You Came for an Explanation, He Sent a Refiner

"In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." — 1 Peter 1:6–7

Good morning. I am glad you are here.

We are in week three of Share the Hope, and today is going to feel different.

Week one — we asked what the angels are looking at. And the answer was stunning. Angels who see the face of God, who have never sinned, never needed faith — leaning in, staring at what is happening inside ordinary believers like us. Not because of anything impressive about us. Because of the

gospel at work in us.

Week two — Peter talked about joy. Not good vibes. The kind of joy that comes from loving someone you have never seen. And the result of that faith, right now, in the present tense, is the salvation of your souls.

So we have talked about wonder. We have talked about joy.

And now today, Peter takes us to the one place nobody signs up for. Today we are talking about why suffering hurts.

When I sat down to work on this, I wanted to put my head in my hands. This is not a subject you master. It masters you. Every time you think you have a handle on it, you sit across from someone whose pain makes your handle feel like cardboard.

What I want to do today is take the question seriously — really seriously — and then show you what Peter actually says. Which surprised me.

1 PETER 1:6–7 "In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." Two verses. But there is a lifetime inside them.

If we rush past the weight of the question to get to the answer, we have given people a band-aid and called it surgery.

WHY DOES SUFFERING HURT THEWAYIT DOES?

Here is something I need you to hear before we go any further. This question — why does suffering hurt — is not just a Christian question. It is a human question.

Down at the core of our souls, we are all the same. Pain does not segregate. Pain does not select. Every heart on this planet has the capacity to feel it.

And here is what bothers me. If every one of us knows what it feels like to hurt — then why do we treat one another as if they just do not understand?

Every worldview on the planet has had to deal with this. Buddhism was built on it. Hinduism says your suffering is payment for a past life. In much of Islam, God's sovereignty is so absolute that you do not even have the right to ask why. And atheism has to face the weight of human pain with no bigger story to put it in at all.

Of all the worldviews in the world, only one actually says: you are right to ask. You are right to feel that this is wrong. That is the Christian worldview.

If your worldview does not let you ask the question, it has not answered anything. It has just told you to be quiet.

The God who invented questions is not threatened by yours. Job asked. David asked. Jesus asked from the cross. The question is not a sign that your faith is weak. It may be the most honest thing your faith has ever done.

THREE KINDS OF WHY I want to describe something to you. Not a story — just a moment. A kind of moment that I think most of us have lived.

You are somewhere familiar. A room you know, a drive you have made a hundred times, a place that should feel ordinary. And something shifts. The medical report. The conversation that rewrote everything. The phone call that changed the map. And you are standing there holding the pieces of a life that looked fine five minutes ago.

That is the why of loss. Something was here. Now it is not. And the ground under your feet is not the same ground it was.

But there is a second kind of why that is quieter and, honestly, harder to name. Because nothing was taken from you. It was just never given. The word that was never said. The room that was never made for you. The relationship where you kept showing up and kept being treated like an afterthought. You cannot point to the moment it broke, because it was never whole. And the strangest

thing about this kind of pain is that it is almost impossible to name, because nothing happened. It was just — never there.

That is the why of absence. And some of you have been carrying it so long you have almost stopped calling it pain.

And then there is a third. You tried. You reached out. You showed up. And you were turned away. Not always with cruelty — sometimes rejection does not even raise its voice. Sometimes it just looks past you. The table that was already full. The door that was politely and firmly closed. You showed up and there was no room for you.

Loss. Absence. Rejection. Three different wounds. One word. Why.

And most of us have been carrying at least one of those in here this morning. And nobody asked. We are very good at keeping the service moving.

WHAT "WHY" REVEALS "Why" is not a small word. It assumes there is supposed to be a reason. It assumes your life is headed somewhere and this does not fit.

If life is random — if none of this means anything — then "why" is a silly question. You do not ask why a rock rolls downhill. It just does. But you do not experience your pain that way. Something deep inside you says: this is wrong. This should not be happening.

Now where does that come from? If you say this is wrong, you are assuming there is a right. If you say this is evil, you are assuming there is good. And if there is real good and real evil, there has to be something behind them. Some standard. Some source.

Paul says there is a law written on the human heart. Not on a tablet. On your heart. You did not learn that suffering is wrong by reading a textbook. You knew it. God's handwriting.

The person who says "how can God allow this" is actually proving that God has to be in the picture for the question to even make sense.

Take God out and you do not solve the problem. You lose the ability to call it a problem. Without God, your pain is just chemistry. Just stuff happening to stuff. But you do not experience it that way. And you know it.

Are you convinced of that? Not in your head — in your bones. Are you convinced that your pain is significant enough to bring to God? Because I find that most people who believe in God still live as if their specific pain is too small, or too complicated, or too embarrassing to actually put in front of Him. They believe He cares about suffering in general. They are just not sure He cares about theirs.

THE COLLISION — WHY IT HURTS THIS DEEP

When you follow the word "why" all the way down — when you chase it to the bottom — it leads you somewhere you did not expect.

You were not built for this world the way it is. You were built for wholeness. For presence. For love that does not break. For a world where things make sense. Suffering is the collision between what you were made for and what you are living in.

You were made in the image of God. And God is whole, and present, and love that does not break. When He made you, He wrote those things into you. Not as preferences. As design. You were designed for a world you no longer live in.

And every time suffering hits — every time something is taken, or absent, or turns you away — something in the deepest part of you rises up and says: this is not right. This is not how it is supposed to be.

That ache — that refusal to accept a broken world as normal — that is not weakness. That is the image of God in you. Still intact. Still functioning. Still pointing toward something you were made for.

Think about what that means. That ache you have been trying to manage or outrun — it is not a malfunction. It is a compass. It is pointing at something real. And the fact that you feel it so deeply is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It is evidence that something is right.

Now here is something most people never follow all the way through. If love is the highest thing in the universe, then real love can only exist where freedom

exists. You cannot make someone love you. The moment you force it, it becomes compliance. But it is not love. So God, in His love, created beings with genuine freedom. And genuine freedom means genuine choice. And genuine choice means the door to evil is real.

Love requires freedom. Freedom opens the door to evil. Evil requires a savior. That chain is not an accident. It is the shape of the story God has been telling since the beginning.

WHY IT REACHES SO DEEP — WHAT IS ALIVE INSIDE YOU

But that answers why suffering exists in the world. It does not fully answer why the same event can hit one person at the surface and another person all the way down to the floor. And I think that question deserves a real answer.

Here is what I mean. When you hit your hand with a hammer, pain has an address. You can point to it. You can locate it. It has a source and, usually, an end. But internal pain does not work that way. It does not have a zip code. You cannot point to where it is. You just know it is there. And that shapelessness — the fact that you cannot find the edge of it — is actually part of what makes it so hard to carry. You cannot explain it to anyone. You can barely explain it to yourself.

And this is where I think we have been hardest on ourselves and on each other. We say: what is wrong with me? Why can't I just move on? Why does

this still hurt? And the answer is not: because you are weak. The answer is: because of everything that was alive in you when the pain arrived.

The first thing pain walks into is your hope. Proverbs says it plainly — hope deferred makes the heart sick. Not disappointed. Sick. Because hope is not just a feeling. It is the direction your whole life has been leaning. You were not just living in the present. You were living toward something. A version of the future you had already imagined. Already counted on. And when that future does not arrive — the medical report that did not go the way you prayed, the relationship you thought was finally turning around, the door you asked God to open that stayed shut — the pain is not just about what happened. It is about the direction you were leaning when it hit.

And underneath the hope was love. Because you do not hope for things you do not care about. The reason the hope hurt when it fell is because you had given something real to what you were hoping for. The depth of your grief is proportional to the depth of your love. C.S. Lewis said it plainly — to love at all is to be vulnerable. The only way to guarantee you will never grieve is to never attach to anything. And most of us were not willing to do that.

Which means the size of your pain is actually a measure of the size of your love. You are not broken because it hurts this much. You loved that much.

But it goes deeper still. Because when something is taken — a job, a relationship, a role, a version of your future — sometimes what gets taken is not just the thing. It is the story you were telling about yourself. Who you were. What you were building. Where you were headed. And when the story

collapses, you are left not just without the thing but without a sense of who you are without it. That is a specific kind of pain that feels like more than loss.

It feels like disappearing. And that is one of the hardest things to say out loud, because it sounds dramatic. But it is not dramatic. It is one of the most common and least-talked-about things that happens when people suffer. They do not just lose what they lost. They lose themselves in the losing of it.

And then the mind does what it was designed to do. It goes back. Not because you are weak or stuck — because you were wired to return to what mattered. The same mechanism that helps you learn from experience replays the thing you lost. Over and over. What should be a feature becomes a source of pain. You keep going back not because you cannot move forward. You go back because what you lost was worth remembering. And part of you is still trying to make sense of it.

And underneath all of that runs anxiety. Which is pain running in the future tense. You are not just hurting about what happened. You are hurting about what might happen. What could go wrong. What you stand to lose. And the mind cannot fully distinguish between an imagined threat and a real one — it responds to both with the same alarm. So some of what you are carrying right now is pain about a future that has not arrived yet and may never arrive. You are paying the price of something you have not even lost. That is a particular kind of exhausting that is very hard to explain to someone who is not living it.

Ecclesiastes says it this way: in much wisdom is much grief. The more you understand, the more surface area for pain. A child does not grieve what they

do not know to expect. But you know. You have lived enough to know what can go wrong, what usually does go wrong, what you stand to lose and how fast. And that knowledge is not neutral. It costs something just to hold it.

There is a weight that comes from knowing too much about how fragile things are.

And underneath all of it — underneath the deferred hope, the love, the lost story, the replaying mind, the anxious future, the weight of knowing — there is something even deeper. Augustine spent his life trying to name it and finally did. He said: our heart is restless until it rests in Thee. This is not dissatisfaction with circumstances. It is a structural ache. You were made for God and you are living in a world that cannot satisfy that need no matter how hard it tries. And the soul knows the difference. Always. Which is why you can have everything going right and still feel the ache. Because the ache is not about what you have. It is about what you were made for.

So when suffering hits, it does not just land on the surface. It walks into every room. It finds your hope, your love, your story, your memory, your fear of the future, your weight of knowing, your restlessness — and it reaches into all of them at once.

That is why it hurts the way it does. Not because something is wrong with you. Because something was very much alive in you.

And I want you to hear that. Really hear it. The depth of your pain is not evidence of your weakness. It is evidence of your life. Of everything God put in you that was real enough to hurt when the world came for it.

SUFFERING ISOLATES — THE 1 A.M.

But suffering does not just reach into all of those rooms. It does one more thing. It locks the door behind it. It makes you feel alone.

There have been many times where my body just wakes me up in the middle of the night. One in the morning. I did not set an alarm. But my eyes are open and my mind is already running, and it is not running anywhere good. Everything I was managing during the day — everything I was able to push down while I was busy — it all comes flooding in at once. The worry. The weight. The things I do not have answers for. And I just lie there and receive it.

And I think a lot of us live that way. Not just at 1 a.m. All day. We let our hearts speak to us constantly, and we never speak back. Never say — that is not true. That is not the whole story. Always listening. Never speaking.

And for some of us — the reason we do not speak back is because we were taught through pain that speaking up brings more pain. Silence became survival. You stopped talking. Not because you did not have a voice. Because using your voice was dangerous.

And now, even when the voice at 1 a.m. is telling you things that are not true, you do not fight it. Because somewhere you still believe that speaking up will cost you.

I know that voice. And the honest thing to say is that sometimes I still believe it. Even after years in ministry. There are nights where the knowing better does not reach all the way down to where the voice is coming from. And if that is you this morning — I am not going to tell you to just trust God more. I am going to tell you the voice is lying. And that the man God called after His own heart said the exact same things at the exact same hour.

And you know what that voice says when you are lying there in the dark? It says: I am alone. And nobody sees me.

THE PRISON GLASS You are in this room on a Sunday morning. Someone asks how you are. You say "Fine." And you are not fine.

But the glass is not just shyness. It is more like a prison. You are behind it. And even when someone walks up and says how are you doing, really — you are talking through it. Shame is monitoring you. Fear is monitoring you. The voice that says if they knew what was really going on they would leave — that voice is watching every word. And so you do not say the real thing. You say "Fine."

That is not just loneliness. That is captivity.

I was on the phone with someone not long ago, and they asked me — how's your heart? Are we good? And I did not say fine. I said: no. I am hurt. I am struggling to lay it down. And my trust is broken. That cost me something.

Every instinct said protect yourself. But I did not.

Speaking through the glass — actually saying the real thing — that is terrifying. But it is the only way the glass ever breaks.

Are you behind the glass with God? Not just with people — with God? Because some of us come to prayer and say the fine version there too. We pray the presentable version of our lives. And somewhere underneath it, the real thing is sitting untouched. And God is already on the other side of the glass knowing the real version, just waiting for us to say it.

When people try to explain your pain instead of just being with you in it, the glass does not get thinner. It gets thicker.

WHEN HELP BECOMES A WOUND Job. One of the oldest books in the Bible. This man has lost everything — his kids, his health, his livelihood. He is sitting in ashes covered with sores. And three friends come to see him.

For seven days they sit on the ground with him and say nothing. Seven days of silence. That was the best thing they ever did. Then they opened their mouths.

One opens with a ghost story. Another calls him a windbag. The third says it would be easier to teach a donkey than to get through to Job. And Job says something that every suffering person has felt: "A despairing man should have the devotion of his friends. Your speeches are heartless."

The people who came to help became his tormentors. Not because they were bad people. Because they were offering explanations when what he needed was presence.

A friend of mine had shoulder surgery. And the hardest part was not the pain. It was that everyone forgets. What do you do when you see someone you love? You reach out. You put your hand on their shoulder. And then your hand lands and he flinches. You did not mean to hurt him. You love him. But you touched a healing wound out of habit.

That is what we do to people who are suffering. Not out of cruelty. Out of habit. We grab the sore spot with good intentions. We give them a Bible verse. We tell them everything happens for a reason. And we do not realize we just put our hand on the wound.

The deepest cry of the human soul in suffering is not "explain this to me." It is "is anyone there?"

And the person who got the explanation instead of presence does not stop asking. They just stop asking out loud. The question goes underground. To somewhere deeper. Somewhere harder to reach.

The psalmist knew that cry. Psalm 139 — where can I go from your Spirit? If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. Even the darkness is not dark to you. The psalmist is saying — even when I feel completely invisible, you see me.

WHAT YOU WERE LEANING ON And suffering does one more thing. It tears away what you were leaning on. We all lean on things, and we do not even know we are doing it. Your health. Your paycheck. Your marriage. Your sense of control.

And most of the time they hold. You lean on them every day and you do not think about it. Until the day they give way. And you hit the floor.

The shock is not the fall. The shock is: I had no idea how much of my weight was on that.

The job goes away and you find out your identity was built on it. The body breaks and you find out your peace depended on your ability to function. The relationship ends and you find out you were not just losing a person — you were losing the thing that was holding everything else up.

Meaninglessness does not come from being tired of pain. It comes from being tired of pleasure. The deepest emptiness comes from having everything and finding out everything is not enough. Which means what you were leaning on was never built to hold you. And suffering is just the moment you find that out.

And I think there is a quiet mercy inside that moment that nobody talks about. Because sometimes what gets torn away in the fire was never stable to begin with. And what is left standing when everything else burns is the one thing we should have been holding all along. Suffering does not just take things. Sometimes it clears the ground.

THE SILENCE — THE MAPLE TREE And then there is the silence. When I was young in my faith — really young — I was at a retreat, and I woke up early one morning, before sunrise, and I walked outside and sat under this big old maple tree. The kind that has been there longer than anyone can remember. And I prayed the most honest prayer I knew how to pray.

I said: Lord, let me see you. Show me something. Give me a sign. Anything. And I sat there. And nothing came. The sun came up. The birds started. People started moving around inside. And I walked back in with nothing. Just a kid under a tree who had asked God to show up and got quiet.

And I wish I could tell you that was the only time. But years later, after I had been in ministry, after I had sat with people in some of the hardest seasons of their lives, I found myself asking the same prayer in a different voice. Not: show me a sign. But: help me understand what I am seeing. Help me make sense of this much pain. And most of the time — quiet.

The psalmist knew this. Psalm 13 — "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" That is not a man who has lost his faith. That is a man whose faith is so real that he will not pretend the silence is okay.

People say: if God is all-powerful and all-loving, why does evil exist? But why stop there? Is God also all-wise? Does wisdom not change the picture completely?

