Marks of a Holy Life

Amen.

Well, good morning, Sacred Mission Church.

Hey, thank you so much for being patient with us as we were trying to figure out some things.

There's demons in technology.

We know that for sure this morning.

But uh nonetheless, uh, we're up and running.

We're thankful to be with you and you worshiping with us.

We're continuing in our sermon series, Hold Fast of Faith.

We're looking through the book of 1 Peter.

And so if you've got a Bible or an app, go ahead and open up to 1 Peter.

We're going to be inside of chapter 1, still closing out chapter 1 this morning.

If you don't know where 1 Peter is and you're following along with us, it's near the end of the Bible.

And so if you thumb through toward the back of the book, there you'll find the book of 1 Peter.

And I guess that we're going to be in chapter 1.

And what we've been looking at throughout this sermon series is as far as in this first chapter, we've been seeing how Peter's been laying the groundwork for our new relationship that we have with God.

If we've been born again, if we've been brought into his family by the power of God, then we have a new relationship with him.

And Peter's really exhausted his efforts to try and communicate that well in this opening chapter.

What he does now is he still drives that home, but he expounds it so much more to be able to understand that not only do we have a new relationship with God as our Father, but we have a new relationship with one another.

And when we are operating in that reality, when we are realizing the truth of our right relationship with God, it will demand a right relationship with one another.

So let's dive into the text and start unpacking this for our series this morning.

So 1 Peter chapter 1, we're going to be looking at verses 17 through 25.

1 Peter 1 · chapter mention

And it says this, and if you call on him as Father, who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the feudal ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you, who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.

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 flowers 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 the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

May God bless the reading and the proclamation of his promises for us this morning.

So if we're going to try to really start looking at this, and Peter is still really not making a transition.

He's continuing a singular thought throughout this whole process.

And we're trying to kind of dissect this 17 through 25 to understand it better.

What I would do is I would actually look at 17-19, 17 through 19 as one kind of segment of this passage.

And the way that I would summarize verses 17 through 19 is that we've been bought by costly grace to live differently.

So we've been bought by costly grace to live differently.

The first thing we have to deal with in this passage is this sense of fear that Peter calls us to, to live in accordance with our relationship to God.

And so he really calls us right out the gate to fear God in the midst of our exile.

So if we back up a little bit, we are realizing that our exile is created through our new birth.

So we become strangers and aliens, foreigners to the place of where we live.

What we used to call home is no longer our home.

Our home is in heaven with our Father.

And so as we're living on this earth, we should conduct ourselves as exiles.

And Peter says that in this new relationship that you have with God as your father, an aspect of that relationship is that we should actually fear him in that relationship.

Now, we need to not try and dismiss this, right?

That's a tendency that we have, or we're going to try and diminish what's actually being said here.

Because in this life, when we try to understand our relationship with God, and we try to understand that relationship through the lens of which we understand love, fear, oftentimes through our rationale, has no place in that equation.

Well, if God is perfect love and we have a relationship with Him now through His perfect love, then why should there be any fear?

You don't fear love.

Well, the reality is God, as we've kind of looked throughout this sermon series, is bigger than just the aspect of his character, which is love.

And what Peter drives home is that it's his holiness that actually establishes every other aspect of his character, whether it be his peace, his love, his wrath, his vengeance, his kindness, his mercy, all of those things are under subject to his holiness.

And so in our relationship with God, Peter calls us to fear him in the time of our exile.

In this life, we should live in fear of our Heavenly Father, who is our judge.

And that's the qualifier that Peter actually puts in there as he's trying to help us understand our new relationship that we have with our Father.

You see, he is holy.

And we talked a couple weeks ago about that holiness establishes his supreme authority in all things because he is totally other in everything that's been created is now subject to the reality of the authority of which he holds in his holy state.

And so he is our judge, seated in that place of authority.

So this fear is both a fear of reverence for that holiness and a fear of being inflicted by his discipline.

That's what Peter is very clearly saying.

And one thing, again, I don't want us to do is to dismiss this or to diminish it as what he's trying to communicate.

