Love One Another

 

 

^"22 Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, ²³ for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God. ²⁴ For,

“All flesh is like grass,
And all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
And the flower falls off,
²⁵ But the word of the Lord endures forever.”

And this is the word which was preached to you."

I Peter 1:22-25

 

Good Morning my beloved,

 

Welcome to worship this Lord's day! We're so glad to have all of you here with us today. Please know, that we continue to lift all of you up in our prayers. We respectfully ask that you would do the same for us. We are so grateful for those of you who have been sharing the ministry website with all of your family and friends. Your faithfulness to share God's Word with others has brought about tremendous results.  May God pour His blessing over each and every one of you. We pray that God's Word will continue to reach those who desperately need to hear it, as we draw nearer to the coming day of our Lord. 

 

Sadly, many Christians today think that reading the Bible is for the purpose of accumulating knowledge. Of course, knowing the Bible is a good thing, but that's not the goal. While others presume that just showing up for church once a week is all that’s needed. As followers of Christ, the goal isn't to acquire more information, it's a transformed life, to become more like Christ. Our common perception of Jesus and our cultural stereotypes of Him are more often than not, terribly misguided. 

 

We live in a culture which has taken some biblical terminology and used them in a way that redefines and cheapens them so that they no longer mean what the Bible intended. More tragically, is it has made its way into the vocabulary of Christians with their devalued meaning.

The phrase "born again," in the secular society has come to describe anyone who makes a comeback or gets a fresh start in life. For example,  Chrysler under Lee Iaccoca was a "born again" corporation. If we allow our culture’s redefine and devalued biblical definitions to affect our thinking, we will miss what is central to biblical teaching. I believe as followers of Jesus Christ, we must keep our minds focused the biblical definitions, and consciously reject our cultures! Lest we forget that on Calvary there was a Substitute who caught the full impact of their sinful weight and rescued us from eternal death and separation from God. It is about being released from a life of bondage and snares that sin has kept you in for far too long. 

Through God’s mercy we have been "born again" to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This certainly doesn't mean that Christians are better than everyone else. We are not better, just better off. We're not better because of anything we've done, we are just better off because we have been saved, secured and forgiven.

Therefore, the biblical definitions are central to understanding the Bible and Peter’s thought in I Peter 1:22-25. Without the truth in God's Word, being rightly understood and applied to our lives, we become like the current culture where loyalty, dedication, hard work, integrity, morals and ethics are all foreign concepts, jumping from relationship to relationship, marriage to marriage, job to job and church to church. 

Let us pray.

Heavenly Father,

Father, as always we thank You for Your Word for us today. Thank You for making it so clear to us. By Your Spirit teach us to love one another with a fervent love as You have loved us, sacrificially, not self-indulgent. Through Your Word, You have taught us the way we must live. We know it will not always be easy, but by Your grace You have enabled us to be capable of that. Help us to live lives that may be useful to you for Your purposes, that we may demonstrate to the watching world that we belong to You. 

Lord, we pray that You would touch the hearts of the unsaved, draw those today that You want to come to Christ, for Your glory.

We pray in Christ's precious name 

Amen

Open with me your Bibles to I Peter chapter 1. Today, we're going to be looking at verses 22 through 25. I invite you to follow along with me as I read to set the text in our minds, while we prepare our hearts. Listen for the voice of the Spirit of God.

 

"Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.  For, "All flesh is like grass,
And all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, And the flower falls off, But the word of the Lord endures forever." And this is the word which was preached to you."

 

Beginning in verse 1 all the way through verse 12, Peter discussed the glory of salvation. In verses 13 through 21, he discussed how we are to respond to God. Now, as we come to verse 22, he is calling us to a second response, a response toward others.  If we are genuinely grateful for Christ having caught us when we were falling to our death, then we should have a proper response toward God, which is to "fix our hope," and "be holy." We are to have a reverent awe of the One who reigns above.

Now, in verse 22, he tells us that if we are genuinely grateful, that we should have a proper response toward others. In other words, how we are to treat each other. After all, we all have been given the gift of salvation.

 

"Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart." He gives us the answer in that marvelous statement, at the end of the verse, "fervently love one another from the heart." 

 

Responding in love, is the proper fruit of salvation directed toward each other. Peter's exhortation is not unfamiliar to us, is it? It's actually an age-old command. To love one another. It's a command that was given to Peter in John 13:34-35, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." It's a basic Christian message, we understand that. It was given to Peter from Jesus, and he passes it on here.

The verb that Peter uses here, is the Greek word, "agapáō," which expresses that highest kind of love, the love of the will. It's not the love of emotion or feeling, you command a feeling or emotion. This is the love of choice, that can respond to a command. Scripture repeatedly makes it plain that the unregenerate person is far from having the ability to demonstrate genuine love. It was upon receiving salvation that believers received the ability to demonstrate God's supernatural love. 

