Making the Mundane Miraculous II

One of the things that's really difficult when you're pastoring a large church like this is to somehow keep everyone encouraged that stuff is happening when they're not aware that it is in their life. Do you know what I mean by that? Because we all come at life and we're in different seasons and times. We wonder, well, I come to church and nothing really hit me and then I wonder if God's really working. And then the next week all of a sudden, wham, God just hammers you and you know, wow. I want to encourage you to listen carefully. Through the summer months, it's so easy to drift and, you know, boy, nice weather. Hey, let's skip worship. Let's forget our community group or fellowship group, whatever it is. And it's so important that we stay plugged in to what the activity of God is because you just don't know how God's going to be touching your life, when he's going to show up in a way that's just for you. And I want to encourage you. I know my whole life as a Christian, now 30 years, expecting to go to a meeting, every meeting I went to, and walk away with one thing. And that served me well. For some of you, it just may have been that song that Les just sang, a song to encourage you to trust that God will always be with you. Others of you, it may have just been to see those young people up there and realize that God's touching some kids. I know for many of you, it's going to be his word today. But whatever it is, over these next weeks of the summer, let's commit to being faithful and consistent and you'll bear a lot of fruit as a result of that. If you have your outline, get it handy. It's something we prepare every week so that you can walk out of here with more than just some thoughts in your head. There's some scriptures on there as well. I'm going to read the text for today. We're on our second week. Second week and a study through the book of 1 Peter. And I'm having fun with this already and looking forward to it. If you missed last week, the tape is out there. You might want to get that and get up to speed with us. 1 Peter 1.13. If you don't have a Bible, just listen carefully. Here we go. 1 Peter 1.13. It's after Hebrews and near the end, just before Revelation. I'll be referring to scriptures. Some of you don't have Bibles that are on this little sheet. This will help you. Therefore, prepare your minds for action. Be self-controlled. Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as He who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do. For it is written, Be holy because I am holy. And since you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a Lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through Him you believe in God, who raised Him from the dead and glorified Him, and so your faith and hope are in God. Now that you've purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply from the heart. For you've been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring Word of God. For all men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of the Lord stands forever. And this is the Word that was preached to you. Reiterating our theme from last week, a little clip from USA Today this last Thursday. Admit it, your life is a frantic mess. You fear the clutter police have issued a search warrant for your home. If they can find it under the junk mail and the credit card bills, your overdue videos, unopened computer software, and never read magazines form a pyramid to rival the ones in Egypt. The phone rings, the kids crank, the microwave squeals, and your desk groans two words, organizationally impaired. Like many Americans, you're seeking to address that deep-seated desire to scale back your life from complicated, from long hours of work, family obligations, those ceaseless trips to the malls, that massive house mortgage, and the insidious armada of paper and technological gibberish invading their lives. We talked about what happens when our lives get overloaded. Remember I threw that suitcase up here, and stuff hanging out, and I said, is this like your life? And about 90% of the hands went up in this room. Overloaded. But discouragement isn't the only thing that can happen when your life gets like that. There's another thing, and it can happen to believers in Christ. When your life gets overloaded, you start to look for ways to make it work, and one little word creeps in that can really affect your life, and that word is compromise. We compromise just a little bit, try to cut some corners, spiritually, or relationally, or ethically. That temptation to compromise follows every one of us. Someone once said, opportunity may knock once, but temptation stands at the doorbell and just keeps on ringing, doesn't it? Find that to be true? I do. But in the end, you see, compromise has a big price to pay. Have you discovered that? You may get away with cutting the corners relationally, or spiritually, or ethically for a while, but in the end, there's a big price to pay. It's a while back now. I was in a different city. I was driving to get to the airport after a couple of days of meetings, and it was a two-lane, each-way kind of situation, and I had to make a right turn to get on the freeway that went underneath the road I was on and head out to the airport. And as we were backed up, it was like a long traffic line. I'm guessing three-quarters of a mile. Really frustrating. And I was getting concerned about reaching the airport on time. And as I got within eye distance of the intersection, I could see I was wondering why cars weren't turning right. You know, when the light would change, they all stopped. Well, there was a sign up there, no turn on red. Well, I also noticed that some cars were zigging through a parking lot of one of those AM, PM, you know, mini-mart places, just cutting through there, and that probably saved everyone who had at least two cycles of the light, maybe three. That's two, maybe four or five minutes of sitting there. So as I'm getting nearer and nearer to the time to make this decision, I had one of those conversations in my head. Do you ever have those? I get those two little voices that start talking. The one on this says, you know, you