If you want to grow as a Christian, I don't care how long you've been a Christian, it won't happen unless you're nurtured by the Word of God.
There is no substitute for that. And so we are to be people who, having been changed by the power of the Holy Ghost, be people who have a desire within our soul, a hunger and a thirst for the pure milk of the Word. Because Christians have been born again, made alive, our manner of life is different than the world. As you'll hear today, our lives can't help but change direction by God's grace, and that growth in holiness is nurtured by the Word of God. You're listening to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. There are many things that we can feed on as Christians, and in our hyper-connected age, we are inundated with options. But we are to hunger for the pure, unadulterated Word of God, as that is what God the Holy Spirit blesses for our growth. And to aid you in that, if you'd like to go deeper in your study of two New Testament letters, 1 and 2 Peter, you can request R.C. Sproul's Expositional Commentary on both letters, and you can give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.
But be quick, as this offer ends at midnight. The Apostle Peter is reminding his hearers what life in Christ should look like since we've been born again. So open your Bibles to 1 Peter chapter 2, because here's Dr. Sproul. We notice that chapter 2 begins with that word, therefore, that every time we see it, I remind you that it connects a previous argument to a conclusion that follows from that argument. And so if we look back again to the ending of chapter 1, Peter said in verse 22, 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, having been born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible seed. And the last time we were together, we talked about what it meant to be born again from a seed that cannot and will not perish. But again tonight I want to just do a little bit of review on this whole concept of rebirth, because it is so important to our understanding the whole of the Christian faith.
You've heard me say in the morning services on more than one occasion that the term born again Christian is really a redundancy. If you're not reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit, you're not truly a Christian, and if you are reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit, you most necessarily are a Christian. So if you're a Christian, you're reborn, and if you are reborn, you are a Christian. And we talk about rebirth in terms of the doctrine of regeneration, which means a new Genesis, a new beginning. And what makes it necessary for this rebirth to occur in a person's life is as the Scriptures tell us, by nature we are dead in our sin and trespasses, and that description of our condition as being dead is not a biological description, but a spiritual description. We are born in this world DOA. We are dead on arrival. We may be alive biologically, but we are dead spiritually. And what that means is in other metaphors that the Bible uses, for example, that the heart that we have within us is a heart of stone. It has no pulse.
It has no beat. It has no flesh of life, but rather it is calcified. It is reified. It is a dead, insensitive organ spiritually. Again what that means is in our fallen condition, we have no inclination in our hearts, no desire in our souls for the things of God. We are dead to the things of God. That's why Jesus said to Nicodemus, unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God, and he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, but in order to embrace the things of God, the spiritual things of Him requires a new birth, a birth that is wrought in our souls immediately by the supernatural power of the Holy Ghost. In Ephesians chapter 2, Paul speaks of this experience as being quickened by God the Holy Spirit. Now we know that when we recite the Apostles' Creed in its more archaic form, we talk about His future coming to judge the quick and the dead. That doesn't mean the fast and the dead, but the quick meaning those who are alive.
Every woman who is ever born a child knows the experience of quickening when she first feels life in her womb. And so the language of the New Testament is the language of a new life that is wrought in our souls, whereas before we had no inclination or desire for the things of God. Now God quickens our souls and creates in our souls a desire for Him and for His Son. Now Peter makes mention of that, speaking of our having been born again, and as a result of this rebirth, he then goes into chapter 2 with the consequences and implications of that.
Again, before I look at that, let me make one more point of review. You've heard me say this before, that there is a doctrine that has permeated the evangelical Christian world in our day called the doctrine of the carnal Christian, and that doctrine comes from a theology that teaches that regeneration involves the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a person's soul, but regeneration does not necessarily change the disposition of the will or of the soul. So in that theology, a person can have the Holy Spirit residing in his soul and actually be a believer in Christ and be saved by faith and remain completely unchanged. That is on a collision course, I believe, with orthodox Christianity and certainly with the biblical understanding of regeneration. Nobody can have the Holy Spirit change their heart and bring it to spiritual life without having change. And we see that implication here by Saint Peter when in chapter 2 he says, Therefore, that is having been born anew, we are to be laying aside all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all evil speaking, as newborn babes desire the pure milk of the word that you may grow thereby, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious.
