Submitting Ourselves as Scattered People
Passage 1 Peter 2:11-3:7
Speaker Chris Steynor
Service Evening
Series Hope for a Scattered People
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11 Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. 12 Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
13 Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, 14 or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. 15 For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. 16 Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God’s slaves. 17 Show proper respect to everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, honour the emperor.
18 Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh. 19 For it is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because they are conscious of God. 20 But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. 21 To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.
22 ‘He committed no sin,
and no deceit was found in his mouth.’
23 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 24 ‘He himself bore our sins’ in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; ‘by his wounds you have been healed.’ 25 For ‘you were like sheep going astray,’ but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.
3 Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behaviour of their wives, 2 when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. 3 Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewellery or fine clothes. 4 Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. 5 For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, 6 like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.
7 Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.
Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.
And we're just really glad to have you here. Should we pray before we dive in to what we've just heard?
Dear Lord Jesus, we thank you that by your wounds we are healed. And, Lord, your mission is for the healing of this world, for the healing of the nations, and for the healing of our souls. And, Lord, we want to pray that you would speak to us now, Lord, by your holy spirit, that we may seek to know you and love you and to follow in your footsteps. Amen. Amen.
So we're currently in a season in a small book called one Peter, which is at the back of the New Testament. The context of this is that Emperor Nero has burned down half of Rome, and he's decided to blame the christians for it. And so the church in that area, they're scattered all over place. They are afraid, they are under intense persecution. And Peter is speaking to them about how they ought to live and act and respond in this situation.
And he's talked a lot about the hope that there is in the gospel, the hope that we're looking forward to of an eternity with Jesus. And he's talked a lot about holiness. He's talked about a lot about this idea that the church is called to be set apart. The church is called to be different. He's all the time affirming, your culture and your community ought to be different.
Your understanding of the world should be different. Your moral compass should be different. You live for a different kingdom. And in this passage, Peter now moves from the sort of existential questions about what you are and what you should be to, well, how then should you live? And the sorts of questions the christians are asking and go, well, you're saying we ought to be holy, that we ought to be set apart.
What does that practically mean about how we relate to the world, how we relate to the government, how we relate to work, how we relate to families. Does that mean we actually ought to come out of all of that completely, or we set up our little sort of separate nation, our separate little government? If the government is trying to kill us, should we pay taxes? Should we campaign for overthrow? Should we bother obeying their laws?
If I'm a victim of injustice in my workplace because I'm a Christian, what should I do? Should we set up an exclusively christian commune so we can live and work in peace? That sounds a lot better, a lot easier. If I've become a Christian and I'm married and my husband or wife isn't a Christian, what should I do? Should I set apart from them?
Should I get divorced. They're really good questions about exactly what it means to live as set apart holy people in a world that hates them. Now, our situation here isn't quite the same as those in Peter's time in 80, 64, but it is true. We live in what we might call a pagan, a non Christian, and an increasingly antichristian culture. Now, it's true that governments and institutions operate under values that are increasingly distant from christian ones.
It's true that we're hearing reports of Christians that are more and more disadvantaged because of what they believe, and they risk loss for not toeing the party line on various issues. More broadly, we live in an age in our country where it's probably true to say there's low trust, low regard in our government. Broadly, the current party isn't likely to get reelected. And we get the sense that the one who does get reelected, it's not so much that they won, but everyone else lost.
The idea of what a family consists of, the institution of family has broken down. Really. It's just a word now to describe an amorphous group of people, a multigenerational group of people that sort of live together. But any mention of what sort of shape a family ought to be or what sort of ideal a family ought to be, certainly with distinct roles, with male and female, husband and wife, mother and father. That's an incredibly controversial idea that our culture doesn't want to hear about anymore.
We're in an age where there's probably low trust in the church. Been a lot of safeguarding scandals from the Church of England. Attendance is 80% what it was in 2019. But there have always been those Christians that have said, you know what, I'm a Christian, but I just don't want to do church. They've given up on the idea of church.
