Since Being Saved (Part B)

This is all true of Him.

Everything that we learn about Him is dependable. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. There's no more after Him, because if you go anywhere past Him, you're just going to find more of Him. He is it.

It's not as though there's a terminus where, okay, then everything stops. No, it's just Him forever. In its final form, the gospel of Jesus Christ is now the Word of God that we have. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of 1 Peter.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Today, Pastor Rick continues his study that he's called Synths Being Saved. This is coming from 1 Peter 1. Faith plus work equals grace because, as Peter says right here, through the Spirit. So let's try to put this in context a little bit now, looking back again at verse 22. Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit, that is what is going on with the Christian life. Insincere love for the brethren. It's so easy to talk about loving the brethren. If it were that easy, he would not have written about it.

He could have just passed on because he could have said to himself, if it were that easy, there's no need to write to Christians, to tell Christians to love Christians. They're going to do that. That's what we do.

I wish, I wish. Seeing that you have purified your hearts, therefore love. Seeing that this one thing is true of you, therefore see if something else is true of you, that you love. Why do so many people fake love? Because they know that it's valuable, otherwise they wouldn't fake it.

By faking it, we admit that we need it. 1 Corinthians 13, verses 1 through 2, we're all familiar with this, we who believe. And incidentally, if you're not a believer, you should be informed that this section, this letter of Peter, this first one is written to believers who are being persecuted for being believers. He doesn't have unbelievers in mind directly, but that does not mean that an unbeliever coming to this passage of scripture is left out. You see, for example, if I were to preach to a room of people who are much more intelligent than I, the whole room, that could be happening right now.

It is funny. I don't have to be as intelligent as you. All I have to do is activate your intelligence to get you to use it in the presence of God.

That's called anointing, to bring the anointing in. It's the same with you. If you have a person, a co-worker or a family member that is more intelligent than you, and you tend to be intimidated, don't be. You've got truth on your side, and all you need to do is activate their intelligence to make contact with the truth.

Now that's not easy, but it is possible. And it happens, otherwise intelligent people would not get saved, and they do. You're looking at one.

Don't look at the guy next to you. 1 Corinthians 13, though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass and a clanging cymbal. Though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

Gasp. God says you're nothing if you don't have the love. How can you say you are a believer?

Having said you believe, therefore let's see it. God says you're not only annoying, but you're nothing without this love that he talks about. We insist that we are saved, but do we do it without love? 1 Peter 4.8, he's going to get back to this, above all things have fervent love for one another, for love will cover a multitude of sins. Love does things that nothing else can do.

Why? What is the thing with this love? Now there's two types of love he's talking about here. Two different words.

Look with me now. He says love one another fervently with a pure heart. Now here, above that, he says in sincere love of the brethren. The first love, in sincere love of the brethren, is phileo. But the second time he uses it, love one another fervently with a pure heart, is agape.

A distinct feature of agape is its source. You see, people that are not saved do not have agape love. They have a common love. They can have love for family, love for profession, love for each other.

They can have romantic love. It's all sorts of love that exists without God. God has ordained this. It's called common grace.

He has allowed certain things to be available even to unbelievers or a society would fall apart. It's common. It's not spiritual.

Agape love comes from him. It is an exotic. It's not like a dandelion that can grow without salvation. It needs care and attention. It needs work.

And it's constantly in need of work. In some senses, because of our flesh, it is the most fragile love. Because someone will irritate us, will offend us. Someone will let us down. Someone will enrage us. And suddenly that love that we've boasted of, we are groping for it.

We can't find it. We get angry with God for allowing us to be in such a corner. And God really doesn't have much to say when we find ourselves there because he said it already all through his word and he wants us now to work it. But it's painful. It's not natural. It's spiritual. So we calibrate our love by what the scripture says, love suffers long and is kind.

How many of you are not kind when you feel offended or moody or whatever else? Your love is gone. The Bible does not give you a pass there.

It is, oh, I didn't know he stepped on your toes. Okay, you don't have to love. Do whatever you want now. Love does not envy. Well, if you were to tell me you are one of the greatest bicycle riders in the world, I would applaud that. If you were to tell me you are one of the greatest pastors in the world, I'd get envious. You see, it's okay.

It's okay for others to be successful as long as they are not more successful than in our sphere. What is precious to us? And so this love takes works so that when I'm standing in a group and someone seems to shine brighter than I do in an area that I should shine brightly in, now I'm sensing envy well up inside of me and not love. And that's got to be dealt with by me.

Nobody can deal with that but me. And praying is not going to really make much of a difference because God is saying, not prayer time, swing the sword time. Now it is time to work. Break out your tools and work.

Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Then what? Work. That's what. So, love suffers long and is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not parade itself, is not puffed up. See somebody proud of themselves, look how much I love. That ain't love. Not agape love. I must add that God is no advocate of half-hearted anything. It comes very easy to all of us, does it not? We start a project, we don't finish it.

