April 18

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade--kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith--of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire--may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

This past Monday, I was at a Prayer Retreat in Estes Park for the Loveland Pastors’ Fellowship. One of the men had recently lost a good friend, and he was expressing his grief and anger at God in a healthy and open way. He opened the can of worms on that emotionally loaded topic of the Problem of Pain. How do we deal with the fact that while God is love, and He has the absolute power to do anything He wants, He frequently does not act, but instead allows us to suffer in many different ways, and even to die what seems to us like untimely deaths. As the conversation swirled around that, with various members of the group offering their contribution, one man told of an experience he had this winter that gave him a new perspective on suffering.

He said that he had gone to a museum in Denver where they had a large globe, about 10 feet in diameter, on display. Inside the globe were cameras that could project images on the surface, and turn that sphere into anything from the earth to the sun to other planets. One such display showed the earth with video of actual weather patterns all over the world from earlier that month. This pastor was fascinated to see the entire world’s weather portrayed for him. It was beautiful, with the white clouds swirling around and moving from west to east, and the blue ocean showing beneath them, and the continents. He marveled at God’s amazing wisdom in designing a system that would bring moisture from the oceans and deposit it on land, thousands of miles from any sizeable body of water.

My pastor friend was walking around the globe as it turned, so as to be able to keep his eye on Colorado, when he noticed in the video a large storm bearing down on our state from the northwest, and eventually covering the entire state. Then he noticed the date showing below the globe, and realized that he had been in that storm! In fact, he was on U.S. 287, trying to get to Ft. Collins that day, and having a terrible time with very icy roads, low visibility, and the hazard of other drivers also trying to navigate the storm. He was grumbling and complaining about the weather, and how difficult it was making his life.

But standing there in the museum, he saw the big picture, and realized how good God was to bring much-needed moisture to our state. Seeing the weather more from God’s view put things in a whole different perspective for him.

Our problem is that we are often so limited in our view of things. We evaluate life from a very narrow set of criteria that almost always have to do with our comfort, our pleasure, our convenience, our financial welfare, our security, etc. But God sees things from a much bigger perspective, and His values are very different from ours. As Americans living in the 21^st Century, we simply do not have a theology of suffering. Suffering of any sort, even the most trivial, is seen as a bad thing to be avoided at all cost. We chafe at the snow storm that brings us the moisture that we must have for life. I’m pretty sure I do not understand God’s perspective on suffering and pain completely, but I do know it is different from ours.

This passage in 1 Peter will help us get a handle on that different value system.

In his great mercy he has given us new birth.” A man named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council, came to Jesus at night with some questions. Jesus told him that he had to be born again. That didn’t make a lot of sense to Nicodemus; he was trying to picture getting back into his mother’s womb and being born again. John 3:5, “Jesus answered, ‘I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.’”

If you are here this morning, you have been born of water, you’ve been born physically. But are you born again of the Spirit? Everything Peter is about to say in this tremendously encouraging passage that gives us God’s global perspective on suffering is based on this condition: that you have been born again of the Holy Spirit, born from above, born spiritually. If that’s not true of you, none of what Peter says applies to you. So if you are not sure, I urge you to talk to someone you know here, or to one of the staff, and let us share with you how you can be born again.

And boy, do we ever need that today. We watch the news, and we lose hope for our country and our world. Bad things happen to us or to our loved ones, and we lose a little more hope. We get older, and our bodies and minds fail us, and we lose a little more hope. Hopelessness fills us with dread and anxiety and fear, or it can just numb us emotionally, so that we don’t feel anything. We can become depressed, or even suicidal without hope.

But God is the “God of hope.” The word hope appears 80 times in the NIV New Testament. We have been born again—we have a new, spiritual life—and we have every reason to be incorrigibly optimistic and hopeful. I’m preaching to myself here, because I have tended to be what I smugly call “realistic” in contrast to Barbie’s “Pollyanna optimism”. But I’m coming to see that I have a right and the ability to be hopeful even in the darkest situations. God is the “God of hope” (Rom 15:13) because when God is part of the equation, no situation is ever hope-less. When we are born again, God becomes an integral part of our lives, so we have been born into a life full of hope.

