New Life, New Lifestyle

Good morning. I just realized, listening to the Bible reading, that I’m using the ESV, and the reading, I think, was in the NIV. And so I apologize if I got the wrong version here, but I’m stuck with it for now.

It’s good for us to pray before we turn to the Bible. I use the collect:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners. Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise, that among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Well, Luther on one occasion said of this letter, this little letter contains virtually everything that a Christian needs to know. And I don’t think we would want to argue against that in any way. And even in talking with a few people in the last day or two, it’s interesting how often the letter of 1 Peter is used in the encouragement of young Christians. And, as I mentioned last night, that has been part of my background too.

In verses 1–12, which we struggled through last evening, you will have noticed, I hope, that there are no exhortations. There are no commands. There are no imperatives at all. Peter is not calling for his readers to do anything, at least not until he tells them what they need to know. We understand from school that an imperative is an exhortation to do a certain thing, and the indicatives, in New Testament or in biblical contexts, are the reminder to us of what God has done for us in Jesus—so that he has taken the opening part of his letter to remind us all of who we are in the Lord Jesus Christ.

He doesn’t begin as many a young pastor will often begin. I say it to my own shame. As I think back on the early years of life in pulpit ministry, there was about my approach something that was far more hortatory (or hortatory), exhorting, like, “Come on! Let’s get going! Get moving! What are you people doing?” That kind of thing—which took me a long time and listening to my wife to realize that that’s not actually the way to see things moving ahead.

And Peter, if I’d learned from him, I would have understood this: that Peter hasn’t begun his letter by directing the reader’s activity, but rather, he begins the letter by defining the reader’s identity. And that’s why these opening verses are so important: that they understand that they’ve been chosen by God the Father, that they’ve been cleansed by the blood of Jesus, and that they are being sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

So it is vital for us—vital for them and vital for us—to know who we are and to know, at the same time, whose we are. The question of identity is a fairly topical subject in sociological terms and in different ways. Young people are often wondering what their identity really is, where they fit, and so on. And it’s a wonderfully liberating thing when somebody comes to an understanding of the gospel, just as we heard earlier from the lady: that she went to the church, and she heard the truth, and she discovered that her identity was not something that she was going to have to establish for herself or would be discovered on a performance basis, but rather, her identity was to be found in the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is a wonderfully liberating truth.

Vital to know not only who we are but whose we are, and at the same time vital to understand what it is that God is doing with us. Why has he redeemed us? Why have these people, scattered throughout this region in modern Turkey, been placed where they are? And what is God doing with them while they’re there?

If you recall, in C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, he mentions this notion when he says—and I quote—“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild the house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He[’s] doing.” He’s making basic repairs. But then the stones start to be broken, and pieces of furniture are moved around in a way that “hurts abominably” and doesn’t make any sense. What is the explanation? Well, he says, “you thought that you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace” in which “He intends to come and live [by] Himself.”[1]

And so, what Peter is reminding us of is something that runs the whole way through the Bible and particularly through the New Testament. We could actually say to one another this morning with great confidence—turn to the person to your right or on your left and say—“I know exactly what God is doing with you.” And they could say, “And I know what he’s doing with you.” Because whatever else he’s doing, he’s doing the same thing in every one of us. And what is that? Romans 8:29: Those he predestined, they were chosen in order that they might be conformed to the image of his Son. In other words, he’s making us like Jesus.

When Paul writes to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 3, he talks about the amazing glory in all of this, and he says, “And we … are being transformed into”[2] his likeness. So God’s eternal purpose is to make us like his Son. The existential reality of it, in the journey of our lives, is in the fulfillment of that. And, if you like, eschatologically, it will be completed, as John says in 1 John 3: When we see him, we will be like him.[3]

Now, it is to these gospel truths that Peter turns. And he does so in such a way that these gospel truths may galvanize the thinking of those who are reading his letter. You will notice that the terminology… Incidentally, I should say about that outline: If you don’t like that outline, make your own outline. I’m sure there is a far better one than what I produced. Because I had to do it in, like—I don’t know when it was. I didn’t like it then, and when I saw it last night, I didn’t like it even more. And so, do not hold me to this outline. I may change it entirely and hopefully to our benefit.