Because he's communicating an active, current discipline that we would experience as exiles because God the Father is our judge.

We have a new relationship with God as our Father that is both joy-filled and fearful.

Our being born again into his family has enabled us to see the depths of his grace toward us and should cause within us a desire not to offend him in our sin.

You see, as we are his children, and as we are experiencing this new relationship with him, then inside of us the transformation and change that should be taking place is that we don't desire to offend our Father in His holiness through our sin.

And so Peter actually talks about going back to the former ways we once lived, not doing that anymore in our ignorance, but now that our eyes have been opened to the depths of his grace and mercy toward us, we should strive to be holy as he is holy.

And so, as good children, obedient children, we should desire not to offend our Father in His holiness by our sin.

We need to wrestle with our understanding of our relationship with God until we're able to see both a lavish love for him and a holy fear of him as inseparable companions.

You see, the way that we love God, the way that we should also fear him, should be inseparable companions to one another.

Our relationship with God still dictates the reality that he is our judge.

Yet, if we do offend God in our sin, we can have assurance of his love for us when we experience the discipline of his judgment.

Right?

And so now we're new relationship with God.

We don't experience his wrath, and we don't experience the wrath that leads to eternal condemnation, damnation, and torment.

See, that's not what we fear.

We fear his discipline, and that's the difference there, because those who are not his children experience his wrath.

Those who are his children experience his discipline.

If we look at Hebrews chapter 12, verses 7 through 8, it says this.

Hebrews 12:7–8

The author of Hebrews says that it is for discipline that you have to endure.

It is for discipline you have to endure.

God is treating you as sons.

For what son is there?

Whom his father does not discipline.

If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.

And so the author of Hebrews, what he's laying out in that passage there is that if we don't experience the discipline of God, then we should actually be fearful that we are not truly his children.

Because a good and loving father always disciplines his children.

And so in this relationship, as we experience the lavish love of God, his mercy, his grace, we also have to realize that there will be an inseparable companion of fear of offending him.

Fear of procuring that discipline here and now.

So when we have comfort if we do experience it, if our sin does cause him to inflict within us discipline, then we can have joy and comfort that we are being treated and counted as sons of the Father.

So after working to fully develop our understanding of our new relationship with God, our Father, Peter juxtaposes our former lives to our new by pointing to our earthly fathers.

And so he says there in that top section in verses 18, knowing that you were ransomed from the feudal ways that you inherited from your forefathers or your earthly fathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold.

So he calls God our Father, and then he juxtaposes the relationship that we have with him to the former one that we had with our earthly fathers.

And so we're now children of God our father, no longer children of our earthly fathers, and our lives actually should reflect a reality.

We talked about this last week, where we have to try to understand the person of God.

We have to understand his values, we have to understand the ways in which he works and moves and has his being.

We have to understand what he calls sin, what he calls truth.

All of those things our lives have to begin matching up with.

And when they don't, what we're doing is we're going back to the ways of our forefathers, our earthly fathers.

And this is something that we have to wrestle with.

And I want to take a second and talk about fathers.

So if you are watching with us and you're engaging this morning and you're a father, what we have to see is what Peter does is he talks about these new people, these exiles who have been born again.

Don't go back to what you inherited from your earthly father.

But point four, move onward to your heavenly father.

You see, fathers, how we live our lives will have exponential impact on the way that our children will be able to relate as God, their father.

Everything that we do and the way that we raise our children.

And is there grace for this?

Is there mercy for this?

Absolutely.

None of us here are ever going to be a perfect father.

We're going to sin against our children.

We're going to not be there when they need us.

We're going to disappoint them in their expectations.

All of those things are true.

But that doesn't negate that we shouldn't strive to be godly examples, pointing them not to ourselves, but to their true heavenly Father, God.

And so the way that we engage with our children, the way that we work to disciple them in the home, the way that we pray with them, the way that we read the Bible with them, the way that we confess our sin with them, and that we're honest about the ways that we fall short, the ways in which we point them to the truth of the gospel, all of that is going to impact the way that our children are able to relate to God as they grow up.