And within all of that one, Peter helps us not only to understand how to live as foreigners and exiles, but how it helps us as christians to understand what should our approach be then to these different institutions? How should we live now? The passage, as you can tell, it's a bit of a whopper. I've got about 20 minutes. We're going to stand and sing a song halfway through to give our legs a stretch, and also it's good to sing, but I'm only going to be able to sort of lightly touch on so many of these things.
There's three questions I'd like us to ask. In this sort of non christian, imperfect, difficult world, we can ask what is redeemable, what institutions are redeemable what is our own story of redemption? And how do we join in with God's mission to redeem the world? Now, if that's a little bit jargony for you, we want it straight. What needs fixing?
How has Jesus fixed us, and how do we help fix things? That's where we're going tonight. So, firstly, what is redeemable? What do I mean by that? Well, christians understand our world, our story, the story of the world in four different chapters.
And the first two of those chapters go like this. The first one is creation. We believe that God created the world, and he created the world good. He didn't create it complete and perfect. He created it good.
There was nothing bad in it. It was a good world. Second chapter is the fall that mankind turned their back on this God who loved them, who created them, who made them for him. And because of that fracture in the relationship, not only does the physical world, our natural world, not only is that in decay, but also communities and families and societies are in corruption. And so how should we live in a world where there are things.
We're aware that there are things that are good but not working as they should? And often it's not straightforward to tell which is which. What are the things that we see that are part of God's original good creation, and what are the things that are corruptions? It's sometimes not easy to tell. When my oldest son Samuel was three, he was really into Duplo, and he'd make his duplo model.
But then I remember one day when he brought to me his duplo model, very, very upset because he would put it down and it would just fall over. And so I solved this by getting more duplo and creating another leg for it. But he was very upset at this because this wasn't the design. He needed me to make that particular design stand up, which it wasn't going to do because the engineering had no structural integrity. In his view, the pieces were wrong.
So he's like, daddy, fix the pieces. I don't know. You got to put a piece there. He's like, no, he didn't want that. He was getting very, very upset.
And we were disagreeing on whether the structure was wrong or whether the pieces were wrong wrong. And eventually the argument couldn't be resolved. And so we abandoned the whole concept of duplo building. It was just thrown away. And when we look at broken structures, governments, churches, families, businesses, we don't always agree.
The world doesn't agree on what exactly is going wrong. Is it the people. Is it the structures? People that are politically left wing go, the structures are broken. We need to redeem the structures.
People who are sort of politically right wing? Go, well, no, it's the people. We need to encourage values and so forth. But as we argue about these, occasionally a voice will come up and go, no, we need more than that. Clearly, this whole concept is broken.
We need revolution because it is so broken, it is not redeemable. And so christians ask, okay, believing that the world is both good but fallen, what things are redeemable? What things can we throw away as we look at our broken world? I'm going to refer to Luther here. Martin Luther lived about 500 years ago.
He was a reformer, wonderful theologian, and he said this. The holy orders and true religious institutions established by God are these three. The office of priest, the estate of marriage, and the civil government. In other words, what Luther was saying, the things that come through in one, Peter, are these three things are always redeemable. The church, marriage and family, and the government, which means we need them and we have regard for them, no matter how broken they are.
For the Christian, the church or the idea of church is never so fallen or ineffective that we decide to abandon the idea altogether. The family is never so broken or difficult that we decide to remake it according to our own ideas. The government is never so corrupt or oppressive than we plot to overthrow it. A broken church is better than no church. A difficult family is better than no family.
A corrupt government is better than no government. These things, Luther says, and they come through in the passage Bible tells us, are always redeemable. Now, in the section we just read, the church only gets a short mention in verse, verse 17. But Peter's been talking about the church for the last few chapters. There's a section, you would have heard it on our approach to the government.
There's a section on marriage towards the end, and there's a little section on work life where it talks about slaves and masters, which is maybe the od one out. There's no sort of particular workplace the Bible says like, that has been ordained by God. The gas company hasn't individually been ordained by God, but it kind of resonates with this idea that we read in the prophets, Jeremiah 29, where God says to the exile, people, work for the good of the city. Work for the good of the city, because if it flourishes, you flourish. And Peter is affirming this idea for the christians, for his church, that actually we are to be in these institutions, we are to be working under the government.