But anyway, that being said, you will notice that although it appears in the outline as an imperative, about “Prepare your mind,” in actual fact, you will notice that the verb in verse 13, “preparing your [mind]” and “being sober-minded,” is a present participle. So in other words, the framework in which all of this is going, now, to be worked out is in the context of the fact that he’s assuming that those to whom he writes are, in the King James Version, girding up the loins of their minds. Don’t you miss the King James Version? I remember as a boy wondering, “I wonder if I have those things, to do that with them.” I said to my dad, “What do we do with this?” But anyway, it’s a Middle Eastern picture, isn’t it? All those robes and things, like Scottish kilts. And if you’re going to make any progress at all, you have to pull them up and tuck them into your belt, because otherwise, they will impede your progress. And so Peter is encouraging these folks to take action along this line, and he says it is vitally important that we think things out in this way.

It’s been costly for Peter to think in those terms, I’m sure. Because, after all, he had been told to “watch and pray,”[4] to prepare his mind, to be ready for action, and he had floundered in that. And now, having been gloriously restored at that wonderful barbecue on the beach,[5] he now writes to them to encourage them not to go down that same path.

When we think of this and we think about it in terms of progress and in terms of runners, it’s interesting: When you meet a runner, they run. There are other people who pretend to run. They are more what I call stragglers, stumblers. I speak out of personal experience concerning this. Every so often, you see somebody going along; you say, “Oh! That’s what I was trying to do.”

And years ago, in the YMCA building in Kowloon in Hong Kong, I had gone upstairs in a momentary act of self-abnegation to try and do some exercise. And I was on a treadmill. It was high up in the building. You could see right over the harbor. And as I got on the treadmill, I was immediately far more concerned about the beautiful view than the progress on the treadmill. Very quickly, somebody came along beside me—a young lady who looked like she really meant business. And she began to make noises with the thing that I never even knew could be made. And so, seeking to be congenial, I started to say things to her, like “That’s quite a harbor.” Zero response. I said, “I love those little ferries.” Zero response. “Is this a regular activity for you?” No response. And then, out of the blue, she just said one word: “Concentrate!” “Concentrate! Act like you mean business! Are you playing with this machinery here, or are you concerned to make progress?”

It all matters in the mind. For as a man thinketh, as a person thinketh, so they are[6]—Proverbs 23. Our minds matter. We remember that from the good book by John Stott.[7] If we went to the right kind of Sunday school, then our teachers made this clear as well. It’s all going to start in the very core of your thinking. Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny. But it all starts in the mind. “Preparing your minds for action, … being sober-minded [in your thinking]”—now comes the first imperative—“set your hope fully…” “Fully.” Not casually, not intermittently, not haphazardly, but completely, entirely.

In other words—and I was thinking this morning as I was going over this: If you created an imaginary conversation between the apostle Paul and the apostle Peter, that they were talking about “What have you been writing lately?” the way people do, and he said, “Well, I’m writing a letter at the moment,” and he explains, “I wanted to make sure that people understood their identity, and so I wanted to exhort them in this way”; and Paul said, “Well, that’s very similar, ’cause I actually took a long time with the indicatives, and I got to chapter 12 of a letter that I wrote to Rome, and I actually was applying it in much the same way as yourself. In fact, when on another occasion,” says Paul in this imaginary conversation, “I was writing to my young lieutenant, Timothy, I said to him, ‘It’s an imperative, Timothy, that you aim for God’s approval, that you study to show yourself approved to God—approved to God, a workman that doesn’t need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.’”[8] And that is the recurring emphasis as Peter continues through this.