And so, as fathers, we need to work hard.

If we're going to labor, if we're going to toil, if we're going to get our hands dirty in anything, it needs to be in the way that we shepherd and care for our families.

We are called to be shepherd leaders in our home.

And here is an example where Peter is able to call out that there's this difference between what they experienced from their earthly fathers to the way that they related to their heavenly father in this new life that they have.

And imagine the stuff that they had to come out of.

They had to come out of pagan worship, idolatry, all kinds of different ethical values that were not lined up with what God said.

They had to come out of a mess of a life to be able to now relate to God in the way that He had always created them for.

But that doesn't dismiss, just because this is written so long ago, it doesn't dismiss the reality that us as fathers are under that same thing.

And the way that we love our children, the way that we raise them, it will have tremendous impact as they grow older and their ability to relate to God as their father.

So our job needs to be pushing them to Him, needs to be pushing them to the gospel, needs to be reading the scriptures with them, praying with them, discipling them, helping them understand grace, understand mercy, understand God and the way that He calls us to understand Him so that when they grow older, their ability to relate to Him is stronger, is more healthy.

But yes, it will need the gospel, yes, it will need the power of the Holy Spirit, and God is faithful to those ends.

So we shouldn't worry, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't work either.

So when we go back to the text, Peter establishes that the catalyst for why we should abandon our former lives and press on to holiness is not the fact of the new relationship that God has established by us or by his power for us, but at what great cost he suffered to bring us into that relationship.

And so when Peter's saying, here's why, here's why you should live differently, the catalyst for that is not necessarily the fact that God through his power has caused you to be born again and brought into a new relationship with him.

The catalyst for that is the great price at which it cost him to be able to bring us into that.

And so Peter sets forth Jesus and he says, look, you weren't bought with gold or silver.

You were bought with the imperishable blood of Jesus Christ.

That was the cost of heaven to bring us into that relationship.

For us to be in relationship with God as Father, it cost him his very Son.

Listen, when we try to understand grace, it's really hard for us to because we seem to be so disconnected from the cost that it actually had on God our Father to be able to bring us into that relationship, to be able to extend grace to us in our lives.

And this is what we often do.

We often see grace as sweeping something under the rug.

We often see grace as dismissing part of our sin and part of our former lives.

Grace is not sweeping something under the rug from our former lives.

Grace is drenching those former lives in blood.

And that's the difference.

That's the great cost of what it was to bring us into heaven, to bring us into right relationship with God.

Grace is not sweeping our former lives under the rug.

Grace is drenching our former lives in his blood.

The costly grace should awaken in us a desire to live the life the Father had planned for us to when he set forth the cost to purchase it for us.

So as we see the great cost of heaven, as we're able to see the sacrifice of Christ the Son, what it should cause in us is to not cheapen that grace.

It should cause in us a deep desire to live the life that God had always intended us to live.

Because that's that process of sanctification, that's that process and initiation of new birth, is that he's actually working to restore and redeem in us the life that he had always planned for us to live.

To live in communion and fellowship with him, to walk upright before him, to live in the holiness that he is and embodies.

That's what he had caused us to do.

That's what he created us.

And so this process of making us be born again is to have us to live in that.

When we see the cost of heaven, to be able to actually accomplish that for us, it should cause within us a desire to walk righteously before the Lord, to cast off our former lives and press on to the holiness of which He's called us to.

When we're thinking about that grace, and we're thinking about that costly grace, like I said before, oftentimes we have this innate propensity to cheapen it.

We cheapen it by the way that we live our lives, we cheapen it by sin that continues within us.

And I love this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

As he is working to explain this costly grace, as he's working to explain the ways in which he can, uh Jesus has set forth his very life to redeem us.

He says this above all, it is costly because it costs God the life of his son.

Ye were bought at a price.

And what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.

Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us.

So when we look at this costly grace, what we see is that it demanded the cross.

It demanded the cross to be able to reconcile us with God.

