The Exile Commands

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. The Hebrew word for holy is the word kadesh and it means literally to cut away. You're cut away from the world. You're separated. You're totally different. You're going to seem weird to everybody around you now because you're literally cut from a different cloth.

If you don't seem weird to everyone around you, isn't it possible that you're more like the world than you are God? Hey, thanks for joining us here on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Okay, so we may not be literally exiled right now like believers in the Bible sometimes found themselves, but many of us can still relate to those early Christians who were scattered. Today, Pastor J.D. shares a message from First Peter that speaks to us under these pandemic conditions of being physically separated from our brothers and sisters in Christ.

We can still find hope and peace even in these circumstances. Open your Bible to First Peter and let's get right into God's Word. First Peter was written to a church. It was a letter to a church that was going through an especially difficult time. Persecution had scattered them to regions all around the world, miles away from their homes. The apostle Peter explains in First Peter how to endure in such situations and a key component of the fact is that they are to do this together. The people to whom Peter was writing weren't physically together, but they were united by a hope that bound them together even when they were isolated. Well, of course, that is true of us also.

We may not be scattered like they were around the world, but many of us are going through a difficult time of isolation. You're in a bad marriage. Your job is just not going that well. You've got health problems. There's something that you're struggling with that just won't go away and your problem just makes you feel isolated.

It has for a while. You feel alone. Together, we endure. We want to come together and press into this common hope that Peter is unfolding for us.

Last week, we introduced the book by explaining the key identity in First Peter. Peter calls the people to whom he is writing exiles. An exile is somebody from one place that is temporarily taking up residence in another. An exile, I explained, is not an immigrant.

An immigrant wants to make their new place of residence their permanent home. An exile is not like that. They may have to live in this new place for a while, but their heart still belongs to their home country. An exile is also not a tourist. The tourist just passes through a new country with little concern about the people around them.

Maybe they have some sense of bemused curiosity, but that's it. Peter says we shouldn't be like tourists either. We are exiles. We temporarily take up residence. We make our dwelling place in this new place that is not our permanent home.

We care for it. We invest in it, but we never lose our longing for our true home. If you live as an exile, do you know what that means that you will be in the society you're living in? Different. How can you not be different? You're from a different place. You speak a different native language.

You hold a different set of values. If you've been spending time with lost people and they cannot tell that you're not from around here, well, honestly, maybe you're not. If someone would describe you and the word different doesn't come out of their mouths, you've got a legitimate reason to doubt your salvation.

Have you actually been born into this new birth Peter's talking about? All right, let me use these nine verses, verses 13 to 21, to give you the six commands that Peter gives to an exile. Number one is get dressed. Verse 13, therefore, he says, with your minds ready for action, be sober minded. With your minds ready for action. The old King James version that I first memorized this verse in translated that versus this gird up your loins for action, which is literally what the verse would say in Greek.

If you just translated the words directly gird up your loins. In other words, get dressed for battle. You ever shown up somewhere dressed totally wrongly? When the last Star Wars came out, my family had one extra ticket.

So we invited one of our single student leaders to go with us. I told him that the one catch was that we were all dressing up like Star Wars characters. So he should also, which of course we weren't dressing up like Star Wars characters.

So he showed up at the restaurant in full Star Wars costume. And we were all just sitting there in regular clothes. And in fact, he walked up to the table and he's like, Hey, where are your costumes? And we were like, gotcha. Now that's all fun and games, but showing up somewhere dressed wrongly could really hurt you if it's in the wrong situation.

I mean, imagine if a friend asked you to come over and help him do some construction and you show up thinking he's invited you to a dinner party. You got on your loafers and a sweater vest. And what you really need is our work boots and jeans. The worst would be of course, to show up for battle, dressed for leisure. Your opponent is suited up with all kinds of gear and weaponry and your loins are girded about with a towel and your feet are shod with flip-flops. You wouldn't just feel silly in a moment like that.

