Rise Up In Relationships | Rise Up | Pastor Joe Coffey

This is a reading from 1 Peter 3:1

1 Peter 3:1–12

through 12.

Likewise, wives,

be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word,

they may be one without a word by the conduct of their wives,

when they see your respectful, pure conduct.

Do not let your adorning be external.

The braiding of hair and the putting out of gold jewelry or the clothing you wear.

But let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable

beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.

For this is how the holy women who hoped and God

used to adorn themselves by submitting to their own husbands.

As Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord, and you are her children

if you do good, and do not for anything that is frightening.

Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way,

showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs

with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.

Finally, all of you have unity of mind, sympathy,

brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.

Do not repay evil for evil or reviling

for reviling, but on the contrary, bless.

For to this you are called, that you may obtain a blessing

for whoever desires to love life and see good days.

Let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit.

Let him turn away from evil and do good.

Let him seek peace and pursue it.

For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous,

and his ears are open to their prayer.

But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.

Everybody, good

morning and welcome to Christ Community Chapel.

I am really glad you're here.

Thanks for coming.

All right.

This is our sixth week of our ten week series we're calling Rise Up.

We're spending ten weeks in the book of First Peter.

And every week we remind you that first Peter

was written to a group of Christians who are living in a hostile culture.

Culture is to a human being a little bit

like a water is to a fish.

It is so much a part of your environment, it's hard

to recognize the impact it's having on you.

But when you become a Christian, you realize that culture has a current

like a river and it's taking you somewhere.

And sometimes as a Christian, you not only have to recognize

the impact of culture, but also resist where it's taking you.

And that can require courage and intentionality.

The early Christians were able to live in such a way that they actually

changed their culture, and a lot of us would love to change our culture.

Now we just don't know how.

Well, that's why we're spending these ten weeks in first Peter,

last week, pastors that covered the passage

that dealt with the governing authorities.

It's easy to think of culture as being out there.

What happens when the culture you want to change

is really close to you?

What do you do if the people you want to change

are the ones that live in your home, or the ones that you worship with?

That's what this passage is about.

So if you have your Bibles, you can go ahead and turn to First Peter

chapter three.

If you don't have a Bible, don't worry about it.

The verses that I'm going to reference will come up on the screen.

If you want to hold a Bible in your hand and kind of follow along with me,

you can use one of our church Bibles and it's on page 954

and our church Bibles, page 954 are here are the three points we had it read to us.

Let me give you the three points I want to pull out of these 12 verses.

I want to talk about the transforming power of true beauty,

the transforming power of true strength,

and the transforming power of true community.

First, the transforming power of true beauty.

This is what it says. The first four verses.

Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands,

so that even if some do not obey

the word, they may be one without a word by the conduct of their wives.

When they see your respectful and pure conduct,

do not let your adorning be external.

The braiding of hair, the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear.

But let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable

beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit,

which in God's sight is very precious.

I went off

a a woman became a Christian back in the first century.

It could cause a major disruption in the home.

It still can.

So Peter is actually answering the question,

how does a believing wife impact an unbelieving husband?

How does any wife change her husband?

All right, wives, if you are wanting to change your husband,

I'll tell you how to do it.

Make a list of the top ten things you want to change.

Read him that list in the morning, every night.

Go over the list.

Tell him how he's doing.

All right. If you're writing that down, stop.

I just want you to know

some of you are really pumped.

You're just going to.

Finally, something I can use from a sermon, right?

That's not the way you're going to change your husband.

You know, when we think about changing someone,

we usually focus on them, which makes sense.

But when the Bible talks about changing some of that,

the focus is always on us.

You know, I almost made these three points.

Instead of the beauty and strength and community almost made him.

Don't worry about him. Worry about you.

Don't worry about her. Worry about you.

Don't worry about them.

Worry about you.

Because the the Bible is always focused on us

in this passage.

But what Peter does is he

actually gives a wife two things.

Two ways to change her husband one,

he restates the pattern and then he redefines beauty.

First, he restates the pattern.

There's a pattern for changing people

that is older than the Earth itself.

It's weaved into the very fabric of the universe.

And that pattern is surrender.

It is laying aside.