And if Jesus, God's only Son, was not too much to pay for us, then we should not work to cheapen the grace that's extended to us in our lives.

You see, the cross of Jesus, it's a necessity for us to run back to again and again.

We never, as Christians, move away from the gospel.

Too often we treat the gospel as some type of starting line in our lives.

And we don't run back to it.

That the gospel should be something that we preach to ourselves every day.

It should be something that we run back to again and again.

Not because we run out of its supply of grace, but because we are prone to forget its cost and be enticed to cheapen it with our ongoing sin.

So why do we run back to the cross?

Why do we run back to the gospel?

Not because we have drain-dried, uh, drain-dried the grace given to us, not because we need to get more grace for the sin that we have in our life.

No, we don't run back to the gospel because of that.

We run back to the gospel because we are prone to cheapen that grace.

And we need to open our eyes and hearts continually to the cost of which it was spent to redeem us.

So if we move on, verses 20 through 21, we see that Peter starts talking about he was foreknown.

He was foreknown, speaking of Jesus.

And so if I was to summarize verses 20 through 21, I'd say this: that this new life was always God's plan for us.

This new life was always God's plan for us.

Jesus' life, death, burial, and resurrection was always the plan of God.

Before there was creation or even the sin to mar that creation, God had determined to redeem it all through Jesus.

Our being placed in God's family as his children was determined before the foundations were set, and so was the holy lives that we would live.

So before the foundation was even set, God had set forth a plan to redeem and rescue us.

Jesus was always the plan.

Jesus is plan A, because before the foundations of the world, he was foreknown, he was chosen, he was purposed, he was elected to do this work of purchasing us.

And so us to be in the family, us to be brought into that family through the finished work, and us to live holy lives was always a part of the plan of God.

I love this passage in Ezekiel.

Ezekiel 36, 26 through 27.

It starts to prophesy about this new birth, this new testament life that we would be living as Christians today, of how God would accomplish that and what he would accomplish through it.

And so Ezekiel 36, 26 through 27 says, 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 give you a heart of flesh.

And I will put my spirit within you, and this is the part here, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

And so God's laying out through the prophet Ezekiel how he's going to accomplish this rebirth, this family of which he is bringing to himself.

How is he going to do that?

He's going to take out that old heart of stone, and he's going to put in you a heart of flesh, and he's going to put his spirit within you.

And he's going to cause you to come alive, and he's going to cause you to walk in his ways.

You see, this is all the power of God.

And I love that part on the back half.

He says, and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

Even the good life that Peter's calling us to live was established before the foundations of the world, and it is being made known to us and revealed to us in and through the power of God.

It is the power of God that causes us to be born again, and it is that same power which also enables us to live holy lives.

All of this, all of this is accomplished through Jesus' sacrifice for us.

And so, church, our hope is in God alone.

Because it is God alone who has accomplished this for us.

Our hope is in God alone because it's God alone who has accomplished this for us.

You see, a lot of times we are, we fall, we fall in a camp called reform theology.

So at Sacred Mission Church, we are reformed.

And the one thing that we really hang our hat on in being reformed is a God-centered theology.

We really work as hard as we can to establish God at the center of our theology so that we glorify Him greatly and we see ourselves rightly in light of Him.

You see, we have an issue though.

We have an issue in our camp, and there's something that we're prone to do, and what we tend to do is we have this phenomenal God-centered theology, but when it becomes to sin, and it becomes to righteous living, we quickly switch it to a man-centered theology.

And what we do is we don't realize the power of God in our lives.

And we'll use scripture stigmats that are true, but they're not fully true in right relationship with who we are now in God because of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.

So we'll say, we'll quote from the Psalms, that the heart is the most deceitful thing.

The heart is the most deceitful thing and cannot be trusted.

But if you read Ezekiel, he says, that heart, that heart that you can't trust, that heart that is deceitful, I'm going to rip it out of your chest.

And by the power of my hand, I'm going to put within you a new heart.

So guess what, Christian?