So again Peter is following this theme of having been born anew by a seed that cannot and will not perish, and in light of that work of God in your soul, we ought therefore to lay aside in the first instance here all malice. Malice is the first thing that should disappear from the heart of a reborn Christian person. You know, in our culture and in our legal system, we hear descriptions of actions that are done, quote, with malice aforethought. Malice does not describe the action by which a person is injured by another. We may call that injurious action a malicious action, but what the term malicious is meant to indicate is that the injury that was visited by one person upon another was motivated by a desire to harm or to injure. How many times we've wounded each other, we've hurt each other, and somebody might come up to you and say, You have hurt me by what you said.
And normally the first response that we make is something like this, Oh, I sure didn't mean to do that. We may have done it, and we may admit that we've done it, but what we're saying is that we didn't think it up the night before and plan in our imaginations to bring pain and harm to another person. In other words, we're saying I may have injured you, but I didn't do it out of malice.
I did not desire in my heart to bring this much pain and affliction on you. So malice has to do with a desire in the heart, a purposeful desire in the heart to wound or to hurt another person. And what Peter is saying is we have to put that aside, and the language that he uses here of putting it aside is the language that was used to describe a person undressing and putting their garments to the side. And now Peter speaks this way spiritually. He says, Take the clothes of malice out of your soul and put them in the closet and leave them there. Then he goes on to add the putting away of malice. He said, We are also to put away all deceit, all hypocrisy, all envy, and all evil speaking or slander.
I believe that we have the whole then followed by its parts. All of these things that Peter lists here are examples of malice. That deceitfulness, for example, is born of malice.
Deceit involves a definite attempt to distort the truth, to hide the truth, to undermine the truth, and it's done intentionally. And coupled with that, the Apostle says, Lay aside all malice, all deceit, and all hypocrisy. Now what is hypocrisy? We know how often Jesus described the Pharisees in those terms of hypocrisy. And hypocrisy in antiquity was a kind of play-acting. It was a kind of pretense, and it was a kind of deception. A hypocrite is somebody who tries to deceive other people about his spiritual state. He pretends to be more righteous than he actually is.
And so along with malice, along with deceitfulness, hypocrisy has to go. I mentioned a little while ago that several years ago the evangelism explosion team in Fort Lauderdale had kept the record of answers that people gave to the diagnostic questions. Have you come to the place in your thinking where you know for sure that when you die, you will go to heaven? Followed by the question, if you were to die tonight, and God said to you, why should I let you into My heaven, what would you say? Well, we know that the vast majority of people who are asked that question answer with some kind of works-righteousness answer saying, I would say to God, I did this. I tried to be good. I went to church.
I did this and did that and so on. And also they kept a record of the objections that people raised to the Christian faith. And they collated these and listed the top ten most frequent objections that they encountered when they tried to communicate Christ to people. And then the head of that ministry wrote to me and asked me if I would write a book on those ten issues and try to give an answer for lay people to give to people. And in the top ten was the charge, the church is full of hypocrites.
Have you ever heard that? I can remember the late Jim Kennedy saying, if you ever find a perfect church, don't join it, you'll ruin it. Or when he would hear somebody say the church is all full of hypocrites, he would say there's always room for one more. But the reason why that charge is brought so often is that the world looks at us. They see us professing our faith in Christ. We call ourselves Christians, but we don't always act in a Christian manner. And they look at us and say that we're hypocrites. But it's not true that the church is full of hypocrites. It may seem like that because the church is full of sinners, and hypocrisy is only one sin. But if somebody sees us sin does not mean that we're hypocrites because I don't know of any Christian who claims not to sin. So it would only be if we claimed to be sinless that we would be guilty of the charge of hypocrisy.