Another way of thinking about it, perhaps, is this: I have a mechanism on my iPad that I travel with. It’s called ForeFlight, and it’s the same mechanism that is used by the pilots up front in the plane. Some of you will know this. It doesn’t let me interfere with anything, you should be… But it does tell me when we’re entering such and such a runway and when we’re transitioning and so on. It gives me altitude, climb; it gives me speed; it gives me all kinds of things. But it doesn’t allow me to clock into the various points along the way. Because in the process from wherever it is to wherever it is, it’s not just one long line. There is a constant moment where they check in: “Checking in with you now in Chicago Center,” “Checking in with you now in Des Moines,” or “Checking in with you on route to Perth”—whatever it might be. And all those points along the way are in order to safeguard that the progress that is being made is identifiable and is safe.

When you think about the journey of the Christian life, the journey of a life under God, you realize how vitally important those pinpoint places are—the checkpoint places and the checkpoint people. Peter understood it for himself, and when you read of the stories of the Old Testament, you read it’s perfectly obvious. For example, when we are introduced to the whiz kid Uzziah in 2 Chronicles, he can do just about everything, it would seem. And the Chronicler tells us that at the beginning of his life, as a young man, “he set himself to seek God in the days of Zechariah,” who introduced him to the fear of the Lord.[9]

Now, the phraseology is important: “He set himself” to it. He decided, presumably. Zechariah must have said to him, “You know, maybe we could have coffee on a Tuesday morning at ten o’clock, and we could talk about things,” and he said, “That would be tremendously helpful.” But there came a day when he decided he’d move beyond that. This was no longer a check-in point for him. And you know how this story ends: He was gloriously helped until he became strong; but when he became strong, he grew proud, to his own destruction[10]—so that the great beginnings of life need to be followed on as we continually set our hopes “fully.”

I think as I listen to the Bible being read, the Lord’s Prayer being said, concerning the Belgian Congo, it made me think there just for a moment of Helen Roseveare. And I think Helen perhaps came to this conference or something like it in Australia here. And I remember her speaking in a Scottish conference, and she said, “I want to talk about ‘one thing.’” And then she gave this little talk, said, “One thing I know: Once I was blind, but now I can see.[11] One thing I desire: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord amongst the community of God’s people to the very end of my life.[12] And one thing I do: Forgetting what lies behind, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God is calling me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”[13]

Now, all of that under that first or second heading (I’ve forgotten): “Set your hope fully…”

Next to notice: “Be holy in all your conduct.” “Holy in all your conduct.” Now, again, let’s not forget that the indicatives underlie this imperative call. We are to become holy because we are holy, in the sense that, in verse 2 at the very beginning, we are sanctified—that we have been, in Christ, immediately set apart; that our justification is not helped by our sanctification, but God does not justify those whom he doesn’t sanctify.

And in the past, our lives were marked by a certain way. He refers to it here in verse 14: “Do[n’t] be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance,” but now you are “obedient children.” By nature, we’re the sons and daughters of disobedience[14]—Ephesians 2. And once again, the exhortation here is absolutely clear, and it is comprehensive: “But as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct.”

Now, we move in circles where we are quite happy to articulate what Peter has articulated concerning the doctrine of election. And rightly understood, the doctrine of election never, ever leads to moral carelessness. That accusation is often leveled against it, but the logic of election—that God has loved us from eternity, has chosen us in Christ—the logic from election is not “I am elect, I’ve been chosen for salvation, so I can live any way I please,” but “I have been chosen for salvation, and therefore, I will live in the way that pleases God”—that the evidence, the ground of our salvation is in the work of Christ; part of the evidence is in our continuance in the gospel itself. “Strive for … holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”[15]

Holiness is a big subject, isn’t it? We sang those hymns to begin—and I’ve enjoyed the singing, both last night and today. I’m sure you have too. But they focus our minds as they need to be focused: “Lord God almighty, you are intrinsically holy. It is your very character. And you want us to become increasingly like you. You’re going to have to do this, and we’re going to seek to do our best as we work out our own salvation.”

Rightly understood, the doctrine of election never, ever leads to moral carelessness.