This hope is based on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Paul put it this way in 1 Corinthians 15:20-23, “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23 But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.” Notice the words, “firstfruits”. That’s an important word. It refers to the first of a crop—the first apples, the first cutting of wheat, the first sugar beets you dig, etc. The important thing about this word is that it implies “later fruits”. The rest of the harvest is coming later. Jesus was the first to be resurrected, but He will not be the last. “In Adam, all die.” That is, everyone who is in Adam will die for their sin. And who is that? Everyone is a descendant of Adam. But all who are in Christ will be made alive in the resurrection when Jesus returns to earth. If you have been born again, you are “in Christ” in this sense, and this is the hope you have to look forward to.

D. An inheritance 1 Pet 1:4; Mat 25:34; 1 Cor 6:9-10; 15:50; Gal 5:21; Eph 5:5; James 2:5; Matt 5:5; Heb 1:14; 1 Pet 3:9; Rom 8:17-18; 1 Cor 15:50; Matt 19:29

How many of you have ever received an inheritance from a parent or grandparent? And some others of us may get one someday. But no inheritance we get from a parent or grandparent will compare with the one we get from Jesus. Peter says it is, “4 an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade--kept in heaven for you.” The recession of 2008, which we are still in, is a poignant reminder of how material inheritances can be erased in the blink of an eye. But the inheritance we have coming from God is being kept safe in heaven for us.

· the kingdom of God (Mat 25:34; 1 Cor 6:9-10; 15:50; Gal 5:21; Eph 5:5; James 2:5)

So we are assured that this inheritance is being kept safe for us; inflation isn’t going to eat away at it, or anything like that.

So that’s a great promise and hope that we have in Christ: born again to a life filled with hope, looking forward to our own resurrection, born again into God’s family where we can expect an incredible inheritance.

But. Life is not a bed of roses. If it is, they forgot to take off the thorns! And Peter was very aware of that when he wrote this letter. He acknowledges that we will face all sorts of trials in this life.

1 Pet 1:6, “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.” Peter was writing to Christians generally, not a particular church or city, but it was during a time when they were liable to be persecuted for their faith. In the beginning, Christians enjoyed the protection of the state[1], but in A.D. 64, the city of Rome burned practically to the ground. The common belief among almost everybody was that the Emperor Nero had ordered the fires so that he could make a name for himself by rebuilding the city. In order to deflect attention from himself, he charged the Christians with having done it. To punish them for this supposed arson, Nero killed Christians with a vengeance. He rolled them in pitch and set them on fire to serve as torches to light his gardens. He had them sewed up in the skins of wild animals, and then let hunting dogs rip them to shreds while they were still alive. He crucified them by the thousands. After the first wave of killings which was pretty much limited to Rome itself, provincial officials who didn’t like Christians would only have to drum up some phony charge against them, and the persecutions would break out there as well. No matter where they lived in the Roman Empire, Christians feared for their lives.[2]

So when Peter speaks of “all kinds of trials”, he is not speaking of some minor prejudice, or social discrimination. He is not even talking about things like unemployment or foreclosure. He’s talking about threats on their very lives. That helps put this statement in perspective: 1 Peter 1:6 “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.”

Our church family has been battered lately. We have had an unusual number of our people suffering from very serious situations. There have been several deaths in our church, and two[3] of our people are waiting for Jesus to take them home. Just in the past month or so, we’ve had a very serious burn wound that didn’t want to heal, single and double knee replacements, life-threatening infections, child sexual abuse, missionary trauma, divorce, cancer, suicide—the list goes on and on. These are not hangnails—they are very serious matters. And when we read what Peter has to say here, we know that he is speaking of situations every bit as serious, or more so, than the ones we face.

Even in the face of such serious, traumatic trials, he says, we can “greatly rejoice.” Not just grind out a begrudging word of praise to God; not just put on a happy mask to hide the fact that we are dying inside; but greatly rejoice. Verse 8 says we are filled with “inexpressible and glorious joy!” I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem natural to me. It makes me want to read on to see how this works.

