Even the most devout Christians go through seasons of doubt and despair. The Apostle Peter knew this firsthand and he wrote to reassure Christians scattered through the world who were in such seasons.
Today on Truth for Life weekend, Alistair Begg takes us through Peter's encouraging message to help us view our own weaknesses and struggles as opportunities for triumph. I invite you to turn with me to 1 Peter 5 and to follow along as I read. The heading in our Bibles is Shepherd the Flock of God. And Peter writes, so—i.e., in light of the first four chapters—"So I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed. Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you, not for shameful gain but eagerly, not domineering over those in your charge but being examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders, clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another. For God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you.
Be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.
To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen. I really want just to look at one verse out of the passage that we read in 1 Peter 5. You turn to it as you choose.
And really, what I want to do is essentially pick up from where we left off this morning. Hopefully you remember that we ended by reminding ourselves or being reminded from the Scriptures that our security and our safety is to be found in the fact that the God who knows us entirely has come to us in Jesus, who is the great shepherd of his sheep. And we read this morning, My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. And one of Jesus' sheep was Peter, who wrote this letter and also the second letter. And you know your Bible well enough to know that it was this Peter who, along the pathway of his life, got ahead of his skis, fell on his face, was dreadfully disappointed. Jesus fastened his gaze upon him, and in many ways Peter must have thought my story as a follower of the great shepherd and the master of my life has certainly taken a bad turn if it hasn't come to a conclusion.
And then, of course, you remember that amazing period of restoration where, as it's recorded at the end of John's Gospel, Jesus comes again, and he meets with his followers. And on that occasion, he addresses a question to Peter, asking him—three times, actually, as you will recall—he asks him, Do you love me? And Peter answers, Yes, I do.
And on the third occasion, John says that Peter was actually grieved that he asked him a third time, and Jesus said to him again, Do you love me? Lord, he says, You know everything. Only God knows everything. Messiah, God, you know everything.
You know that I love you. Jesus says, Feed my sheep. Feed my sheep. And so, what happens is the Holy Spirit is poured out, and at the very outset of the birth of the church, post-Pentecost, Peter is central to that. He is feeding the sheep by preaching and by teaching and by moving among them. And also, in response to Jesus' exhortation, he wrote—and we have in the first and second letters the remarks of Peter, and in particular in this first letter, he essentially provides his readers with a condensed summary of the Christian life. If you read these five chapters carefully, you will almost sense that you are part and parcel of a discipleship course.
He begins so straightforwardly with three things that are true of every Christian, chosen by God the Father, sprinkled by the blood of Jesus, and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. To these people who are scattered all over the place, he immediately writes to feed them and to see them grounded in the faith. The people to whom he was writing were dispersed throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia, as we find in the opening chapter.
Largely, they were in modern-day Turkey. And he writes to them, recognizing that they were exiles, that they were part of the dispersion. And he writes to them in the awareness of the fact that great storms are brewing, trouble is brewing. I take it it's before Nero.
If it had been during Nero, I think he would have mentioned Nero. But it's somewhere in the early sixties that he's writing, and he's writing to remind them of the fact that—and now we get to chapter 5 and to verse 12—to remind them of the fact that this is the true grace of God. Stand firm in it. Now, that's not our verse, but it's there in verse 12. So this is… When he's finished his thing, he says, What I'm actually saying to you is this. What I have provided for you is a record of the true grace of God, and make sure you stand firm in it. And as he is coming to his close, he has dealt with the issue of humility in verse 6.
He has then gone on to address the question of anxiety. And then, finally, he comes, in verse 10, to this matter of security or safety. And he says, After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. It's really, really helpful to be able to read this and recognize that as we go back into the workaday life of another Monday and whatever this week or these weeks before us will bring, that Peter understood, and so his readers understood, that their Christian faith did not remove them from the realm of trials, of suffering, of difficulty, of pain, and so on. Because we live in a fallen world.
We live in the not-yet dimension. All that is before us is before us, but it is not immediately experienced by us. And so he commends them, you will notice, to the God of all grace. To the God of all grace. A grace that can meet every need, a grace that enables us to prevail in every situation. And it is this God, this grace, that is the basis of our safety and our security.