Most of the time, when we think about holiness, we think immediately of separation, which, of course, is accurate. We think often about clothing, especially when we think immediately about conduct—and he is addressing conduct: “holy in all your conduct.” So it’s going to be expressed in a lifestyle. But again, in my Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, holiness is kind of scary. And I say that because my parents would have ministers to our home for Sunday lunch. And usually they left me on the couch by myself with one of these men. And they would say things to me like “Aye, son, maybe one day you will be a minister!” And I’d go through to my mother; I’d say, “Take the man away from me!” He had nose hairs that would scare you, and it was… He was a holy man. “Is it like that? Do I get one of those suits? What am I supposed to be? I want to be a holy boy for Jesus. What’s that about?” It’s about your heart. It’s about devotion. Holiness is actually that things have been set apart—utensils, people, places—taken for the express use of God, set apart. And now we are to become that which we have been set apart to become. And devotion actually is at the heart of it all.

Ferguson says there is a “love that flows within the being of God, among and between … the Father, [the] Son, and [the] Holy Spirit. It is the sheer intensity of that devotion,” within the Godhead, “that causes [the] seraphim … to veil their faces.”[16] What is happening here, in this intrinsic, eternal love that is expressed in the absolute perfection of the Trinity itself? Devoted to a special purpose; withheld from, in some senses, ordinary use; entrusted to be treated with special care.

When Paul writes about marriage, he says it’s really a metaphor of Christ and the church.[17] And the covenant of marriage is very helpful in thinking about the way in which our conduct would be expressive of a genuine moral desire for orthodoxy and propensity for righteousness. But at the heart of that has got to be devotion. A faithfulness to your husband or to your wife is not by means of a legal enactment. There is a legal dimension, but the thing that keeps you is devotion. Devotion.

And if you don’t do it here in Australia, then you can just do it by coming and taking in some of the country songs from the United States. They’ll help you with this:

Oh, baby, I’m gonna love you forever,
Forever and ever, amen.
As long as old men sit and talk about the weather,
As long as old women sit and talk about old men,
Honey, honey, I’m gonna to love you forever.
If you wonder how long I’ll be faithful,
I’ll be happy to tell you again.
’Cause I’m gonna love you forever,
Forever and ever, amen.[18]

Beloved, what kind of love is this, that exists within God himself and then is worked out by the Holy Spirit in us? You say, “That was a silly song. I don’t know why you brought that up.” I just brought it up so that somebody could say that, and then you could mention it to me.

Let’s go from that silly song, or okay song, to my baptismal hymn. I’m fifteen years old. I’m in Yorkshire, England, and it’s now my turn to go forward. And the hymn that is being sung goes like this:

O Jesus, I have promised
To serve thee to the end;
Be thou forever near me,
My Master and my Friend.
I [need] not fear the battle
When [you are] by my side
Nor wander from the pathway
If [you will] be my guide.[19]

Peter lived this reality, and if you are in Christ this morning, you’re in process of living it as well.

In verse 17, we are at the same time to “live … in reverent fear.”[20] “Live … in reverent fear.” And he comes back again to the fact that they are living in an alien world “as you work through this time,” he says, “of your exile and live in reverent fear before God, whom you call as your Father.”

One of the things I’ve noticed when people become Christians, men that I’ve known: They begin to speak to God in a way that they never spoke of him before. Sometimes, on the golf course, they said things that they shouldn’t have said. But even when they spoke about God, they refer to him as “God.” And then they began to talk about him as “Father”: “I spoke to my Father this morning,” or “My Father’s word to me today was this.”

You see, this is an indication of what God has done. There is an awesomeness about it. There is an understanding that comes to the heart of the person—that when the psalmist says, “Come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!”[21] it makes perfect sense to us now. Because before, we never knew this to be the case. Now, by the work of the Holy Spirit, adopted into his family, we’re able to “cry, ‘Abba! Father!’”[22] I’m not sure that that “Abba! Father!” is a declaration of peculiar intensity and devotion. I think my experiences of “Abba!” are when I’ve found myself up against things in such a way that when I bow before God in prayer, sometimes all I can actually say is “Abba? Father?” But, you see, that’s the cry of a child. That’s the cry of someone who is part of the family. That’s not a theological construct. That is a living relationship.