I'll give you a good definition of

of submit or surrender.

It's laying aside your desires

for a higher purpose.

Zach mentioned that last week in his sermon.

If you didn't, if you missed last week's sermon, you should watch it.

It was really, really a great sermon.

But in it, what

what Zach did was he drew attention to how Jesus

actually changed you, how Jesus actually changed me.

And he referenced, in the Garden of Gethsemane.

He hours before Jesus goes to the cross,

he is struggling in prayer.

And this is what it says.

And going a little further.

And he fell on his face and prayed, saying, My father,

if it be possible, let this cup pass through me.

That was his own personal desire.

And then it says,

let this pass for me

nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.

That was the surrender.

And from that that unleashed the power of the gospel,

which is the power to transform human

beings and life on this planet.

No power has ever no greater power has ever been unleashed

on this world than what happened right there.

So, and last week,

the thing that that struck me in Zach's sermon, too, he had

a, he drew a Venn diagram

with two circles that were intersecting

and one circle represented you, and the other circle represented Jesus.

And what he said was the overlap, however big that overlap is between

those two circles is how much you are like Jesus.

Now, what Peter is saying

when he says, wives, be subject to your own husbands.

He is not telling them to be a doormat.

He's not telling him to accept abuse.

What he's telling them is to have the quiet confidence

that when they become more like

Jesus, when they're willing to put aside

their own personal desires for a higher purpose,

they will actually unleash a power,

the power of God in their home.

So, ladies, I will tell you this if you want to change your husband,

the best way to do it is for you to become

a little more like Jesus,

to serve a little bit more

like Jesus for love, a little bit more like Jesus.

That's the first thing that Peter does.

The second thing is he redefines beauty.

He says, don't focus on outward beauty, but he says, focus on inward beauty.

There.

There is a movie that came out in 2001 called shallow how the comedy

with Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow and Jack black.

This is the premise of the movie Jack Black,

played how and how was struggling to find a woman

who would meet his very, very high standards of beauty.

And then he gets stuck in an elevator with Tony Robbins, who's a self-help guru,

and he, Tony Robbins, hypnotizes him, reprograms him to see the beauty

inside of a woman not on the outside and the whole rest of the movie.

Jack black is seeing things that no one else sees.

I think it's fascinating that Hollywood would make that movie

when our culture focuses it.

Maybe particularly Hollywood focuses so much on the external.

And I want you to know when when Peter is saying, don't pay attention to.

He's not saying that you can't do any of those things.

You can't braid your hair, wear jewelry, or try to look good on the outside.

What he's saying is that is that beauty doesn't have the power

that inward beauty has the the beauty that God values.

There's a story in Samuel where Samuel is sent to find the next king of Israel,

and he sent to the home of a man named Jesse, who has eight sons.

And God says to Samuel, one of those sons is going to be the next king.

Now God could have told him which one right then,

but instead he wants to teach Samuel something.

So sure enough, Jesse brings out his firstborn son, who is tall and handsome.

And Samuel says, this has got to be the guy.

What a great king he would make.

And God speaks to Samuel and says, it's not him, Samuel.

You look on the outside,

but I look on the inside.

I look at the heart.

And then David, who was the youngest and least

impressive, is the one that God says he's the one.

So even in the Old Testament when it talks about the coming Messiah,

what Jesus was going to look like physically, it says he was not going to be

an attractive man physically.

But I just started to read a book this morning on the beauty of Jesus.

It was the beauty of Jesus that drew people to him.

So what

Peter is telling wives, there's a way for you

not only to impact your husband and change them, but there's a way for you

to become even more beautiful.

And that, again, is to become a little bit more like Jesus.

So those are the two things that he gives the wife.

Then he moves to the husband.

And this is what he says, the husband.

Verse seven likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way,

showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs

with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.

All right.

If I was a woman right away, I'd be irked by being called the weaker vessel.

I get that, so let me cover that first.

When Peter says weaker

vessel, he's not talking about value.

He's not talking about equality.

What he's talking about is physical strength.

But even more than that social vulnerability,

it was much more dangerous in the first century

to be a woman than it was to be a man.