If you want to really have a continual or a consistent God-centered theology, then you can't revert back to man-centered theology when understanding the way that you're supposed to live righteously and holy before God.

Because it was the God who caused you to be born again, also gave you a new heart.

And guess what?

That new heart is not the most deceitful thing above all others.

That was the old heart.

Just like the old life.

Guess what?

He gave you a new life.

He's been caused to be born again.

Even in the scriptures, it declares that he's given you a new mind.

So the way that you used to think, you should no longer think because you've been empowered with a new mind.

So you have a new heart, spirit of God within you, mind of Christ within you, all of this by the power and hand of God.

So quit falling back to such a man-stream theology to try and pacify yourself in the ongoing sin that is in your life.

What Peter's calling us to do is be holy because the God we serve, the God who caused us to be born again, has caused us and called us to be holy like him.

And so if we're going to have a consistent God-centered theology, then we have to strive to have every aspect of that theology, even our anthropology, be centered around God and his power and might.

You see, the beauty and mercy of God is that he's given us a new heart.

He's given us a new mind.

He's put his spirit within us.

He's caused us to be born again.

Everything from that former life has been put to death.

It's been trampled under the conquering victory of Jesus.

And we are now more empowered than we've ever been to live holy, to walk rightly and righteously before the Lord.

Now, if we look at the second or the last kind of section of this passage of Scripture, verses 22 through 25, it says, having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth, for sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly with a pure heart.

So if I was to summarize this section of Scripture, 22 through 25, I'd say that this new life is eternal and places us in new relationship with God and one another.

So this new life is eternal and places us in new relationship with God and with one another.

And evidence that holiness is being cultivated in our lives will be a deep and intense love for our brothers and sisters in Christ.

So if we want evidence that we are living in the new life that God has called us to, one of the primary evidences of that will be a deep love for our brothers and sisters in Christ.

The word used here to describe what kind of love that we should have for one another means to be stretched or to be strained.

It's the same kind of word that's used when Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane and he's sweating drops of blood.

He's being strained and stretched in his plea for God.

That same type of language is being used here to describe the love that we should have as believers to our brothers and sisters in Christ.

If it costs Jesus to love us, perhaps our love for one another should cost us as well.

The life we now live with the community of faith is more real, more tangible, and eternally more lasting than any other human relationship.

And our new lives should reflect this truth.

We are not born again into an only child heavenly home.

We are born again into an eternal home with eternal siblings.

So that's what he's really working to summarize in that end passage is that we are brought, we are, we are made new.

We are brought into this family by the imperishable seed, the word of God.

All of that has caused us to be, have these new lives of which we walk in.

And so that imperishable seed has then caused others, our brothers and sisters in Christ, to be born again into this new family.

And so we're born again into an eternal family that was produced by imperishable means that causes our relationship with one another, therefore, to be eternal.

And so the relationship that we have with our children, the relationship that we have with our spouses, with our own parents, it falls eternally short to understand the real relationship that we have with each other as Christians, as those who have been bought with the precious blood of Christ.

And so we need to live lives that reflect that truth, that reflect that reality, that we are in an eternal family with eternal siblings, and we should be stretched and strained in the way of which we love them.

Because that is an evidence that we are pursuing the holiness of which God has called us to.

All of this is rooted in God's word, his promises to his children.

The word of the Lord shall endure forever, and everything it establishes shall endure as well.

We do not have to worry about our future, because our hope is assured in his everlasting word.

So our main idea this morning is this.

This is what Peter has been building to this whole chapter.

All of the theological framework to establish the why culminates in the what of our lives.

Live holy, love the brethren.

Live holy, love the brethren.

To this we live by faith.

Knowing sin will continue, knowing that grace is necessary, but we press on to see this truth and this reality reflected in our lives.

For this purpose, we were born again.

And this is what's beautiful about this, right?

Peter's working so hard to help us understand that so much of this is not about us.

So much of this is not about us.

And doesn't this parallel so greatly when we look at what are the two greatest laws?

When Jesus was tested in his earthly ministry, he was asked, what are the two greatest commands?

