Sermon Tone Analysis

Good morning and welcome to Dishman Baptist Church.

He is Risen!

What a blessing it is to be together with you this morning and to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ together.

Please take your Bibles and turn in them with me to 1 Peter, 1 Peter 1.

If you don’t have a Bible please just raise your hand and someone will bring one to you.

Our passage for this morning will be found on page 1075 of that Bible.

I never would have thought that the words civil war and America would have been connected during my life time - at least not outside the walls of academia and even there with reference to the events of 1860-65.

Surely not something that could happen in the present.

Certainly not something that could happen within a century of the victories won during the second world war and then after that during the cold war.

Yet now as we look around at the world we live in, the vast disparities in opportunity, economic status, ethnic divisions, ideological divisions and the environment is ripe.

In fact if you walk out on the street this morning the one thing that you would probably get whole hearted agreement on is that the world is not getting better or safer.

Even coming out of the recent mask mandates there has been no celebration of the return of “normal”.

Instead people just walk around like a bunch of Bergens - almost seeming to sleepwalk through life.

We are currently at a 40 year high in inflation and gas prices, although falling now, remain high.

Violence continues to pepper the social media feeds and news outlets.

And that is only within America.

Looking around the world it seems possible that another world war could take place.

On top of that we still have the lingering affects of a global pandemic and the world does not seem to be in a good place.

This seems to be the nature of the human condition.

In the late 19th century a French painter by the name of Paul Gauguin painted a painting and in it posed three questions that sum up the essence of the human condition - Where do we come from?

What are we? and Where are we going?

The world this morning has no answer to these questions.

In fact - the best the world can come up with is that we come from an accidental combining of random molecules, that we are little better than animals and that we aren’t going anywhere.

Now that truly is hopeless.

Peter wrote this letter that we’re going to look in to today to an audience in the first century that also knew the seeming hopelessness of the human condition.

Scattered from their homes, spread all over the world, persecuted or at the least ridiculed for their odd beliefs at every turn these people knew the struggle of maintaining hope in the world around them.

We are much the same today.

As we look around at all the conditions that I’ve noted a moment ago, the only reasonable reaction is to lose hope and to settle into a matter of fact lifestyle that just tries to get from one day to the next.

Politicians have failed.

World systems have failed.

Society has failed.

In fact it all seems rather hopeless.

And it would be - if this were the end all, be all of life.

If there were nothing beyond this, nothing beyond this moment, it would be.

In fact if this is all there is we are really wasting our time here.

But intuitively we know that there is something beyond this.

We know that there is something more.

Peter’s point in writing to his audience in the first century was to address two things with them - the first was to help them understand and be equipped to weather the suffering that would find them in this world.

The second was to provide them the hope that would equip them - and that is the same hope that we can find in our lives this morning.

We’re going to read 1 Peter 1:1-9 but spend most of our time this morning focused in on verses 3-5.

Please follow along with me in your Bibles as I read.

Just some brief background on this letter before we get in to what the particular verses we’re going to look at this morning mean for us.

As I just said Peter addresses this letter to those residing in a part of the Roman Empire that is now a part of modern day Turkey.

Peter is writing to mainly Gentile Christians at a time when persecution of the church is increasingly becoming likely.

If Peter wrote this letter sometime between AD 62 and AD 64 both he and Paul have been imprisoned by the Roman Empire and Nero is just about to blame Christians for the burning of Rome.

The tide of public sentiment throughout the Empire, never exactly favorable towards Christians to begin with, is about to turn openly hostile.

There are some interesting parallels between our day and the day in which Peter is writing.

The Christians were about to be blamed for something they were not involved with and, in our modern context, we see the church being made a scapegoat for the such things as the Capitol riots and Christian nationalism - which is not true Christianity.

Peter addresses the letter to the chosen, living as exiles.

We should recognize that those who have placed their faith in Christ are a part of the same chosen and while we may not have been expelled from our homes or scattered across the physical world, we are exiles here as our citizenship is in Heaven and this place is only a temporary home.

This is an important realization because it factors in to Peter’s reasons for the hope that he is delivering to his audience.