A one-year-old is at the doctor's office. The nurse comes in with a needle. And the baby looks at his mother — the person he trusts more than anyone — and she is not stopping it. She is letting it happen. She might even be holding his arm. From the baby's point of view, she has betrayed him. The same questions we ask God. Where is the protection? Where is the love?

Does the mother have a reason? Of course. A good reason. A loving reason. Can the baby understand it? No. Not yet. Not with what he can see.

The gap between what you are going through and what you can understand about it — that gap is where most of the suffering actually lives.

David wrote Psalm 23 from the valley of the shadow of death. And I think we have read that psalm so many times we have stopped hearing it. He does not say: I looked up and saw the shepherd standing in the light. He says: even here — even in the darkest valley I have ever been in — I will fear no evil. Not because the darkness lifted. Because you are with me. You do not always see Jesus face to face in the dark. But you see the silhouette of what He carries. The rod. The staff. The outline of a shepherd who has not gone anywhere. The shape of care moving through the darkness toward you. You do not see His face. You see His tools. And somehow that is enough to keep walking.

What if the silence is not abandonment? What if the silence is the sound of a shepherd moving through a valley He already knows?

Suffering shakes what I believe. It isolates me. It tears away what I was leaning on. And it leaves me in a silence I do not know how to read. But Peter does not ignore any of this. He just does not answer it the way you expect.

THE TURN — JOB AND PETER Before I take you to what Peter says, I want to show you something in the book of Job.

After all the speeches, all the arguments, all the terrible advice from his friends, Job finally gets what he has been begging for. God speaks. And God asks him sixty-four questions back to back. Which was the last thing Job wanted. He wanted answers.

Where were you when I made the earth? Were you there when I set the boundaries of the ocean? Do you understand how any of this works?

Job said: I will only accept what I can fully understand. And God said: okay. Let us start with the basics. Because if you do not understand the physical world around you, what makes you think you should be able to understand what I am doing inside your pain?

And there is something else in Job most people miss. Job did not just suffer for his own sake. He suffered to demonstrate before heaven itself that a person can love and trust God for who He is — not just for what they get from Him. The suffering in Job's life had a cosmic audience. And the question being answered

was not just his.

Can a human being, in the middle of real fire, love God for nothing? Job answered that question. And so does your faith when it is tested. You may be answering it for an audience larger than you know.

And here is what Job said at the end. After all of it. After the silence. After God showed up — not with answers, but in person.

"I had heard of you by the hearing of my ear. But now my eyes see you."

That is not an explanation. That is an encounter.

And Peter does the same thing. Look at verse 7 again.

"...so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." Peter does not explain why you are suffering. He tells you what is happening to your faith while you suffer.

You came to this text wanting a reason. And Peter says: I am not going to give you a reason. I am going to tell you something better. Something is happening to your faith right now. In the fire. And it is worth more than gold.

Peter does not answer the origin question — where did this come from. He answers the goal question — where is God taking your faith through it.

The refiner does not explain the ore. He works it.

THE REFINER Peter uses gold and fire. In the ancient world, this is how gold was purified. You take raw gold — mixed with junk, impurities, things that do not belong — and you put it in the fire. The heat does not destroy the gold. It separates it. The junk rises to the surface. The impurities burn away. What is left is pure.

But a refiner does not throw gold into the fire and walk away.

"He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver." — Malachi 3:3 He will sit. Not stand at a distance. Not check in and leave. He sits. That is patience. That is attention. That is presence.

The refiner watches the metal. He knows how hot it needs to be. He knows how long. He knows when the junk has risen to the top. And the ancient refiners used to say — the silver is ready when the refiner can see his own face in it.

Picture that. Not a God who started a fire and stepped back to watch from a safe distance. A Refiner who has pulled up a chair. Who is watching this specific metal. Who knows this specific temperature. Who is not going anywhere. And who is looking for one thing — the moment He can see His own face in what the fire is making.

"When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. The flames will not set you ablaze." — Isaiah 43:2

Not a promise that there will be no fire. A promise that you will not be in it alone.

And Paul makes it even clearer. Suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope. The fire is not random. It is constructive. The Refiner knows exactly what He is building.

THE REFINER WENT INTO THE FIRE HIMSELF

Now here is the part that changes everything. The Refiner is not watching from a distance.

The Refiner is Jesus. And He went into the fire Himself.

Martin Luther said this: no man ever feared death like this man. Not: Jesus breezed through it. Not: He had a divine advantage over the pain.

No man ever feared death like this man. Because no one would ever die a death like this man.

In the garden, the night before the cross, the Gospel writers say He was deeply distressed. Troubled. Overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. He fell to the ground and prayed. He was a real man. He knew hunger. He knew grief. He

wept at a grave. And now He was facing the fire.

Jesus cried out from the cross — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — that is the same question you ask at 1 a.m. The same question you asked when the ground shifted. He went there. With His own body. With the same word you use.

Why? Where are you? He knows that question from the inside.

Do you believe that? Not just that He suffered — that He suffered the way you have suffered. That the distance between His cry from the cross and your cry at 1 a.m. is smaller than you think. That He is not a God who understands your pain in theory. He understands it from experience. From inside it.

And I want you to know something about how He went in. Before the cross, they offered Him a numbing agent — wine mixed with something bitter, meant to dull the edge of the pain. He refused it.

He went in completely present. Nothing to blunt it. Nothing to take the edge off. He chose to feel all of it. So that no one could ever say: someone has suffered worse than this.

But the tomb was not the end. On the third day — the stone moved. The grave clothes were folded. He walked out. Not as a ghost. As a man with wounds real enough to touch. Thomas put his fingers in the nail holes. This was the Refiner coming out of the fire.

The resurrection is not just comfort. It is proof. Proof that what He starts in the furnace, He finishes. Proof that the fire does not have the last word.

Hebrews says we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our sufferings. Not: He understands in principle. He was there. Fully present. Without anesthetic. He can sympathize because He endured.

Henri Nouwen called Jesus the wounded healer. He does not heal you by standing outside your pain and fixing it. He heals you by entering your pain and being with you inside it. His wounds are not just something that happened to Him. They are how He reaches you.

And Brother Lawrence spent his whole life learning something that sounds simple and is not: God's presence is not something you have to earn or manufacture. You practice noticing that He is already there. In the ordinary. In the quiet. And yes — in the fire. The Refiner is already sitting at the furnace. The invitation is not to find Him. The invitation is to stop and realize He has been there the whole time.

The fire does not make your faith. It reveals the genuineness that was already there. God is not starting from scratch. He is burning off what does not belong so that what was always real can finally be seen.

Your faith is real. The fire proves it. And Peter says this proven, tested faith is worth more than gold.

YOU CAME FOR AN EXPLANATION. HE SENT A REFINER.

So let me bring this home. We have been honest this morning about what suffering does. It shakes what you believe. It isolates you. It tears away what you were leaning on. And it leaves you in a silence you do not know how to read.

And we have been honest about why it reaches so deep. Because it walks into every room where something was alive in you. It finds your hope, your love, your story, your memory, your fear, your restlessness. And it reaches into all of them at once.

And underneath all of that — underneath every layer — is one request. The same request Job made. The same request you have made at 1 a.m.

"God — just tell me why."

And God does not give you a reason. He gives you Himself.

That is what happened to Job. He begged for an explanation, and God showed up — not with answers, but in person. And Job said: I had heard about you. But now I see you. That is what Peter is saying. You are in the fire. Something is happening to your faith — something more precious than gold — and it will result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus is finally revealed.

But the reason it is not meaningless is not because you understand it. It is because the Refiner is in the fire with you. And the Refiner has scars on His hands that prove He has been where you are.

It hurts because you were not made for this. You were made for wholeness. For presence. For love that does not break. Suffering is the collision between what you were made for and what you are living in. That is not a flaw in you. That is the image of God in you, refusing to accept a broken world as normal.

It hurts because something was very much alive in you. And pain found every room.

And it hurts because God is coming near. And when God comes near, everything that is not Him starts to burn. Not because He is angry with you. Because He is too close for the junk to survive.

The pain is not destruction. It is restoration. He is burning away what does not look like Him, so that when He looks into your life, He sees His own face. The same face that walked out of the tomb. The same face that carries the scars.

Are you convinced of the love of God for you — that His concern about you, His interest in you, His desire for you supersedes anything you could long for in yourself? Not love in general. Not love as something He holds for people at a distance. His specific attention to you. His actual interest in what is happening inside you right now. Because here is what I have seen. Most people who are in the fire believe God loves people. They are just not sure they qualify. Not sure it is personal enough to reach into the specific thing they are carrying.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted. Not the idea of the brokenhearted. You. In the specific shape of your specific breaking.

You asked God for a reason. He gave you Himself. And He has not left the fire.

There is a rare condition where a person cannot feel pain at all. They can step on a nail and not know it. Put their hand on a burning stove and not flinch. And the mother of a young girl with this condition said: "My prayer every night is that my daughter would begin to feel pain."

If pain is a signal that something is wrong, is it so hard to believe that God would let you feel it as a signal to turn back to Him? Not as punishment. As a hand on your shoulder saying: come back. I am here. Come home.

A God who went through the fire Himself and came out the other side will not let the fire have the last word.

I keep asking God for a reason. And He keeps giving me Himself. And sometimes that makes me angry, because I want to understand and He wants me to trust. But His presence in the fire is better than any explanation I could ask for. Because explanations do not change anything. But His presence in the fire changes everything.

CLOSE — INVITATION If you are in the fire right now — and some of you are — I am not going to stand up here and give you the reason. I do not know the reason. But I know who is in the fire with you. Someone who has been there. Someone who came out the other side.

Something is happening to your faith right now. Something real. Something precious. Something gold cannot touch.

You asked God for a reason. He gave you Himself. And He has not left the fire.

If your chair needs to become an altar this morning, it can. If you need someone to pray with you, I am here. We are here.

Some of you have been asking for an explanation for months, maybe years. And maybe this morning, the invitation is not to understand. Maybe the invitation is to stop demanding a reason and let the Refiner be what He already is. Present. In the fire. With you. Doing the most precious work of your life.

He has not left. He is sitting at the fire. And He is not going anywhere.

Let me pray for us.

Father, we came to you this morning asking why. Some of us have been asking for a long time. And you are answering us — not with a reason, but with yourself.

You are the Refiner. You are in the fire. You have not left. And we remember this morning that you went into the fire first. That the cross was not plan B. That the tomb was not the end. That the scars on your hands are the proof that you know what fire feels like — and you came out the other side.

We asked for an explanation. You gave us you. And that is enough.

Help us trust you when we cannot see what you are doing. Help us feel you close when the silence feels like you walked away. And do the precious work in our faith that only fire can do. We do not understand it. But we trust the one who sits beside it — and who walked through it Himself.

In Jesus' name. Amen.

A Living Hope

“Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” — 1 Peter 1:8–9 I WHERE WE ARE

Alright. We’re in week two of Share the Hope. And the whole series is asking one question: How do we share the hope we’ve been given?

And I want to start this morning with something that might seem obvious, but I think it unlocks the whole series.

Joy is shareable. By nature. We already know how to share it. We do it every day without thinking about it.

Think about it. When something makes us laugh — a video, a moment with the kids, something the dog did — what do we do? We share it. Immediately. We pull out our phone and send it to somebody. When something moves us — a song, a story, a sunset — we take a picture and post it. When something makes us happy, we don’t have to be taught how to share it. Sharing is what joy does. It overflows. It’s natural. It’s instinctive.

So here’s my question. If sharing joy is the most natural thing in the world — why are we struggling to share the hope of the gospel?

And I don’t think the problem is that we don’t know how to share. We share all day long. The problem is we’ve lost the thing worth sharing.

Now, we’re working through 1 Peter 1:3–12 backwards in this series. Last week we started where Peter ended — verses 10 through 12. And Peter ended with a question: What are the angels looking at? And the answer was stunning. The angels — who see the face of God, who’ve never had to trust because trust is what you do when you can’t see — are stooping down, leaning in to peer at what’s happening inside ordinary believers like us.

And we talked about what they’re looking at. It’s not us. It’s not our performance. It’s the exchange being reversed. In Romans 1, Paul said we traded the glory of God for images of ourselves. That’s the oldest story in the universe — a creature choosing itself over its Creator. The angels have seen that a billion times. That’s not what fascinates them.

What fascinates them is what Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 4 — God has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay. The glory that was traded away is coming back. The self-life — the sin, the inward curve — is being exchanged for the glory of God. Inside ordinary people. In real time. That’s what the angels can’t stop looking at. We ended with a prayer: Open the eyes of my heart, Lord. I want to see You.

And this week the question gets more personal: How do we find joy… again?

But I want to reframe that. Because I don’t think it’s really “again” — like joy is a set of car keys we lost. I think the joy was always there. The table was always set. We just walked away from it.

So the real question is: How do we get back to the table?

Let’s read our text. 1 Peter 1, verses 8 and 9. All the way to the end — because that last phrase is where everything’s headed.

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Love. Faith. Joy. And then — the salvation of our souls. Every word in that sentence is flowing toward that destination. Love leads to faith. Faith leads to joy. And all of it — all of it — is the experience of salvation arriving. Present tense. Right now.

But before we can talk about salvation, I want to show us where the love comes from. Because it doesn’t start with us. II WHERE LOVE STARTS

Okay, so we say “God is love” all the time, right? It’s on coffee mugs. It’s on bumper stickers. And because we say it so much, I think we’ve stopped hearing it. It’s become wallpaper. So I don’t want to just tell you God is love this morning. I want to show you.

I want to take you to one scene first. The baptism of Jesus. Matthew 3:16–17. Picture this. Jesus comes up out of the water, and three things happen at the same time:

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Do you see who’s there? All three. The Son is in the water. The Spirit is descending like a dove. And the Father’s voice breaks through heaven and says: This is my Son, whom I love.

That’s the Father, declaring His love for the Son. Out loud. In public. And the Spirit is right there — the Spirit is the one making the love visible. The Spirit is the dove. The Spirit is the means by which the Father’s love is expressed and experienced. All three, present. All three, active. All three, bound together in love.

That’s what love looks like inside the heart of God. Before we were ever part of the picture. Before we were ever invited in. The Father, Son, and Spirit — loving one another from eternity.

But here’s what’s incredible. That love didn’t stay inside. It reached. And 1 John 4 shows us exactly how. Listen to this — John says:

God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Did you catch the order there? Not that we loved God. We didn’t start this. But that He loved us. God moved first. And the way He moved was by sending the Son. That’s the love of the Trinity reaching toward us — fully God becoming fully man, carrying the Father’s love with Him, because He never stopped being the Son.

And then John tells us how that love actually lands in us. Verse 13: This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit.

The Spirit. The same Spirit who descended like a dove at the baptism — the one who made the Father’s love visible — that Spirit has been given to us. He’s inside us now. And He’s doing the same thing He did at the Jordan River. Making the Father’s love real. Making it something we can actually experience. Not just know about. Feel.

And then John lands the plane. Verse 19:

We love because he first loved us.

We love because He first loved us.

That’s it. That’s where the love in 1 Peter 1:8 comes from. When Peter says “you love Him” — that love didn’t start with us. It started in the heart of God, flowed through the Son, and was poured into us by the Spirit. We’re not generating love for God on our own. We’re responding to a love that found us first.

And here’s why that matters. Because I think most of us, when the joy fades, do the same thing. We try harder. We try to manufacture love for God. We try to produce devotion through effort, through performance, through willpower. Like if we just push hard enough, we can force our way back into the inner life of God.

And it doesn’t work. It never works. Because we can’t get in from the outside. The door doesn’t open from our side.

It opens from the inside.

Like a tomb. Nobody from the outside rolled that stone away. It moved from the inside. And when the disciples got there and peered in — He wasn’t there. Which means He was already out. Already moving. Already on His way to find them before they had the sense to come looking. That’s the gospel. The door burst open from the inside, and He came out looking for us.

And Paul says it so clearly in Romans 5:1–2:

Since we’ve been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we’ve gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

Access. That’s such a big word. The blood opened the door. The Spirit moved in. And now the same love that the Father declared over the Son at the Jordan River is being poured into our hearts. We’re not outside the circle anymore. We’re in it.

Love for God is only complete when both are present. The blood that brought us in, and the Spirit that holds us there.

