The Enduring Word

The church must come back to confidence in God's way of doing God's work because the Bible does give us a blueprint for generating spiritual growth among the people of God. It is a blueprint that God guarantees will not be fruitless because in the first instance it is to be accomplished by the method of proclaiming the Word of God. It can be sad when you look at best-selling Christian books, books promising the secret to spiritual growth or church growth, when in reality the answer to those questions isn't a secret, and it's the same answer as it was yesterday and two thousand years ago.

And that's what R.C. Sproul will consider on this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. We're in a short sermon series in First Peter on Sundays, sermons preached by Dr. Sproul at St. Andrew's Chapel in Sanford, Florida. These sermons form the basis of his expositional commentary series and today only you can request the hardcover edition of his commentary on First and Second Peter when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Thank you for helping further the proclamation of God's enduring Word with your generosity.

Open your Bible to First Peter chapter 1 because here's Dr. Sproul in verse 22. Take a little quick poll before I look at the text before us. Let me ask this question. How many of you people take advantage of reading Table Talk magazine? Let me see those hands. Please get them up there high. And at the bottom of each page there's a section. And what's that section called?

Coram Deo. And literally the term means before the face of God. I remember the first time I ever had to preach in the presence of my mentor, Dr. John Gerstner. I was completely intimidated. I did not want him present in the congregation.

I was exceedingly nervous about it, and I let him know that I really didn't enjoy having him there. And he said, why not? And I said, because preaching in front of you is exceedingly daunting. I'm afraid I'm going to make some theological blunder, some exegetical error, and bring shame and embarrassment and bring shame and embarrassment to myself and to the church. And he said, I don't understand why my presence would be so intimidating to you when you preach. Don't you know that every time you preach, you preach before the face of God? Why should you find it daunting to preach in the presence of men when God listens to every word that you say?

He who has ears to hear, let him not hide his head. But what Peter has been saying is that he calls us to be aware of living our life before the face of God. And Coram Deo includes within it not only the idea of living before the face of God, but under the sovereignty of God and living to the glory of God, before His face, under His authority, and to His glory. Now, if that doesn't capture the essence of the Christian life, I don't know what does. So Peter continues his discussion of these things in verse 22 when he says, since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, comma.

And before we even get to that comma, there is much that is written here for our consideration. Verse 22 begins with sort of a strange statement. Peter says, since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth, he indicates that our souls are purified through obedience. And yet the reason why we fail to give God due obedience is because our souls are not yet purified. And the striking thing to me is that I usually think of the purification of the soul that it would take place so that we would obey God. So the purification is unto obedience. But here, strikingly, the Apostle tells us that purification is not only unto obedience, but it takes place by obedience. You see, the more our souls are involved in obedience, the greater the purification occurs. And the greater our souls are purified, or purified, the greater our obedience will be.

This is not what is called a vicious circle, but this is a glorious circle where obedience feeds purification and symbiotically purification feeds obedience. I remind you of some of the things that we learned before in our study of Romans, that this concept of obedience is exceedingly important to the message of the New Testament. And so many times after I read the Scripture, I will quote the words of Jesus in which He said, He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Elsewhere the New Testament tells us that we are to be doers of the Word and not hearers only. And I think I mentioned to you in our study of Romans that there's something of a play on words in the Greek between the verb to hear and the verb to obey. The verb to hear in Greek is the verb akouein. We get the English word acoustics from that Greek word akouein. And the word or the verb that means to obey is the Greek word houpo akouein.

And you may notice the similar root in both of those Greek words. The second word, to obey, simply repeats the verb to hear and attaches with it the prefatory word houpo, and that word houpo comes into the English language by the prefix that we prefix that we use that means hyper. We have children who are active.

We have children who are hyperactive. That means they are active to a higher degree than others or than that which is normal. And so in the Greek the word to obey simply means hyper-hearing. That is hearing beyond the simple sensory experience of having sound strike our auditory nerves and is processed by the brain in such a way as that we hear something. But the hearing that God wants from His people, the hearing that Christ said if you have ears to hear, He means that you may hear it not only in the eardrum but in the ears of your soul. So that hearing brings change to our lives which is manifested in obedience. Now here this obeying that which Peter speaks is obeying the truth. We've talked many times about the alienation that our culture has today against the very idea of objective truth, and this antipathy or allergy against objective truth, dear friends, is rooted and grounded in fallen humanity's fundamental hostility to truth itself. People do not want truth to be objective. People do not want truth to be binding upon our consciences because by nature truth is our enemy, and we do not want to submit to it. Or as Peter speaks here, we do not want to obey the truth. The tragedy of fallen humanity is that we tend to give ourselves to obedience to the lie, to that which is false. But the purification of our soul comes in obeying the truth. It's not enough simply to hear the truth. It's not enough even to recite the truth of the creeds. It's not enough to affirm our agreement with the propositions of the truth. But what Peter is talking about here is the next step, the deeper step, and that's obeying the truth.

How does that happen? It happens through the Spirit. Again, Peter is speaking here of that process of growth and development in the Christian life that we call sanctification. Which sanctification is dependent upon the operation and energizing influence of God the Holy Spirit in our lives?

I will never obey the truth of God apart from the power and the grace and the assistance of God the Holy Spirit. And again, we're living in strange times in terms of how the church functions. We have been caught up with a fierce desire to find a way to relate to this culture, this crazy world out there that has been immunized to Christianity. We're trying to find new ways, new methods to reach the lost, and that motivation is a righteous one because we should have compassion for the lost. We should have a zeal for reaching the lost. The danger is when we ask the lost how they want to come into the kingdom of God, how they want to worship God, and how they want to hear the Word of God and then tailor our strategy and our method to their tastes and their preferences.