And what Peter is telling a husband is, you need to take all of your advantage

and make sure you use it on behalf of your wife.

It just like he gives the wife two things.

He gives the husband two things.

He is the way to live with his wife,

and then the way to see his wife first, the way to live.

He says, live with your wife in an understanding way.

In order to understand your wife, you have to know her story.

You have to know her strengths.

You have to know her pressures.

You have to know her pain.

Years ago, I don't know

what precipitated this conversation,

but my wife Karen and I were talking and she ended up saying to me,

Joe, you really don't know

what my life is like.

You don't know what I do day to day.

What she was saying is, you don't understand me.

And I remember feeling really defensive and I was about to respond.

But those kind of conversations to me are a little bit like playing chess.

And I have to anticipate the next move.

So if I said to her, that's crazy, of course I understand you,

I know what you do.

And then her move would have been, well, then what did I do yesterday?

At which point I would go, yeah.

So I just knocked over my king apologized,

and I said, let's go to lunch on Tuesday

and I had lunch on Tuesday, had a yellow pad.

And I said, I want to know what you do on Monday.

I don't know what you do on Tuesday.

And I went through every day.

And now for years now, before I leave for work, I ask her,

what do you have going on today?

And then I try to remember when I come home to say, how did that go?

Well, I'm trying to do is live with her in an understanding way.

Men, can I can I ask if the two of us just sat down

with no one else?

And I said, tell me about your wife.

Tell me her five greatest strengths.

Tell me what keeps her up at night.

Some of the pain she is carrying today.

Could you tell me?

So, according to Peter,

if you're a Christian and you're married

as a husband, ignorance is not neutral.

It's neglect.

That's the first thing.

The second thing he gives them, he gives husbands, is how to see your wife.

He says they are fellow heirs with you of the grace of life.

When he says that, he's not just saying that they are co-equal heirs

with you and are equal to you in every way.

He is also reminding the husbands that your wife is a daughter

of the King of the universe.

I have two daughters.

I love them fiercely, and I always have.

Now they're both married,

so I watch how their husbands treat them

right.

Both those guys come to this church, so I'm watching.

The reason is because I care,

right?

You know,

at the end of that passage, it says so that your prayers will not be hindered.

Listen, men, you mistreat a daughter of the king of the universe.

Heaven will go silent.

So, Peter say, all right, so Peter starts out by saying, listen,

if if the culture you want to change is the one that you lives

right in your home, this is the way you do it.

You got to work on.

You become more like Jesus.

Jesus is always easier.

It's more powerful to experience Jesus than to just hear about him.

And that's particularly true in your home.

Then he jumps to the community at large, to the whole church, and he says this.

Finally, all of you have unity of mind,

sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.

Do you not repay evil for evil or reviling

for reviling, but on the contrary, bless?

For to this you are called, that you may obtain a blessing.

You know when when you read that you don't have to think very hard

to realize that inside the walls of the church was not a picnic.

When he says, don't repay evil for evil,

he's talking about inside of here.

And the reason is because

churches are full of half

baked followers of Jesus, right?

You're half baked the people around you.

And that means we're all these consent, these these circles, this Venn diagram.

Some of us have a tiny sliver where we're like, Jesus,

some of us have a little bit more that we are like Jesus,

but it makes sense that there's going to be conflict inside of here.

But one of the things that made the Christian community so much different

than the culture out there is when people came in, they realized something.

They do things differently.

One of them,

one of the negative things about having a lot of churches, a lot of good churches

in the same area, is that it's easy to just get upset with

somebody and just leave and go to another church.

And, and I get that there are good reasons to leave a church,

but sometimes you can short circuit what God wants to do, and you

because remember it, my points were almost

don't worry about them, worry about you.

God can use anything and everything

that is happening to you to make you more like Jesus.

That is so

hard to actually wrap our heads around and embrace.

But it's true.

God can use anything and everything that's happening in

you right now to make you more like Jesus.

Peter then goes through kind of the five characteristics of a community,

a church that can actually have the power to transform

the first thing he says unity of mind.

I love that.

That means the we have one thing, one thing that we can agree on.

I was some years ago when the Cavs were in the playoffs.

