Living for God

I invite you to take your Bibles, and we’ll turn to 1 Peter chapter 4. First Peter chapter 4. I’m going to read from the first verse:

“Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because he who has suffered in his body is done with sin. As a result, he does not live the rest of his earthly life for evil human desires, but rather for the will of God. For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. They think it strange that you do not plunge with them into [that] same flood of dissipation, and they heap abuse on you. But they will have to give [an] account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to men in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.”

This is the Word of God. Let’s pause in prayer before we study together:

Make the Book live to me, O Lord,
Show me thyself within thy Word,
Show me myself and show me my Savior,
And make the Book live to me.[1]

For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Now, we’re continuing, this morning, our studies in this first letter which Peter wrote to the scattered believers of his day, men and women from diverse backgrounds and various circumstances who were in need of understanding the true grace of God and were, like us this morning, glad of the encouragement to stand fast in that grace. And while almost two thousand years have elapsed, still we’ve been discovering that although we are a long way away geographically and removed vastly by history, still the book of 1 Peter is very relevant to our lives, and no less so this morning in the verses that we have just read.

I’d like to introduce our study this morning by suggesting to you that nobody likes to be thought of as a weirdo. No one likes to be thought of as a weirdo. At least, that is most normally so, except for a few weirdos. But normal people do not like to be regarded as being weird. The pressure to fit the mold, the longing to conform to the standards and the patterns provided by our peers, is something which all of us can identify with despite our age or our circumstances. I’m sure with only a moment’s thought, each of us could recall an occasion where we felt distinctly out of place or we felt the pressure of about to become horribly out of place, and so we went about the circumstances in such a way to make sure that that didn’t actually take place.

In order to earth this, I thought myself of the first time I ever came to the United States in 1972. And part of that extensive and exciting summer holiday involved a period of time in the north of Michigan. And at some point in that period, I was invited to go with a group of young people—teenagers, fellas, girls—into the sand dunes of Northern Michigan, where there were a variety of Yamahas and Hondas and Suzukis, anything from 100 right up to a 250, and they were all dirt bikes. And when I arrived on the particular morning at this scene, I discovered that these guys not only could ride these bikes, but they could do wheelies on the bikes, and they could do them with the girls on the back or anything at all. And so, promptly, without any thought, they turned to me, and they allowed me to choose a bike.

Well, in that moment, I had a major dilemma, ’cause I had never ridden one of these bikes. But I didn’t want them to think that I was weird, so I got on. And not wanting to be thought weird, the girl that was with me got on the back. She was actually braver or more foolish than myself. And we popped the clutch and went—it must have been about seventy yards—before I wiped out for the first time. And then I proceeded to get around behind some trees and wipe out with monotonous regularity. And there was a circuit that they were going round, where you finally came back to the beginning. I want to tell you that it was bad that they thought I had a weird accent, that they thought that I looked weird. But the ultimate ignominy was that when I finally completed the circuit, the girl was riding on the front, and I was riding on the back. She then asked if I would like to go around again. I said no, and she popped a few wheelies and tore off round the corner. And sometimes, when she’s tucking my children into bed, I find it hard.

Being born again alters our view of the world.

Well, why did I mention this? Because at the very heart of the passage, in the fourth verse, Peter is talking about being weird or being strange or being thought of as strange. And he’s pointing out that if the radical implications of the Christian gospel are going to take root in the lives of men and women, and they’re going to display the impact of that to the culture of their day—whether it’s the first century or the twentieth century—then they need to be very aware that those who were once their buddies, the gang with which they hung out, will find it strange as a result of the change that has taken place. If you like, those with whom we were formerly in step will now think that we’ve gone somewhat weird.