And the joy Peter’s talking about? I think it’s what it feels like to be inside that circle. To actually be participating in the love that’s been flowing between Father, Son, and Spirit since before the world was made. That’s why Peter calls it “inexpressible and filled with glory.” It’s not just a strong feeling. It’s divine love passing through a human heart. III WHAT ABIDING IS

Okay, so we’ve been brought in. The blood did that. The Spirit’s here. But now the question is — and this is the question I think most of us are really asking when we say we’ve lost our joy — How do we stay? What does it actually look like to live inside what we’ve been brought into?

And Jesus answers that so directly it almost feels too simple. John 15:9–11:

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

I want to walk through this slowly because there’s so much packed in here.

“As the Father has loved me” — that’s what we just saw. The eternal love inside the heart of God. “So have I loved you” — that’s the circle reaching toward us through Christ. And then the invitation: “Abide in my love.” Stay. Remain. Don’t walk away from the table.

And then He tells us why He’s saying all of this. And it’s easy to miss. He says: “These things I’ve spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

Whose joy? His. Not ours. His. The joy that exists inside the Trinity — between Father and Son and Spirit — flowing through the vine into the branches. We don’t produce it. We receive it. The branch doesn’t manufacture fruit. The vine does. The branch just stays connected. It just abides. And the fruit happens.

So here’s where this connects to Peter. Because look at 1 Peter 1:8–9 — it’s easy to read love, faith, and joy like a checklist. Three boxes. Check, check, check. And if the joy box is empty, we need to go find joy somewhere and fill it back up.

But the more I sat with it, the more I realized — that’s not what Peter’s doing. Watch the order:

We love Him — our hearts are drawn to who He is.

We believe in Him — our hearts rest in what He’s promised.

We rejoice — and this is the part I kept missing.

Joy isn’t a third thing we add to love and faith. Joy is what love and faith feel like when they’re actually happening. Think about it — what would it even mean to say, “I love Christ but I’ve got no gladness about it”? That’s not love. That’s duty. Or, “I trust Christ completely but I’ve got no peace about it”? That’s not trust. That’s a gamble.

Joy is the deep gladness of being drawn to someone precious and resting in someone reliable. It was never separate from love and faith. It was always inside them.

And love, faith, and joy together — that’s the abiding. That’s the branch drawing life from the vine. That’s faith in motion. And Jesus used this beautiful picture in John 6:35 — He said, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me won’t hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst. Coming and believing, side by side. The same thing. And the thing they are is eating and drinking. The soul feeding on Christ. Not a box we checked once. An ongoing meal. Vine and branch. Always flowing. Always receiving.

But okay — I can feel some of you thinking, What does that look like when I wake up tomorrow? Fair question. Because if abiding doesn’t work on a Tuesday, it doesn’t work.

Here’s what I’ve realized. If we’re not preaching the cross to ourselves every day, we’ll slide right back into faith-plus-works. Where our standing with God depends on how well we performed today. And the moment we go there, one of two things happens. We’re either crushed because we can’t measure up, or we’re proud because we think we can. Only the cross deals with both.

And it starts with handing over the stuff we’ve been protecting. The corners of our hearts we’ve told God to stay out of. The habits. The appetites. The unconsecrated sin. Because that’s the current that pulls us from the table. And as long as we’re feeding on that, we can’t feed on Him. But look at Romans 6:14:

Sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.

Shall not. Not “might not.” Shall not. Grace is stronger than the pull. Drifting doesn’t have to happen. But it can, if we stop abiding.

But what does preaching the cross to ourselves actually look like? Most of our joylessness — the low-grade, day-to-day kind — comes from listening to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves.

We wake up and the self starts in. Before our feet hit the floor: You’re behind. You’re failing. God feels far away. And we just lie there and take it.

But the psalmist does something different. Psalm 42:

Why are you downcast, oh my soul? Why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God. His soul was crushing him. And he stood up and said: No. Self, you listen to me. And he preached. That’s what preaching the cross to ourselves sounds like: Listen, self. If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son — will He not freely give us all things? Who can bring any charge? It is God who justifies. Self — what can separate us from the love of Christ?

That’s Romans 8. And those words are a weapon. We preach the gospel to ourselves before our selves preach despair to us. That’s abiding.

So practically? It starts with the Gospels in the morning. Not as homework. As a meal. Read until we see Him. Sometimes five minutes. Sometimes thirty. Sometimes we feel nothing and sit there anyway, because showing up hungry is better than not showing up.

And then through the day — we just don’t hang up. You know when you call someone and forget to end the call? Do that with God. Five-second prayers. Before an email: God, help me. Before a hard conversation: Give me wisdom. Before the scroll: What am I about to feed on? Every car ride, every meal, every moment the kids are losing it. Not eloquent. Just — the line stays open. Everything becomes prayer.

Abiding is ordinary. It’s the Gospels as a meal, preaching the cross to ourselves, five-second prayers all day, handing over the sin, and never hanging up the phone. Joy is what our souls taste when we do. IV THOUGH YOU HAVE NOT SEEN HIM

Now, Peter says something that, when I first really heard it, seemed to make all of this harder. He says it twice: Though you have not seen him. And again: Though you do not now see him.

And I get why that’s a problem, right? If abiding is about feeding on Christ, and feeding happens through seeing Him — how do we love someone we’ve never seen? Isn’t that a disadvantage? Didn’t the disciples have it better than us?

So, this is going to sound like a strange turn, but stay with me. I want to tell you about Alicia.

When she and I first started getting to know each other in college, we spent three months on the phone. Three months. We were in different places. Yeah, we’d seen pictures. Yeah, we video chatted sometimes. And yeah, we sent actual letters — through the mail, with stamps and everything. But we’d never been in the same room. Never face to face.

And here’s the thing — because we couldn’t be physically together, all the distractions that come with being in the same room? They were gone. No temptation to skip the hard conversation and just hold her hand. No temptation to let the physical replace the personal. The distance took all of that off the table. And you know what happened? We went deeper. We talked for hours. We asked the questions you only ask when there’s nothing else to do but really talk. We got to know each other in ways that I honestly think being together would’ve made harder.

The distance didn’t weaken the relationship. It sent us somewhere proximity couldn’t reach.

And I think that’s what Peter’s describing. We haven’t seen Christ with our eyes. But we know Him through the Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, John — four portraits covering the full range of who He is. And because the distractions of being physically there aren’t present, we can go deeper than the people who were.

Think about Nicodemus. This is a man who came to Jesus at night — probably because he didn’t want anyone to see him — and they had one conversation. One. And Nicodemus left confused. Or the woman at the well. She met Jesus once, for maybe twenty minutes, and her whole life changed — but she still only got twenty minutes. Zacchaeus climbed a tree and got a single afternoon.

They each got a glimpse. A fragment. A sliver of who He is.

But us? We go with Him to Gethsemane, where even the inner circle fell asleep. We hear whole sermons, not just a sentence caught over someone’s shoulder in a crowd. We see His courage when He’s challenged, His patience when Peter gets it wrong for the hundredth time, His tenderness when the kids come running, His tears when He looks over Jerusalem knowing what’s coming. We see the whole range of who He is.

The crowds got fragments. We get the whole portrait.

The Gospels aren’t second-best. They’re a deeper seat.

And this is what Jesus said to Thomas. Now — you’ve probably heard him called Doubting Thomas your whole life. But I’m done calling him that. We don’t name people after their worst moment, do we? Thomas’s doubt was real. It was honest. He’d just watched Jesus die, and the other disciples were telling him He was alive, and Thomas said, I can’t believe that until I see it. That’s not rebellious. That’s human.

And Jesus didn’t shame him for it. He came back into the room, looked right at Thomas, and said: Put your hand here. See my hands. Reach out and touch the wound. He met Thomas exactly where he was.

And Thomas responded with the greatest thing anyone ever said to Jesus in the Gospels: My Lord and my God.

That’s not Doubting Thomas. That’s Believing Thomas. And I’ll call him that from now on.

And then Jesus looked past Thomas — and I think He looked at us — and said:

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

Blessed. Because there’s a seeing that happens in the heart that goes deeper than eyes. Paul said: God has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

And that seeing — the heart seeing Christ in the Gospels — that’s the abiding. That’s the feeding. That’s what produces love, which enables faith. And when love and faith are actually happening — when we’re drawn to His preciousness and resting in His reliability — joy is what that feels like from the inside. It’s His joy, flowing through the connection. The joy that’s been moving between Father, Son, and Spirit since before the world was made — now moving through us.

That’s the answer. That’s how we get back to the table. We see Him. We love Him. We trust Him. And joy is what happens when we do.

And if the sermon ended there, it would be enough. But Peter’s sentence doesn’t end there. It keeps going. And where it goes changes what joy even means. V SALVATION IS ARRIVING

Stay with me — the end of verse 9.

Obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

That word obtaining — it’s present tense. Not past: “you obtained,” done, behind us. Not future: “you will obtain,” someday.

And most of us have never heard it that way. Most of us think of salvation as something that happened. Past tense. We prayed a prayer. We got saved. Done. And now we’re just waiting. For heaven. And everything in between is just — the hallway. Not really salvation. Not yet heaven. Just endurance.

Can I be honest? I thought that for years. And it almost killed my faith. Because if salvation’s behind us, then the most important thing God’s ever done in our lives is in the past.

That’s not what Peter says. Peter says obtaining. Present. Progressive. Right now. We’re in the act of receiving the salvation of our souls.

Salvation is initial. Salvation is ongoing. And salvation is pressing us toward being made complete.

It’s the continued, daily work of God rescuing and renewing us. Making us whole. Unbending the heart that was curved in on itself. Filling us so completely with the love of Christ that sin loses its grip. Remember what we said last week — the exchange? We traded the glory of God for ourselves? Salvation is that exchange being reversed. The self-life is being replaced by Christ’s life. The glory is coming back into the clay. And that work hasn’t stopped. God didn’t start something in us and walk away. He’s in this room. He’s working right now. The salvation of our souls is arriving at this moment.

And you see what that does to joy, right? If joy’s just a feeling, then losing it’s no big deal. We’ll get it back eventually. But if joy is the experience of salvation arriving — if joy is what it feels like when God is actively rescuing and renewing us — then the absence of joy is a signal. It’s telling us we’ve stopped receiving what was always being offered.

We haven’t lost our salvation. But we’ve stopped participating in it. We walked away from the table. We stopped eating. We stopped drinking. And the joylessness we feel? That’s the ache of a soul that was made to live inside the love of God and is trying to survive outside of it.

The cure isn’t finding something new. The cure is remembering what we first tasted. And sitting back down.

And this is why salvation should be celebrated. Not just remembered. Not just confessed. Not just filed away as a date on a calendar. Celebrated. Because somewhere along the way, we stopped being amazed by it. Salvation became wallpaper. Background noise.

But when the early church talked about miracles — and they saw real miracles, signs and wonders, the lame walking, the sick healed — the biggest miracle they kept coming back to was salvation itself. Changed hearts. Dead souls coming alive. People who were bent inward their whole lives suddenly looking up. That was the miracle that made the Sanhedrin nervous.

In Acts 4, Peter and John had just healed a lame man and preached about Jesus, and the authorities hauled them in and told them to stop. Stop talking about this. Stop preaching in that name. And Peter and John looked at them and said:

We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.

They couldn’t stop. Not because they were brave. Because the joy wouldn’t let them. They weren’t sharing a doctrine. They were sharing what happened to them. And what happened was so real, so alive, so present that telling people to stop talking about it was like telling them to stop breathing.

And that’s what we saw, right here in this church, when we baptized those people recently. Remember what it felt like to stand in this room and hear them talk about what God had done? How their lives had changed? There was joy in their hearts. And there was joy in ours. That was the miracle. Not legs getting longer. Hearts coming alive.

But here’s the danger. And I need us to hear this. That joy? That celebration? It fades when salvation stops being present tense and becomes a memory. When we stop tasting and start just remembering. And if we lose the joy, we lose the sharing. Because we don’t share old news. We share what’s alive. We share what we can’t help talking about.

Salvation is the miracle. And it hasn’t stopped. The river doesn’t end. VI THE RIVER FLOWS OUT And here’s what ties the whole series together. When the abiding’s real, something starts to happen that we didn’t plan. Jesus said it in John 7 — Whoever believes in me, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

The water doesn’t just satisfy us. It becomes a spring inside us. And the spring overflows. Not because we tried to be inspiring. Because we were drinking. And the drinking became a well. And the well became a river toward everyone close enough to get wet.

Paul lived this. He told the Thessalonians:

We cared for you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well.

Not the gospel at arm’s length. His life, shared up close. And that word delighted — that’s not duty. That’s joy overflowing into relationship.

That’s what sharing hope looks like. A life shared up close.

And here’s where I need to be honest with us.

A fire that isn’t tended becomes a smolder. And a smolder still gives off a little warmth — enough to fool ourselves. But it’s not a fire anymore. It’s the memory of one.

I’ve been in churches my whole life. And here’s what I’ve seen — in every single one, including this one. At some point, what’s presented up front starts to drift from what’s actually happening behind it. We say we’re welcoming. And we mean it. But the gap between who we think we are and who we actually are — that’s where people get hurt. And that’s where our witness dies.

I’m not saying this to shame us. I’m saying it because I’m afraid of it. The only thing that makes a church genuinely warm is people who are genuinely being warmed by Christ. People who are abiding. Those people don’t manufacture warmth. It comes off them like heat off a fire.

But when the fire’s real — people walk into a room and feel something they can’t explain. Something that holds on the third visit and the tenth visit and the hard visit. And they find out — yeah. These people actually care. Not because they’re performing. Because something happened to them they couldn’t have pulled off on their own. Our joy is our witness. And the world can tell the difference between a fire and a smolder.

And notice — this series isn’t called Share the Faith. It’s called Share the Hope. And that’s intentional. Because faith is our doctrine — what we believe. And sometimes we think evangelism means explaining a theology we don’t fully understand to people who didn’t ask. No wonder we freeze up.

But hope? Hope is what we’ve experienced. Hope is what we’ve tasted. And sharing hope is what Peter and John were doing when they said, We can’t help speaking about what we’ve seen and heard. They weren’t defending a doctrine. They were overflowing.

Get the fire burning again — get the salvation back into real-time experience — and the sharing takes care of itself. In the weeks ahead we’ll talk about what that looks like. But it starts here. It starts with the fire. VII RETURN TO THE TABLE

I want to close where we closed last week. Because this is the prayer of the whole series. The prayer every week builds on.

Last week I asked God to open my eyes. And I meant it. And honestly? By the middle of the week, I’d walked away from the table. The prayer faded. The fire went out. I stopped abiding and didn’t even notice.

But the table’s still set. The vine’s still producing. The blood’s still sufficient. The Spirit’s still here. Nothing changed on God’s end. I’m the one who walked away.

So this morning I’m not asking us to try harder.

I’m asking us to sit back down at the table.

To start drinking again. Not the sip of duty. Not the gulp of performance. The deep, slow, satisfied drink of a soul that’s remembered where the bread is. Where the water is. Where Christ is.

Open the Gospels this week. Not as an assignment. As a meal. Look at Jesus till we see Him.

Look at the man on the beach, building a fire at dawn. He’s cooking. Breakfast. For the friend who swore he’d die for Him and then denied knowing His name three times before the sun came up. And Jesus didn’t lecture him. He fed him. Sat down with him by the fire and asked him about love. Three times. Once for each denial. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?

Look at the man face down in a garden. Blood pressing through His skin. Praying the most honest prayer anyone’s ever prayed: Abba, Father, not my will but yours. No audience. No performance. Just a Son, talking to His Father, in the dark. And meaning every word.

Look at the man standing in front of Believing Thomas, offering His wounds. Put your hand here. Not to shame him. To save him.

And as we see Him — as we sit back down at the table and taste again what we first tasted — something’ll happen that we can’t produce on our own. Our souls will drink. And be satisfied. And the joy won’t be something we manufactured. It’ll be His joy — now flowing through us.

And the salvation of our souls will keep arriving. Initial. Ongoing. Pressing toward complete. And the river will flow out. Toward our spouses. Our kids. The neighbor who’s been watching. Not a gospel at arm’s length. Our lives, shared up close.

How do we find joy… again? We sit back down at the table. We receive what salvation is already giving. And the joy that comes from that — His joy, not ours — overflows into everything and everyone around us.

And in a moment, we’re going to do exactly that. We’re going to come to the table together. The bread and the cup. The body and blood of Jesus. Not as a ritual. Not as something we check off. As a meal. As a remembering. As a present-tense act of receiving what salvation is already giving.

