Video Player is loading.

Up next


Sarah’s Fearless Daughters

Refuge Church
Refuge Church - 85 Views
8
85 Views
Published on 05 Jan 2021 / In Film and Animation

Do you have problem passages?

When I say problem passages, I mean passages that make you so uncomfortable that your immediate instinct is to figure out a way to make the passage somehow say the opposite of what it seems to say. We are prone to this, because sin has corrupted every part of what it means to be human; it didn’t spare our emotional self, rational self, sexual self, relational self—any part of our self.

And so when we run into a passage of Scripture that confronts some area of our self that has been twisted or put out of alignment by sin, our first instinct tends to be to doubt the passage rather than to doubt our reason, our emotion, our intuition.

We’re like a person missing a shoe trying to tell a guy with a level that the floor is off kilter. So here’s a presupposition we need to have as we think and reason and wrestle our way through the Scriptures: Christians don’t get to have problem passages.

When we come to the text, we come to it humbly. We come to it for instruction. We come to it to be corrected, molded, shaped by it.

Now listen, because here’s why this matters so deeply: Those places where you feel great reluctance, great resistance, great fear and trepidation at the Word of God—those are very often precisely those places where you most need God’s gracious, sovereign rule to knock you over and stand you back up.

Those are often the very places where a competing god has successfully discipled you to, in the words of the Apostle Paul in his great letter to the Romans, “exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship the creature rather than the Creator.”

This morning in 1 Peter, we come to a text like that—a text that may knock us over. A text that might feel like having the rug pulled out from under us. A text that stands in stark, bold opposition to the discipleship programs of the gods of this age, the vicious and false god of egalitarian, self-defining, self-sovereignty.

So what I want to do here up front, before we read our text and get to work, is to make a plea to you, especially to my sisters this morning. Peter speaks to you today, eye to eye, with great care for your soul and for your joy. And for some of you, this may feel like a hard word, a strange instruction; it may not make sense to you.

And so as your pastor, I’m pleading with you to doubt your own heart, thoughts, feelings, and intuitions rather than God’s Word. To soften your heart, to submit yourself to the Word of God in faith that God is wiser than we are, that he loves us more than we love ourselves, and that obedience to him always results in blessing in the long run.

One of the great problems facing the church today is that pastors often feel great freedom in rebuking men and male sin—we often have no problem being very direct with men—but when it comes to the patterns of sin and fear and idolatry that tend to thrive among the Lord’s women, there is very often a great trepidation to engage. There is a fear to bluntly, directly confront feminine sin.

I feel that. I feel twinges of fear, even now, to preach this text faithfully. But I love you and don’t want to rob you of enduring good out of fear of offending you in the next 45 minutes. So I’m going to try with all my might not to rob you. Let’s read our text this morning, ask for the Lord’s help, and get to work.

Sermon Text: 1 Peter 3:1–6

Show more
0 Comments sort Sort by

Up next