We have, we'll be working in the companies that are set up.
And so the instruction is go and go and redeem the world. Go and redeem the institutions. Being set apart as a holy people does not mean we just pull away from the world altogether. But here is the problem for christians. Working in a world as aliens and foreigners, in a world that has completely different values and worldviews to them, it is going to be painful.
In a non christian world, it is likely that Peter is going to be saying to christians, he's going to be inviting them to put themselves into structures and situations and relationships that may prove to be oppressive and unjust. He anticipates that the way of redemption, of healing the world, of buying back the world, is going to be difficult, and specifically that christians are going to be particularly vulnerable to injustices. And so we need tools for when the structures fail us. And so Peter, in this section, he's basically giving us a roadmap for how christians should respond to this. And the first place he goes is to say, remember your own story of redemption, look to how Christ has redeemed you.
This is the central part of the reading we heard. Let's read again to this. You were called because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow. In his steps, he committed no sin and no deceit was found in his mouth. When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate.
When he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness by his wounds. You have been healed, for you were like sheep going astray. But now you have returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls.
Question what did it cost Jesus to redeem you? Answer, to redeem you, Jesus took on the curse of sin. You see, in verse 24, it talks about how Jesus bore our sins in his body on the cross. That's the niv translation. Now, the word cross is probably not the best translation.
The word in the Greek is tree. He bore our sins in his body on the tree. And in that imagery, Peter's conjuring up. What Peter's conjuring up points towards an important meaning, an important image of what Jesus did on the cross. It's a reference to the Old Testament law in deuteronomy 21, where God is giving the laws to his people and he's giving instructions for those that have committed capital offences, very, very serious offences.
And one of the ways that that was carried out was to be hung by a tree. And the imagery of that was very powerful. The idea that the person had committed such a bad offence that they were beyond redemption, not only in this life but also in the next. Trees were fixed to the ground and if you were hung on one, it was a symbol of saying, you're not going anywhere, now go to hell, you are unredeemable. And the passage says those punishments were reserved for those considered cursed.
It was a symbol of being utterly beyond redemption. Now at that time, crucifixion hadn't been invented. Crucifixion was invented by the Romans essentially as a more painful, more humiliating version of the same imagery.
Crosses made of wood stuck into the ground saying, go to hell. And that is what Jesus underwent for us. That is what Jesus underwent for humanity. And it tells us two things. Firstly, it tells us that humanity's state before God was otherwise as profoundly hopeless and irredeemable as you can imagine.
Such was the cost of humanities turning their back on the maker of the universe. Utterly expendable, irredeemable. But secondly, it tells us that God is a God who redeems the unredeemable and he redeems the unredeemable at a great cost to himself. And says to Christians, saying to the church, now go and do the same. And therefore, as we go out into the world and maybe sometimes we look out and we attempted to be in despair, our culture is going down the pan.
Our government is no longer fit for purpose. Our education systems are poisoned by ideology, our health care system is falling apart. Our entertainment are increasingly obscene and debased. Our definitions of justice are being twisted to evil ends. Christians know that we trust and believe in the God who has already redeemed the irredeemable because he has redeemed us.
And so we avoid demonising those things that God has said is redeemable. But instead, with our story in mind, that story in which we have rooted our souls and our eternities, we go out and live to redeem what calls us. God calls us to redeem. He bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sins and live for righteousness. So how do we join in with God's mission to redeem the world?
What does that mean? What does that look like? We're going to answer that question after we've sung. Rand, would you like to come up? We're going to sing.
Thank you. Broken one, let's stand it.
Broken one, take heart for your king has entered in, made your heart his home when he washed away your sin in the darkest day. Know your shame is all gone when he looks at you. God will see his son at the throne of grace. He says in a carting one take heart, for your king will walk beside with each rising sun, every grace he will provide in the heart essay he will never forsake, for he knows your grief and he feels your pain. When the world gives way, Jesus will remain one.