ought to, Jay, you really ought to just shoot through there. You're going to be late. You could miss the plane. The other voice says, don't do it. It's illegal. You know, I'm looking at, I could miss this plane. Illegal, what? I've got to get to the plane. So, I get up to the thing. I'm saying, I've got to go for it. I've got to zigzag through here. And just when I made that decision, the guy in front of me made his shot through, and the traffic started to move forward. And I said, well, you know, maybe I can get through in this cycle, and inched up. I didn't quite make it. I turned the corner at the next light cycle, 50 yards past the mini mark. All these cars were lined up, one after another. And here, an officer of the law was parked across the street, an unmarked car, and he was just on his radio. Green Honda, yellow Toyota, just lining them up, every one that went through. Ticket, ticket, ticket, ticket. I said, you know what, Lord, thank you that I heard you, and I knew, I knew, I knew, yeah, I knew that being obedient, no, it was sheer grace that I didn't add to my point list. But, um, shortcuts, compromise, have consequences. And so that's why Peter says, the answer to our overload, the answer to being buried underneath so much stuff of decisions and weights and responsibilities isn't ethical or moral or spiritual or relational shortcuts, it's the word I introduced last week, salvation. A word that people say, oh, what do you mean salvation, what's that have to do, salvation as God intended is the fullness of life that he's provided for us to walk through the days of our lives within the context of what God has ordered and planned for us. And I talked last week that we were chosen by God, and that we are walking with God, and that we are held by his hands eternally. Several of you came up afterwards and said, does that mean you can't lose your salvation? And we got into some discussion, which I may address at some other time, but the point was that this salvation is Peter's answer to what these Christians were facing, and I believe the answer to what many of us are facing. And friends, listen, I'm not sure yet that we've done justice to this idea of what salvation is about. J.I. Packer, a very well-known theologian, wrote in his book, Knowing God, actually it's called The Pursuit of Holiness, these words, listen. He says, the idea conveyed by salvation is nowhere in doubt in Scripture. Salvation always means being rescued from jeopardy and misery so that one is now safe. But New Testament salvation is also salvation from sin and its consequences, from sin's guilt. How many want to be free from guilt? I sure do. Free from its power? How many want to be freed from the power of sin that's constantly stalking you? I sure do. He says, ultimately, it's free from sin's presence. That's when sin will one day be nothing but a bad memory. But listen to this, especially if you're a newer Christian. The plan of salvation teaches me not merely that I can never do anything to earn, increase, or extend God's favor or to avoid the justified fury of His wrath or to wheedle benefits out of Him, but also that I never need to try to do any of these things. God Himself has loved me from eternity. He Himself has redeemed me from hell through the cross. He Himself has renewed my heart and brought me to faith. He Himself has now sovereignly committed Himself to complete the transformation of me into Christ's likeness and to set me faultless and glorified in His own presence for all eternity. Friends, God is going to complete the work He began in you. When almighty love has thus totally taken over the task of getting me home to glory, listen now, responsive love, what we give back to God, fed by gratitude and expressed in thanksgiving, should surface spontaneously as the ruling passion of my life. In other words, I can't do anything to be saved except to receive what God has done. But once that's been done, the ruling passion of my life should be to live for Him. And so Peter says, if you've received that salvation, then these verses spell out what it means to live for Him in four specific ways. Let's look at them real quickly. Number one, four ways to live for God. Number one, set your hope on the grace. Look at it. Set your hope fully on the grace to be given when Christ Jesus is revealed. That's Roman numeral one in your outline. Now this sounds easy, doesn't it? Just set your hope on grace. All right, fine. What does that mean? Doesn't sound like there's much sacrifice or difficulty or trouble there. How tough can it be? You know, when I'm discouraged, when life is overwhelming me, just set my hope on grace. But friends, I've discovered that when people get discouraged, it's oftentimes the last thing they do. They set their hope on a pill. They set their hope on a check they're going to receive. They set their hope on a doctor or on an attorney or on some kind of solution other than the grace that's to be fully revealed to them in the day of Christ Jesus. They hope in people. They don't hope in God. And so Peter says, prepare your minds for action. What does that mean? It means, the Greek word literally means to roll up the sleeves of your mind. Now whether or not you'd like to know it, our minds are polluted, cloudy things. How many of your minds right now are wandering all over, just, oh man, I want to get out. I've got to get dinner ready. You see, we need to roll up the sleeves of our minds and focus on the grace. What's grace? It's God's power to perform His will in our lives. Get it done. Roll up our minds. And then he says, be self-controlled. What does that mean? That means simply this. It's the word that was used to describe a drunken person. A drunken person who wobbled and weaved and was blurry-eyed in his vision. Peter is simply saying this. Get your mind focused on what God is about to do. Look forward to it. Anticipate it. As Scott said in the beginning of the service, we should come here with anticipation that we're going to hear from God. We should awaken every morning with the anticipation that the grace that we need to get through the mire of the clutter of our lives will be available to us. Now I wrestled with