Because the thrill is gone, it's harder than what we thought. That's why contracts exist, because of the flesh. But God still does not come along and say, that's okay, I like it. James chapter 1 verse 8, a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. Hosea 7 verse 8, Ephraim has mixed himself amongst the peoples.

That are the unbelievers. Ephraim is a cake, unturned. He's half-baked.

He's done on one side but the other side is raw. He's no good like that. Love serves as evidence of our salvation.

Now that's pretty serious, is it not? What if you were to say, I'm a Christian, and you don't love anybody the Christian way. God comes along and says, no you're not. Then what happens?

You better scramble to fix that. John 13, 35, by this all will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. You know, I can preach a good sermon like I'm preaching right now, incidentally.

I don't have pride, I just, you know, truthful. I could, a man could stand in a pulpit and preach a wonderful sermon, and at the end of the sermon at the greeting line, somebody come and say some loveless things to him nonetheless. It is a bizarre thing! And it happens!

And you can't pop them in the back of their head as they're walking by, though you might want to. So how do we account for this? How do people sit under sermons about love and get up and 30 seconds later not do it? Because the war is on.

And we're very serious. 1 John chapter 3, when we get to 1 John, John, you know a subtitle for John's first letter? The Paddle of the Apostle. Because he's going to beat the snot out of everybody who's wrong. And he's right for doing it. 1 John 3, 14, we know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death.

That's pretty serious stuff. He's saying you don't have this purification that my brother Peter is talking about. I'm not saying that you have to feel it.

Agape love doesn't care too much about your feelings. It cares about your obedience. Your knowing what right and wrong is and submitting to it and not just acknowledging it.

Without this, without this there can be no repair work. We become self-righteous, high-minded and scorned. Verse 23, having been born again not of corruptible seed but incorruptible through the word of God which lives and abides forever. He says having been born again. You know that's not a common phrase in the Bible. It's a different Greek word than what Jesus uses in John's gospel. Jesus, the words he uses for born again means born from above. Peter uses the word that means born again, begotten again. They're connected.

You can't separate them. Peter is quoting his master. When Jesus spoke, he spoke in the Aramaic, not the Greek. When John wrote, he wrote in the Greek and he put it into the agape. For example, love into the agape phileo but not in the Aramaic. Anyway, I'm going on a rabbit's trail there.

It was fun for me but probably confusing for you. My point is he says you must be born again. Nicodemus was a man of pure religion. Jesus called him the teacher of Israel. Yet Jesus also told him that he was not good enough that way for God.

He's not good enough that you're so religious. You have to be born again. You must be touched by God with new life, spiritual life. 1 Peter chapter 1, the one we're in now, verse 3, blessed be God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who according to his abundant mercy has begotten us again. Same Greek word translated a little differently.

To a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The Bible deals with death and life, misery and victory. He deals with it again, 1 Peter chapter 2, as newborn babes desire pure milk of the word that you may grow thereby. Peter was not raised to be a scholar. He was a fisherman.

He came to read and study when Jesus entered his life. And he always keeps the word in front of us because he knows what happens when that doesn't take place and it's not worth it and it's not good. Not of corruptible seed but incorruptible. This is rebirth produced. Now there are physical laws and there are spiritual laws. And just as there are natural laws that result in being born, there are spiritual laws that result in being born again.

They are available to all who hear the gospel and we are those who are supposed to communicate this. And someone says to you, oh, are you a born again Christian? Ask them, what do you know about being born again except you're not born again? Just ask them that. And then be ready to tell them what it means to be born again because in their head oftentimes they have another image that's not biblical, that's not accurate, and they're sticking that on you and they need help. And the only way they're going to get help is if someone tells them and says, let me tell you what born again means, that you've heard the truth concerning God and man, man's sinful state, his destination, his choices of destination, that Jesus Christ is God the son, the savior of the world, the lover of sinners who died on a cross for them. We lay it out for them and then we give them the choice.

And it's okay to say, are you ready to make a choice now or you want to play around with this? Not of corruptible seed, but incorruptible seed. The corruptible seed is that which is natural which dies.

It does not last forever. It comes from that which dies and it produces that which will eventually die. You put an acorn in the ground and it produces an oak tree. In time that oak tree is going to die.

Oh, it will produce acorns and other oak trees will come, but ultimately they will die too. But this seed of the spirit, it does not die. It's eternal. It's eternal life. It's our salvation through the word of God which lives and abides forever in verse 23, that's where I am. God has preserved his record, which is his will. It is the Bible that the spirit of God uses to make us children of God. Faith again comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.

Go out and preach to the world making disciples of them, teaching them to observe all things that I've said to you. What Satan of course in his hatred towards humanity, he attacks the word of God from the beginning. Has indeed God said? Did God really say that? We get this all the time.

Do we not? Well, I have a problem with the Bible because it was written by men. Well, it should have been written by frogs.

I mean, what are the choices here? And if angels had written it, you'd be coming back saying, well, you know, I have a problem. Angels wrote it. We didn't write it. Men did not write the Bible.

They just copied it down. You see, when God gave the 10 commandments to Moses, he put them on stones. He engraved it on stones and Moses broke the law in his rage. My kind of guy, not my choice. I didn't plan to be this way, messed up.