You may say, Well, how does this take place? Well, it takes place in the way that God has ordained—that he comes to us in his Word, he comes to us as we gather around his table, he comes to us in the company of one another, as we watch out for one another, as we care for one another, as we pray for one another, as we learn what it is that we've been brought into—a great communion of his goodness. And it is the discovery as well that in our weakness we discover that his grace is most obviously present. Now, that, of course, is true of Paul as well. You remember, when he is aware of the fact that he has a besetting problem that he can't get rid of, and then the Lord says to him, My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. And I wouldn't be at all surprised that some of you tonight feel a peculiar sense of weakness, for all kinds of reasons. And if the adversary of the evil one has been at your heels or at your mailbox or whatever it might be, you might feel yourself threatened in some way. So then let's take these four verbs here—which is my point—take these four verbs, somewhat repetitive, in order to make one point, essentially.
And that is that the God who called you to his eternal glory will look after you, and you are safe in him. The first verb in English is restore, katartisi, in Greek. And it is an interesting word. Peter knew this word. He knew it—of course he did, or he wouldn't have used it—in this way. But he didn't know it in this way. He knew it from his fishing. And you will remember at the beginning of the Gospels that Luke records that the nets, after Jesus had told them to put the nets down on the other side of the boat, the nets were breaking.
That's in Luke. And in Matthew, when Jesus comes on James and John, the sons of Zebedee, you will remember, they were katartitsi-ing their nets. They were mending their nets. That which was broken they were restoring. It's the same word that is used in orthopedics, of the resetting of a bone, putting things back in position in a way that is whole. It's the same word that would be used of restoring a vessel that had run aground, had taken on water, was brought back into dry dock, in order that it might be fashioned once again and set out onto the sea. I wonder if you ever thought about a Sunday like that, that here you come, broken, torn, like nets, or punctured, as it were, by the vicissitudes of life, and you say, Lord, I'm just back. Restore me. Restore me.
That's the thing. He says, God will do that. He will restore you. The second verb is to confirm, or to establish. I'm not gonna try and impress you with my limited knowledge of Greek, but it is an interesting word as well. It means to set up, or to fix, or to firmly strengthen, or to set in a firm and fixed position.
So if you have come to a night like this and you feel that you've come out of a week where you just haven't been able to take a stand for anything at all—you've been caught here and caught there and blown about and so on—where shall we look? Well, we look to the God of all grace. Peter says you can be confident in the security of his provision for you in this way. It actually means to support us so that we won't topple over. So that we won't topple over. I never found a child that cared about toppling over. The children have an art in toppling over. It's what they do. They topple over.
And they get right back up. That's right. That's good. I like it when you write pieces for me. It sells me.
It's good. Yeah, they topple over, and they get right back up. But we topple over, and we don't get right back up.
Where did that come from? I used to be toppled, though I could topple over with the best of them. But not now. Some of us in our Christian lives, we've begun to topple. Now unto him who is able to keep you from toppling. From toppling.
Well, the devil would love to get you toppling, falling all over the place, insinuating lies, discouraging you, making you fainthearted, fearful, the God of all grace. Thirdly, he strengthens. To strengthen. The prior verb has to do with fixing us so that we won't topple over. This verb has to do with preventing us from collapsing. From collapsing. Which, again, is another thing.
As you age, you have to—when you go to the doctor, you've got to be able to stand up out of the chair without using your hands on the arm, right? Like, I mean, who thinks about that when they're young? He says, What?
No. But now it's like, Oh, I see what he meant. Yeah? It's because these things, whatever they once were, they are not what they were, and even in my case, they never were anything to start with. So it is a peculiar challenge. Think of it spiritually, to prevent us from collapsing. We all know people—sadly, we all know people—who have missed out in their Christian lives, because for whatever reason, they collapsed. They fell apart.
They were no longer stabilized, no longer steady. And the last verb is to establish you. To establish you. To make you steadfast, ground you. How form a foundation ye saints of the Lord is laid for your faith in his excellent word! What more can he say than to you, he has said, to you who to Jesus for refuge have fled? Here is the great stabilizing safety security, summarizing it in this way.