Take heart, for your king will soon return, ending every stripe he will rain upon the earth. In the longest day no love victory is won. Do not feel the world he has overcome. You are safe in him, covered by his love.
You take seats.
Take seats.
How then do we live, having established all this, having got our sense of what God wants us to redeem, what God wants, what God is fixing, and how he wants us to come and cooperate in that. Each of these sections deserves like a whole sermon on its own. But here are some pointers from the passage. At the start, Peter wants to say, remember, your first battle is not actually out there, it's in here. It's internal, the whole section.
Starting in verse eleven, Peter says, dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires which wage war against your soul. There's no point complaining about the world if we're no different. It's comfortable to have despair at the world. It's almost low hanging fruit for our spiritual lives. It's easy to take the worst of what we see and simply shout about how bad things are.
But the world will only be changed by changed people. And actually the gospel's answers the world is probably neither right wing nor left wing. Right. The left wing just emphasises it's about the structures, change them. The right wing says, yeah, people need changing, but it's almost certainly other people need changing.
If only other people had the values I did. Whereas the christian gospel says, actually start with me, we start with ourselves. So Peter says, firstly, the first battle is internal. It's the bigger battle and it's the hardest battle than the war out there. Secondly, set your strategy on winning the people around you through your conduct.
And each section talks about this in different ways. In verse twelve says, live such good lives among the pagans that though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God. It is God's will. Verse 15, that by doing good you should silence the ignorant. Talk of foolish people.
Verse one, chapter three. If any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behaviour of their wives. When people who live and work around you speak words over you that are unjust or untrue. When people gaslight you or demean you, the temptation is to speak a lot of words back or to act in line with what those words are saying. Where you're going to speak unjust words to me, maybe I'm going to believe them or I'm going to be angry and react against them.
But Peter says, look how Jesus subverted the powers of evil and darkness. If you want to do the same, subvert them by your actions. Be so good that words and acts of cruelty or oppression are shown to be simply silly. Go out of your way to show that these words are simply untrue by your actions. Thirdly, Peter says, fix your eyes on the true eyes of justice.
Do you see in each section it fixes our eyes on the Lord Jesus. Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake. To this you are called because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example. Entrust yourself to him who judges justly. Entrust yourself to him who judges justly.
At the church where I grew up, I did a gap year helping out with the youth work. There were some teenagers whose dad was a QC, he was a judge in the highest courts. And I remember one of our leaders saying to one of these kids, oh, look, stop that behaviour. I'm going to have to throw you out. And he retorted, yeah, my dad's a lawyer, right?
That was his boldness in assuming that his dad would also approve of his behaviour. But it was like, yeah, my dad's a lawyer. And there is a real sense that if we are a Christian, you can claim my dad is the judge of the high court of the universe. And Jesus, my adopted older brother, is my lawyer making the case to him. And so you imagine you're dragged before a small claims, know of people that are making all sorts of wild accusations against you and, you know, the court is totally rigged.
But, you know, if that case reaches the high court and your dad is the judge, you can be at peace. And Peter is reminding christians that whatever injustice they may face on his behalf, he's saying, you know what? The appeals process may take longer than you want it to, but do not worry. Entrust yourself to him who judges justly. Entrust yourself to him who judges justly.
And so they're the three things that all the way through this passage, Peter is saying, the first battle is internal. Win people through your actions and fix your eyes on the true eyes of justice. Before we go, I want to just make some really brief comments on each section just so we're kind of practical. But these are all for discussion in your connect groups. Let's start with.
Oh, hello. He'll come later. Let's start from the end. So there's a section about marriage. And Peter has words for those that are married.
He has words for husbands and wives. He has more words for wives than husbands simply because wives who are married to non christian husbands are going to likely to have it tougher than husbands who are married to non christian wives. That's probably going to be true in egalitarian cultures, but in this highly sort of patriarchal culture, that's going to be true. So Peter wants to help the wives more. And the emphasis of what Peter is saying there, I don't think it's about anti beauty products.