And what has God done? Well, he’s “ransomed” us—“ransomed” us from our foolish ways, the things that we’ve inherited from our forefathers. This actually plays into the whole question of “Was it a largely Jewish congregation or a gentile congregation?” And I imagine that the pastor would say to the Jewish believers, “Make sure that you fill our gentile friends in on the background of the Passover and so on. And then, you gentile people, be very obvious in the way you explain to your friends what it meant for you to live without hope and without God in the world and without the covenants and without the promises and without anything at all.”[23] Because, after all, all of us have been brought out of a lifestyle that is actually “futile.” “Futile.”

You know, the futility of life, the cultural environment in which we live at the present time, is one of the greatest opportunities for evangelism. I’ve found that it is quite amazing how quickly people are prepared to immediately acknowledge that our world is broken. They’re not prepared to decide just why it is broken, but it’s not difficult for somebody to say, “Yes, we’re in a dreadful mess. I’m not sure what we should do at all.” Well, you don’t have to go just to the pages of yesterday. You go back through life, and you find again and again, because of the nature of man, that we are the living evidence of what Paul writes in Romans 1: that behind a facade of wisdom, we’ve become foolish people. We exchanged the glory of God for things that creep and crawl and fly.[24] We’re more concerned about an environmental structure than we are about the moral realities of our souls.

Gauguin, who… I know very little about running, and I know very little about modern art, and Impressionist art particularly. But I do know that Gauguin has his largest painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It’s memorable for one reason, mainly. I don’t like his paintings, but it’s memorable. But he wrote on his painting. He didn’t normally write on his paintings. But if you go there, you will see that up on the corner, he wrote three questions. Gauguin was raised as a Roman Catholic. He was catechized. He moved down into the islands and lived a profligate existence and ended in death prematurely as a result of his profligacy. On the corner of his paintings he wrote, one, D’où Venons Nous (“Where do we come from?”), Que Sommes Nous (“What are we?”), Où Allons Nous (“Where are we going?”).

And he had no answer for the questions. The people who ride the bus with us, the folks that we’re going speak to—whether it’s in Spain or Zambia or Cleveland, Ohio, or Glasgow, Scotland, or wherever else it is—are men and woman made in the image of God, made by God for God to know God, love God, and serve God. But they don’t. And they need to come into contact with the good news that has been given to us in order that all the world might come to know Jesus.

The futility of life, the cultural environment in which we live at the present time, is one of the greatest opportunities for evangelism.

We can’t delay on this; we must proceed. But the present generation, at least where I live—the present generation, the folks who spend inordinate amount of time on their cell phones to find out whether they’re being liked or not being liked—they have actually swallowed three basic lies. Lie one: There is no creator God. Lie two: There is no absolute morality. And lie three: There is no ultimate truth. That’s where they start from. Do you understand why it is that there is a sense of hopelessness, of a prevailing ennui that is almost debilitating, certainly stultifying?

“Live … in reverent fear.” People say, “Well, I don’t want to fear God.” This is not to fear God in terms of his retributive judgment in relationship to the Christian life. It is simply awe, and it is wonder. Because I think we would agree—isn’t it?—that to fear God is to love God, is to know God, is to serve God. To fear God is to have a heartfelt love for God that emerges from our understanding of who he is and of what he’s done.

Since we’re thinking mission as well, I’m just hearing C. T. Studd in my head. I mean, when this dawned on Studd—the wonder of redemption! And he was a great cricketer, good for England, tons of money, and he does something that is absolutely ridiculous: folds it up and moves out to take the good news to the world. And they said to him, “What are you doing, Studd?” Remember his answer? “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice that I could ever make for him could ever be too great.”[25] And so he folded up his money.