Now, the word of God to us this morning concerning this—taking for granted this notion—seems to come with telling impact to a generation which, arguably, in an environment in the church whereby we have adopted a posture which says to the world, which says to a pagan culture, “You must understand this: we are not different from you.” And we are at pains to explain how we are just the same as everybody else when, in point of fact, Peter writes to the believer, and he says, “Get this very, very clear: you, in Christ, cannot be the same as everybody else.” Oh yes, you may have two eyes and a nose and two ears and a relative amount of hair, etc. But once you’ve gone through those superficial characteristics, at the very heart of the man or woman in Christ, there is such an impact of the Spirit of God that the non-Christian world must inevitably regard it as strange that we are no longer like them. Now, we will return to that at the conclusion, but I want to sow the seed for the moment.

What needs to happen, then, if we’re going to live in this kind of climate? Well, we need to realize that conversion—being born again—is a mind-altering experience. It alters our minds. It alters our view of the world. It alters our view of business. It changes our perspective on family. It changes what is funny and what isn’t. It changes what is sad and what is joyful and so on. Peter has already mentioned this in 1:13, where he has encouraged the readers to get a grip of their thought processes—or, in the NIV, “Prepare your minds for action.”[2] And he has reminded us, and we’ve noticed it before, that if ever we’re going to get to grips with living our Christian lives in a way that impacts our society, then in the realm of our minds, we need to be doing the business.

An Attitude to Be Adopted

Now, he’s returning to this in 4:1. Because he mentions, you’ll notice, the attitude which we need to have—the critical importance of a right attitude.

We understand that in so many areas of life, don’t we? I mean, you go out to play a game of tennis, your attitude impinges upon whether you do well or poorly. It’s very important as they play the finals at Wimbledon around this time. And as those people go out there, one of the things that they’ll talk to them about as they interview them is “How do you prepare your minds for this encounter?” Because surely the way you think about things has a dramatic relevance to the outflow of the experience.

So, it is with this attitude that we begin this morning, and then we’ll proceed through the outline and go as far as we can. You’ll find the outline in the bulletin.

First of all, Peter, then, tells us about an attitude that’s to be adopted. The first verse has as its first word the word “Therefore,” which stands as a signpost, if you like, at the gate of the verse, pointing back into chapter 3, to the instruction that has already been given, and now forward into chapter 4, to the implications which are about to be faced. Those of us who were present last Sunday morning will recall that Peter was using this whole picture of baptism at the end of chapter 3. And we paid particular attention to this phrase which he supplies us with: that baptism is, in verse 21, “the pledge of a good conscience toward[s] God.” And we wrapped it up last time by noticing that this word “pledge” was a technical word in the culture of the day, that it would be the word that would be used to seal a business deal, and it was a word which was picked up and used in relation to this whole notion of baptism. And we said that when a man or a woman was baptized, Jesus was asking them, “Do you accept the terms of my service? Do you accept its privileges and promises, and do you undertake its responsibilities and its demands?”

Now, it seems perfectly clear that Peter still has this picture in his mind as he proceeds to write further in what are the opening verses for us of the fourth chapter. And probably the most helpful way to understand the first verse—and the second verse, actually—is to turn to Romans chapter 6. And so I’m going to ask you to do that now. And as you’re turning to it, let me say two things.

First of all, many of you will know that at the end of Peter’s second letter, he mentions that Paul wrote with the wisdom that God gave him and says of Paul in 2 Peter 3:16 that “his letters contain some things that are hard to understand.” And I was reading that again this week, and I was thinking that if I have the chance to speak to Peter one day, I’m going to say to him, “You should talk!” Because these most recent verses that we’re involved with are not exactly the easiest to understand. And so we turn to Paul for some help by way of clarification.

The attitude to which he refers, the attitude of Christ, or the guiding conviction of Christ—we’re still in 4:1 for the moment—Christ’s attitude was simply that death issues in life and that as he would be buried in death, immediately his spirit would be quickened and made alive, as we’ve discovered, and he would be vanquishing the powers of darkness. And that same attitude, that same picture, says Peter, is to be part and parcel of the Christian’s life, to face the paradox head-on: that the way to up is down, that the way to life is through death, and that it is in the end of ourselves that we come to the beginning of ourselves—that it is in facing our need that we find God’s great supply.