You too, you didn't plan to be as messed up as you are. Sin has done this to us, but we're fighting back now in Christ. And so when God told Moses, go get two more stones and bring them up and I'll write on those also.

Moses carried those stones. Well, the word of God is men have carried this word through the ages and they kept it up to date in different languages. And the naysayers want God to write a new scroll for every generation every, as often as they decide he should, and it's not going to be that way. But anyway, Satan comes along and says, as indeed God said, and that resulted in failure to obey God's word, which resulted in the first known sin to man and departing from God's word and all the death that has followed in suffering was because of that moment. Verse 24, because all flesh is as grass and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass, the grass withers and the flower falls away. And so here is a contrast between this passing life and the unfading, the unfailing, the imperishable eternal word of God and what that means.

We don't worship the Bible, the God of the Bible we worship. And what he has to say, his word is one with himself. He's illustrating his points through stories. He makes them straight out clear through imperatives. He takes all sorts of steps to communicate to us what he wants and what he does not want. We Christians are not those who should be saying, I don't know what God wants. Maybe you don't know what God wants as far as a, you know, a job offer. You've got to go through that understood. But as far as morality and spirituality, we're not questioning this. I don't know, does God want me to steal this or not?

I really like it. We don't, we're not faced with those kinds of questions. So in this contrast, we are all expendable. We may think that we're not, but in this life we are. He's quoting Isaiah 40 and what he says that he is, is the God of the word, everlasting. His word stands forever. And since Christ is the word of God, this is all true of him.

Everything that we learn about him is dependable. He is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. There's no more after him because if you go anywhere past him, you're just going to find more of him.

He is it. It's not as though there is a terminus where, okay, then everything stops. No, it's just him forever. In its final form, the gospel of Jesus Christ is now the word of God that we have. Verse 25, but the word of Yahweh endures forever. Now this is the word which by the gospel was preached to you. And so this impermanent nature of this world in contrast again to the permanent nature of God's word. One, one great Christian writer wrote this. He said, the more familiar I become with the scriptures, the more I am pleased with the logic of the Bible.

That's something worth thinking about. The more he read the scripture, the more he realized how wonderful it is. So if you've been a Christian for any length of time, let's say a couple of decades, you know that while your reading is going on, so is your life running parallel to it.

And that parallel life for the sake of this illustration is constantly challenging what you're reading. And you are in return constantly fighting it off and not only on defense, but on offense, staying a step ahead of it so that whatever comes your way, you will be ready according to the plans of God. This is how the martyrs have always faced their deaths and their struggles and martyrs have not always died a martyr's death, but they have suffered a martyr's life. Paul said, all those who live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. Well, why is that? How, what do you mean? Because if you're living godly in Christ Jesus, you're sharing the faith and if you share the faith, you're going to take hits. That's how it is. And then you are either going to be shaken in your faith at some point and recover or you're going to be shaken in your faith and be less strong.

This is up to you. No other book in history has been so assaulted by so many rulers and people of influence as the Bible and yet they're dead and gone and it is still here. The word of God, it stands forever. We learn of believers dying than rather turning away from what God has said. Dying, supporting the scriptures, upholding it. The Bible is to die for. And so I close where I started in Revelation chapter six, verse nine. When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar of the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held.

They didn't have to die those deaths. They could have just said, God's word is not trustworthy. God's word is not true. God's word is not dependable. I believed it. I waited for the results from believing it and it didn't work out the way I thought it would.

Therefore, I'm going to abandon it. That's what Judas Iscariot did by the way. See Christ, the Messiah, he realized this is Messiah, but wait, things aren't turning out the way I envisioned them. Maybe I should help them along. Whatever his story was, he became a betrayer of Jesus Christ and Jesus said it would be better if that man wasn't born, but he was.

These died upholding what Peter and all those of the scripture repeated after hearing it from God and it has been preserved and we have it to this day. And so the challenge for us is, well, you say you're a Christian. Next time you feel yourself not loving, force yourself. That's how you do it. You have to storm the gates. They're not going to just, oh, here comes those Christian soldiers. Let's just open the gates and let them in.

That's your flesh. It's not going to just lie down and let you take over. We're going to have to storm it. Now, after I've preached to you, I don't have to do anymore. I can just let you go out and suffer through these things and I can be a big fat hypocrite. May it never be so. I have to fight just like you.

Sometimes you may see, you know, it doesn't look like he's fighting too good. Well, you know, on the inside, we're full out war. We're so glad you tuned in today to study the book of First Peter on Cross Reference Radio. Cross Reference Radio is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. And we're blessed to bring you God's word with each broadcast. If you'd like more information about this program or want to listen to additional teachings from Pastor Rick, please visit our website crossreferenceradio.com. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never have to miss a program. Just search for Cross Reference Radio in iTunes, Google Play Music or your favorite podcast app. We hope you'll tune in again next time to join us as we continue our study through the scriptures right here on Cross Reference Radio.