But he held back a significant portion for his wife. His wife found out, and she was annoyed with him. And she said, “Why did you save that money for me?” She said, “Do you think that God can only take care of you, but he can’t take care of me?” She says, “Give the remainder away.” And history records that they gave it to William Booth of the Salvation Army in order that the gospel might be conveyed, in a context very different from the background out of which Studd had come, in all of his affluence.

Two to go: “Love one another earnestly.” So we’re now turning inwardly in this imperative. Our impact on the world that is made on account of genuine gospel communities and relationships is, Jesus told us, absolutely significant. John records it in his Gospel. When he writes his letter, he says, “No one has ever seen God.”[26] But the invisible God becomes visible when people who, by dint of their background, their diversity—by race, by gender, by intellect, cultural status, whatever it might be—when you come in a context where all these people are together, and they actually live with one another; that, in Romans 12 terms, they are seeking to be a competitive congregation.

“Oh, but,” you say, “we’re not supposed to be competitive. We’re supposed to be encouraging.” No, we are supposed to be competitive. You’ll find it in Romans 12: “Outdo one another in showing honor.”[27] “Outdo one another.” It’s a competition to be honorable, so that when people come in, they say, “What is the basis of this at all? What kind of love is this?”

Just trying to read my own notes here. Yeah: He says we have purified our souls in obedience to the truth. He’s speaking about the nature of salvation itself: that God has come and grabbed ahold of us. And we understand that if we love him, we keep his commandments[28]—that the blessings of the gospel are now ours to experience, to share together, and to share with each other so that people who have no knowledge of such a thing may encounter God in that way.

I don’t like that statement, you know, “Preach the gospel all the time; use words if you have to.” It sounds really sort of trendy. But that’s like saying, “Feed people; use food if you have to.” It’s a silly idea—that the word of the gospel is a penetrative word, and it is expressed, then, in word and in the living Word in Christ and in the living word, if you like, of congregations that are on fire for Jesus, so that there’s supposed to be a love that actually weathers storms, that settles conflicts, that overcomes disappointments, that tackles disagreements, and that forgives with sincerity.

Some of you over here will perhaps know of Bill Gaither and the songs that he wrote—sort of Southern gospel songs. And many of them are very singable and good. There is one that goes along the lines of “I’m so glad…” You’re supposed to sing it on a Sunday evening or something to your congregation with each other: “I’m so glad that you’re part of the family of God,”[29] you know? But we don’t do that at our place. No, no, no. We’re not doing that. We changed it to—we sing to one another, “I’m surprised that you’re part of the family of God.” Because I am surprised that I am part of the family of God, that he loved me from eternity, that he marked me out; he made me his own.

So, if we’re going to love one another in that way, we need to realize, too—and I made it an imperative in that outline, which, again, is suspect—but you will notice: “Having purified your souls by obedience to the truth” and so on, “since you have been born again, not of perishable … but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God.” “Through the living and abiding word of God.”

In other words, the Word of God is entirely trustworthy. The life that we know is through that Word. By his Word, God is pleased to bring himself near. “In the beginning was the Word … the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”[30] God steps down into time. In the Upper Room Discourse, and Jesus is speaking about what it means to obey him and to love him, and he says, “And when you live in this experience, the Father and I will make our home with you”[31]—so that by God’s Word, he makes himself present in our lives; so that our reading of Scripture is a direct communication between the living God and those whom he has adopted into his family, as we speak in this context. By his Word, he makes his purposes known. By his Word, he accomplishes the purposes that he has declared.

In fact, I don’t think any of us are here apart from the conviction this morning—the conference wouldn’t exist were it not for the fact that we are committed to this notion—that the Word of God does the work of God by the Spirit of God in the lives of the people of God; that whatever vessel God chooses to use, it is his Word, it is the entrance of his Word, that brings light.[32]

By his Word, God makes his purposes known. By his Word, he accomplishes the purposes that he has declared.