And when you think of that in relation to what Paul teaches concerning baptism here in Romans 6, I think it will fall into line for you. It certainly will reward your further study if it’s not immediately apparent. Let me read for you these first six verses as you have them open before you.

Paul has just outlined the great doctrine of justification by faith. He has explained that a man or a woman may be redeemed as a result of grace through faith plus nothing. And he wants to anticipate the notion which will come inevitably. Some bright spark will say, “If what you’re telling me, Paul, about justification by faith is true—namely, that as a result of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, all my sin has been dealt with, past, present, and future—surely, then, what I ought to do is to go out and sin a lot so as to magnify the forgiving grace of God.” Paul wants them to understand that that is as ridiculous a notion as saying that since you married your wife and she’s a very forgiving person, you’re going to wake up in the morning and slap her around the face just to give her an opportunity to show how much she can forgive you. It’s just a very silly, ridiculous idea. “So,” says Paul, “it is a ridiculous notion for someone who has been forgiven so much to go out, then, and to live in disregard for Christ’s sacrifice.” And that’s the framework of what he’s now about to share.

“What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” Why not? Answer: “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” And then he goes on, and he ties the experience of baptism into the reality of conversion, and he says, “Or don’t you know”—and you know in your minds—“that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore,” he says, “buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him … in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.”[3]

The guarantee of one day being resurrected is grounded in the fact that there was a day to which we are able to look back when we died. He is not talking about dying physically now. He is talking about being united with Christ in his death. And so the people who say, “Well, I’ve always been a Christian, you know. Oh, I’ve always believed. I’ve always gone along here, and I went along there, and…” Paul says, “No, you haven’t! You have no guarantee of being resurrected with him unless you can look back to having died with him”—and that peculiarly portrayed, says Paul, in our baptism, where, graphically, we identified in an outward way the reality of what had taken place internally. “For we know,” verse 6, “that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be [rendered powerless], that we should no longer be slaves to sin.” Now, remember, we’ve said often that when we become a Christian, we are no longer enslaved to sin. Sin no longer reigns, but it remains. That’s why we battle. However, he says, “anyone who has died has been freed from sin.” Then he goes on to explain what he means by that: “Now, if we died with Christ,” and so on and so forth.

Now, we don’t have time this morning, nor is it in our orb, to expound the sixth chapter of Romans. One of these days, we’re going to do Romans 5, 6, 7, and 8, because it is foundational to our understanding of the Christian gospel. But for the moment, just flip between Romans 6 and 1 Peter 4, and let me try and give you some words to help you in your grasp of this. I believe that what is being said here, where Peter says, “He who has suffered in his body is done with sin,” is a proverbial expression relating to the whole notion of our being united with Christ in his death, so that by faith portrayed in baptism we were united with Jesus. The death he died to sin became our death, and the benefits of that death and resurrection were then transferred to us.

John Stott puts it so helpfully when he says every Christian’s biography is in two volumes. The Christian biography is in two volumes. Volume 1 covers all of life before that day when we were united with Christ in his death as we came to him in repentance and in faith. Some of us have a long volume 1, with many things in it, converted in adulthood. Some of us have a very slender volume 1, converted in our childhood, and a longer volume 2. But all of us who are genuinely in Christ have a two-volume biography. And the second volume begins on the day when we met Jesus, when we laid hold of his great gift of salvation, when his Spirit was placed within our hearts, when we were adopted into the family of God, where we strode out in obedience to Jesus, when we proceeded to be baptized as an evidence of our commitment and faith, and when we went on, then, out to live our lives. Therefore, whenever we’re tempted to live as per volume 1, we need to take ourselves back to 1 Peter 4:1, which says I have to put on a particular kind of attitude. It’s mentioned in Romans 6:11, if your finger is still in there, where Paul says that what we need to do is to “count [our]selves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

The death Jesus died to sin became our death, and the benefits of that death and resurrection were then transferred to us.

