Come & Welcome to Jesus Christ

So far in Peter’s letter, the Apostle has labored to expand our awe and our hope in the glory of God in the gospel. The gospel he’s unfolded for us in just a few paragraphs is a massively glorious gospel. An imperishable-inheritance-bestowing gospel. A future-glory-guaranteeing gospel. A freed-from-our-father’s-futility gospel. It is a gospel around which the entirety of the Scriptures orbits.

And now we’ll see that this gospel doesn’t just make declarations about what God has done for us, but it makes demands of us as well. God is going to tell us, through his servant Peter, what to do. And so my question here for you, right up front, is simple: Are you ok with that? Will you be commanded by God? Will you be told what to do?

Because the gospel Peter preaches here is a gospel that calls us somewhere. It urges us with earnestness and vigor towards a certain vision for this new humanity, the new people of God forged in the supernova heat of the cross and the empty tomb. And I hope that you will see that this is not contrary to God’s grace, but a living and growing extension of it, that the Lord’s demands of his people are not onerous and crushing, but life and peace and joy. That he is not like wicked Pharaoh, who commanded the Israelites to make bricks without straw, but that he extravagantly provides all that his people need to obey him and glorify him glory in him as his new creational new humanity.

We’ll handle this section in two basic parts.

1. In verses 22 to 25, we’ll see what grows up when you plant the imperishable seed of the gospel into a people. Namely, a new humanity marked by earnest love.

2. In 1 Peter 2:1–3, we’ll find that the earnest love of God’s new humanity chokes out the weeds that grew up out of the soil of the old humanity—and we’ll find that this sin-killing work of the gospel in God’s people is not an optional or negligible feature of God’s people.

Peter writes,

“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding 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,
but the word of the Lord remains forever.”

And this word is the good news that was preached to you.

So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

-1 Peter 1:22–2:3