This is the table. It’s been set since the cross. And it’s set right now.

So let’s sit down. Let’s eat. Let’s taste again what we first tasted. And as we do, let’s pray the prayer of this whole series:

Open the eyes of my heart, Lord. I want to see You.

Do it again, Lord. Do it again.

Share the Hope — Week 2 Falcon Community Church of the Nazarene

Honor, Guard, Cherish

Good morning church.

First of all, I just want to take a moment and wish you a happy Father’s Day. To the dads. To the men who stepped in when somebody else stepped out. To the ones who never had a father and decided to become one anyway.

I just want you to know you are seen today.

And here is what I love about a day like today. On a day like today, I get to stand up in front of the men in this room and tell you about my father.

And of course you know what I mean. I mean the Father.

I love the Father, church. The Father has loved me in a way I could not begin to describe to you. And one of the joys of my life is getting to introduce him to other people. To tell you how blessed I am, by his undivided grace toward his Son, and by the Spirit of his Son that lives inside this clay vessel.

I think about Peter. I think about sitting down next to him while he writes these words.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. 1 PETER 1:3-4

And... you have to understand something about me to understand why this verse wrecks my heart.

I did not have a father for so long. And for so long, I did not want the Father to be a Father. I can tell you, there was a point where Jesus was all I wanted. I thought he was all I needed. All that I have ever desired.

For my whole life as a child and young adult, I had no clue what a father is supposed to be. I have only been one for nineteen years.

There are three hearts in this world that call me father. And each one sees me a little differently. Three sets of eyes. Three versions of the same man.

And I think to myself, if three hearts, over nineteen years, and seventeen years, and thirteen years, can see me that many ways what about him?

What about our heavenly Father, who has had ages? Eons of watching his children. Some of them turning to see him. and those children of the world… turning to reject him. A Father who, in all that time, has done everything and I mean, everything out of love for those he loves, which is all of his children. You see, living for Jesus cost me so much of my life. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t.

Savior? Yes. Friend of sinners? Yes, I needed that one. Lord? In time. In time he became my Mater and Lord.

But….. there was a season where I just I didn’t want him to live for me. I wanted to live for him.

And here is what I did not understand back then. To live for Christ is to live with a heart that treasures the Son’s Father.

There’s this moment, the night before Jesus dies. He’s in a room with the men who’ve followed him for three years. And one of them, a guy named Philip, finally just says the quiet part out loud. He says, Lord, just show us the Father. That’s it. Show us the Father, and we’ll be satisfied.

And church, I understand Philip, because theres a bit of him within me. Because that has been the cry of my whole life. Just show me the Father. That would be enough. I’ll be reading about Jesus and someone like this would say, just show him… put the beef down and lets hear it sizzle.

And listen to how Jesus answers him.

Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. JOHN 14:9

Now church, here is something I had to learn the hard way. You cannot see the Father rightly until you see the Son rightly.

And for a long time, I didn’t. For a long time, Jesus was useful to me. He was my rescue. He was my way out. He was the one who got me to the good stuff.

But a Jesus you use is a Jesus who is still all about you.

Listne, He is not a springboard to the Father. He is not a door you walk through to get to the thing you actually wanted. Looking at him is looking at the Father. He is not the window. He is the face.

And you might be asking me, okay pastor, but how? How do I see the Son rightly? How do I stop using him and start treasuring him?

And church, the answer was sitting right there in the verse I already read you. Go back and listen to how Peter even starts.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 PETER 1:3 DID, You hear that? That’s not a man teaching. That’s a man worshiping, within these words, within this page.… Peter can’t even get the sentence going without blessing God first.

And that, right there, is the difference. A Jesus you use you study him for what he can do for you. A Jesus you treasure you can’t open your mouth without blessing him.

And when you finally see him like that, you start to see the whole shape of it. Listen to the verse again. His great mercy came first. It came to you through the risen Son. And it was always headed somewhere. Into a living hope.

Mercy first. Through the Son. Headed somewhere.

I didn’t start any of it. I was caught up in the middle of it. Mercy I didn’t earn reached me through a Son I didn’t deserve. And I get just a little taste of that even now. Sometimes I’m sitting in prayer. Sometimes I’m up on a mountain west of here looking over the edge of our world. And sometimes, if I’m honest, I’m just sitting in the pain that I’m in. Sometimes it’s mine. Sometimes it’s a weight I’m carrying for somebody else.

And in those moments something comes up out of me. And it isn’t holy, holy, holy. It’s quieter than that.

It’s that still, small voice. Right here, in my chest. The recognition that he is present. That he is in me.

And all it ever says is Beloved… I am here.

And maybe maybe that’s why this one little word, this Abba, this daddy-word, this most intimate way a person could ever say the name Father, means so much more to me now than it ever used to.

Because a love that deep, a love that’s been singing that same song since before there was even such a thing as time well, a love like that can only mean one thing.

It means he could love a weaker vessel like me.

Now hold onto that word. Weaker vessel. Because we’re about to walk into a verse where Peter uses it. And I’ll be honest with you, church, most of us hear that verse and we brace ourselves for a sermon about women.

But I want to tell you where I actually live in this text. I am the weaker vessel. Not weaker than Alicia. Weaker than my Father. I am the clay. He is the glory poured into it.

And here is what I’m learning.

I cannot honor, and guard, and cherish what I have not first been honored, and guarded, and cherished as.

I have nothing to hand my wife that he did not first hand me. But what he handed me he was never asking me to keep.

So here’s the question forming within me right now is this … What are you beholding? What are you, men… what are you treasuring in this life? Because what you behold is what you become able to give.

Right? We don’[t give what we don’t have.

Here is the verse.

Likewise, husbands, live with your wives according to knowledge, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered. 1 PETER 3:7

The whole thing hangs on one phrase. Live with her according to knowledge.

Now... that’s a good phrase, isn’t it? Live with her... according to knowledge.

That’s where we begin. And right here, it makes you stop and ask. Knowledge of what?

I mean... is Peter really asking me to know how a woman’s mind works? Because if that’s the test, brother, I’m in trouble.

because I think…. after, Twenty-one years in, I’m still learning her. And honestly? I love that. I’m not at the bottom of her yet. I’ve got another twenty-one years, Lord willing, to keep discovering her. To love her, to make her smile and to hold her when she’s scared, all the while praying that the Lord takes me first, because I wouldn’t be able to function if she was not with me.

Im not trying just to be romantic here.. just honest… because… living with her… accourdiign to knowledge, well that tells me she must be the brains of this whole operation we call marriage and life.

But… honestly, this question Peter raises, tells me something. Whatever Peter means by knowledge here, it can’t be a box you check on your wedding day.

Thats not it… it can’t be… So if it’s not that... then what is it?

Well, my best answer, at this stage in my marriage, is this.

The knowledge Peter’s after is learning to see her the way her Father sees her. Not the facts about her. Not her schedule, not her coffee order, not even twenty-one years of knowing her habits. I mean learning to behold her the…. way heaven beholds her.

Now hold onto that, Because here’s what I’m finding. On the mornings I get her wrong, it’s almost always because I forgot who she actually is. When I get things wrong… in our marriage, and im being honest.,.. I make mistakes… im human just like she is… when I get her wrong….. and start seeing her not has the beloved of Christ… iu no longer see a soul mate, I start seeing a problem.

I see A schedule. Something standing between me and my day. and I ask… in those moments, why? Why have I….. stopped seeing a daughter of God. A fellow heir. A clay jar, jus like me, in my love for the father, through Christ… who is carrying his glory.

Why would I see her in any other way other than to To live with her according to knowledge, which means to live with her is to never stop seeing what, and who she really is.

And church, watch how much seeing Peter packs into this one little verse. Knowledge of what honor is. What a vessel is. What weaker even means. And knowledge of how in the world a man can get his own prayers all tangled up.

And I love that. Because it means you don’t have to go groping around in the dark. You don’t have to wait till you’ve read the right book on marriage to start honoring her tonight. Peter says it’s already close. The knowledge, the you need to honor her, and love her, and to treasure her… is already near you.

So let me flip it around. What’s the opposite? What does it look like to live with her without knowledge?

And Peter already answered that one, back in chapter one.

He says, As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.

As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. 1 PETER 1:14 Former ignorance. Now hear me on this. That’s not the ignorance of a man who doesn’t know the facts. After twenty-one years, believe me, I’ve got the facts. I know her coffee order. I know which version of her is walking through the door after a hard day of housewifing.

No. The ignorance Peter’s talking about is sneakier than that. It’s knowing her so well that you quietly stop looking at her. It’s when knowing her turns into assuming her. It’s when she stops being someone you behold, and starts being someone you use. A help to your day. A problem in your evening. Something in the way of where you’re trying to go.

And that hurts my heart so much… when did you last looked at her, or him… or someone you care about and go, wow… I’m so captivated by you.

And, trust me, I know that road, church. I do. Because that’s exactly how I used to treat Jesus. I used him. And then one day I learned to treasure him. And everything changed.

So here’s the choice sitting in front of every man in this room. You’re going to live with her one of two ways.

According to what you now know, the daughter of God she really is.

Or according to what you used to be in the dark about, back when she was just useful to you.

Beholding her. Or using her.

And men, you’ve got to land on one or the other. But hear me, when I say choose, I don’t mean this is a choice you make by gritting your teeth and trying harder. Like if you just buckle down and decide to see her better, you’ll pull it off.

Because I’ve tried that. And it lasts about until Tuesday.

No. I learned this in the deeper room, remember? I didn’t climb my way into seeing the Father. The Spirit opened my hands. And, It was a gift. And it’s the same here. You can’t manufacture this kind of sight. You can only receive it.

So the real choice isn’t whether you’re strong enough to see her right. The choice is whether you’ll keep your hands open. Whether you’ll let him give you his eyes for her.

Igt all comes down to this… to know her.

And, be careful, because we hear that word and we think we know what it means. To know her. Like, have her figured out. Know what she’s going to say before she says it.

But that’s not the word Peter’s reaching for.

Listen. The very first time the Bible ever uses that word, to know, it’s not in a classroom. It’s not information at all. It’s Genesis. Adam knew his wife, and she conceived a son.

That’s the Bible being tender with us. Knowing, all the way down at its root, is the closeness between a husband and a wife. It’s covenant. It’s belonging. It’s two people who’ve given themselves to each other. To do what? To fulfill the purpose God has given to them.. to love him and to love one another.

Thats the gospel right there in genesis.

And then, watch what God does with that word. He picks it up in Hosea, and he says it about himself. He says, I will betroth you to me forever. And you will know the Lord. God takes the most intimate word we’ve got, the one that started in a marriage, and he says, that. That’s how I want to be known by you.

Not studied on a Wednesday night, or a Sunday morning. … Not figured out…. Known.

So when Peter turns to us husbands and says, live with her according to knowledge, do you hear how deep that goes now? He’s not asking me to master her. He’s asking me to know her the way God knows me. With covenant. With faithfulness. With a love that just... stays.

And here’s the thing about that kind of knowing. For Peter, it’s never cold. It was never just facts in your head. When you know someone like that, really know them, it lights a fire. It changes what you want.

Think back to before you knew God. Before any of this. There was a time we were all just... in the dark. Didn’t know what was up or down in the universe. Didn’t know the cross. Didn’t know the Spirit. Didn’t even really know what love was. The whole thing was fog.

And then God opens your eyes. New birth. And the knowing starts flooding in. But watch what Peter says happens next, because this is the part we skip right over. The new knowing

makes new wanting. New loves. New desires. You don’t just know more. You start to want differently.

That’s actually how you can tell something’s alive. Right? How do you know a baby’s alive? It wants something. A living thing wants.

Its natural… the only reason your even here today is what? You want something. And for osmen of you, its Christ, for some of you.. its to be recognized as fathers at churhc… for some of you… you’re just here and confused.

Now somebody’s going to push back on me. Pastor, there’s a long way between my head and my heart. And listen, maybe. Yeah, sometimes there is.

But I know that distance better than most. I lived in it for years. I had all of Jesus up in my head. I had the facts. But the Father didn’t land in my heart until he opened my hands and I finally saw him. And here’s what I learned in that moment. What closed the gap wasn’t me trying harder to feel something. It was the seeing. The seeing is what lit the fire.

So when Peter turns to us and says, live with her according to knowledge, I’m hearing all of that underneath it. He’s saying, men, you know her now. So you’re going to feel something now. Because you cannot really see who she is and stay unmoved.

So let me show you what you’re actually looking at. When a man finally sees his wife with those eyes, here’s who’s standing in his kitchen.

She is a fellow heir of the grace of life. That’s Peter’s word. A fellow heir. Same grace as you. Same inheritance as you. Same forever as you. Remember that inheritance I read you way back at the beginning? Imperishable, undefiled, unfading, kept in heaven? Hear me, men. That’s not just yours. It’s hers. Every bit as much as it’s yours.

And I think that changes the very first thought a man’s allowed to have in the morning. Not what she did wrong yesterday. Not the argument you never finished. The first true thing, before your feet even hit the floor, is this. The woman lying next to me is going to inherit the world.

And I didn’t make that up. Paul did.

All things are yours, whether the world or life or death or the present or the future. All are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. 1 CORINTHIANS 3:21-23

She inherits the world, church. And that’s just for starters. After that, the galaxies are her backyard.

So let me ask you something. When’s the last time you read Scripture to her? And I don’t mean about her. I mean to her. When’s the last time you pulled a Solomon?

Because Solomon went for it. Listen to how this man talks to his wife.

Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing. SONG OF SONGS 4:2 Now, some of you know Alicia and I have two Finn sheep. Jeb Jeb. And Pickles.

So picture this with me. I take Alicia out to the pen. Just the four of us. Jeb Jeb, Pickles, me, and my bride. And I look deep into her eyes, and I say... honey... your teeth... they’re just like Jeb Jeb after a good wash.

I don’t think that lands the way Solomon meant it.

But here’s what he’s actually doing. He’s saying, baby, your teeth are white, you’ve still got every one of them, and in his day, that was a compliment. That was the man swooning.

And here’s what gets me about it. Solomon isn’t being weird. He’s a man who has looked at his wife so long, and loved her so much, that he’s run clean out of normal words. He’s grabbing for sheep and goats and towers because plain language just can’t hold what he sees when he looks at her.

So let me ask it straight, men. When’s the last time you looked at your wife long enough... to run out of words?

Because that’s what beholding does. It ruins you for careless words. And it’s the opposite of being harsh. So let me ask the other plain question. How do you get to be harsh with someone like that? How do you talk down to a fellow heir of the grace of life over a sink full of dishes? Or dirty kids, or something doesn’t get done?

I don’t care what she did. I don’t care how many problems are stacked up in your house this morning. Strong believer, struggling believer, the morning after the worst fight you’ve ever had, it doesn’t change the knowing. She is a fellow heir of the grace of life. And the man who really sees that... loves her as the father loves her.

Now right after Peter calls her a fellow heir, he uses a word that trips people up. He calls her a vessel.

And church, you remember what I told you about myself this morning? I said I’m the clay, and he’s the glory poured into it. Well, here’s the thing, that’s not me being poetic. That’s Peter. He’s been saying it this whole letter. The container fades. The treasure doesn’t.

So when Peter gets to chapter three and calls her a vessel, his people already know exactly what he means. A vessel is a container. And it almost always holds something worth more than itself.

Alicia just bought this pitcher for our counter. Fills it with water, drops in some fruit. And when I come in thirsty and reach for it, I promise you I’m not admiring the pitcher. Nobody writes a poem about the pitcher. I want what’s inside. The glass is just carrying the good part.

And church, Paul says it out loud, the same way, with the same word Peter’s using.

We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

There it is. Jars of clay. And what’s in the jar? The glory of God himself.

So when Peter calls her a vessel, he’s not insulting her. He’s telling you what she’s carrying. She’s clay holding glory. And so are you. Every one of us in this room is a clay jar carrying something worth a thousand times more than the jar.

And men, once you really see that... you handle people differently. You stop being careless with the clay. Because you’ve finally noticed what’s inside it.

Which brings us to the word everybody snags on. Weaker. The weaker vessel.

And I’m not going to dance around it. I want to open the book and watch what Peter actually does with it. Because Peter does not do the thing we’re all afraid he’s about to do.

Here’s the first thing. Look at the whole verse again.

Likewise, husbands, live with your wives according to knowledge, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life. 1 PETER 3:7

You see it? Weaker vessel... since they are heirs with you. Same breath. Same sentence. Weaker, and fellow heir, sitting right next to each other. So whatever Peter means by weaker, he cannot mean lesser. The same verse says she inherits everything you inherit. He built the guardrail right into his own sentence.