I was on my way to a Cavs game,

and it happened to be when racial tensions

here on our nation were pretty high.

And as I got close to Rocket Mortgage Arena, I.

I was stopped at a stoplight and I looked over at the car next to me.

And the driver was a man about my age who was an African-American man.

We locked eyes and we had the exact same Cavs t shirt on,

and we looked at each other at the same time.

We did this.

Right.

If something is

as shallow as rooting for the same team

can overcome racial tensions, even for a moment,

because at that moment we had unity of mind.

How much more

should we be able to overcome the differences of the people

sitting around us?

Because we believe in Jesus?

There isn't a person here.

You shouldn't be able to look at and do a.

Sit with.

Together we're together.

That's unity of mind.

Second thing he says is sympathy.

And sympathy is to feel what somebody else feels.

But let me give you a different kind of twist.

I think sympathy is is thinking the

the best of somebody, not the worst of somebody.

You know, I've told you before that one of my struggles is,

how I judge other drivers when I'm out on the road.

And one of the things that bugs me is when somebody drives

under the speed limit, like, if you're driving 35

and it's a 45, I'm like, what in the world?

And then I remembered when I

was teaching my kids to drive and they were driving.

They drove slower than the speed I wanted them to.

It was safer for everybody if they drove.

And I remember cars

being lined up behind me and just going, just take it easy, just relax.

Don't you see? It's a it's a kid,

but nobody would think so.

Now, if you're driving in front of me and you're going

35 and a 45, I'm going to assume you're just learning how to drive, right?

That's sympathy.

But when you look at somebody here in church

and they're not acting the way you think they should act

or they've said something to you, they shouldn't say, I want you to try to

have sympathy.

Everybody is carrying around some kind of pain.

That's the second thing.

The third thing, he says, is brotherly love.

That's a particular kind of love.

A lot of you have siblings.

One of the things that is true is siblings.

You can't get rid of them.

You are stuck with those siblings.

That's the kind of love that happens inside.

And that's

why it's good to just hang in there and let God do the work inside of you.

He wants to do.

When there are people with sharp edges around you.

And then he he says, A tender heart and a tender heart

is not allowing pain to make you hard,

but allow pain to keep you soft.

I had a friend give me this book last week.

It's called Sacred Fire and I read this.

It says all of us will get hurt.

That's a given.

However, this is the challenge.

How we handle that hurt with either bitterness or forgiveness will cover

the rest of our lives and determine what kind of person we're going to be.

Suffering and humiliation will either soften our hearts or hardened our souls.

One of the things that stood out

in a Christian community in the first century is when people walked

in, they realized people had the same kind of pain that they did out there.

But people inside handled it differently.

Instead of making them hard, it made them soft.

Instead of making them bitter, it made them kind.

And then finally says with a humbleness of mind,

I read this this week about that.

That that's having a a healthy self suspicion.

That's what it said.

That means to

to believe that you might be wrong.

You might be wrong

when Peter is talking to a group of Christians

who live in a hostile culture, and he's talking to them

about not a culture out there on the East Coast or on the West Coast,

but a culture that is right where they live,

how they can change the people they live

with, the change the people they worship with.

He basically gave everyone the same task.

He said, you want to change the people around you,

be a little more, be a little more like Jesus.

So this is my

my assignment for you.

And I started doing this in my quiet time in the morning in my journal.

I would draw those concentric circles or those that Venn diagram,

and I would draw it and how much I felt like I was overlapping.

Jesus.

And then I pray,

Lord, by tonight,

would you make me just a, just a little bit more like Jesus?

So for you, by tomorrow,

be asking God, make me just a little more like Jesus.

And if all of us do that,

there is no telling the power that will be unleashed

in our homes and in our world.

Would you pray with me?

Our father in Heaven.

I am grateful that you sent Jesus

to live in our place and die in our place, and resurrect so that we could be

reconciled to you so we could experience forgiveness, have hope.

But I'm also grateful

that you sent Jesus to transform us

into his likeness,

that even now we can become more like him.

And as we do,

we can impact the people around us

in a way that we could never do it before.

I pray that you would do that work inside of each

one of us for your glory

and for the the world's good.

We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.