You'd be putting yourself in mortal danger. Yet this is exactly what many Christians do when it comes to spiritual things, Peter says. They just don't take the battle that seriously. They're lazy in their approach to scripture. They rarely pray and plead for God's strength and situations that they're going through. They don't take temptation seriously and they have no accountability with sin in their life. And they flirt with sin often. They treat sin and areas of compromise in their lives lightly. You know, the bad thing with most sin is not the action itself. It's that you give Satan a foothold into your life.

By the way, I know that I'm talking to somebody out there right now that is entertaining as sin. Right now you're in compromise. You're looking at porn. You're in a relationship that your godly friends are all worried about. You're starting a relationship that's wrong or you're doing something unethical or whatever.

I'm not sure exactly what it is. But you've given a foothold to the devil and he is going to destroy you with it. I'm telling you from the Holy Spirit, do not play around.

That's what Peter is saying. You need to have your minds girded, your heart guarded with truth. There is a lot of Christian parents that don't take seriously the battle that is going on for their kids' hearts. I don't care if your kids are in public school, private school, or home school. God holds you, the parent, responsible for the shaping of their hearts.

That's never something you give away to somebody else. He's holding us responsible to protect our kids from the lies that the enemy is trying to seduce them with. Peter is going to say in chapter 5 that Satan walks about in our society like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. Listen, if I knew that there was some kind of predator on the loose in my neighborhood and I let my kids go out completely unsupervised, how would I not be considered a delinquent parent? Listen, a far more dangerous enemy than any sexual predator is hunting your child and mine.

And that predator is named Satan and he is using the winsome lies of the culture to destroy them. Peter says, wake up and get dressed, clothe your mind in scripture, bathe your heart in prayer. The second command in the second part of that verse, if you'll look there, is lift your eyes. Set your hope, Peter says, completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Peter is urging us to set our hope exclusively on what God has promised to us as our eternal inheritance.

And what is that, do you recall? That we will know Christ, that we will be like Christ, and that one day we get to be with Christ in a place where there's no more crying and no more pain and all sad things come untrue. Peter says, set your hope completely on those promises.

Don't cut it or water it down with anything. You ask, how do Christians water it down? Well, they set their hope or their happiness on other things that God needs to provide for them in order for them to be happy. I'm glad I know Christ, you might say. I'm glad He's making me be like Christ and I'm glad I have the promise to be with Him one day, but I also really, really need you to provide me with good health, with good kids, a great marriage, lots of money. And then when God doesn't come through with one of those things, we accuse God of letting us down. Let me just ask you to consider, what do you feel like God has to provide for you in addition to the promise to know Christ, to be like Christ, and to be with Christ? What else does He have to provide for you in order to fulfill His promise to you? You know, Christians love the verse Romans 828, and we know that God has promised to work all things together for good to them that love God, who are called according to His purpose.

But you have to ask, what is that purpose? Well, Paul answers the question in the next verse. Paul says, here's God's purpose. Here's the good thing that He's pursuing in all these things. Those that God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son. His purpose is for you to know Christ and to be made like Christ. That is how all these things are working together for good. So yes, pray and ask God to bless you and take care of you now, but put your hope, your hope exclusively in knowing Christ and being made like Christ and being with Christ.

And if in a particular season that's all that He gives you, you can be satisfied with that. Here's command number three, don't look back. Here's what he says, as obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires of your former ignorance. Before you came to Christ, your life aspirations arose out of a wrong way of looking at the world.

Peter says, calls them the desires of your former ignorance, wrong desires that grew out of wrong ways of looking at the world. You thought, for example, that making lots of money would make you happy. And then maybe you saw that the people who made the most money didn't seem to be the happiest, or maybe you thought romance was the key. If you could ever just find that special person and the love of your life. You know, I saw an interview recently with the hip hop star Drake, where he said one of the most profound things about the human human soul.

Here's what he said. There was a point where I felt like I needed to keep the company of a different woman every night I was trying to fill a void. But in those moments after sex, I'd know that it wasn't working.