Now here’s the second thing, and this is the one that settles it for me. You have to back up and read what Peter was saying right before he ever turned to us husbands. Look how he describes her, just a verse up.

For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves... And you are her children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening. 1 PETER 3:5-6

Read that last line again. Do not fear anything that is frightening. That’s his picture of her. A daughter of Sarah. A woman who hoped in God so deeply that nothing in this world could scare her.

So sit with that. Two verses before Peter ever says the word weaker, his portrait of this woman is a woman who is fearless. Rooted. Brave. Unshakable. So when he turns around and says weaker vessel, he is not talking about some timid little thing who needs a man to have a backbone for her. He just told you how strong her soul is.

Now, is there a plain sense to the word? Sure. In general, she may be the more physically tender one, and Peter’s first readers just assumed that. I’m not going to pretend the word isn’t on the page. But watch what Peter builds on top of it. Read his own logic. He does not say, she’s weaker, therefore you’re in charge. He does not say, she’s weaker, therefore you decide. Look at what he actually says. She’s weaker... therefore show her honor.

That’s the whole move. Weaker, therefore honor. Peter takes the one place she might be more easily hurt, and he does not build a ladder over her. He builds an altar to her. The more tender the vessel, the more carefully you carry it. The honor goes up, not down.

And you have to understand how strange that is. Because our whole culture has only ever handed us two options for this. Two. And Peter’s holding out a third that nobody’s selling.

The first one’s the old one. Strength means you’re in charge. The stronger one stands over the weaker one and sets the terms. And honestly? A lot of you, when you heard “weaker vessel,” that’s the ladder you braced for. You thought, here it comes, the Bible’s about to put men on top.

But it didn’t. Peter already kicked that ladder over two verses ago. Fellow heir. Do not be afraid. He is not handing you a throne.

The second option is the one we’re most proud of. We looked at that old hierarchy, and we hated it, and I get why. So we said, alright, no difference at all. Dead even. We’ll keep score.

You do half, I do half, you got the kids last time so it’s my turn, and if there’s a noise downstairs at two in the morning, it’s as much your turn as mine. And that sounds like fairness. It sounds like progress.

But you want to know what it actually is? It’s still a ladder. It’s just a ladder where everybody’s white-knuckling their own rung, making sure nobody climbs higher. It’s a marriage run like a bank statement. And there is no honor in a bank statement. There’s just math.

And then here comes Peter. And he won’t put the man on top. And he won’t hand you a measuring tape either. He points at this woman, this vessel full of the glory of God, points at the very place she’s more tender, and he says one word. Honor. Guard her there. Spend your strength on her.

That’s not a ladder. That’s an altar. Our culture can hand you a throne, or it can hand you a scoreboard. Only Jesus hands you a man who lays his strength down, on purpose, like worship, over the treasure God set right in front of him.

And men, hear how this lands on me. I told you at the very start. I’m the weaker vessel. Weaker than my Father. I’m clay too. So I don’t get to stand over her as the strong one looking down on the weak one. That was never it. I’m just one clay jar, who got handed a little strength by pure grace, and the whole point of that strength is to spend it guarding another jar carrying the same glory I am.

That’s what the strength is for. And whatever strength I’ve got, I didn’t make it. It was given to me. So even my guarding... is just grace passing through.

So if there’s a noise downstairs in the dark, I’m not lying there doing the math on whose turn it is. Love doesn’t do math. Love runs toward the noise. If something’s down there, I’m going first. Not because she couldn’t handle it. She might handle it better than me. That was never the question. The question is whether there’s something in a man that says, I will put myself between her and the danger, because she is my treasure. And because Someone went first for me.

But church, hear me. Most nights there is no noise downstairs. Most nights it’s just the two of you. And the day you had. And the things that didn’t get said.

And do you remember how Peter even ended that verse? He says, show her honor so that your prayers may not be hindered.

And men, I have to be honest with you about what that is. We’ve been circling it all morning and I think it’s time we just name it. Using her instead of beholding her. That’s

not a rough patch. It’s not the dishes. It’s not the schedule. It’s not whose turn it was at two in the morning. I’m just going to say it plain. That’s sin.

And here’s the thing that wrecks me about it. It’s the same heart. The same heart that curves in on itself and uses Jesus is the same heart that curves in and uses her. I know that heart. I lived in that heart for years.

And now church, here’s where a lesser sermon, here’s where I would have preached this ten years ago. I’d just tell you to go home and fix it. Try harder. Be a better man. Be a better husband. But do you hear it? That’s just using Jesus again, isn’t it? Reaching for him like a self-improvement plan. Like a ticket to a better marriage.

No. The answer to a curved-in heart was never a better effort. The answer was a cross.

The Son already went down first. He ran toward the worst noise there ever was your sin and mine and he went all the way down into it. He honored you and guarded you and cherished you while you were still the man using everyone to fill himself. He paid it. It is finished.

And church here’s the thing I keep circling back to. Even there. Even on that cross. His eyes were not first on me.

I used to think they were. I used to think the whole thing was just about getting me out. But the Son went to that cross for his Father. For his Father’s love. For his Father’s name that it would be shown for the glory it is. He went down loving his Father all the way to the bottom of it.

And it took me years to see this but it’s the only kind of cross that could ever have saved me. Because a Jesus who died just to get me out well, that’s a ticket again, isn’t it? That’s a rescue and nothing more. But a Son who goes to a cross for the love of his Father that’s a treasure. And in the wake of a love like that the door swung open and I got carried all the way home. I didn’t just get out of something. I got in.

So hear our word one more time. Only now don’t hear it as a job. Hear it as the gift it always was.

I cannot honor, and guard, and cherish what I have not first been honored, and guarded, and cherished as. And on a cross, church you were.

So you don’t kneel tonight to buy your way back. You kneel because you already belong.

Because here’s what that old sin still tries to do. It dulls you toward God himself. You’re carrying something you won’t even name and all of a sudden you don’t feel like praying. You kneel down already thinking is he even listening? Sin will quietly talk a man out of the very thing he needs most.

So when Peter says, so that your prayers may not be hindered this is what he’s reaching for. Look with me at the very next verse. 1 Peter 3, verse 12.

For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. 1 PETER 3:12 The man who uses his wife finds his own prayers all tangled up. Not because God is keeping score. Because sin always pulls the heart back in on itself. And a heart that pulls toward self is always a heart that can’t guard, or honor, or cherish anyone other than self.

And that, men that’s the whole sermon in one room. The man who’s been beholding her can kneel. The man who’s been using her can’t. And if you can’t hear me that’s not the end. That’s the altar again. You go first. Not down the stairs this time. Down to your knees. You kneel beside her and you say Lord, we don’t even feel like praying tonight. Help us. Amen. That’s a lousy little prayer. And it’s one of the most honoring things a man can do. Because he went first. Because Someone went first for him.

Come And Be Loved

So here’s what I’m not going to do. I’m not sending you home with a list. Five steps to a better father. Ten ways to love your wife. You’d lose the paper by Tuesday and church, so would I.

I’m going to give you one thing. Just one.

Tonight. Before your head hits the pillow. You go first. You find her and you look at her long enough to run clean out of words. And then you say the truest thing you know. You are a fellow heir of the grace of life. And I haven’t been beholding you the way heaven does. And I want to start tonight.

That’s it. You don’t have to fix the marriage tonight. You just have to go first. Because Someone went first for you.

Honor, Guard, Cherish 1 Peter 3:7 Father’s Day

When They Ask

Open Your Bibles

If you have a Bible, and I hope that you or somebody around you does, let me invite you to open with me to First Peter, chapter three. First Peter three, verses fourteen and fifteen. Feel free to use the table of contents if you need to. For those of you visiting with us today, my name is Pastor Matthew, and we are in week six of a series called Share the Hope. Week six. The final week. For five weeks we have been walking through this letter from Peter, backwards, from chapter one verse twelve all the way to the beginning. And we have been doing it because Peter builds something around one phrase that he gives us in chapter one, verse three. A living hope. He has been showing us what that hope does in us. It holds us in suffering. It refines our faith like gold in fire. It produces a joy too deep for words to explain. And it stirs the curiosity of angels. Today, Peter brings it home. And I want you to hear this text, because it is going to tell us what every single believer in this room does on Monday morning with what we have been seeing for five weeks. Listen to the Word of God. 1 Peter 3:14–15 (NIV) “But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” The Word of God. Now, here is the question this text puts on the table for every single one of us. What does it actually mean to be ready? And this question matters enormously, because there is a wrong way to answer it. And if we get the wrong answer, we are going to walk out of here today and do the exact opposite of what Jesus told us to do. Listen to this. Luke 21:14–15 (ESV) “Settle it therefore in your hearts not to meditate beforehand how to answer, for I will give you a mouth and wisdom which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict.” Peter says always be ready. Jesus says do not meditate beforehand on how to answer. Do you feel the tension? Good. Because if we misunderstand what Peter means by ready, we are going to spend our entire Christian lives doing what Jesus told us not to do. So what kind of readiness is Peter talking about? I want to give you three truths from this text this morning. Three truths that I believe answer the question of how we share the hope we have been learning about for five weeks. And I want to encourage you, if you are taking notes, write these down.

Truth Number One

The readiness lives inside the reverence. Look at the verse again. Peter says, “in your hearts revere Christ as Lord, always being ready to give an answer.” Now listen to this. That word being is not actually in Peter’s original sentence. It was added by translators to smooth the English. What Peter wrote is one single thought. Revere Christ the Lord in your hearts, ready always to give an answer. There is no second command. The readiness is not a separate assignment you have to work up for. It is what happens when Christ is revered in your heart. Revere Christ, and the readiness follows. It grows up inside the reverence. So what does it actually mean to revere Christ in your heart? Peter gives us enormous help here, because he is borrowing from Isaiah. Turn with me to Isaiah chapter eight. When you see what Peter is pulling from, the whole verse opens up. Isaiah 8:12–13 (ESV) “Do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.” What God was asking of Isaiah was not a life of constant terror. What God wanted was for the thought of displeasing Him to be a weightier thing to Isaiah than the thought of being rejected by people. Write this down. The measure of your reverence for God is the measure of your desire not to displease Him. And what would have displeased God most in Isaiah’s situation? Isaiah fearing the same things his unbelieving countrymen were fearing. Because God had made promises. Real, specific, glorious promises. And when you fear men more than you trust God’s promises, you are casting a vote against His trustworthiness. You are saying with your fear, your word is not enough. The threats are bigger than the promises. But here is the other side. When you trust God’s promises more than you trust the threats of this world, when you revere Him, the fear gets displaced. Not by grit. Not by positive thinking. Hope grows in the space where fear used to live. That is the fight. Go to His promises when you are afraid. Let them work on your fear. Day after day after day. Your fear will turn to hope. And you will have a reason to give for the hope that is in you. And church, let me say this a different way, because revere can feel like a church word. When Peter says revere Christ as Lord in your heart, what he is really describing is a heart that treasures Him. A heart that holds Him above every other affection. A heart for whom Jesus is not a belief on a shelf, but the most precious thing in its sight. When you treasure something, you do not have to be told to protect it. You do not have to be told to think about it. You already do. Warmer. This is the beside-them illustration. Slow down on Alicia. Do not perform it. Let me make this as personal as I can. I have been married to Alicia for a long time now. And every year, we are becoming more one than we were the year before. Day by day by day. And because of that, when temptations or opportunities come my way, something sits at the front of my heart. It is not will I get caught. It is not what will people think. It is, will this hurt her? That is not fear of punishment. That is what treasuring her looks like. That is a picture of what treasuring Christ looks like. The more you become His, the more you love Him, the more unthinkable it becomes to do anything that would grieve Him. Not because you are afraid of Him throwing you out. Because you treasure Him. You love Him. You do not want to disappoint the One who has loved you all the way to a cross. And hear this. The same thing is true of us as the body of Christ in this room. Paul tells us that we are one body. The arm does not harm the leg. The eye does not wound the hand. We are one. And when Christ is truly treasured in our hearts, something happens in a congregation. We start caring about one another the way we care about our own flesh. Because we belong to Him, and therefore we belong to each other. Now the personal confession. Slow down. This is the pastoral moment. Do not perform it. And church, I need to stop for just a minute and make a personal confession. Because this is where this text hit me hardest. I am your pastor. I stand up here every week and open this Book. And you might think that means I have this figured out, that I wake up every morning overflowing with hope. I do not. Not always. Some mornings the first thing I feel is fear. Fear about this church. Fear about whether I am doing this right. Fear about things I cannot control and people I cannot fix. My hope wanes. And when that fear shows up, I have learned to do one thing. I open His Word. And I say out loud, sometimes almost in a whisper, Lord, I need to hear You. I need You to speak. I cannot carry this today on my own. And I sit with Him in the Scriptures until something shifts. Until a promise lands. Until the fear that was bigger than me meets a Savior who is bigger than the fear. And every single morning the fight is the same. Will I trust the threats, or will I trust the promises? That is the fight of faith. And it is fought on your knees, with His Word, in prayer. Bring readiness down to earth. Two pictures: pre-kids, firefighters. Make the abstract concrete. Before Alicia and I had kids, there was a whole season of getting ready. The nursery. The car seat. The hospital bag sitting by the door. We were not anxious about being ready. We were getting ready because someone precious was coming, and we wanted to be prepared to receive them. Think about the fire department. Those men and women do not sit around hoping a fire does not come. They train. They check the equipment. They stay ready. So that when the call comes, they are not scrambling. They are ready to run toward it. Peter is calling us to that kind of readiness. Not anxious readiness. Loving readiness. The readiness of a heart that has already spent time with the One we are going to speak about. Which is exactly what you see in the early church. Look at Acts chapter four. Peter and John had just healed a lame man at the temple gate. The whole city was talking about it. And the religious leaders arrested them, dragged them in front of the same council that had condemned Jesus a few weeks earlier, and commanded them to stop speaking in the name of Jesus. And in that moment, with their lives on the line, Peter and John said, we cannot help but speak of what we have seen and heard. And listen to what Scripture tells us about the council’s reaction. Acts 4:13 (NIV) When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. They had been with Jesus. That was the whole explanation. Not a degree. Not a training program. Not a clever argument. Nearness. They had been near Him. And it showed. This is the sustained readiness picture. Let it flow. Do not announce movement. Let each layer carry you. So what does readiness actually look like, when it is not cramming and not rehearsing? The readiness Peter is describing is not a task you complete. It is a way of living. Readiness is living in a constant awareness that Christ is sufficient for you. Not theoretically. Actually. In this hour. With the thing you are carrying today. The diagnosis. The bill. The child you cannot reach. The marriage you are trying to save. Readiness is waking up and knowing, before anything else, that He is enough for what this day is going to ask of you. Readiness is cultivating a relationship with Jesus where He is not a subject you study but a Person you know. There is a difference. You do not study your spouse. You know her. You do not memorize facts about your best friend. You walk with him. Peter wants us to know Jesus like that. Present tense. Ongoing. A friendship, not a syllabus. Readiness is saturation in His Word. Because Jesus promised that when the moment comes, the Holy Spirit will bring to your mind the very things you need to say. And the more time you spend in the Word, the more the Spirit has to draw on when that moment comes. So open your Bible. Sit with it. Let it sink down. Not because you are behind. Because the Spirit delights to take what has been treasured in your heart and put it on your lips when it is needed. Readiness is dependence. Moment by moment. Waking up in the morning and saying, Lord, I cannot do this day without You. Walking into a meeting and whispering, Lord, help me. Getting in the car after something hard and saying, Lord, I need You now. Not one big dependence at the altar once a year. A thousand small dependences every day that keep you tethered to Him. And church, there is one more picture of readiness I want you to see. Paul uses it in Ephesians chapter six. Listen to how he describes it. Ephesians 6:15 (NIV) “And with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.” Feet fitted. Shoes on. Laces tied. Ready to move. Because feet are for going. And the readiness Peter is describing is not just an attitude that sits in a chair. It is shoes that are already laced up. When the Spirit says move, you are not scrambling for your shoes. You are already wearing them. That is readiness. Aware. Close to Christ. Saturated in His Word. Dependent on Him moment by moment. Shoes on. Ready to move when He says move. And notice what every single one of these has in common. Not one of them is something you manufacture. Not one of them is an assignment. Every single one of them is the fruit of treasuring Him. Of being near Him. Of letting Him become, over time, the most precious thing in your sight. Which is why I want to say this carefully. I am not saying small groups are bad. I am not saying Bible study is a waste. I am not saying the new member class or Sunday school or the discipleship class do not matter. Of course they do. These are good. These are how we get ready together. Keep going. Keep opening your Bible. Keep gathering with the saints. But church, hear this. If all that training, all that study, all that gathering is not leading you to treasure Christ more than you did last year, then what is it for? What does all that knowledge have that the heart cannot taste? You cannot share what you do not have. And if your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength is not treasuring Christ, then something is off. Not broken. Off. And the fix is not more information. The fix is to come back and taste Him again.