It's about not relying on outer beauty to show your husband who Jesus Christ is, but rather allowing outer beauty to be the sign that points towards something of much greater worth. I might sum up this as Peter's describing a way. He's saying there's a way of showing strength and substance, of character that is distinctly feminine. That's what he's saying to the wives. Now, it's not really my place to dig into what that means.
That would be mansplaining and that would be very bad in this culture. They really don't like it. But what I want to highlight is Peter is giving a solution to the redemption of family that is different from what the world is saying. The world is saying men and women, there's too much oppression between them. And so men need to become more like women and women need to become more like men.
And they're saying to young men, if you want to become a woman, that's fine. Saying to young women, if you want to become a boy, that's absolutely fine. Peter is saying, no, there is something good about masculinity and femininity and the way it is expressed in marriage. Do not lose hope on that. Redeem that.
Secondly, there's a section on work and in the workplace. I once, a guerrilla christian event, had a young person bring this passage to me and saying, look, Peter's telling people if they're getting a beating from their boss just to take it, doesn't that show that the Bible is for injustice? No. We have HR departments and processes and protocols and laws and jurisprudence that has all come from a Christian Foundation, a christian basis in this country. If you are being unjustly treated, use them.
They are good. But the world needs more than salvation by institution. With all of that in place, there are going to be times where we get stuffed over by people or stuffed over by the system. And we need tools. We need tools to know what to do as christians when that happens.
And that is what Peter is giving us there. And finally, at the start, there was a section on the government.
I'm going to clarify this next statement because it needs a lot of clarifying. You'll notice the passage stops short of saying, obey the government. It stops short of saying, obey the government. Now it says, instead, submit to the government. Now, that's not a licence to go and do whatever we want.
Clearly, submitting to the government means almost all the time. We obey the laws, we revere the laws, we have respect for the laws. We are good citizens. But what Peter leaves room for is those thin points at which maybe a Christian is called to break the law. For example, in countries where they say christians are not allowed to meet to worship, what does it mean to submit to the government under those laws?
It means to say if we genuinely believe before God, that in this instance and in this place, we are called to do something the government is telling us we shouldn't do. We submit to the government by being willing to take the punishment they have for us.
This guy, Alexey Navalny, you will have heard about him on the news. From what I can see and from what I can read, he did not decide to build an army around him to overthrow the government. Instead, what he tried to do was use the channels of government, the formal channels, to bring reform and to bring redemption. This is a quote from him. It's attributed to him.
He says, if you want, I'll talk to you about God and salvation. The fact that I'm a Christian, which rather sets me up as an example for constant ridicule in the anticorruption foundation because mostly people are atheists. And I was once quite a militant atheist myself. But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities. There are fewer dilemmas in my life because there is a book in which, in general, it is more or less clearly written what action to take in every situation.
It's not always easy for me to follow this book, of course, but I am trying. And so, as I said, it's easier for me probably than many others to engage in politics. And then he quotes scripture. Blessed are those who are hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied while certainly not enjoying the place where I am. I have no regrets about coming back or about what I'm doing, it's fine because I did the right thing.
On the contrary, I feel a kind of satisfaction because at some difficult moment I did as required by the instructions and I did not betray the commandment.
This is somebody who entrusts himself to the one who judges justly. And he lost his life for it. But it seems to me that in that moment, he did what he could to make the injustices and the impression and the horrors very, very visible. There were, BBC commentators know, on Friday at his funeral, we saw a Russia that we don't normally see, which is the one wanting a changed Russia. And his actions in following that path, rather than the easier path of overthrow and anarchy, shone that light.
He did it because he knew that there will be a just judge who had gone before him. And we're called to do the same. Let's pray.
Dear Lord Jesus, we thank you for the call on our lives. We thank you for the identity you place on our lives. And Lord Jesus, I want to pray for those who are struggling right now as we go out into a world where we are exiles and foreigners. And we thank you that your word does not only speak in the abstract, but, Lord, it gives us practical wisdom, practical instructions. Lord Jesus, all centred around following in your footsteps.
And Lord Jesus, we pray that by your spirit you would give us courage, Lord, to follow in those footsteps, to walk in those footsteps, and, lord, to do so by the help of your spirit and the help of our church. Amen. It.