Those quiet moments are the realest moments that a man will ever have in his life. The next day, I would convince myself to do it again. But during that time, I always knew it wasn't working. Maybe you thought that being liked by others was the key. Or maybe you thought you'd find this by being the best. You know, like everybody else right now, I'm watching the Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance.

Here's a guy who is literally the best that there ever was. And it didn't lead him to happiness. It led him to emptiness, and to an unsettledness that you can see come through in these interviews.

You assume maybe that that life with you in charge was just going to make you happy. But something woke you up to the fact that it just wasn't true. Or maybe you just considered the cross. You know, if Jesus Christ is true, then the way of rebellion against God leads only to death. That's what the cross shows you.

Real life is found only from the resurrection. And so when you realize that, you turned your back on your self-willed way of living and you surrendered to Christ. You demonstrated that by being baptized, and declaring that you were being buried to your old way of living and raised to new life in Christ. But what Peter is recognizing is that even after that profession of faith, and even after that realization, that aha moment, even after that conversion, your baptism, it's easy to fall back into those old ways of thinking. Now you, for example, you sense some unhappiness or you're discontented. And the first impulse you have is, I just need some more money and then I'll be okay. I just need a different living situation.

I need to get vengeance on somebody. And Peter says, remember, you recognize once that that doesn't work. Don't go back there. You were buried by baptism into death to those old things. Don't go back there.

Those old desires came out of ignorance. Don't assume, I just need more money. I just need out of this marriage. I just need to get married. I just need to get even with this person. If you're unhappy, press into the hope of knowing Christ.

That's what the cross and resurrection show you about happiness and purpose that there you're going to find your purpose of knowing Christ and being made like Christ and, and being with him one day. Command number four is be weird. Now, some of you have instinctively been obeying this command from birth and you don't need any kind of admonition, but I'm talking about a different kind of weird.

Okay. Verse 15, but as the one who called you as holy, you also are to be holy in all of your conduct. Verse 16, for it is written, be holy because I am holy quoting from Leviticus 11, holiness, holiness. That is a strange word for most Americans. And to be totally honest, it's not very attractive to most Americans because the word conjures up images of something sterile and boring, bright, white, colorless light, or maybe sanctimonious, pious, prudish religiosity. That's just no fun, but think of holiness as wholeness, which is actually where we get the English word holiness. Holiness is holy, perfect goodness, holy, perfect justice, holy, perfect integrity, holy, perfect love.

Now we're all attracted to those things, right? Perfect justice, perfect beauty, perfect love. Who wants a government that is partially unjust? No girl wants to marry a guy that is only partially truthful or partially faithful or partially loving. God is pure goodness. And so things like injustice and impurity and deception are repulsive to him. Habakkuk 1.13 says that God is of such pure eyes that he cannot even behold evil.

That doesn't mean that evil is invisible to him. It means he can't look on evil with neutral emotion. I mean, think about watching something that you find repulsive, a torture or some kind of injustice.

You see something presented, a movie or a documentary on cruelty or abuse or the damages of marital infidelity or racial injustice, and you just can't watch it and feel neutral. You react viscerally. That's what God is like with all unholiness. And Peter is telling us to be like God in that.

The Hebrew word for holy is the word Kadesh, and it means literally to cut away. You're cut away from the world. You're separated. You're totally different. You're going to seem weird to everybody around you now because you're literally cut from a different cloth. So again, I will say to you, if you don't seem weird to everyone around you, isn't it possible that you're more like the world than you are God? Isn't it possible that you're not actually born again, that you're still a member of the world's family and not actually a member of God's?

If you are holy, if you are separated, it's going to show up in differences. Let me ask financially, are you out of sync with this world? I've explained this before, but if you're doing with your money what God says to do, you're going to be at least three steps behind the people who make the same amount of money that you do.