Now, people sometimes say, “I don’t fully understand this. What are we supposed to do, pretend that something is true that isn’t true? Is that what it means?” Well, that’s what it means, of course, if you’ve never come to faith in Jesus Christ. If you’re here this morning, and you’re living by the Sermon on the Mount, and you’re doing the regular routine of Christianity, and somehow sin has a stranglehold on your life, you know no victory, you are constantly under the burden of it, you have no volume 2—it’s all in volume 1—then if you think that what I’m saying to you is “I want you to pretend that you are dead to sin and alive to Jesus Christ,” then that’s not right. Nor is Paul saying that.

Paul’s statement in Romans 6:11, and Peter’s in 1 Peter 4:1, to take this attitude is posited on the fact of the life-changing encounter with Jesus which has introduced us to volume 2. So here I am, and I’m going through my day, and the challenge comes to lose my temper. I have that fifteen-second interlude, that door of opportunity to walk the way of Christ or to walk the way of self. What is the key to victory? Well, sure, it’s the Spirit’s ministry in our lives. He’s the one who gave us the fifteen-second opportunity. He’s the one who brings to our minds the Scriptures. And in that moment, he says, “Reckon yourself a dead man. Don’t do it! Don’t live out of volume 1! You’re in volume 2 now! Arm yourself with the same attitude of Jesus, who saw that life came through death, that victory came through apparent defeat, that power came through evident weakness.”

Now, back in 1 Peter 4, you will see that the word which he uses here—“arm yoursel[f]”—is a doing word. In other words, nobody ever just fell into having the right attitude. Wouldn’t it be super if you could just wake up in the morning, get out on a certain side of the bed, and suddenly everything was hunky-dory? You had the right attitude, you were all volume 2 the whole way, and there was no backtracking at all? But it isn’t like that! At least not in my life it isn’t. So, what do we have to do? Well, we have to arm ourselves.

Do you have a burglar alarm in your house? I don’t. The jolly things go off all the time, it seems to me, and you have to get phoned up everywhere. I suppose sometime they help you, but anytime I’ve stayed in someone’s house, the rotten thing always goes off, scares me half to death; I’m frightened to get up and look around. But anyway… And if you get the privilege of using somebody’s house, they have these long, elaborate instructions, and they always tell you, “Make sure… Now, make sure: do not leave this house without arming the alarm. Otherwise, what’s the point in having it? Got the point?” “I’ll do my best.”

What Peter is saying is exactly this: “Do not start your day, do not walk out into the warfare, without arming yourself with the same attitude of the Lord Jesus Christ—putting it on, wearing it consistently, and making sure that it is in place.”

When a married man, you see, who has a two-part biography as well… And he might have a seven-part biography, but there was a time when he was single, and now there’s a time when he’s married. Volume 1, he was single; volume 2, he got married. When a married man is tempted to live as a single man, let him take his thumb and feel the ring on the fourth finger of his left hand. And let him roll it round his finger and, in doing so, remind himself that this is a symbol of his union with the girl to whom he said he would live forever. Let him roll it round his finger and remind himself that he is no longer single, that he now is radically different, that he has entered into a relationship which means he may never be the same again. Let him remember these things, and then let him live accordingly.

When the born-again Christian is tempted to live as though they were not a born-again Christian, let them handle, as it were, the reality and evidences of their faith symbolized in their baptism—which is, you see, what makes such a nonsense of an “unbaptized Christian.” This whole thing is irrelevant to people who are unbaptized. Because Paul says, “I want you to look back to that day. You came in your old clothes, you took them off, you went down into the water, you came out, they gave you a white coat, and you walked around the streets, and everyone said, ‘Hey, that guy got baptized. That girl got baptized. There’s going to be a difference in her life. There’ll be a difference in him now.’” Did they then do an end run around, over a wee bridge, back over, take off the white thing, put on the old clothes—the prebaptismal clothes? They could. It’d be ridiculous. It would cause confusion. And when the born-again Christian is tempted to live as if they weren’t, let him recall his conversion, sealed in his baptism, and let he or she live accordingly.

