s like when you’re in a conversation with someone and you’re talking to them, and all of a sudden they look over your shoulder and smile and wave. Now, you’re deducing that what’s going on is over your shoulder they’re seeing someone they know, and they’re saying hi to them. But your eyes aren’t picking it up. Your senses aren’t experiencing what their senses are, so you’re not acting the same way they are.
That’s what the Christian life is like. As believers, the more we taste God’s goodness in his word, the more we act in a way that’s out of rhythm with the rest of the world and causes them to take notice. God can use that to draw them to himself.
So we’re not only animated to love earnestly, we’re also animated to fight sin. That’s how the taste of the goodness of God applies to our temptations. Look at 1 Peter 2:1. He says, “So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.” Put these things away.
Tasting God’s goodness in his word helps keep us from actual, specific sins. For a fuller treatment of this, I’d recommend John Piper’s book Battling Unbelief. He’s particularly skilled at drawing those types of application from Scripture. But here are some brief examples of how we might approach it.
He says, “Put away malice.” Malice; what’s that? The desire to harm others: “Man, I want to hurt that person. They’re so out of line. They hurt me so bad,” or, “They are so bad to others, I just want to hurt them.” Malice.
How do we fight it? Well, it’s by tasting the goodness of God’s forgiveness. We read in Ephesians 4:32 that we are to forgive others in the same measure God forgave us. That’s a big measure.
What about deceit and lying? In Ephesians 4:25 we read we are to “put away falsehood, since God made us members of one another.” God designed this unity for the body of Christ, so we shouldn’t lie to other believers. We shouldn’t do that; it’s out of line.
What about hypocrisy, this hiding who we really are, being two-faced, our outside not matching what’s really going on in our hearts? But if we read Matthew 23:27-28, we taste that there is a beauty of symmetry when the inside matches the outside. That’s what God desires. So we’re enabled to fight hypocrisy.
What about envy, that feeling that comes up when we’re unhappy that others have what we don’t? They have what we want, we don’t have it, so we’re disgruntled with them. But we read Hebrews 13:5; we taste the goodness of God. The fact that we’re to “keep [our lives] free from love of money and be content with what [we] have.” Why? Since “God will never leave [us] nor forsake [us].” We actually taste, when we read that verse, “God’s never going to leave me or forsake me! Everything else that I don’t have, in comparison to that is actually pretty small. God’s never going to leave me or forsake me! Therefore I don’t have to crave money, I don’t have to crave possessions, I don’t have to envy other people who have possessions and status that I don’t have.”
What about slander, hurting others by talking badly about them behind their backs? Well, if we read James 3:9-10, we taste the goodness of God in his creating every human being in his image, a shining statue to his glory. Yes, even though that statue’s been defaced by sin, nevertheless, that person is still an image-bearer of God; therefore, they are worthy of dignity, and we shouldn’t spray graffiti on that statue by talking bad about them behind their back.
So, in our final application, we are to exercise our senses to lean into love as believers, as Peter is saying here. This new life, if you feed it right and if you let it express itself right, it’s going to blossom in love, so lean into that. That’s God’s design for you: lean into love.
Lastly, look to the source. Look to the source. Earlier I referenced Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in John 3. Later on in that conversation, Jesus refers to a short account in the book of Numbers. This is where treating the Scripture like the night sky comes in, because it doesn’t take up a huge amount of space in the book of Numbers. It’s not even a whole chapter; it’s just a section of a chapter. It’s a little strange.
It’s this account of how the Israelites have sinned, and God sends snakes on them for judgment. The snakes are biting them and some of the people are starting to die, and God says, “This is what you need to do, Moses. You need to make a bronze snake that looks like the snake that’s biting the people and lift it up on a pole. Lift it up high enough so that they can see it. Anyone who sees it, all they have to do is look at it, and they’ll be healed, and they won’t die from the snakebites.”
Then Jesus says these words to Nicodemus in John 3:14-15: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Throughout the Christian life, we’re to have an ever-clearer sight and an ever-deeper understanding of what the Son of Man lifted up means. We see him in the form of our sin, judged and chastised, bearing the punishment of our sin against us (like the snake was the symbol of judgment on the pole—the sight of that lifted up) and knowing that in him, because he is bearing our sin, we have forgiveness, and we see the glory in it.
If you’re not a believer—if you’ve never done it—may today be the first time that you look with eyes of faith on the Son of Man lifted up, and may you join the happy ranks of those who have been stirred to life by the music of his voice.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, I pray that would indeed happen, Lord; that anyone who is listening to these words now who has never experienced the new birth, has never been remade from the inside out, has never placed saving faith in Christ, that they would do so today; that you would do that miraculous work in their hearts, Lord. Lord, I also pray for all the believers hearing this message, that you would encourage them with the reality of this miracle that has happened to them, this imperishable seed that they have been born of; that they would have a craving for your word, that they would take the next step in their Bible reading, whatever that is; that they would go deeper into your word. I pray that you would give us all a higher value for what we have in Scripture and how you can use it to preserve us, Lord, and we can use it to express your love to you and others in this world.
Father, we pray for the rest of the service this morning, that our praises would be pleasing to you, that we would sing with true hearts, that our hearts would be not far from you as we worship you, as Isaiah said, but that we would be close to you as we sing. We ask all this in the name of Jesus, amen.
Andy Lindgren