If your spending habits don't differ from everybody around you in big ways, again, you might be more like the world than you realize. In the book of Leviticus, where Peter's quoting from with this command to be holy, God commanded the Israelites to leave the edges of their field unharvested. They were only to harvest the middle of the field and leave the edges easily accessible for the poor so the poor could glean from those sections for themselves and eat.

Now, nobody else in the ancient world did that. Farmers in those days would, like most business owners today, try to wring out every last cent of profit from their yield, right? It's just smart business, but God wanted Israel to be different so that when foreigners would walk past Israelite fields, they would say, hey, why didn't you harvest the edges? And then they could say, well, it's because we serve a God who cares for the poor and shares with them and we do also. Listen, to be wealthy is not to be sinful, but you need to have edges.

You got bigger fields so you can harvest more, but you should also have bigger edges. Sexually, are you out of sync with the world? I've always loved the words here of Saint Augustine who said, Christians are most out of sync with the world in their relationship with three things, money, power, and sex. The world is stingy with its money and with its power, but it is promiscuous in its sex. Christians, by contrast, are promiscuous with their money and power, which means they just give it away, but they're very guarded with their sex.

He even used the word stingy, meaning that it's just reserved for one person, which is the exact opposite of the world. Are you out of sync with the world in how you handle your anger or frustration? How do people in the world handle their anger? Well, they rage or they go for vengeance or they just avoid conflict and harbor grudges and gossip. What did Christ do? Well, he never sought vengeance. Often he confronted, always selflessly and patiently, but he confronted and then forgave and moved on.

He kept no record of wrongs. Peter's saying, be holy. Be so separate in how you act that people will notice the difference. He's going to get into this in chapter three. They're going to ask you, what motivates you? It's going to show that you have a different hope and a different judge and a different perspective on life than everybody around you, so much so that they ought to have to ask. Okay, command number five, verse 17, stand amazed.

If you appeal to the father who judges impartially, according to each one's work, you are to conduct yourselves in reverence. By the way, many translations there will say fear, which is literally what the Greek says there. You will live in fear during your time as strangers. Literally what he is saying there in Greek is live in fear, which sounds like the opposite of what we usually say the gospel message is. We say in 1 John, perfect love cast out fear, and that's true. But the best way to think of fear here is not in contradiction to that.

Think of it as all. Why are we to stand in all? Well, Peter says it's because we serve a God who judges impartially. Everybody is going to be judged fully and impartially based on what they did and why they did it.

Nobody's getting away with injustice. God is not a respecter of persons. But Peter goes on, verse 18, for you know that you were redeemed from your empty way of life, inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, verse 19, but with the precious blood of Christ like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb.

What Peter is saying is, here's why you stand in all. The same God who will judge everybody impartially gave Christ for you to satisfy God's judgment against you. Though our deeds and our motives were bad like everybody else's, God was not showing us partiality. God redeemed us by suffering judgment in our place. To save us, it cost God something immense. He didn't save us through some trifling gesture, a wave of a wand, or the uttering of a spell, or a set of rules that he just dictated for us to follow.

To purchase our salvation, he had to give his own son to be cursed and humiliated and tortured in our place, and that ought to make us stand in reverent awe. See from his head, his hand, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down. Did e'er such love or sorrow meet or joy compose so rich a crown? Were the whole realm of nature mine?

That would be a present far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. King David said the same thing this way in Psalm 130. He says, there is forgiveness with you, O God, that you may be feared. Usually you think, well, forgiveness means you don't have to fear, but again, he's talking about all there. Same thing Peter's talking about, meditating on the price of our salvation, thinking about how great the judgment of God was against us, how right that judgment was, how much God paid to redeem us. That ought to make us stand in wonder of God. It ought to make us afraid from ever being apart from him again and make us stand in awe of the treasure that he has now given us.

It's fear and awe, but it's a confident fear, a fear of what your life would be like without God and in awe of how secure you are with him. Okay, lastly, Peter's last command, number six, is to love extravagantly. Look at verse 22. Since you have purified yourselves by your obedience to the truth so that you show sincere brotherly love for each other from a pure heart, love one another constantly. The last command that he gives us is to love.