Peter highlights three factors regarding their status as the chosen - they were chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

This is not to say that God foreknew those who would choose Him and then on that basis selected them but rather that God sovereignly chose those who would be His people as Paul writes from before the foundation of the world.

He writes that this is through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit meaning that it is the work of the Spirit to bring life into the spiritually dead heart through regeneration and then to continue to work within the new believer to bring about maturity.

We are brought in to the community of the chosen through the shed blood of Christ - as Peter refers to it here as being sprinkled with the blood of Christ - as His sacrifice makes an atonement for our sins removing from us the penalties that we have incurred and instead conferring upon us Christ’s righteous standing before God.

Peter will later tell his readers the full purpose of his letter.

In 1 Peter 5:12 he writes 1 Peter 5:12 “Through Silvanus, a faithful brother (as I consider him), I have written to you briefly in order to encourage you and to testify that this is the true grace of God.

Stand firm in it!”

The purpose of his letter is to encourage them to testify to God’s grace and to stand firm in this grace as the tides of persecution and suffering rise around them.

As he embarks on this purpose in chapter one his first determination is to give them hope by revealing three things - the source of hope, the characteristics of their hope and the security of their hope.

How do you give someone hope?

I read a few articles on this in preparation for this morning - even one from Reno Forklift Company and their seven ways to provide hope for the national month of hope.

Did you know that April is the national month of hope?

I didn’t.

But thankfully the Reno Forklift Company informed me of that.

Another article defined giving hope this way: “To give someone hope is to unveil the sheet of darkness and turn their face towards the bright glimmer of light.

It is balm for the soul.”

That is an amazing definition - because at the heart of it is what Peter does here.

He takes his readers eyes off of their current situation and turns them upward.

The secret to giving someone hope is to take their eyes off of the situation in which they find themselves and turn their eyes somewhere else.

No one who has hit rock bottom or who is in a hopeless state looks around and says what nice accommodations there are.

What a nice dungeon they’ve found themselves in.

No one, well not many people, in the midst of suffering think to themselves “well it could be much worse”.

No.

They want the suffering to end and so to focus their eyes on the conditions in which they find themselves really doesn’t provide much hope.

In fact they would be right in saying “Well thank you very much.

I didn’t think I could feel much worse about my status but you just proved me wrong.”

But what does Peter do here - he focuses their eyes upward.

He, in the most complete and perfect way, unveils the sheet of darkness that surrounds his readers, and that may surround some of us today, and turns their face not simply toward a glimmer of light but to the Creator of light Himself.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessed be the God and Father - in fact what Peter writes here literally is simply Bless the God and Father.

Eulogetos from which we get our word eulogy means “being worthy of praise or commendation.”

Blessing God is a common expression found in the early Jewish traditions.

Psalm 66:8 says “Bless our God, you peoples; let the sound of his praise be heard.”

Psalm 68:26 “Bless God in the assemblies; bless the Lord from the fountain of Israel.” and Psalm 104:1 “My soul, bless the Lord!

Lord my God, you are very great; you are clothed with majesty and splendor.”

speak of blessing the Lord.

Two other times in the New Testament a book opens with such a blessing.

Ephesians 1:3 “Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavens in Christ.”

and 2 Corinthians 1:3 “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort.”

In each of these there is a break from the traditional Jewish phraseology with a distinctively Christian theme.

Blessing God not just as God but with the further clarification that He is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is not to say that there is any lessening of the deity of Christ here - throughout His earthly ministry Christ referred to God as His Father.

In fact it was this very proclivity of Christ’s that caused so much trouble for Him with the Pharisees and ultimately led to His crucifixion.

You will remember the charge that was brought against Christ the He had claimed to be the Son of God John 19:7 ““We have a law,” the Jews replied to him, “and according to that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.””

In doing this Peter is making two claims.

First he is making a claim to Christ’s deity.

Notice how he refers to Christ - as the Lord Jesus Christ.

He names all three of Christ’s titles.

Lord is the word kurios and it is most commonly used to refer to God in the Old Testament as the sovereign ruler of all creation.