Truth Number Two

You are called to be a witness. Now look with me at the second half of what Peter says. Always ready to give an answer. The word Peter uses there for answer is a courtroom word. But I want you to hear this carefully. It is not the word for the defense attorney giving a closing argument. It is the word for the witness. There is a difference. A defense attorney has to make the case. A witness just tells what they saw. A defense attorney has to win the argument. A witness just tells the truth. A defense attorney has to be an expert. A witness just has to have been there. And church, that distinction matters more than almost anything in this verse. Because when most of us hear be ready to give an answer, we hear be ready to win a debate. Handle every objection. Defend the whole structure of Christian theology against anyone who challenges it. And if that is what Peter meant, none of us would ever be ready. We would spend our whole lives feeling guilty about something Peter never asked us to do. But a witness is not a spectator. A witness is someone who has seen something with their own eyes and now gets up and tells the truth about what they saw. That is the assignment. And here is what makes a Christian witness different. The power of the testimony is not in the witness. The power is in what the witness has seen. You are not standing up to say how impressive you are. You are standing up to say how impressive He is. Your story is the evidence. Christ is the verdict. Look at the best example of this in all of Scripture. John chapter nine. In John nine, Jesus comes upon a man who had been blind from birth. He spits on the ground, makes mud, puts it on the man’s eyes, and tells him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. The man obeys, washes, and for the first time in his life, he can see. But instead of celebrating, the religious leaders drag him in for questioning. They interrogate his parents. They interrogate him, twice. They throw theology at him. They threaten him with being thrown out of the synagogue, which in his culture meant being cut off from everything and everyone. And in the middle of that pressure, with his whole world on the line, listen to what he says. John 9:25 (NIV) Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see. Church, I love this man. No seminary. No system. No script. He does not pretend to know what he does not know. He just tells what happened. And here is the power of it. They could argue with his theology. They could poke holes in his logic. But they could not look him in the eye and tell him that the thing that happened to him did not happen. ••• So to the person in this room this morning who is sitting there thinking, I could never share my faith. I do not know enough. I want to say to you as plainly as I can. You are not disqualified. You are exactly the kind of person God uses. Can you say, I was lost, and Christ found me? I was afraid, and He gave me peace? I was carrying something I could not put down, and He took it? I was blind, and now I see? That is your account. That is all Peter is asking for. And church, it has always been enough. Your story is the bridge. Christ is the destination. And here is what makes this humbling and freeing at the same time. God alone opens blind eyes. The blindness that keeps people from seeing the glory of Christ is real, and it is deep, and no amount of human effort removes it. If you have ever sat across a table from someone you love and watched them hear the gospel and see no glory, you know what I am talking about. You have felt that helplessness. You have sat in the car afterward and thought, what more could I possibly say? And right there, right at the place of your greatest helplessness, the commission comes. God sends us to open eyes that He alone can open. You are not the power. You are a jar of clay with a treasure inside. Paul said it this way. I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the growth. The miracle of life, the moment blind eyes open, that belongs to Him. You tell the truth about what Jesus has done. And you trust the God who spoke light into your darkness to speak light into theirs. The miracle is not your responsibility. The faithfulness is.

Truth Number Three

The way you answer is part of the answer. Peter does not just tell us to share. He tells us how. And the how is not a footnote. Look at the end of verse fifteen. 1 Peter 3:15c (NIV) “But do this with gentleness and respect.” That word respect in some translations is fear. Fear of whom? Not the person in front of you. Two verses earlier Peter just said, have no fear of them. This is reverence toward God. The same honoring of Christ as holy we have been tracing all the way through this passage. Gentleness toward the person in front of you. Deep, settled reverence for the God above you. Those two things together produce the posture of a person who does not have to win. Because repentance is a gift. Something God gives. You do not produce it by being persuasive enough. You do not force it by being louder or more theologically armed. And if the outcome is genuinely in His hands and not yours, do you see what that frees you from? You can afford to be the kindest, calmest, most patient person in the room. Because the result, the miracle of a heart coming alive, does not depend on your rhetorical skill. It depends on the sovereign mercy of God. And hear this. Gentleness is not a personality type. Some of us are naturally soft, and some of us are not. That is not what Peter is describing. Gentleness is a fruit of the Spirit. It is what the Spirit of God grows in a heart that treasures Christ and rests in His promises. You do not manufacture it. You cannot fake it. It grows in you as you stay near Him. ••• And church, we do not have to look far to see this posture. We have already seen it. This is the posture Jesus Himself carried to the cross. Peter watched it with his own eyes. He saw a Man who could have called legions of angels and stayed silent instead. He saw the kindest Man who ever lived absorb the worst that humanity could hand Him and not return it. Mocked, and not mocking back. Struck, and not striking back. Led like a lamb to the slaughter, and opening not His mouth. That is the spirit Peter is asking us into. Not a posture we summon from somewhere deep inside us. A posture that grows in us as we stay near the One who carried it first. A hope that makes you anxious does not look like hope to the person watching you. A hope that makes you defensive does not look like hope. A hope that makes you cruel when you feel cornered does not look like hope at all. But a hope that makes you calm. A hope that lets you really listen before you speak. A hope that helps you absorb an unkind word and not return it. A hope that makes you gentle when the world expects you to be sharp. That is a witness before you open your mouth. And Peter tells us the goal. Look at the very next verse, verse sixteen. The ones who slandered you. Who called you names. Who mocked what you believe. They meet you. And you were gentle. And you listened. And you did not fight back. And they went home ashamed of what they had said. The shame cracked something open. And the light got in. The way you answer is part of the answer.

Why We Are Not Ready

Now church, before we land this, I want us to stop and remember what we have actually been living in for five weeks. ••• Think about what this hope actually is. This is the hope that held you in your suffering. Not beside it. Not above it. In it. The fire did not destroy you. It refined you. The trial was never evidence that God abandoned you. It was evidence that He had not finished. That the thing He started in you on the day He spoke light into your darkness was still moving, still burning, still making you into something you could not have become any other way. The suffering was never the end of the story. It was always the refiner’s fire on the way to the inheritance. This is the hope that produced a joy this world cannot explain, cannot manufacture, and cannot take away. Not happiness. Not the absence of pain. Joy. The kind that coexists with grief. The kind that rises in the middle of the hardest season of your life and makes no logical sense, and yet there it is. Peter called it joy inexpressible and full of glory. So deep it does not have words for itself. And then this, and this is the one that has never left me since week one. The angels. The angels who announced the birth of Christ. The angels who rolled the stone away. The angels who have stood in the unmediated presence of Almighty God since before time began. Those angels lean over the edge of heaven and strain to look at what is happening in you. Not in the cosmos. Not in the movements of empires. In you. In your ordinary, broken, scared, still being made whole life. The redemption working itself out in you. They look at it and cannot stop looking. Do you understand what you are carrying? This hope does not live in a doctrine. It does not live on a shelf. It lives in a Person. In Christ. And the way it gets from Christ into your heart is through setting your mind on who He is and what He has promised. You meditate on Him. You dwell with Him. And when the heart arrives at what the mind is seeing, when His nearness becomes real and the promises do their work, something happens that you did not manufacture and cannot fake. It burns. That is the Emmaus road. Two disciples walking away from Jerusalem, carrying the wreckage of everything they thought they knew. A stranger falls in alongside them and begins to open the Scriptures, and they do not know it is Him. Not yet. And then He is gone. And they turn to each other. And one of them says the most beautiful thing in the Gospel of Luke. Luke 24:32 (ESV) “Did not our heart burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” That is what happens when a heart meets Christ in His Word. Not guilt. Not duty. Not grim determination. Him. Wonder. Love. The kind of fire that gets into your chest and will not go out. The kind of joy that makes you want to get up and go, immediately, that same hour, in the dark, and tell someone what you just saw. They did not strategize. They did not rehearse. They did not ask whether they had enough theological training. They ran. Because something had happened that was too good and too real and too alive to keep to themselves. That is what five weeks of living hope has been trying to produce in us. And this burning. This wonder. This joy in the suffering. This hope the angels cannot stop looking at. This is what we are timid about sharing? Let that sit. Then turn. Quietly. Like a man who just found the answer. Church, the reason most of us are not more free in telling people about our hope is not that we lack training. It is simpler and deeper than that. We do not feel very hopeful. And when our hearts are not full of hope in the promises of Christ, here is what happens when a conversation comes up. We feel it as a duty to defend a doctrine instead of a delight to tell somebody why we are so hopeful. Do you feel the difference? One is a burden. The other is an overflow. But here is the good news. And this is where the whole passage turns. If the problem is that we are not hopeful enough, the solution is not to try harder to witness. The solution is to get closer to the source of the hope. Revere Christ. Treasure Him. Set your mind on His promises. And the readiness will come. Because the hope will come. Because it always comes when you get near Him. The way to get ready to share your hope is to get hopeful. And notice what Peter assumes. He does not say, go find someone and make them listen. He says, be ready for everyone who asks you. Peter assumes someone is going to ask. Not because you forced a conversation. Because your life looks different enough, hopeful enough, settled enough, peaceful enough, that somebody gets curious. Are we living close enough to Christ that there is anything to ask about?

Before We Go

Now church, before we close, I want to be very direct. Because I am not assuming that every person in this room this morning is a follower of Jesus. Some of you are here because a friend brought you. Some of you grew up in church but have never personally put your faith in Christ. Some of you have been coming to this church for a long time, but if you were honest, you would say you have never actually trusted Jesus for yourself. You know the story. You have not surrendered to the Savior. And I want to say to you, right where you are sitting this morning, the greatest change possible can happen for you today. Here is what the Bible says. You, like every one of us, have sinned against God. You have turned from His ways to your own ways. And that sin separates you from God. And if you die in that separation, you will be separated from Him forever. But God loves you so much. So much that He came to us in the Person of Jesus. Jesus lived the perfectly righteous life that we could not live. And then He went to a cross, willingly, and died the death that you and I deserved to die. He took the weight of your sin on Himself. And three days later, He walked out of the tomb, alive, in victory over sin and death. And the Bible says that anyone, anyone, who turns from their sin and trusts in Jesus as Savior and Lord of their life will be forgiven of every sin they have ever committed and restored to a relationship with God forever. That is the Gospel. That is the greatest news in the world. And that invitation is open to you this morning. If you have never personally trusted in Jesus, I want to invite you, right now, in the quiet of your own heart, to pray something like this. Just between you and God. God, I know I have sinned against You. I know I cannot save myself. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for my sin and rose from the dead. Right now, I turn from my sin. I trust in Jesus as my Savior and my Lord. Please save me. Make me Yours. Today and forever. If you prayed that prayer this morning, even silently where you are sitting, I want you to know something. The God who does not lie has heard you. You are His. And I want to know about it. After the service, come find me, or send me a message, or tell somebody on our team. Because heaven is rejoicing over you right now, and we want to walk with you from here.

Go And to every believer in this room. This is Commissioning Sunday. This is the last sermon in Share the Hope. And I want you to hear this clearly. You are not walking out of here with an assignment that is too big for you. You are not walking out of here with a script you need to memorize by Tuesday. 1 Peter 1:3 (NIV) “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” You are walking out of here carrying a living hope. A hope that came out of an empty tomb on the third day. A hope that has been making its way through two thousand years of broken, ordinary, scared, needy, still being made whole people. People whose hearts burned on the road. People who could not stop themselves from running back to tell someone. People who stayed close enough to the source that the world could not help but notice. That is the hope of this church. That is the hope of your life. It is not something you have to manufacture. It is alive. It is sustained by the risen Christ Himself. And it will show. Stay near Him. The hope takes care of itself.

Easter: A Living Hope

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time." — 1 Peter 1:3–5

Where We Are

Alright. Let's open our Bibles together to 1 Peter chapter 1. Find with me verses 3 through 5. We are in week four of Share the Hope.

And if you have been with us — and I hope you have — you know where we have been. We started with wonder. What are the angels looking at? And we found out they are stooping down to peer at the mercy of God alive inside ordinary people like us. Then we talked about joy — the kind that comes from actually loving and trusting someone you have never seen. And last week we sat in the hardest question of the series — why does suffering hurt the way it does? And Peter did not give us an explanation. He gave us a Refiner. A God who sits in the fire with us.

Wonder. Joy. Suffering.

Those are real places to be. But Peter does not start there. He starts here. Verses 3 through 5. This is the headwaters. Everything we have preached in this series — the wonder, the joy, the fire — all of it flows from what Peter says in these three verses.

And today is Easter. Which means this is not just the theological center of the series. This is the day the center holds.

But before we get into the text, I want to ask you something. And I do not want you to answer it yet. Just hold it.

What if the only way to keep anything is to be willing to lose everything?

I know. That does not sound like an Easter question. Sounds more like a threat. Sounds like something someone says right before they take something from you. But hold it. We are coming back to it.

What We Carry

We all carry things we are afraid to lose.

Most of us do not say it out loud. We do not walk into a room and announce it. But it is there. Under everything. Like a hum you have lived with for so long you forgot it was running. That low-grade awareness that the things you love most are also the things most capable of being taken from you.

Think about it. You hold your plans carefully. The way you carry something fragile across a room — both hands, eyes forward, breath held. You hold the people you love. You hold the futures you have imagined for your kids, for your marriage, for your life. You hold the version of yourself you have worked hard to build — the capable one, the steady one, the one who has not yet been undone.

And you hold your fears. Quietly. Usually alone. Usually at night when the house is still and there is nothing left to distract you from the thing you have been avoiding.

What if I lose it?

Whatever it is for you this morning — and I think you know what it is — that question is not small. It is not a sign of weak faith. It is one of the most honest things a person can carry.

There was a season in my life — before Falcon, before this church, before most of what defines my days now — where I held on to everything I could.

The grief around me was layered. And what I mean by that is — it was not one thing. It was not a single loss I could name and grieve and slowly move through. It was the kind of grief that stacks. One thing on top of another on top of another. A friend I loved — a prayer partner, someone who had stood with me in the work — died by suicide. And before I had found my footing in that, I was walking alongside his one-hundred-year-old mother as she approached the end of her own life. And at the same time there were others. People I had journeyed with for years. Cancer. Then death. Then the quiet ministry that follows after — when the services are over and the flowers have wilted and everyone else has moved on and you are still there. Still holding. Still trying to be present for what remains.

That is what layered grief does. It does not give you time to recover from one thing before the next thing arrives. And after a while you stop counting the losses. You just carry them.

People I loved were dying. People I had walked with for years. And somewhere in the middle of all of that I was still just a man. Carrying my own frustrations, my own questions, my own quiet ache that I did not always know how to name.

And I held all of it. The grief. The responsibility. The weight of other people's pain pressing against my own. Because I believed — deeply — that this was what faithfulness required. That holding on was the same thing as being obedient. That if I just gripped tightly enough, long enough, I could keep what mattered from being lost.

I was wrong about that. But I did not know it yet.

I think most of us believe some version of that. We believe our grip is what stands between the people and places and purposes we love and the void that would swallow them if we let go. We think loosening our hands is the same as abandoning what we care about. That surrender is just a spiritual word for giving up.

And so we hold on.

And our hands get tired. And the weight gets heavier.

And somewhere underneath all of it, a question begins to surface. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just there.

Is there another way to do this?

Easter is the answer to that question. And not a nice idea about hope. It is a historical answer. Written in the body of a man who faced that same question and answered it with His face in the dirt.

The Garden

Before we go to Peter, we need to go somewhere else first. Because Peter did not write these words in a vacuum. Peter wrote them as a man who had been in a garden on the worst night of his life.

Gethsemane.

It is Thursday night. The meal is over. The bread has been broken. The cup has been passed. Jesus has washed His disciples' feet — the act of a servant, the posture of a king on His knees. And now they cross the Kidron Valley in the dark and walk into a garden at the base of the Mount of Olives.

And everything changes.