And also I have to tell you that the church is the only institution I know that requires you to be a sinner to join it. The church is a communion of sinners. But among our sins is not to be listed the sin of hypocrisy because hypocrisy is a kind of deceit, and deceit is a kind of malice. Then Peter goes on from there and says, and we ought to lay aside all envy and all slander. Dear ones, just as deceit and hypocrisy are twins, so envy and slander are also twins. The biggest motivation for slandering people is a sense of jealousy or envy towards them. When we envy people, we will tend to speak badly about them. And in doing that, we fail to love our neighbor. And so Peter says if you're born of the Spirit of God, of that seed that does not perish, then get rid of malice.
It's got to go. Don't let deceitfulness be a part of your character or of your behavior. Put aside all forms of hypocrisy, and the last thing a Christian should ever be is envious because when we envy our neighbor, we not only do violence to our neighbor, but we do insult to God who has given to us the pearl of great price. You know, the tragedy is that there are people who are Christians who are envious of unbelievers.
I don't care what an unbeliever has, wealth, fame, position, status. What can any of those things be that would compare to the unspeakable gift that God has given to us? We have no right to envy anybody. And if we can put aside envy, that'll go a long way to cure our lips from slandering other people. Why is slander incompatible with the new birth? Remember when Paul writes to the Ephesians and talks about this concept of quickening, and he says that God has quickened us together in Christ, where while we were dead in sin and trespasses, while we followed the course of this world, while we were following the prince of the power of the air, and were by nature the children of wrath just like the others. And in our unreborn condition, the Bible says that we were followers of Satan. And Satan's name means the slanderer. That is the vocation of Satan to slander, to slander Christ, to slander his church, and to slander his people. And the last thing we want to do is to imitate the father of lies and join him in this destructive activity of slander. So if you're a Christian, put the slander aside and never pick it up again. Then he goes on to say, As newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word that you may grow thereby.
There's just a bunch of commas in here. And what he's saying is not so much assuming that his audience are recent converts and are merely babes in Christ. The Bible does speak of new converts as being babes in terms of their spiritual progress, and there are other occasions when the Bible rebukes people who have been Christians for some period of time who are still on a milk diet and are not interested in dealing with the weightier things of the Word of God and chewing on the meat and the substance of the things of God, and they're still acting like infants. But the point that Peter is making here in his metaphor is that just as infants have a strong desire for milk, so the Christian who is born of God should have a similar thirst for the Word of God.
Let me say that again. Any of you who have babies at home know that if it's time for them to be fed and you're five minutes late with the feeding, they will start to scream like the next meal is the most important thing in this world. Their desire for their next bottle becomes one of great passion, and they're earnest about it. And that's what Peter says, just like a little baby has this intense desire to be fed. So we ought to seek, notice this, the pure milk of the Word, only he doesn't use the word seek. He says desire.
If you want to grow as a Christian, I don't care how long you've been a Christian, it won't happen unless you're nurtured by the Word of God. There is no substitute for that. And so we are to be people who, having been changed by the power of the Holy Ghost, be people who have a desire within our soul, a hunger and a thirst for the pure milk of the Word. Again, I don't know anybody who has a great desire to drink milk that is spoiled.
Nothing is spit out of the mouth faster than a taste of milk that has become impure. And so the desire we are to have is for a substance that will feed us that is without impurities. And that, Peter describes in metaphorical terms, is the Word of God.
It is pure. Again, he's not making the distinction here between subsisting on milk or moving to the state of maturity where we eat the meat of the things of God. His point here is to compare us to the desire and the urgency that a baby has for milk so that we should have that same desire, that same urgency for the pure milk of the Word. It's spiritual milk that is in view here that is necessary for spiritual growth.
That was R.C. Sproul on this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, preaching from 1 Peter. Today's sermon was just one of many that Dr. Sproul preached as he worked his way through both 1 and 2 Peter. Those sermons and his lifetime of study formed the basis of his single-volume hardcover commentary covering both letters. You can request a copy of this expositional commentary to add to your library when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. As you walk through these short letters of Peter, you can read Dr. Sproul's Theological Explanations and practical application to help you in your study and in your growth as a Christian. This offer ends at midnight tonight, so give your gift at renewingyourmind.org or by clicking the link in the podcast show notes while there's still time. Be sure to join us next Sunday as R.C. Sproul continues his sermon series in 1 Peter, here on Renewing Your Mind. .