Do you get the point? That’s what this is all about here in 1 Peter chapter 4. When the person who has been redeemed by Christ arms themselves with the attitude of Jesus, there is a result which takes place. And you’ll notice what it is: “He does not live”—notice the phrase—“the rest of his earthly life…” There was a previous part, but there has been a crossroads. There was a day where the individual said… And I remember it well when I was baptized as a teenager in Ilkley in Yorkshire. I remember the night. I remember waiting for my turn to come. I remember my heart beating faster and faster. I remember how I was choked as I heard the congregation sing and as I tried to sing along with them the words:

O Jesus, I have promised
To serve thee to the end;
Be thou forever near me,
My [Savior] and my friend;
[I dare not—I need not] fear the battle
[When] thou art by my side,
Nor wander from the pathway
If thou [wouldst] be my guide.[4]

I was sixteen, and God in his grace and in his mercy has kept me the last twenty-two years—and many of you for longer.

And yet the devil comes to you, irrespective of age or spiritual maturity, and he says, “Lay off the armor. Live as though you weren’t. Blow it out. Have some fun. You don’t need to go through with this.” And Peter says, “I’m writing to you”—1 Peter 5:[12]—“that you may know the true grace of God and that you may stand fast in it.”[5] That’s my longing for you as a congregation, for us as a congregation: that you might know the grace of God and that you might stand fast in it; that little children, such as we’ve seen this morning, we may be privileged to see grow through their infancy and into their teenage years, yes, and profess faith in Jesus Christ as a result of the keeping power of God in the lives of moms and dads and those who nurture them. We will never do it but that we’re in the Word and we allow the Word to constrain and control and to guide.

The change in verse 2 is very straightforward. Once we lived responding to the evil desires of our humanity. That doesn’t mean that everything we wanted was bad, but it means that the root of it all was self, and the fruits of it all were ultimately selfish. But now, in Christ, we’ve been given a brand-new software package. Now we live for the pattern established by Jesus. Now we live for the will of God. Once, according to verse 2, we were swept along by a variety of random impulses.

You say, “But I became a Christian when I was ten! I don’t remember all these random impulses. I wish that I had fallen off the back of a bike. I wish I’d been a Hells Angel. Then I would have a decent testimony.” Listen, let me tell you something, young person: if God in his goodness has brought you through a Christian family and has brought you to himself in your youthfulness, thank God for it today. Because the miracle of God’s grace is not simply to save people out of sin, but it is to save people from a life of sin. You don’t have to drink poison bottles to know how bad that stuff is! And if we had been left in our own devices, we would have followed all those random impulses and desires and designs, and the Lord only knows where we might have been if he hadn’t restrained us. But now he has given us a desire to do his will.

What’s the will of God? Well, it’s not a package let down from heaven on a string. It’s not a blue line that you find like in the Cleveland Clinic: here you go to the surgery, and the red one takes you somewhere else. The will of God for us is a scroll which unrolls from day to day. And at the heart of it all, says Paul to the Thessalonian church in 1 Thessalonians 4:3, “it is God’s will that you should be [holy].” So we don’t know anything else about the will of God, we know one thing: that you’re supposed to live a holy life. So we’ll set our stall up in such a way as to allow us to do the same.

The miracle of God’s grace is not simply to save people out of sin, but it is to save people from a life of sin.

Well, in all of this, you will notice how important a Christian mind is. It’s how we think about these things that determines what we are going to do. Ephesians 4. Let me just give you a cross-reference, and we’ll move on. Ephesians 4:22: “You were taught,” says Paul, “with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new…” Notice the next phrase; underline it if you write in your Bible: “to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”

In the process of disciplining children, we know, clearly, that we need to discipline them for actions or for the absence of actions. But we need also to discipline them for attitude. Indeed, in a very real sense, it is in the realm of the attitude far more than in the realm of the action that the attention needs to be taking place. And the same is true in our Christian lives. We can have all the right actions. We can fool one another most of the time. We can be present and correct. We can be attending this and attending that. But we don’t have the right attitude. That’s why Peter says, “If you want to know how to live for God, there is an attitude to be expected.”