1 Peter 1:7, “These [trials] have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” These trials have come—now watch this—so that your faith may be proved genuine. The trials prove the genuineness of our faith. How does that work? I think it must be if we are able to “greatly rejoice” in the face of those trials. Does our faith make a difference in the way we cope with the hardships of life? I just mention one member, Marie Hoch who passed away this week, as an example of what I’m talking about. Marie had cancer for eight years, which has flared up and caused her intense pain, and then gone into remission multiple times. During this last battle, she has again been in a great deal of pain, both from the ravages of the cancer, and from a fall that broke some ribs, and from pleurisy. But through it all, Marie has been positive, interested in the lives of her visitors, encouraging to her care-givers, witnessing about the love and truth of Jesus to her nurse, and still writing God-honoring poetry. I read this passage from 1 Peter to Marie last Tuesday at McKee, just hours before she died, because it seems to me she is a great example of what Peter was talking about. She really did “greatly rejoice” through it all, and that proved the genuineness of her faith.

And then notice this next phrase, because this is why it makes sense to “greatly rejoice” in our trials. Our faith, Peter says, will “result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” We are used to thinking that Jesus gets all the praise, glory and honor, but this says that we will be praised, honored, and glorified for believing in Jesus when He returns. That’s something to greatly rejoice in.

This whole discussion of how we handle suffering raises the question, What’s important to you?

What are things (not spiritual things) you think about, want, particularly enjoy, work for, sacrifice for? What’s important to you? [SHARE]

· A quick glance at the magazine rack on your way out of the supermarket indicates that our cultural values are sex appeal, gossip, and money.

· If we ask what do Americans spend their discretionary money on, it quickly becomes apparent that entertainment is very high on our list. Rockies tickets this year in the outfield along the foul line will set you back from $38 - $70 each. Tickets for a popular rock group, U2, at the Anaheim stadium this summer range from $175 to $600 each, for similarly located seats to the Rockies’ seats I priced. –And most of those seats are already sold out, for a June 6 concert!

· Our society is dissolving in a vat of narcissism. We are preoccupied with ourselves, with customizing our life to our exact preferences. You don’t have Yahoo! on your computer, you have “My Yahoo!” We want to have the latest tech gadget, the right fashion “look”, be popular, be rich, live comfortably, have the latest convenience appliance, etc. We are unbelievably shallow, and we do not know how to suffer.

1 Peter 1:7-9, “These [trials] have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold…may be proved genuine … Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him, and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

To God, our faith is more valuable than gold. Gold is currently trading in the neighborhood of $1,150 per ounce; it is one of the most precious of the precious metals. A 14K gold necklace will set you back $2,700 at Macy’s. If you could choose between a strong faith and a $2,700 necklace, which would you choose? The goal of our faith is the salvation of our souls, and that’s worth more than anything. If we are getting that, then literally nothing else matters. It doesn’t matter if you are being set on fire or eaten alive by dogs or crucified by the thousands. It doesn’t matter whether your civil rights are being violated, or someone arrests you for saying homosexual behavior is a sin. (That’s a very real possibility in Canada, by the way.)[4] On the other side, last week we looked at the parable Jesus told about the man whose crops wouldn’t fit in his barn. So he decided to build bigger barns to store it all in. But when he died, he had nothing! None of what we long for and scratch for and fight for and envy and work so hard to protect in this life goes with us into the next.

The Apostle Paul had a lot going for him as a young man. He had one of the best educations available for a rabbi; he was an up and coming leader in the eyes of the religious establishment, even to the extent of being entrusted with hunting down Christians and putting them in jail. He had an impeccable religious pedigree which he summarized as being “a Hebrew of Hebrews”. Moreover, he had been scrupulous in keeping the law, so that he could claim that he was faultless in that regard. Then one day, He met Jesus Christ—or rather, I should say, the risen Jesus intercepted him—and suddenly, Paul’s value system dramatically changed. He later wrote, Philippians 3:7-9, “But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him…” Before, education, keeping the law, ecclesiastical power may have been most important to him. Now he thought of all of that as a loss, not a gain—as rubbish (literally, a pile of manure[5])—compared to the surpassing greatness of something else: knowing Christ Jesus my Lord; gaining Christ; being found in Him.