He takes Peter, James, and John a little further in. And Mark tells us something that should stop us. He says Jesus began to be greatly distressed and troubled. The language is violent. This is not quiet anxiety. This is a man being crushed from the inside. He tells the three of them — my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here. Keep watch with me.

And then He goes further.

Mark says that. A little farther. Past the three. Past the people who were supposed to be with Him. Into the dark. Alone.

And the three of them fall asleep.

Picture this. It is the middle of the night. The olive trees are black against the sky. Somewhere in the distance there are torches moving — Judas is already on his way. And in a clearing, alone, with no one watching, no one praying, no one awake — Jesus falls on His face.

Not kneeling. Not standing with His arms raised. Face in the dirt. The Son of God, flat on the ground.

And Luke tells us something most people read past. He says His sweat became like great drops of blood falling to the ground. The capillaries beneath the skin rupture under extreme distress and blood presses through the pores. That is what is happening to Him. He is not calmly surrendering. His body is breaking under the weight of what is coming.

And from that posture — face down, alone, bleeding into the dirt — He prays.

Abba.

That is the cry of a son who is terrified and the only person He wants is His Father. That is not theology. That is a man on the ground calling for the one person who has never failed Him.

Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me.

He is asking for it to stop. And understand — nobody is forcing this on Him. He said it Himself. No one takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord. Twelve legions of angels are one word away. One word and this is over. He walks out of that garden untouched and the cross never happens.

But He knows what is in the cup.

I drink tea. Every morning. Loose leaf. And I have this little metal strainer that I set over the cup. And when it was new it was shiny and clean. But over time — weeks and months of constant use — the tea stains it. The metal darkens. The mesh gets clogged with residue. No matter how many times you rinse it, the stain stays. It becomes part of it. Constant use leaves a mark that you cannot wash away. And I think about that. Because it reminds me of a woman I used to visit. An elderly lady. And she had this cup — white porcelain — that was always sitting on her table. And on the rim of that cup, stained into the porcelain, were her lip prints. Darkened with tea. Layer after layer after layer of use, pressed into the surface until the stain was permanent. You could not wash it off. It was part of the cup now. The evidence of a life lived — every morning, every sip — marked into the thing she drank from.

And I remember looking at that cup one day and my mind went somewhere I did not expect it to go. It went to Gethsemane.

Because the cup in front of Jesus is not a metaphor. It is not just a word for suffering. The cup is real. And what is inside it is the accumulated stain of every human life that has ever been lived. Think about it. Every lie you have told. Every time you chose yourself over God. Every grudge you held onto when you knew you should have let it go. Every night you spent feeding on something you knew was destroying you. Every time you looked at another person and saw a means to your own end instead of a soul made in the image of God.

All of that is in the cup. Layer after layer after layer. Pressed into it. Stained into it. Your sin is in that cup. And so is mine.

And the Father is holding it out to His Son. And He is asking Him to drink it. Not the clean parts. Not the diluted version. The whole thing. Every dark and rotten and corrupted thing the human race has ever done — from the garden of Eden to this morning — concentrated into a single cup. And the only innocent man who has ever drawn breath is being asked to take it. All of it. Into Himself.

If you looked into that cup you would see your own face looking back at you. And Jesus looked at it. And He did not pour it out. He drank it.

But I do not think we stop long enough to ask what drinking that cup actually cost Him. We talk about the nails. We talk about the cross. But the cup was doing its work long before the soldiers arrived. Think about what was in that cup from His side.

Betrayal was in that cup. Judas — a man He had walked with for three years, shared meals with, trusted with the money — was already on his way with a kiss and a bag of silver. And Jesus knew it. He could see the torches. He knew who was carrying them.

Desertion was in that cup. In a few hours, every single person who had sworn they would die for Him would run. Peter would deny Him three times before sunrise. The rest would scatter. He would hang on that cross and look out and see — almost nobody. The crowds that waved palms on Sunday would scream crucify Him by Friday. That is in the cup.

And here is the one that I think about the most. Rejection was in that cup. Think about this. For three years He had shown them who He was. He healed the sick. He raised the dead. He walked on water. He fed five thousand people with a boy's lunch. He cast out demons with a word. He preached the most beautiful sermons anyone had ever heard. And it was not enough. They did not believe Him. He gave them everything He had and they looked at Him and said no thank you.

That is in the cup. Not just our sin. His sorrow. The full weight of loving people who did not love Him back. Of giving everything and being told it was not enough. Of being faithful to people who were unfaithful to Him.

And He drank it anyway.

And church — I need you to hear this — there is a cup in front of you too. Not the same cup. Not that cup. But yours. The thing God has been setting before you that you have been pushing away. The conversation you do not want to have. The surrender you do not want to make. The area of your life you keep telling God is off limits.

Most of us want Easter without Gethsemane. We want the resurrection without the cup. We want open hands and a living hope but we do not want to drink what is in front of us. We want it to be painless. And it is not painless. It was not painless for Him. And it will not be painless for you. But here is what I know. He drank His cup. And the Father answered it with resurrection. And whatever cup the Father is setting before you — if you will drink it, if you will stop pushing it away — He will answer yours the same way.

And for a moment — and I do not think we talk about this enough — the Father and the Son will be separated.

Think about that. The Father and the Son have never been apart. Not once. Not for a fraction of a second. Since before the world existed — since before there was anything at all — there has been a Father who loved a Son and a Son who loved a Father. That fellowship is the oldest and most beautiful thing in the universe. It is the thing everything else was made from. And it is about to be torn apart.

Jesus will hang on a cross and cry out the most devastating words ever spoken — My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He does not say Father. For the first time in eternity, He says God. Because in that moment the intimacy is gone. The face is turned. The Son is alone in a way that no human being has ever been alone — because no human being has ever had that fellowship to lose.

He can see that coming. Standing in the garden, with blood pressing through His skin, He can see the cross and the darkness and the moment when the Father will turn away. And He is being asked to walk toward it.

And everything in Him recoils. Every nerve. Every instinct. His body is screaming through His skin. The cup is in front of Him and it is the most terrible thing that has ever existed.

And in that moment — alone, bleeding, torches getting closer, disciples asleep, the full weight of human sin pressing down on Him — He says six words.

Not what I will, but what you will.

That is not resignation. That is not a man who ran out of options. That is love. At the most expensive price ever paid.

Nobody took His life. He laid it down. He was the author of the drama. His role in the drama was the cross. And He chose it. Freely. With blood running down His face. He chose it.

So how? How do you do that? How do you look at the full weight of what is coming and walk toward it? What held Him there when twelve legions of angels were one word away?

Hebrews tells us.

"...who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God." — Hebrews 12:2

For the joy. Not despite the suffering. For the joy.

Now, I have heard people explain that joy as the rewards. The throne. The kingdom. The authority. As if Jesus were doing math in the garden — weighing what He would lose against what He would gain and deciding it was a good deal.

That is not what is happening here. And you know it is not. Because of the word He just used.

Abba.

He did not cry out my throne. He did not cry out my kingdom. He cried out Father.

The joy set before Him was not a list of things He would receive. The joy set before Him was the Father Himself. The completion of what the Father sent Him to do. The moment when the work would be finished and the Son would return to the Father's presence — not to collect a reward, but to come home. Paul puts it this way in Philippians 2. He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. He emptied Himself. He took the form of a servant. He humbled Himself to the point of death — even death on a cross. And therefore God highly exalted Him.

Do you see the order? The exaltation came after. Not as the motivation. As the Father's response to the Son's love. Jesus was not gripping a future throne to get Himself through the present suffering. He was looking at the Father. He was loving the Father. And the Father's will — even when the Father's will was the cup, even when it meant the cross — the Father's will was enough.

Because He trusted the Father's love. Not the Father's rewards. The Father's love.

Can I tell you something? I think about my marriage when I read this.

Alicia and I — and she knows this, she is sitting right here — we have had moments where I was holding something so tightly that it was hurting both of us. A fear. A plan. A version of how I thought things needed to go. And I could not let go of it by willpower. I tried. But what finally loosened my grip was not trying harder.

It was trust.

It was knowing that the person I was releasing it to loved me. That she was not going to let me fall. That her love for me — and more importantly, that Christ at the center of our marriage — was more reliable than my grip on the thing I was afraid to lose.

Our marriage is not held together by my grip. It never was. It is held together by a love that is bigger than both of us. Christ is the center. And when Christ is the center, you can open your hands. Because you are not letting go into a void. You are letting go into a person you trust.

And if that is true in a marriage between two broken people — think about this — how much more is it true of a Son who has known the Father's love since before the world existed?

Jesus could open His hands in the garden because He knew whose hands He was falling into.

And that changes what surrender actually means. Because most of us — if we are honest — think surrender is a trade. I give up something I want and God gives me something better. And we call that faith. But that is not faith. That is negotiation. That is just gripping something shinier.

What Jesus did in the garden was not a negotiation. It was love. He loved the Father so completely that the Father's will became the only thing that mattered. Not because He understood it. Not because He could see what was coming. Because He knew the Father. And knowing the Father was enough.

The joy set before Him was not a throne. It was the Father's face.

And the Father answered that love with resurrection.

He released His safety. His comfort. His right to be treated as who He actually was. Everything a human being holds tightly — reputation, control, self-preservation, life itself. He released it.

And He walked toward the cross.

And three days later the tomb was empty. Nobody rolled that stone from the outside. It moved from the inside. He was already out. Already alive. Already moving toward the people who had abandoned Him.

The resurrection is God's answer to Gethsemane. It is the proof that willing surrender does not end in loss. It ends in indestructible life.

PETER OPENS HIS MOUTH Now. Let me tell you who is talking.

This is Peter. Same Peter who stood in that garden and watched Jesus fall on His face. Same Peter who — hours later — stood outside a fire in a courtyard and denied knowing Him. Three times. While Jesus was being beaten. While the cup was being poured out.

A woman pointed her finger and he ran. The strongest disciple. The one who swore he would die first. He looked at a servant girl and said I do not know the man.

And the rooster crowed. And Luke tells us that Jesus — in the middle of being led to His death — turned and looked at Peter.

And Peter went out and wept bitterly.

That is a man standing in the wreckage of everything he promised he would be.

After the resurrection, Peter went back to fishing. Back to the old life. Because what do you do when you have failed that completely? You assume you are disqualified. You go back to what you were before you ever heard follow me.

And Jesus found him there. On the shore. At dawn. Building a fire. Making breakfast.

Not a lecture. Not we need to talk about what you did.

Breakfast.

And He asked him about love. Three times. Once for each denial. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?

I have watched this happen. Not just in Scripture. In my own life.

I have had friendships that I thought were over. Seasons where the distance felt permanent. Where I was not sure there was a way back. And I have watched God do what only God can do — take something that felt dead and bring it back. Not the same. Different. Deeper. The way a bone heals stronger at the break.

That is what happened between Jesus and Peter. Their relationship died in that courtyard. And the resurrection did not just bring Jesus back to life — it brought them back to life. Breakfast on the shore. Three questions about love. A friendship that had been destroyed, raised into something deeper than it was before.

Resurrection is what God does with surrendered things.

So years later Peter sits down to write to people who are losing everything. Scattered across Asia Minor. Displaced. Afraid. They gave everything to follow a crucified Messiah and the world is pressing in from every side.

And Peter opens his mouth. And the first thing out — before any theology, before any encouragement, before a single instruction — is a shout.

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." — 1 Peter 1:3

That is not an argument. That is a berakah. A blessing. A burst of praise. The kind of thing that erupts from a person who has seen something so real they cannot contain it. Peter has been to the garden. He has been to the fire. He has been to the shore at dawn. He has been to the empty tomb. And the first thing out of his mouth is not let me explain what happened.

It is blessed be God.

Why? Because he has seen what God does with open hands.

Now stay with me here. Because there is something underneath this verse that most people read right past.

Peter says God has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Think about that. How? How does a historical event two thousand years ago cause something to happen inside me right now?

The new birth happens in here — in the human heart. The resurrection happened out there — in a tomb outside Jerusalem. How do you connect those two things?

When the Holy Spirit comes into your life — and that is what happens when a person is born again, the Spirit of God invades a dead soul — what He does is unite you to Christ. He joins you to a living person. Not to a memory. Not to a philosophy. Not to a moral example you try to follow on your best days. To the risen, living, breathing, reigning Jesus Christ.

Paul tells us exactly what that union means.

"If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his." — Romans 6:5 Think about what is happening. Here comes the Holy Spirit. Here is Christ, risen from the dead. Here is your soul — dead in sin, curved inward, still clutching the glory you traded for yourself. And the Spirit does a miracle. He unites you to Christ.

And in that union, everything true of Christ becomes true of you.

His death counts as your death. The punishment has been endured. The debt has been paid. You have been to the cross and back. It is finished.

And His life counts as your life.

"For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." — Colossians 3:3 Church, do you hear that? Your life is hidden with Christ in God. That is the safest sentence in the Bible. Your life is not out in the open where anything can reach it. It is hidden. In Christ. In God. Tucked inside the one person in the universe who has an indestructible life.

He can never die again. Which means you — hidden in Him — can never die again.

And that is why Peter calls it a living hope. Not because the hope is optimistic. But because the person it is attached to is alive. Right now. This morning. And He cannot be killed.

No resurrection — no new birth.

No new birth — no union with Christ.

No union with Christ — no hope.

But there was a resurrection. And there is a new birth. And there is a union with the living Christ. Dead hopes stay in the grave. This one walked out.

What Open Hands Receive

Now Peter keeps going. Look at verse 4.

"...to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time." — 1 Peter 1:4–5

Three words. I want you to hear each one. Because Peter is not just describing what you are going to receive. He is describing what you could never have kept by holding on.

Imperishable. It cannot decay. Cannot rot. Cannot break down over time. Think about what is perishing in your life right now. Your body is perishing — you feel it, the ache that was not there ten years ago. Your possessions are perishing — the house needs a new roof, the car needs another repair. Everything you own is in a slow-motion process of falling apart. Even the people you love most are mortal. Everyone you love is dying. Slowly. And you know it. You just do not say it.

This inheritance cannot perish. Time cannot touch it.

Undefiled. Cannot be stained. Cannot be corrupted. Think about it — every good thing you have ever held has been touched by the fall. Every relationship has a crack. Every achievement has a shadow of pride. Every moment of happiness carries the awareness that it will not last. Nothing in this world is pure all the way through.

This inheritance cannot be stained. Sin cannot reach it. Unfading. Does not lose its beauty. Does not dim. Does not grow ordinary. We know what fading feels like. The excitement of a new job that became a grind. The fire we had for God that slowly became a smolder. Everything fades. The newness wears off.

This inheritance does not fade. A million years from now — full brightness. No dimming. No settling.

Three negations. Not what the inheritance is. What it is not. It does not perish. It is not defiled. It does not fade.

Name every way you have ever lost something. And this is none of those things.

And here is the thing nobody wants to hear.

The things you are gripping most tightly right now are already perishing.

The clenched fist contains things that are already dying.

The open hand receives things that cannot die.

But Peter is not done. He knows what you are thinking. Okay, the inheritance is safe. But what about me? What if I let go and I am the one who is lost? "...who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time." — 1 Peter 1:5

Guarded. Military word. Garrisoned. Surrounded. And it is present tense. Not will be guarded. Is being guarded. Right now. This morning. In this room.

The inheritance is kept for you. And you are kept for it. Same power that raised Jesus from the dead — that is the power guarding you right now.

You are not as fragile as you think you are. Because the thing holding you together is not your grip. It is His.

The Call

So let me come back to where we started.

What if the only way to keep anything is to be willing to lose everything?

That question sounded dangerous an hour ago. But now you have been to the garden. You have watched Jesus open His hands. You have heard what Peter says is waiting on the other side.

And I want to ask you the second question.

Are you afraid of what God might ask you to release?

Maybe you know exactly what it is. A relationship. A plan. A grudge you will not release because letting go feels like saying it was okay. A habit you have been protecting. A part of your life you have told God to stay out of.

Or maybe it is bigger than one thing. Maybe what you are holding is yourself. The self-project. And somewhere deep down you know it is not working. You know the fists are tired.

But you will not let go. Because you are afraid of what will be left.

There came a moment in my life where a question rose to the surface. Not forced. Given. And answering it honestly meant releasing something that had become part of my identity. My calling. My place.

And slowly — with trembling hands — I began to let go. Not all at once. Not with certainty. But with a fragile trust that God was present even there.