An Abuse to Be Expected

Secondly, and with far less embellishment, there is an abuse that is to be expected. He says, “You know, if you start to live like this, it’s not necessarily going to be a bunch of fun.” And the scenario is clear. He’s obviously writing to those who’ve been converted from a pagan background rather than those who have come from the fringes of faith. So, like many of us this morning, he’s writing to people who were once in the swim with people—hence the whole notion of “plunging in” which you find there in the fourth verse. He says, “Once you were happy to go through the list in verse 3, to hang out with the gang. Once you laughed at the same jokes. You shared the same values. You adopted the same lifestyle. But now it’s different.” And so he says, “Recognize that they’ll think it strange you don’t plunge with them into the same flood of dissipation, and they heap abuse on you.”

I was talking with somebody just recently and saying, “How’s business going?” And the person was saying, “Well, it’s really pretty encouraging,” and, as we continued to talk, went on to say, though, that in the whole realm of sales and in the building of relationships, it had actually become somewhat more difficult since coming to faith in Christ rather than before. Now, why would that possibly be? Well, I don’t know. We didn’t pursue it. But I can imagine that if it were me and I was involved, in the volume 1 of my life, there were probably some little tricks that I had up my sleeve that really helped. But since I moved into volume 2, I couldn’t pull ’em out of volume 1 the way I once did, and my friends, who were so used to me playing out of volume 1, are really ticked off that I’m not doing it anymore. So they move their accounts, ’cause now I’ve started to spur their conscience. Now I’ve started to trigger their minds. They think it’s really strange. And they may not do it to our faces, but they will do it behind our backs. They will abuse us.

Now, Peter motivates the readers by reminding them of their past and their present and their future. First of all, their past in verse 3: he says, “You have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do.” It’s almost… I bet if you were writing it, you would write, “You’ve been spending enough time (quite enough time)…” In this phrase, I think, is the statement of the father to his teenaged daughter: “You’ve spent enough time in the bathroom, honey (quite enough time in the bathroom)!” Do you get the picture? So Peter’s saying, “Hey, guys, you’ve spent enough time doing this stuff—especially if you came to Christ at the age of forty and it’s a threescore-year-and-ten shot. You’ve got thirty years left! Goodness me, you’ve used forty years doing this nonsense!” he says. “Now you’ve got thirty years. Let’s go! You’ve spent enough time!”

The dark list of verse 3, which I’m not going to delve into—“what pagans choose to do.” Pagans in every generation choose to do these things. Pagans did them in the first century, and pagans do them in the twentieth century. They were attractive in the first, and they’re attractive in the twentieth. Read 1 Peter 4:3 and realize this, Christian people: that this dark list of pagan living is dressed up in trendy clothes and drives in classy cars and is marketed as a desirable way of life seven days a week in affluent Western culture. We live in a society that is sex-soaked, is materialism-soaked, is idol-soaked. Just stand in the bookstore in the Galleria and allow your eyes to scan the magazines. And once you’ve dealt with Sailing in Connecticut and Woodworking in Boston and a couple of those other things, by and large, you can feast your eyes on a whole display which says, “Hey, hey! You want to live life? Come here. I’ll show you how to do it.” And Peter says in 1 Peter 4:3, “I’m telling you, don’t even start. And don’t play with it if you’re a Christian. You’ve spent enough time there.”