What’s important to you? Getting a good education? Wearing the right clothes? Being popular in school? Having a nice home? Taking luxurious vacations? Having a good job or career? Those aren’t bad things; but is anything more important than them to you? How would you fill in the blank: “I consider everything else in my life a loss—a negative—compared to the surpassing greatness of ______________.” What is more important to you than everything else in your life put together?

When our relationship with Christ is our highest value, then we can “greatly rejoice” in the face of terrible trials of various kinds. Then we will be filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy at the thought of seeing Jesus some day.

Another thing that is very important to God in the context of our suffering is ministry to others.

2 Corinthians 1:3-4, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”

When we are hurting, God comforts us. He is full of compassion for our suffering, as we saw time and again in the ways Jesus responded to people. Isaiah tells us “in all their distress, God was distressed.” Jesus told Saul that when he was persecuting Christians, he was persecuting Jesus. God really does feel our pain.

But life is not just about you. Ignore the advertising that tells you it is; it’s not. Even when He is comforting and encouraging us, God is preparing us to help others in their distress. His comfort is not just for our benefit (which we might tend to think, narcissists that we are), but for the benefit of others whom we will be able to comfort when they are in trouble.

Do you see how different God’s value system is from ours? We need that big, global picture.

A third thing that is important to God in our suffering is the thing that is most important to Him—His reputation.

Paul understood suffering probably better than most of us do. Here’s how he described his experience in 2 Corinthians 11:23-27, “I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. 24 Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. 25 Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, 26 I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. 27 I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked….” It’s an absolutely ridiculous accounting of his sufferings.

Then he went on to tell about some wonderful revelations God had given him. But, 2 Corinthians 12:7, “To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

What was important to Paul in the midst of his terrible sufferings? Being able to brag about God’s strength when he felt weak. Being able to display the power of God in his life, not through his strength and his gifts and his being rich and famous, not through the comfort and luxury of his lifestyle, but through his sufferings. People today who point to their wealth and possessions as proof of the goodness of God miss the biblical perspective entirely.

I don’t want to feel weak, and be insulted and suffer hardships and persecutions and difficulties. But I do want Jesus Christ to be glorified in my life, and I want that more than I want to avoid all those other things.

What’s important to you? When you are suffering from any reason, whether it is physical, or psychological pain, or financial hardships, or broken relationships, or criticism, etc., that’s the time to step back to look at the whole globe. What’s the big picture here? How does God see your pain?

Certainly, He cares. He hurts with you, and wants to comfort you in it. But these three things are much more important to God than whether you suffer or not: First and foremost is your salvation—that’s worth everything; it’s far more important than not suffering. Secondly, He intends to use that suffering to equip you to comfort and encourage others. And third, He wants to display His power in the midst of your weakness, so that His reputation is magnified through you. This is a radical paradigm shift for me, because I hate pain so much. But I want to see the world the way God sees it, because that is ultimate reality. What’s really important to you?

[1] See, e.g. Acts 25:11; Rom 13:1-5

[2] William Barclay, The Letters of James and Peter, Revised Edition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), p.146ff.

[3] Norma Gingery, Alice Peterson

[4] April 30, 2004. © 2010 WorldNetDaily.com . Canada's governor general, the representative of Queen Elizabeth II, signed into law yesterday a controversial measure opposed by religious believers and free-speech advocates who say it will criminalize public expression against homosexual behavior. The bill, passed 59-11 by the Senate on Wednesday, adds sexual orientation as a protected category in Canada's genocide and hate-crimes legislation, which carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. The House of Commons passed the bill in September, 141-110. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38268 accessed 4/13/10.

[5] Greek Strong's Number: 4657: σκύβαλον. Root: neuter of a presumed derivative of <G1519> and <G2965> and <G906>. Usage Notes: English Words used in KJV:dung what is thrown to the dogs, i.e. refuse (ordure) :- dung. James Strong, Strong's Talking Greek & Hebrew Dictionary, (Austin, TX: WORDsearch Corp., 2007), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, Under: "4657".