And he said, Love God, love your neighbor.

He said, those were the two greatest commands.

And as we walk into this new life, don't we see the parallel that Peter's actually establishing here?

If you've been born again, if you've been brought into this family, then we're finally equipped to fulfill those commands, to love God and love our brother.

That's what we're called and enabled to do finally, because of the work of the Godhead three in one.

The Father's purpose, plan, and election, Christ's purchasing work through his life, death, burial, and resurrection, and the power of the Holy Spirit causing us to be made alive.

What beautiful God-centered theology that now enables us to do what God has always called us to do: to glorify him, to love our brother.

For this purpose, we are born again.

But oftentimes what happens with us is that we live in me-centered life, rooted in a me-centered theology.

See, this is where we drop the ball constantly as Christians.

Constantly as people who try to understand our relationship with God rightly.

We tend to fall into me-centered lives rooted in a me-centered theology.

We need to stop and reflect for a second.

Peter just went to work on showing us the bigness of God's plan.

His power, his grace, his love, his sacrifice, all this to fix our eyes on God alone.

Not to fix our eyes on ourself, not to fix our eyes on our circumstances, but to fix our eyes on God alone.

He's the reason we've been purchased by Christ, caused to be born again and given an inheritance that cannot be destroyed.

And then Peter lays it all out in showing us how it was for living holy lives before God and loving our brother.

Here in chapter 1, we discover that we are the passive beneficiaries of God's work, but the active participants in living out the fullness of it.

So let me say that again.

We are the passive beneficiaries.

We did nothing to receive this grace, to receive this favor, to receive being born again.

We did nothing.

We're the passive beneficiaries in that, but we are the active participants in living out the fullness of its purpose.

To love God, to love our brother.

To live holy and to love our brother.

But see, often what we try to do is we try to live me-centered lives with me-centered theology.

And what we do is we we really focus on ourselves so constantly.

And what is God doing for me?

Is God getting me out of this circumstance?

Is God blessing me?

Is God giving me the desires of my heart?

What is God doing for me?

Look at how much he loves me, that he gave Jesus to purchase me.

Look that I am the apple of his eye.

Look at everything that he wants to do for me.

And you'll hear even preachers, I wouldn't even call them preachers, these puppeteers in the pulpit that really try to work to say, look, God is about you.

Your breakthrough, your promise, your next level of spiritual living.

And if there's toxicity around you, get it out.

If there's haters around you, brush them up.

Do whatever you've got to do to become who you are to become.

But the reality is we will only become the fullness of what we're called to become if we strive to live wholly before God and be stretched and strained in our love for one another.

But me-centered theology does not have any cost to following God, and it has no cost to loving our brother, because everything is supposed to be for my gain and for my benefit.

And that's not what we see here at all.

That to live wholly before God and to love our brother should cost us tremendously.

And that's the active participation and the plan that God has for us in our lives.

But we get so focused on our circumstances.

God, when are you going to get me out of this?

We get so focused on what we have or do not have.

God, when are you going to give me what I've been asking for?

And God constantly, from eternity past to today and now, has been saying, worry about living holy before me and loving your brother.

I will take care of everything else.

Seek first my righteousness and my kingdom, and everything else will be added to you.

That's what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount.

We keep getting it wrong because we keep seeking to live me-centered lives with me-centered theology.

You see, the enabling agent for the children of God to live the way they're supposed to is a theology that is rooted in the grandeur and majesty of God, not in the greatness and bigness of yourself.

You see, it's only when God is the center of our theology will we be able to live selfless lives that seek the glory of the God who works all things and the good of our brother who co-labors with us.

It's only when God's the center of our theology, not when we are.

We talked about this at Easter.

When we look at the scriptures, when we see how much of it is about me, how much of it is about me.

I called out this one name in the book of Numbers.

One name mentioned once in the book of Numbers, a book that most people will never even read because they can't just go through the laundry list of names and so forth.

One little name.

That's about it.

We are part of a bigger family.

We're part of an eternal family.