Now, when we’re prepared to stand against the tide, we must also be prepared to be thought of as a weirdo. So verse 4: they’ll “think it strange.” Will you notice something very carefully here? Peter assumes that our non-Christian friends will think it strange that we do not plunge with them into these things. Would you be prepared to think through the possibility that our non-Christian friends think it strange for the very reverse reason? Our non-Christian friends think it strange that we do plunge with them into so many of the things. They know that we have principles. They just expect us to live by them. They know that Christians speak with a different tongue—at least, they’re supposed to. They’re just surprised when we don’t. They know that Christians say with Jesus, “What shall it profit a man [to] gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”[6] And they expect that, somehow, that that’s going to have an impact on our lives. But in a chameleon Christianity—a kind of thermostatically controlled deal whereby we respond to whatever the surrounding environment is and warm it up or cool it down depending on what our preference may be—our non-Christian neighbors are saying, “I don’t know why this guy is so much like me if this transforming power of Jesus is as radical as it might.” They’ll poke fun at our integrity, our purity, the reality for which we stand. They may long for it themselves, but it’s easier to laugh at it.

The vibrancy of Christian faith… And I don’t want to be some prophet of doom for the Western world. I don’t know enough about the Western world to speak with any authority. But I’m just intrigued by what’s coming out of the Eastern Bloc, aren’t you? Here we’ve been for all these years, praying for these poor boys over there behind the Iron Curtain. They’re coming out from behind the Iron Curtain, telling us stories of packed churches, of vibrant prayer meetings, of meaningful evangelism, of life-transforming implications as a result of the renewing power of Jesus Christ. And they can’t wait to get over the Berlin Wall to see how Christianity is really supposed to be lived in the West! And they come out, and they say, “What is this? Can this be Christianity?”

The gospel which is being proclaimed in the West is so convoluted in so many cases that it offers believing in Christ as nothing more than a means to contentment and prosperity, whereas the gospel behind the Iron Curtain was an invitation to have no future, no education, no family, and no freedom. So there was no superficial conversion over there. Nobody’s going to join the club just for the fun of it. Nobody’s going to hang around just to be seen with the group. It’s going to mean that Jesus transforms the life, or there’s nothing. They come over the Wall, and they say, “Goodness gracious me!”

It’s conceivable, loved ones—and, yeah, I know you won’t like to hear this, but it’s okay, ’cause you’re sending missionaries to Britain, and they’re sending a few over here—it is conceivable that if God does not revive the church in the West, unless Christ comes, the next outpouring of missionary zeal will come from the Eastern Bloc and not from the Western world. Because these are the guys who are in touch with God. Who thinks it strange anymore? Very few! Why? ’Cause it’s not very strange.

Well, that’s us done. You say, “Well, there’s another point.” Yes, there is. We’ll come to it again. There is an account to be settled. The tables will be turned; that’s verses 5–6. But we’ll come back, and we’ll pick that up, because I want us to sing a little and to praise God and to respond to his Word.

Let’s just pause in a moment of silence. And just as we prepare to round out our worship by praising God in song, by bringing our offering in response to his love, let’s ask ourselves this morning if there’s a volume 2 in our experience—if there’s been that encounter with Jesus. And if there has, let’s derive encouragement from God’s Word to live in that volume and out of it. Let’s ask ourselves the question: How many of our friends think it strange that we are the way we are because of our testimony? Not that we would go out and try and be strange but that we would just be Christian and allow the difference to be seen. Let’s ask ourselves the question, “With whom can I talk further concerning this study this morning?” so that we can sharpen one another as to its implications in our lives. And let’s, all of us, avoid the potential of believing that because we preached it or heard it, that we did it. And let’s be an encouragement to each other to live for God while the day of opportunity is still there for us. And let’s thank God for those who are an example to us on the path.

Hear our prayer, O God, and let our cry come unto you. And grant that as we offer the worship of our hearts and the gifts of our money, that we may do so in sincerity and in truth. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

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[1] R. Hudson Pope, “Make the Book Live to Me.”

[2] 1 Peter 1:13 (NIV 1984).

[3] Romans 6:1–5 (NIV 1984).

[4] John Ernest Bode, “O Jesus, I Have Promised” (1869).

[5] 1 Peter 5:12 (paraphrased).

[6] Mark 8:36 (KJV).