 

Peter's command to love one another, is really driven home by using terminology that surrounds the command. Which I believe it extremely helpful to us. If you were to walk up to someone and given the command to love each other, you would have to presuppose that they had the ability to do that. So, Peter answers for us the question whether we can respond to that command or not. 

 

As I stated earlier, the unregenerate man does not have the capacity to love like this, he hasn't experienced it, therefore, it's foreign to his nature. Scripture indicates this to us on a number of occasions. Let's look at Luke chapter 11 verse 42, when Jesus said to the Pharisees "But woe to you Pharisees! For you pay tithe of mint and rue and every kind of garden herb, and yet disregard justice and the love of God; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others." 

 

In other words, because you have an outward religion, because you have not the love of God. Those things are absent from your life. What an indictment of sinful men! That is characteristic of an unregenerate person.

 

In I John 4:12, "No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us." We have the capacity to love, since we have been called out of darkness into His light, to be the light in the world. Because we have been given "obedience to the truth purified your souls." He's saying at the time of your salvation, you received the capacity to sincerely love the brethren at the time when your souls were purified.

 

Salvation is a purging event. It not only cleanses the sins of the past, but in a sense it gives a new power for the future.  It is a cleansing that not only covers but a cleansing that enables.  Look at Ezekiel 36 verses 24 through 27, "For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances."

 

Before we move on, I want to draw your attention to what Peter says in the beginning of verse 22, "Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls." On the surface, it sounds as though you did it yourself, that it's a result of some human effort. That's not the case, it's not a human work. We just read in Ezekiel 36, that is no less than the work of God. By the work of God, you received the capacity to love at the time when your souls were purified with the capacity to respond to a command to love. So, purifying is obviously tied to the new birth, at salvation.

 

Verse 23, "for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God."  "For you have been born again," Peter is explaining what he has in mind when he says you purified your souls. You were born again at the moment of salvation. You were purified at the moment of salvation. "Born again," is a passive in which God gives you new life. Whereas, "you purified your souls," is an active. Peter states that this is not a life that will end quickly, it is not of perishable seed, but made imperishable by the Word of God.

 

So Peter looks at salvation from the moment God transformed you from the divine perspective and from the moment of salvation, your souls were purified from the human perspective. Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls, love one another. We can now respond to that command because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts. For the believer, to love is natural or should I say supernatural, meaning it's natural to our new state.

 

I John 4:7 says "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God." In other words, if we don't love one another we are not the children of God.

 

Verses 24-25, "All flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls off, but the word of the Lord endures forever. And this is the word which was preached to you" Peter says every once in a while, a beautiful flower rises out of the grass, that's the beauty of the grass. That's the glory. 

 

Everything that is flesh is like grass, grass withers dies. Everything that is of flesh is like a flower and a flower falls off. Whether common or spectacular, everything that is of flesh crumbles and dies. Think about it, generations of men come and go like the leaves of a tree. Even the healthiest, wisest, strongest, richest human being die. Though some men's lives may be rare and beautiful, like the flower, they just die like everyone else. This is a great illustration of the flesh of man verses the eternal Word of God.

The new life we receive from God is imperishable, or the Greek word "aphthartos," which means undecaying, immortal. This new life which God imparts to us through His Word is eternal, not subject to death. It is the blood of Christ that saves and the preaching of the Gospel is what points people to His precious blood.

 

God extended an invitation to salvation "through the preaching of the gospel". He is extending that same offer to you today! Beloved, having this new birth in common should make our love for one another overflow out the work the Holy Spirit has accomplished within us. 

 

In Closing..

 

The evidence of your salvation continues is and will always be obedience to God’s Word. Our continued obedience continuously changes our hearts and minds into greater and greater purity.

 

In order to love as we are commanded in God's Word, we have to acknowledge that God is now in charge of our life, that we have been bought with a price, that He is Lord and we are His servants. In today's world, those are often a hard realization to come to. Love is willing to confront the sinfulness in the lives of those we and it committed to helping them get better. However, even when love has to confront, Love is always caring. It is never devoid of compassion and tenderness. If  we are truly redeemed, purified, the natural result is that we love one another.

 

Biblical love is a self-sacrificing, caring commitment which shows itself in seeking the highest good of the one loved  The greatest love I can demonstrate to others, is to tell them of the greatest news that has been proclaimed in the history of the world. That God so loved the World that Christ, His Son, died to redeem them. 

 

May it be so..

 

And now may the Lord bless you and keep you;

the Lord make His face shine upon you,
And be gracious to you;

The Lord lift up His countenance upon you,
And give you peace.

Now and forever, in Jesus' name
Amen

 

 

 

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