this. How do we look forward? How do we put our eyes on the horizon of faith? Say that term with me. Horizon of faith. Say it again. Horizon of faith. How do we put our eyes out there? What does that mean? I was fumbling around for an illustration of this. How does that work? I came up with something I wanted to share with you. Yesterday I was invited to participate in a charity go-kart race. This was a big deal for me. This was a good opportunity for me to test out the old back and see how things were going. I thought when I was first asked to do this, hey, this is going to be light-hearted fun. Kind of like Fun for All up there in Cranberry. Great time. Just bounce around. Everything's under control. Well, I get down there. Folks, these are big boys with their little bad toys. They are ready for action. These guys are primed and pumped. Everyone had pit crews and the whole thing. It was a big deal. I got fired up for this, I have to tell you. Once I caught a glimpse of the scope of it, I had to watch my attitudes for godliness. I said, Lord, speak to me. Am I okay in this? Is it okay to really go after this? To really put the pedal to the metal and do some bumping and bobbing and weaving? God led me to 2 Kings 9.20. If you don't trust me, open it up. There all the papers go, Scott. There they all go. 2 Kings 9.20. I read this in my quiet time. It's talking about a chariot that's arriving at a particular place and the driver's name of all things is Jehu. Jehu? And here's what it says. Look how reported. He hasn't reached them, but he's not coming back either. The driving is like that of Jehu. He drives like a madman. Can you see that on my bumper sticker? 2 Kings 9.20. Well, anyhow. But, I'm getting carried away. I'm missing my point. As part of preparation for that race, some had to take some training, which I didn't get to take because of it being on a Sunday morning, but the instructor gave me the booklet. I want to read from the booklet, from the driving school booklet, about how to maintain one's course of action driving at high speeds. Teach yourself to look ahead. The farther ahead your vision is focused, the greater the perspective. Objects do not pop into view immediately or unexpectedly, setting you up for the ground rush syndrome. Now, that's insider talk for bad stuff happening right in front of you. Looking ahead to objects on the horizon will maximize the extent of the visual range and greatly reduce the chance of ground rush syndrome. Now, this skill requires patience to perfect and constant practice to keep. A maximum visual horizon provides a perspective of overall situations and that vision protects you along the way. Do you hear what this is saying, friends? This is saying what I'm trying to tell you about setting your hope fully on the grace that's to come. It's saying, look forward because what you need is coming through the grace of God. Put your eyes on that and all the clutter and the stuff and the heartbreak and the pain that you're living in, the discouragement, all that stuff isn't going to rush up and overcome you. If your eyes are focused fully on the grace that's to come. Vision sets perspective. Can I say to you, some of you are depressed today because you're looking right next door, right down at your feet. You're driving your car right out in front over the nose. Put your eyes out on the horizon. Set your hope fully on the grace that's to come. All right, number one. Number two, then Peter says, in response to salvation, number two, be holy, verses 14 and 15. Now, I don't know about you, but I began, when I started to do this message, I started to struggle with this. And I thought... Jay? Jay. Dave. Yeah, I just heard you were struggling. I said I was starting to struggle. Actually, I struggled all week, I have to be honest. Okay, well, do you want me to give it a shot? Are you serious? All right. Right here. Right there? Okay. The other day, my wife, Kelly, and I were having dinner with our two boys, and one of us was whining because we were having spaghetti. Don't want to have spaghetti. He hates spaghetti. Never want to see spaghetti again. And we told Kelly, that's what we're having. Actually, it wasn't Kelly. It was one of my sons, and he was kind of going on about, you know, I don't want to have spaghetti. I hate it. And while I'm convincing him it's spaghetti or hunger, his brother is saying things like this. Dad, I'm eating the spaghetti. I'm eating it, right, Dad? I'm eating it. And he's going to have to eat it, isn't he, Dad? And I'm convinced sometimes that's what we think about holiness. Hey, Dad, look at me. I'm doing okay, aren't I? I mean, I'm surely not like, you know, I wouldn't do that. You're going to get him for that, aren't you? So holiness becomes sort of this sheer determination to flex my moral muscles and then to feel like I'm receiving approval from God because of it. Well, the thing I want you to see about holiness as we look at it in relation to Peter is that holiness is more than virtue. It's there on your outline. Holiness is more than virtue. It does include virtue. I mean, it does eventually work its way out into my behavior and my conduct and my emotions and my thinking, but it's more than that. The Bible talks about holiness and sort of delineates it out in a couple different ways. The first thing that I want to show you about holiness is that it has the idea of separateness to it, that you are set apart when you enter into a relationship of holiness. This is all through the Old Testament. Things were set apart for God. They were placed in an environment where God could use them for his unique purpose. Think about Moses standing in front of the burning bush and God said, Take off your sandals because the ground you're on is holy. It's holy ground. It's been separated out for me to use to declare something to you. There were objects in worship that were holy. There were even certain people who were designated as holy, and these were the people who performed certain temple rituals and ceremonies. Now, make the connection over to 1 Peter. Now, what Peter is saying is, because of what God has given you, because He's chosen you, because He's called you, because