That is why the exhortation of the Scriptures is “Today, if you hear his voice, do[n’t] harden your hearts.”[33] I mean, you could hear my voice, unless you’re deaf. But that’s not the voice. The voice for which we listen is the voice of God through his Word by the Holy Spirit. It is a mysterious thing. It’s why people will come out of a meeting like this, and they say to you afterwards, “It was amazing what you said about such and such,” and I say to myself, “I never said such and such and such and such.” And she said, “Well, that’s what I heard.” I said, “Well, that was good that you heard it, but I never said it.” Well, who said it? Who’s the preacher? Nobody knows how to preach. There’s only one: Jesus himself.

Well, we could unpack the final phrases there. They’re straightforward, and we should draw to a close. The way in which the syntax of the closing sentences there comes across, I’ll just point it out to you. When you get to “The grass withers,” in the original it is “Withers the grass and falls the flower.” That crumbles. “All flesh is like grass, the glory of man like the flower of the field.” You read the obituaries. I read them every day in the London Times—amazing stories, little biographical pieces, some of them great scientists, amazing musicians, and other things, and so on. And the reality of it is that all of that—all of that—is just like the flower or the grass. It’s not irrelevant in time, but it’s largely irrelevant in eternity.

“The word of the Lord remains forever,” and “this word is the good news that was preached to you.” So let me conclude in this way: “Go on up…” “Go on up to a high mountain.” By the way, I love your mountains here. We’ve got bigger mountains than this in Scotland, but that’s by the way.

Go on up to a high mountain,
 O Zion, herald of good news;
lift up your voice with strength.[34]

“Say to the cities of Australia, say to the cities of the world, ‘Behold your God!’”[35] And as you go out to the cities of the world and say that, do so in the awareness of the promise of God.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
 and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
 giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

listen to this:

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
 it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
 and [it] shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.[36]

And for that and more besides we thank God for his grace and his goodness.

Just a moment of silence, I guess, before we discover what happens next.

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952), bk.4, chap. 10.

[2] 2 Corinthians 3:18 (ESV).

[3] See 1 John 3:2.

[4] Matthew 26:41 (ESV),

[5] See John 21:1–13.

[6] See Proverbs 23:7.

[7] See John R. W. Stott, Your Mind Matters: The Place of the Mind in the Christian Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1973).

[8] 2 Timothy 2:15 (paraphrased).

[9] 2 Chronicles 26:5 (ESV).

[10] See 2 Chronicles 26:15–16.

[11] See John 9:25.

[12] See Psalm 27:4.

[13] See Philippians 3:13–14.

[14] See Ephesians 2:2.

[15] Hebrews 12:14 (ESV).

[16] Sinclair B. Ferguson, Devoted to God: Blueprints for Sanctification (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2016), 2.

[17] See Ephesians 5:32.

[18] Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz, “Forever and Ever, Amen” (1987). Lyrics lightly altered.

[19] John Ernest Bode, “O Jesus, I Have Promised” (1868).

[20] 1 Peter 1:17 (NIV).

[21] Psalm 95:6 (ESV).

[22] Romans 8:15 (ESV).

[23] See Ephesians 2:12.

[24] See Romans 1:22–23.

[25] C. T. Studd, quoted in Norman P. Grubb, C. T. Studd: Athlete and Pioneer (Harrisburg, PA: Evangelical Press, 1933), 145. Paraphrased

[26] John 1:18 (ESV).

[27] Romans 12:10 (ESV).

[28] See John 14:15, 1 John 5:3.

[29] Gloria Gaither and William J. Gaither, “The Family of God” (1970). Lyrics lightly altered.

[30] John 1:1 (ESV).

[31] John 14:23 (paraphrased).

[32] See Psalm 119:130.

[33] Psalm 95:7–8; Hebrews 3:7–8, 15; 4:7 (ESV).

[34] Isaiah 40:9 (ESV).

[35] Isaiah 40:9 (paraphrased).

[36] Isaiah 55:10–11 (ESV).