And what I found was that letting go did not mean losing what mattered. It meant entrusting it. The same thing I learned in my marriage — you do not let go into a void. You let go into a person whose love is more faithful than your grip.

My life is not sustained by my grip. But by His.

Now, church. I need to be honest with you. And I want you to hear this the way I mean it — as a man who loves you.

I have been gentle this morning. And I think you needed that. But Easter is not gentle. The resurrection is not gentle. A stone rolling away from the inside and a dead man walking out into the morning air — that is not gentle. That is the most explosive event in history.

So let me ask you something. If Jesus Christ is alive — and He is — if He walked out of that tomb and is seated at the right hand of God right now — if the Spirit that raised Him from the dead is in this room —

Then why are you living like He is still in the tomb?

Why are you gripping your plans and your fears as if the most powerful person in the universe is not right here? In God's name — how can we sit in a room on Easter Sunday and be unmoved? How can we hear that the grave is empty and shrug?

Some of you have been calling it faithfulness. It is not faithfulness. It is fear. And this morning, at an empty tomb, fear loses its authority over you. Some of you have been coming to church for years and you have never once fallen to the ground. You have never gone a little farther — past the pretending, past the managing — and said Abba. Not my will but yours.

And I want to be specific about what I mean by managing your faith. Because I think some of you are doing it and you do not even realize it. You come on Sunday. You sing the songs. You nod at the right places. You go home and you live the rest of the week on your own terms. You pray, but you do not listen. You read, but you do not let the word read you. You have a Bible on your nightstand and a life that does not match it. And you have gotten so good at this that you have convinced yourself it is normal.

That is not faithfulness. That is management. And there is a world of difference between a managed faith and a surrendered life.

The joy is gone because you took your life back. Piece by piece.

And that is how it happens, by the way. It is never dramatic. Nobody wakes up one morning and says I am going to walk away from God today. It is slower than that. Quieter. You skip the morning prayer one day. Then two days. Then a week. You stop opening the Bible and start opening your phone. You start making decisions without asking. You put a wall around one area of your life — just one — and tell God that part is not His business. And then the wall gets a little bigger. And a little bigger. And before you know it, you are managing a faith you used to surrender. And the hope went flat because you disconnected from the living person it was attached to.

But He is not dead. He is alive. And the same Spirit that raised Him from the dead is in this room right now. And He is able to do what you cannot do for yourself.

So here is what I want to do. And I am not going to be vague about it.

I believe there are people in this room who need to make a decision this morning. Not think about one. Make one. Some of you — this is the first time. You have never given your life to Jesus Christ. Maybe someone brought you here and you did not want to come. But something has been stirring. And this morning the Spirit of God is offering to unite you to Christ — His death for yours, His life for yours. A living hope attached to a living Savior who cannot die. This is the morning something new begins.

Some of you gave your life to Christ years ago — but you took it back. Not all at once. Slowly. You started managing what you used to surrender. The fire became a smolder. And you have been wondering why everything feels flat. I will tell you why. You walked away from the table. This is the morning you come back.

And some of you — God has been asking for something specific. You know what it is. He has been pressing on it. And you have been saying not that, Lord. This morning, in the light of an empty tomb, He is asking again.

Will you open your hands?

I am not asking you to come to the front of a room. I am asking you to do what Jesus did.

He fell to the ground. He went a little farther. Past everyone else. And He went to the Father. Not to a reward. Not to a throne. To the Father. Because the Father's love was enough. The way I have learned in my marriage that love is what makes it safe to let go — Jesus knew that in the deepest way any person has ever known it. He knew whose hands He was falling into.

That is the altar. It has always been the altar. Not a piece of furniture. The posture of a human being who has stopped negotiating with God and has finally fallen to the ground and said — take it. Whatever you need. I am done holding.

You can do that right where you are. Nobody has to see it but Him. Open your hands. And what you release into His hands will not be lost.

Because think about what is on the other side. Not emptiness. Not loss.

An inheritance that cannot perish. Cannot be stained. Cannot fade.

A life hidden with Christ in God.

A hope that is alive — because the One it is attached to walked out of a grave.

Sometimes losing everything is the start of the new beginning you have been praying for.

Peter opened his mouth and the first thing out was a shout. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

That was not theology. That was a man who had been to the garden and to the fire and to the shore and to the tomb — and the first thing he could do was worship.

When Peter and John stood before the Sanhedrin and were told to stop talking — they said we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard. That is not courage. That is overflow.

And that is where this ends. Not in heaviness. In worship. Because the tomb is empty. Because the Savior is alive. Because the Father answered the Son's love with resurrection — and He will answer yours the same way.

He is risen.

He is alive.

And everything changes. Father. Here we are. Holding things. You know what they are. You have watched us grip. You have watched our knuckles turn white. You have watched us call it faithfulness when it was fear. And you have been patient with us. This morning we have seen the garden. We have seen your Son fall to the ground. We have seen Him look at you — not at the throne, not at the reward, at you — and say not my will but yours. And we have seen what you did with that love. You answered it with resurrection. So here we are. Trembling hands. Stubborn hearts. And we are asking you to do what only you can do. Meet us here. Unite us to your Son. Cause us to be born again — or born again, again — to a living hope. We open our hands. Not because we are brave. Because you went first. Because the Father's love is enough. Even when it costs us everything. In the name of Jesus Christ, who is risen, who is alive, who is in this room right now. Amen.

Share the Hope — Week 4 Falcon Cornerstone Community Church of the Nazarene

Holiness Part One

Beginning today, we together being a new series called, “Unveiled: Revealing the sanctuary of our hearts.” All thought the Bible God is calling his people to be set apart. To be holy for he is holy. 4 times in the book of Leviticus found in the old testament, you read God calling the children of Israel into a life of holiness. And in each of those four instances, God say, I am holy, for you are to be holy. Or I am holy who sanctifies you holy. Peter, one of the disciples of Jesus reminds us in the very first chapter of his first letter, that since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (I Peter 1:16) Paul to the Thessalonians also reminds us, For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. So today, it’s important that we ask the question. Well, what is holiness?

Have you ever been put in a situation where you didn’t know what to do? Of course, You’re alive right. Most often, everyday we find ourselves asking what in the world do I do? Life is full of situations that leave us going, “How do I navigate this?” How do I figure out this problem? Where do I go? Who should I ask for help? And those are moments, and situations where I dunno about you, there not my favorite. I don’t go looking for confusion. I want answers. I want a road map to life. A little confession here, I didn’t travel a lot when I was a kid. Our kids, have flown on planes to Puerto Rico, Gabe and Chloe have been on planes to go from Colorado to Pennsylvania and back. But when I was a kid, if, and I mean if I traveled, it was usually boo longer than 200 miles or less and always in the back seat of a car. But When it comes to flying, I didn’t fly until I was in my 20’s, when Halliburton wanted to relocate our family to the Engineering training center in Brighton Colorado to work in the research lab. And I was terrified to fly. I think most of my freight was the fact that when flying, I had no control. Flying in an airplane wasn’t anything like driving where you can see danger, or react to danger or you can come to a moment where you’re kind of scared, like those moments driving in the snow, and you turn the radio off to concentrate better, and if it gets scary you can pull over and just rest your nerves. But you cant fro that in a plane. And I had so many questions that came to mind when flying. Where do I check in? Where’s the bathroom? Will miss my next flight. So many questions, and so many fears. We all have some sort of fear just like that. And so, what do we do? We try to be prepared. We try to find the rules.

Did you know we do the same thing with our faith? We come to church and we get around people and we have all kinds of fears. Fears of wondering if we would be accepted. Sometimes the Fear that our kids wont be accepted in the congregation. There’s the fears of knowing the right christian language. What should I say, when to say amen, epeiclaly during pastor Matthews sermon. And so, just like life, we want our life of faith to be comfortable, and we want to know how to fit in, and the rules to living a good faithful life and we desire to do what is right. For many, we might find ourselves feeling the same way in our relationship with Christ. Okay, Jesus my life is yours, I’ve come by faith and I trust in you, and you alone, and I know You love me, but how do I navigate life now? How do I make the right choices in life? What does it mean to “follow Christ”? What does it mean less of me and more of you. What does it mean to consecrate my life? Is that once, or daily, or every other month? How about last week? How many of us agree with Paul. I have a desire to do what is right, but I find that I keep dong what is wrong. There's a war going on within me. And so, every time… every time anyone comes to faith in Christ, we ask, What are the rules?! What can I watch? Is it okay if I hang out with this person? How does tobacco or alcohol fit in. How much is good to give when it comes to tithes and offering. We also live in the day and age of social media. And so, we ask, what do I post? Was this too judgey? Is this going convict someone to where they think I am talking about them when I wasn’t. Life is just hard to navigate and we want to know the rules. And to be honest, I think we also want to play by the rules. But sometimes life gets hard. Sometimes our faith gets so bogged down with trying to figure out the right and wrong ways to navigate it too. Can I tell you some good, but unsettling news? The rule book you are looking for doesn’t exist. Because Jesus didn’t come to give new rules, He came to give a new identity. I think this is the best foundational truth when it comes to holiness. Holiness is more than just what we do, and how we do it, and what is right and wrong.. Holiness, in its simplest form is us, taking on a new identity in Jesus Christ. So who are you?

As we dive into this new series over the few weeks, there’s one verse that we’re going to keep coming back to, because it speaks so much to who we are in Christ.

This verse comes from 1 Peter 2:9-10 NIV But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

So holiness… what does the Bible say about holiness? One of my favorite moments of Jesus was when he was asked what was the greatest commandment. In essence, a scribe in Marks gospel that was speaking with Jesus was saying, what is the greatest rule. Whats are the rules to a life of faith. So he was asking Jesus, what rules should I follow. What commandments should I adhere my life to. What rule should govern my actions and decisions in life. So in essence he’s asking, what must I do. And the thing he didn’t realize was, he was trying to ask what can I do in my own power to make sure I am holy. So Jesus, answers his question by simply reciting the Shema from Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy chapter 6 verses 4-5 says, 4 “Hear, O Israel: dThe LORD our God, the LORD is one.1 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. This word Shema is a word in Hebrew that means ‘to hear or listen’. But in the rich meaning of this word, it’s not just listening and hearing, but listening and hearing with the intent to obey. And so, Jesus answers the scribes with a rendition of the Shema.. Jesus says in Marks gospel, , “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. And to love your neighbor as yourself. Who’s our neighbor? We spoke about this last week… it’s anyone I come into contact with. And so, when Jesus answers the scribes question, what he’s saying was this… It’s not so much about following rules, or commandments as much as it’s about God wanting Himself to be the center of your love. God wants to be the center. And not just center, but also king of that area. Surrendered to His will. And I think this is the danger.. so many of us with trying to find the rules, we try to put God in the center, but he has no control over our life. Its like, we want God to abide by our rules. And so, who am I to do that?

I was thinking about this question, who am I… this week, and I was thinking about the fact that sometimes, through circumstances of life, we can lose a grasp on the reality of who we are. Most often, the things we do, that are not good things. Like lying. Being overly aggressive towards others. Letting anger control us. Having unhealthy sexual addictions. Not being so loving towards others. Showing no grace or mercy to those who make mistakes. And so what do we try to do to fix these issues.. we look for rules. We seek to ways to change these things in us, and in the end, they never really change us, as much as we find ways to suppress them. Rules, more or less alleviate or lessen the effect more than get to the root of the issue that’s deep down. And the issue is, We have a heart issue. Our heart has the identity of our old life, there needs to be a process… a cleansing, and renewing of the heart.

But how do we get there, if theres are not new rules? How do we begin to recognize in our own life who we are meant to be? First, we need to recognize the enemy that is without. I Peter chapter 5 verse 8 says, Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” Peter Knew this from experience. Jesus said to him before his three denials, in Luke 22:31, ““Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat.” Jesus even knew what it was like to be sifted by Satan. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness and the word says, the enemy left him for a more opportune time. Which became the garden moment where Jesus prays in the garden for the Fathers will. The book of James reminds us: “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”

Secondly, acknowledge the brokenness within. James 1:14-15, “but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. 15 Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” It wasn't until Simba acknowledged his brokenness that he was healed. He had to acknowledge his brokenness. We’ve got to come face to face with the reality that the temper we have, the desire to say hurtful things to others, and even the desire to think hurtful and wrong things about ourselves is not God. We have sin in our hearts that God sent his Son t die for…. So, When you know who you are in Christ, you’re able to see yourself for who you truly are made to be. Thirdly, Understanding your part. 2 Peter 1:5, “For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith…” How have you added to your faith this week? Or let me ask you this… have you added to your faith, or have you neglected your faith. You see, you play a part in holiness. And it’s the only part that is your part. Do you know what it is? It’s repentance. Repentance is your part. Do you know what repentance is? Repentance is responding to God love. Hear that again.. repentance is responding to Gods love. And the proper response is this: move over and Let go and Let God. With whatever it is your holding onto. 1 Peter 5:5, Peter says later on, “All of you, clothe yourselves with humility…” John 3:30- John the Baptist, “He must become greater; I must become less.” Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Galatians 2:20 Holiness isn’t trying harder to make yourself clean, it’s getting out of God’s way.

And Finally, Understand the Holy Spirits part. 2 Timothy 2:20-21, “In a large house there are articles not only of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay; some are for special purposes and some for common use. 21 Those who cleanse themselves from the latter will be instruments for special purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.” Paul is speaking here while Ising the imagery in what the holy Spirit does with us. He moves us from items of wood and clay- that may be in the house. To instruments of gold and silver- used by the master’s hand. Do you know how that is done? Malachi 3:3 tells us, “He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver.” Do you know how a silver smith does this? Refines silver. It’s not an easy process.. because it takes time, and heat. The smith throws the ore into a kettle. And as the heat melts the metal, and then he takers the dross, Dross means the worthless stuff. It’s mineral waste, but its the impurities, the things that are not perfect. They come to the top. They surface.And then the silver smith, one by one takes them away. He scrapes them off. When you ask the silversmith, How do you know when the silver is pure… He says, when I look into the kettles and I take out all of the impurities and I see me. There a Disney cartoon that shows us this. It’s called the lion king. Think of the Disney movie, The Lion king. Simba is a young cub. He loves his father. His identity is in being like his father. He wants to be brave and a good king, just like his father. It the same with us. In the beginning of humanity, Adam and Eve, when they were created by God, they had this perfect union with Him. Our greatest reflection of Gods righteousness in us was in the garden, before sin entered into our life. But then, Trouble strikes. Simba loses his father and then he was lied to, the enemy prowls like a loin to steel and kill what we have. And so, with the enemy, saying Simba had killed his father, Simba runs away so he runs away and meets Timon and Pumba. Its the same with Adam and Eve. In their shame when they had sinned against God, Adam and Eve hid from God. They ran from him. Now, I love Timon and Pumba, but they begin teaching Simba something contrary to his real identity. And, so over the years, Simba begins to live as a forager for bugs. Contrary to his real identity as a lion. Until one day, he meets Nyla and is reminded of his past hurts. Of why he ran away. Rafiki, he reminds me of the Holy Spirit. Through this word, prevent grace, The spirit keeps reminding us… who are you? What reflection are you reflecting? And so, Rsafiki reminds Simba his father is alive, He is in him as he shows the reflection to him. Lets watch this moment together.

I love this movie. Simbas father lived in him. It wasnt until Rafiki showed him that After this moment, Simba has a moment with Rafiki about how the past hurts, but his identity isn’t in the past… his identity is in who he was called to be… and he was called to be the king of the pride. So he has a choice. Return home and return to his idienty, or stay where he is and be the person he was not meant to be. And What we realize is this: When you know who you are, you’ll know what you’re supposed to do. Simba chooses to be who he was destined to be, and he ends up going home and facing his past.

This morning… you have an opportunity, no obligation, only opportunity this morning…. To come and get out of God ways. To give over to him the wheel of your life. To allow the silversmith to do his work. You see, friends, God wants to do his greatest work at the spot of your greatest resistance. God wants to do his greatest healing at the spot of your greatest pain. God wants to deliver his greatest strength at the spot of your greatest weakness. Will you give these to him? Will you do it right now? Heavenly Father, there are things in our life that are like wood and clay. There materials for building yes, but you want to come into our lives and make our hearts one where you see your own reflection in our life. You desire to see your love being reflected back to you, from within us. I pray this morning with boldness. Come. Refine us. It’s a process that takes heat. It takes time, and it takes great suffering at times. Come. Clean our life. And give us new life in your son, our savior and Lord, and his name is Jesus. In his name we pray.. amen. *