We do that because we're part of a new family. You're united by a common salvation and a common hope. The gospel gives us a remarkable ability to love people. The gospel gives us patience, for example, with the flaws of others because we recognize in the gospel that we had a bunch of flaws of our own when Jesus saved us and forgave us. The gospel frees us from the tyranny of needing other people to be happy so that we can stop using them and start loving them. You know, when you're co-dependent on somebody, you can't really love them. You use them when you need to be the best in order to feel valuable.

Well, that puts you always in competition with everybody else. You can't love them because you're competing with them for a sense of self-worth. The gospel gives you the ability to love. It makes you complete in God so that you can be free to love others. It shows you patience and love so that you are compelled to show it to others.

We can love, John says, because he first loved us. So there are our six exile commands. Obedience to all these commands flows out of the hope in this imperishable inheritance.

Obedience is fueled by our hope in Christ. Look at the last verses in this chapter, verse 24. For all flesh, he says, is like grass.

All its glory like a flower of the grass. The grass withers, the flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures forever. That's a quote from Isaiah 40. Everything else he's saying that we live for is going to fade.

Every other hope, every foundation is going to crumble. But Christ, Peter says, Christ is eternal. Peter's question to you is, have you found this hope that makes obedience to these commands easy?

The greatest invitation ever given came from the lips of Christ. He said, come unto me, all you who are laborer and just feel heavy laden and crushed by the weight of the world. And I will give you rest. If you give your life to him, he can forgive your sin. He can give you new life, a new birth. He promises to bear you up under all your troubles. He will be your guide when you feel lost. He'll be your support when you feel broken.

He'll be your comforter when you feel overwhelmed. Has he been speaking to you since quarantine started? Has he been inviting you to come to him?

Is he doing that now? Why not, why not give into that now and receive that invitation? Allow God to be your guide when you feel lost, your support when you feel broken. Has he been speaking to you since the pandemic started, inviting you to come nearer to him? Why not surrender to that right now? If that's you, we'd love to pray for you.

Just call us at 866-335-5220. I think it's safe to talk about Christmas now, right? I mean, we're only a few days away from Thanksgiving and we're starting to put out our decorations where we already have them out. And they remind us of the manger in baby Jesus, the shepherds and angels. You probably have some of that too, right, JD?

Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, I had a manger scene growing up. There's something quaint about the manger scene and something that moves our hearts and makes us smell cinnamon and think about family.

But really, you know, there's deeper questions. And one of the things I love about Christmas is there's a longing we experience. Maybe it's a longing for a family to be put back together.

Maybe it's longing for meaning in life. It's just one of those times that God has built into our calendar that reminds us that there really is more to life. So I wrote a book called Searching for Christmas, and basically it's an exploration of what God promises about His presence to us in very dark times. We've had a year that's been filled with a lot of darkness, and this book just explores promises.

It does it around the names that God gave to this Messiah that would come and how He would be the Wonderful Counselor, the Everlasting Father, the Mighty God, and the Prince of Peace, and what those mean for your life. We'd love to give you two copies of this new book, one to keep and one to give away during this holiday season. You could reserve those at jdgreer.com.

You can see other things there. Just go to jdgreer.com and all that information is there. Like Pastor JD said, we'd love to hear from you. So be sure to get in touch today so we can get you copies of Pastor JD's newest book. Ask for Searching for Christmas when you give a donation today of $25 or more. And guess what? We'll actually send you two copies of the book, one for you and one to give away this holiday season.

Or maybe you're thinking bigger. With a gift of $50, we'll send you five copies or 10 copies with a gift of $100. We're excited to get this book into as many hands as possible this Christmas season. Call us right now at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or you can give easily online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Bidevich inviting you to join us again next week for more of our teaching series called Together We Endure right here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.