And we can't be so selfish to think that all of this is just about us.

No, it's about God.

It's about living holy before Him.

And it's about loving our brother.

It's only when we have a God-centered theology will we be able to live selfless lives and seek the glory of the God who works all things and the good of our brother who co-labors with us.

Too often we have a me-centered theology which will only demonstrate itself in a me-centered life.

If we have a me-centered theology, it will only demonstrate itself in a me-centered life.

But the beauty of the gospel is this Jesus ransomed us from the feudal ways of our former lives by his precious blood.

The gospel message is right here in the text that we're studying this morning.

That he ransomed us from our feudal lives by his precious blood.

What great cost it was to have us in this family.

And when we're able to see that, we're able to see the cost of heaven to be able to bring us into this family, then we're going to be able and more equipped to see our right place within it.

You see, we have to strive to see the cost so that we will desire even greater to live holy before God.

We will desire even greater to love our brother.

Because look, it wasn't just the cross that caused us to have a right relationship with God as Father.

But it was also the cross that caused and demanded us to have a right relationship with one another.

You see, this is about a bigger family.

It's about this bigger, uh, eternal group of children that belong to the Father because Jesus purchased them through his precious blood.

And so we shouldn't go back to our former ways.

Selfishness, our former ways of greed, our former ways of living.

We should strive on to new ways of living, the new life that God has called us to.

To live wholly before Him, to love our brother.

So what would this look like if we live this out?

I have three ways and then I'll wrap this up.

First off, personally, we should work to develop and cultivate a God-centered theology.

We should cultivate a God-centered theology.

Good theology will always magnify God and diminish you.

Good theology will always magnify God and diminish you.

We should see God bigger and bigger as we study Him, as we rightly understand Him, as we seek to know Him personally, and then ourselves will become smaller and smaller and smaller.

We will be diminished.

It's really the cry of John the Baptist as he's preparing the way of the Lord.

He says, Lord, let it be that you might increase and that I might decrease.

And that should be our heart's cry.

That God would increase as we work to cultivate a God-centered theology.

And that ourselves, our lives, would decrease.

That we wouldn't be selfish any longer, that we wouldn't be greedy any longer, that we wouldn't worry just about us and what we have, but we'd be able to open our eyes to be able to see God and his glory and the desire to live holy before him and our brothers around us.

That we'd be stretched and strained to love them.

Number two is be stretched and strained in your love for one another.

Be stretched and strained for your love for one another.

It cost Jesus to love us.

It cost Jesus greatly to love us.

It should actually cost us as well.

So if it costs Jesus to love us, perhaps it should cost us to love one another.

So as we're loving one another, as we're, especially in this season and this time, we have to ask ourselves, what lengths am I willing to go to love my brother and love my sister in Christ, who's a part of this eternal family with me?

Am I being stretched and strained?

Is it costing me something to love them?

And as we see brothers and sisters going through hard times, as we see brothers and sisters who are feeling the weight of this circumstance, what ways are we willing to have it cost us to love them well?

And it's not always just in monetary things, it's not always just giving up money or giving and stuff.

Sometimes it's just got to cost us our pride to go to them and encourage them and strengthen them and build them.

Sometimes it just has to cost us our fear of being able to rebuke them in their disbelief and in their doubt.

Sometimes it's just got to cost us this emotional state that we find ourselves in to go and bend down and stoop down to love them where they are.

And so, how are you being stretched and strained now to love your brother?

Lastly, we will work to grow the family.

We will work to grow the family.

Peter ends this section, this chapter, and this is what was preached to you.

So he talks about you who were born again.

You have been brought into the family.

It was by this word.

And this word is the good news that was preached to you.

You see, it was the hearing of the gospel, the preaching of the gospel, that was the agent that God used to bring us in to his family.

And so we should see that the family of God is bigger than just us.

And we should labor with him to make the family bigger.

We should work to grow the family.

This good news that we heard, we should freely and joyfully proclaim to others so that God may expand the numbers of his children for his glory, for our joy.

So let's pray.