He loves you, you are holy. No longer does God just set aside certain objects or certain people for holiness. Now, God's life actually enables you who have been chosen and been called by God to experience that holiness. You now, in this separated relationship, you've been somewhat removed from one environment, although you're still there, you're still in the world, you've been removed and you've been placed into another environment. And as we go on in Peter, you're going to see he talks about this very thing. That you've been put in another environment and that environment shows something about your relationship to God and His love for you. So holiness means separatedness. It's not that I never enter in somewhere else or talk to people. Jesus is the greatest example of going to where people were hurting. But my separatedness is connected to my, and this is the second word, relationship to God. Holiness is always connected to a relationship to God. There's a very telling verse in Isaiah 66. You can look there later. Isaiah 66.1 God is looking around, talking, and He says, Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool. Where is the home you will build for me? Where will my resting place be? And the obvious answer in the passage is, we can't build a home that will contain you. Even when first kings, when they were dedicating the temple in first kings, I think this is a little bit before Jehu. In first kings, they're dedicating the temple. And Solomon even says, even as we dedicate this temple, it's impossible that it will actually contain God. So God, have Your presence sort of hover over it and Your name rest on it. God says, what can You build me? What home can You build that I can rest in? And since God knew we couldn't build a home that He could rest in, what Peter is saying is, He built a home. You know what that home is? Your heart. Your heart. And my heart. Holiness is a relationship that we'll see even later on in this passage that comes from the heart. That comes from the central place of who I am where God is revealing to me who He is. That's what holiness is. Now, three things about how holiness gets worked out in our lives. The first thing is, I just want to give you three words and we'll move on. The first word is origin. How does holiness work in my life? And this is really just a summary of what we've just said. God is the source of holiness. It originates with Him. It doesn't originate with me. It originates from God. He is the one who makes us holy and gives us the ability then to live holy lives. So where does our holiness come from? It originates from God. It originates from His love relationship with us that was demonstrated in Christ. The second word is a word we have to look back in the passage back to verse 14 where Peter says this, he contrasts what it means to live a holy life with what they were living before they came to Christ. He says, as obedient children, do not... what's that word? Conform. Do not conform to the evil desires that once drove you. The second word, how does holiness really flow out of me? It flows out of me because it originates from God in my life, but also because then I conform my life towards that holiness. I am involved in the process. I conform. I shape my life around God's holiness. Peter's saying in the negative, don't shape your life around evil desires. Don't conform. Don't put the form of your life around the desires that led you to do your own thing. But instead now, live your life, conform your life around God's holiness, around His life. And then what am I conforming? That's the third word. And that's the word desires or passions. Don't conform your life to the evil passions that once drove you. What are these things? These passions, these desires? These deep inclinations of my soul. These are the bedrock foundations of who I am settled and lodged deep in my heart. These desires for certain things. And all of us have these. All of us have these desires. And they will be conformed towards my Master. Whoever or whatever is my Master in life, my desires and passions will be formed around that life. And so Peter's saying, God is the originator of holiness in you. Live your life in such a way that it's conformed, it's shaped, your passions and your desires are formed and shaped by God's life in you. What do you think? Impressive. I have a question though. If this is something I struggle with, I expect that probably a lot of people here have. Are you aware of holiness as you grow in it? Does the thought go through your mind? I am holy. How come you get to ask the question? This is your point. I didn't ask you any questions on your point. I think most of the time, God's work of holiness in our life is even hidden to us. Like the seed planted in the ground. A lot of that you don't see. You don't have a sense of. And this is what I like about what Jay said earlier. If I'm looking just down right now at my seed and don't see a lot of growth taking place in it, then it may lead to discouragement. It may lead to the fact that I really don't think God is working in my life. Instead of seeing it as a process that God is in control of, that He will bring about the transformation that He sent me on. We can't say strongly enough. The simple little verse you've all heard, Be holy because I am holy. You can interpret that two ways. You can say, You better be holy because that's the way I am. Which is not what David said. Rather it's, You can be holy because I am. It's causative. The other two points in the aisle we're not going to get to today. When we sat down last night and worked over our notes together, I said, I'm excited about tomorrow. I have about a half a message. He said, I have about a half a message too. I said, That'll be about an hour. It's proven to be about right. We're going to put a comma there. We're going to go on with the other two responses at a future time. I think it's an appropriate time right now for us to stand together and to acknowledge openheartedly before the Lord with our voices and with our hearts that he has given us salvation today. So let's sing this chorus that we, it's one of our favorites here. It's one about his spirit moving among us.