Support so that we won't topple, strength so that we won't collapse, and a foundation so that we can't be moved. And then you will notice in verse 11, this is just an exclamation. It's a whoa! To him… Peter is writing in this way, and then he breaks off, as does Paul in certain places, and he just says, To him, power, dominion, forever.
He can't help himself. Let me finish in this way. If you read the text carefully, you will have noticed what I have noticed. That… In fact, if you read it like this, it comes across, If you leave out, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ?
Just for a minute. So, after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace will himself. The God of all grace will himself. That's amazing.
He's gonna take care of it himself. I don't know how to understand the intervention of God. Some have entertained angels unawares.
All of us have met Christ in the kindness of others, God himself. And Peter gets this, doesn't he? Peter absolutely understands this.
And with this I want to finish, and you needn't turn to any of this, but you will be familiar with it when we go there. So the Peter who is giving this great encouragement to be strengthened by the God of all grace is the Peter to whom Jesus is speaking in Luke 22. Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you that he might sift you like wheat.
But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail, and when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. Peter said to him, Lord, I'm ready to go with you both to prison and to death. And I believe he meant it, don't you? Jesus says, I tell you, Peter, the rooster will not crow this day until you deny three times that you know me. Now Peter, Simon, was standing warming himself, so they said to him, You're not also one of his disciples, are you? He denied it and said, I'm not. One of the servants of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off—so he, I mean, he knew he was dealing with. I mean, if your next-door neighbor had his ear cut off by somebody, you would be paying attention. A relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off said, Didn't I see you in the garden with him?
Peter again denied it, and at once a rooster crowed. Let's leave aside, I'm going fishing, and all the disciples going, Yeah, hey, we'll go fishing as well. This thing's over. It's come to a crashing halt. We gave our lives for nothing.
Look at where it's ended. And then somebody said, Look, it's the Lord who's walking out to us here. And when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment, for he was stripped for work and threw himself into the sea.
Now, if you've been doing Monty McShane, you've read the end of John at the end of the year. And I must confess, I actually sat for a long time with this verse. It made me laugh.
I said, Somebody put this in incorrectly. You don't put your clothes on to jump in the sea. You take your clothes off to jump in the sea.
No! When Simon Peter heard it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment, for he was stripped for work and threw himself into the sea. Dress is important. I'm not gonna go and say hello to Jesus in my underwear.
I'm gonna put my clothes on. And then when you read the rest of the story, you realize that he then gets to the shore, the others are dragging the boat, and when they finally get up there, it's breakfast. It's breakfast. And the chef is Jesus. And when they'd finished the breakfast, Jesus then said, Do you love me? And there we have it. They said to him, Follow me.
And we're still not finished. Because John says, Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them, the one who also had leaned back against him during the supper and had said, Lord, who is it that is going to betray you? And when Peter saw him—that is, John, the writer of the gospel—he said to Jesus, Lord, what about him?
And Jesus said to him, Look, if it's my will that he remain until I come, what's that to you? You. Follow me.
Follow me. I hope you're as encouraged by Peter as I am. I was just upstairs for a little while before, and I went to play the old Gaither song, which I'd like to sing for you now, but in kindness, I'm not going to.
But it goes like this. Something beautiful, something good, All my confusion he understood, All I had to offer him was brokenness and strife, And he made something beautiful out of my life. You see, the devil is going to come and say, You know, all of that busted brokenness, missteps here, there, and everywhere, that is a disqualifier.
Don't believe the lie. All the winding path that God has brought you along is in order that you might be the useful person that you are today, so that as you meet strugglers on the sea of life, you don't have some peculiar, ridiculous story of triumph, but you have a story that says, He gave me beauty for ashes, and the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness, because he is the God of all grace. Will you turn to God and ask him to make something beautiful of your life, flaws and all? Listening to Truth for Life Weekend, and that is Alistair Begg with a message he's titled, The God Who Keeps Me From Falling. If you'd like to share this message with friends, you can do so for free using the Truth for Life website or our mobile app.
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It's perfect for reading with school-aged children. For more information, visit our website at truthforlife.org. Thanks for studying the Bible with us. What does Adam and Eve's rebellion in the Garden of Eden have to do with our celebration of Christmas? We'll hear the answer next weekend as we explore the roots of the Nativity. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.