Dear friends, that's fatal. And sooner or later, the church must come back to confidence in God's way of doing God's work because the Bible does give us a blueprint for evangelism. It gives us a blueprint for reaching the lost, and it gives us a blueprint for generating spiritual growth among the people of God.

And that blueprint is not a matter of rocket science or of Madison Avenue technology. It is a blueprint that God guarantees will not be fruitless because in the first instance it is to be accomplished by the method of proclaiming the Word of God. Because as Peter is spelling it out for us here, that power that changes lives, that power that purifies the soul is the power of God the Holy Spirit working in and through the Word of God.

And God has established a church, a fellowship and communion of believers to gather for mutual support and edification and encouragement, to be a group of people who in their assembly experience an extraordinary kind of love, which we'll look at here in just a moment, and that that grace that comes through in just a moment and that that grace that comes through the preaching of the Word is confirmed by the sacraments that Christ has given to His church and strengthened by the discipline of prayer, personal and corporate. Whatever else we try to do to make the message attractive to a fallen world, we must never, ever, ever negotiate those fundamental biblical methods of worship and of preaching, of evangelism, and of spiritual growth. Again, I want to plead with you that the constituent nature of human beings has not changed with Generation X or with the Baby Boomers. Television changes culture.

Technology changes the way that we do things. But the fundamental constituent nature of your humanity remains the same as it was when God created Adam and Eve, that the way to the heart is through the mind. And mindless Christianity never really produces the purification of the soul. The purification of the soul comes through obeying the truth of the Word of God through the Spirit of God. There aren't any substitutes for that.

There aren't any shortcuts. There's no such thing as sanctification in three easy lessons. Our souls are purified in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren. Love one another fervently with a pure heart. Notice that Peter has mentioned our souls being purified, and now he speaks of love that is fervent accompanied by a heart that is pure.

Pure souls, pure heart, sincere and fervent love. Now again, the Apostle is speaking here of an extraordinary kind of love. It is true that the great commandment is to love the Lord our God with all of our mind and strength and soul, and the second is added unto it that we must love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. And the neighbor there in the great commandment is not simply somebody that lives next door to you. It's not somebody that's simply in your own class or in your own group or in your own community. You remember when the Pharisees came to Jesus and put Him to the test on that, and He said, Well, who is our neighbor? And how did Jesus answer that?

Who is your neighbor? A man went down from Jericho and fell among thieves. He was robbed.

He was beaten. He was left by the roadside for dead. And then we see the clergy coming through in a hurry to do their spiritual labor. They noticed the plight of this poor man who had gone on the road to Jericho, maybe whispered a prayer for them, said, God bless you, hurried on their way. It didn't even bother to go across the street, or when they did go across the street, not to have to come into immediate contact with this poor soul.

And you know the rest of the story. It's the hated, the despised Samaritan with whom the Jews had no dealings, who stopped, bound up the man's wounds, took him to the innkeeper, found a place for him to have continued care, paid the bill to the innkeeper for this man who had been beaten. And Jesus said, You want to know who your neighbor is? Who was the neighbor in this parable?

And He could have simply not even given a parable. He could have said, I'll tell you who your neighbor is, everybody. Every single person that you ever meet is your neighbor, and we are called to love our neighbor.

Now let me just qualify that. When we're called to love our neighbor, that means we're called to love the most obnoxious pagan people in the world. But what that means is chiefly a verb rather than a noun. It means to be loving, to treat these people with care and with kindness and with patience, as the good Samaritan did. It has very little to do in that context with feelings of great warmth and affection. To love your neighbor means to be loving to your neighbor, not necessarily that your hearts are filled with personal affection for them.

But when you get beyond the neighborhood to the brotherhood, everything changes. Now the love of the brethren is one that is to be done fervently with a pure heart. But Peter has now called our attention to our adoption into the family of God. And just as we have a special commitment and loyalty to people in our families according to the flesh, we are to have that same kind of fervent love for our family in the Spirit, our brothers and sisters in Christ. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you have love one for another. Behold, how they loved one another.

That's the impression that we should make on the watching world. They look at us and they say, I can't believe those people over there at St. Andrew's. You can't get one of them to speak ugly about another one. They're so protective. They must be hypocrites because they don't even see the blemishes that we can all see. They stick up for each other.

They guard each other. They cherish each other because their love is fervent. And the love that they have comes from a pure heart.

Now that's not natural, not at all. And Peter reminds us of that here when he says, we love one another fervently with a pure heart, having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible through the Word of God which lives and abides forever. The reason why we have the ability, the capacity for this kind of brotherly and sisterly love in the body of Christ is because God has changed our hearts. He's caused us to be born anew so that what is not natural can be accomplished by the supernatural work that God has performed upon our hearts. Again, if you need a quick and simple definition of regeneration or rebirth, it is the result of the immediate, that is without any secondary means, the immediate work of God the Holy Spirit upon the human soul by which that soul was once dead to the things of God, whose heart was a heart of stone, has now been quickened to new life by the power of God the Holy Spirit.

That was R.C. Sproul on this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, preaching from 1 Peter chapter 1. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham, and it's good to have you with us. Do you know the good news, the gospel? If you're unsure, visit renewingyourmind.org slash gospel and download a free e-book from R.C. Sproul to help you understand the gospel message and also to help you as you share that message with others. That address again is renewingyourmind.org slash gospel.

R.C. Sproul spoke of the enduring Word of God today, and if you'd like to dig deeper into God's Word, specifically into 1 and 2 Peter, you can request Dr. Sproul's expositional commentary on both of those letters when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you click the link in the podcast show notes. Use this commentary to aid you in your study and in your devotional reading, but be quick to request your copy as this offer ends at midnight. Next Sunday, R.C. Sproul continues his sermon series in 1 Peter, so be sure to join us then here on Renewing Your Mind. you