1 Peter 2:11-17 How to Live Like an Exile
Good morning! We are headed back to 1 Peter this morning, chapter two, verses 11-17, page 1015 in the pew Bibles.
If you remember back to chapter one of this letter, the Apostle Peter was writing to what he called, “the elect exiles of the dispersion,” Jewish Christians living outside of Israel and away from Jerusalem. The original audience of Peter’s letter, the original recipients were scattered throughout the provinces of Asia, mostly what is now modern day Turkey.
And though we are not them, we have a lot in common with them and can easily identify with the principles that Peter lays out for them.
Peter called them exiles because they were living away from their homeland, but the they were living away from their homeland in two senses, first they were dispersed away from Jerusalem and so they were exiles, but that was just their earthly homeland, which wasn’t really their homeland at all once they were adopted by God the Father through faith in Jesus Christ.
Everyone who comes to faith in Jesus Christ and is adopted by God the Father becomes an exile here on earth, because Heaven is now our home. And we, though the millennia and miles separate us from these First Century believers, are exiles and sojourners with them while we remain here on earth.
So let’s look at our text together.
11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. 12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
13 Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, 14 or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. 15 For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. 16 Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. 17 Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.
Let’s Pray.
Peter’s tender exhortation here to earth’s exiles, to the church, begins with a strong reminder that the church is not only on foreign soil but is at war.
Far too often, even among us, we forget that we are foreigners here, that nothing is permanent here on earth, and that the only true and lasting joys are in heaven, our real home. We find all sorts of ways to distract ourselves from this truth, we chase all kinds of things that seem totally harmless and allow them to cloud over and crowd out that which is truly important.
These are what Peter calls, “the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.”
He tells us to “abstain,” from them. That sounds pretty cut and dried, doesn’t it?
The word translated, “abstain,” means to be away from, a long way away, just like those believers were a long way from home, and we are a long way away from our heavenly home, we are to stay a long way away from the passions of the flesh.
I’m not sure I need to delineate exactly what constitutes a “passion of the flesh,” but it’s not as simple as we might first think, this though isn’t just about sex and sensuality, this is about anything that feeds the monster called our “self.”
Selfishness is the king of fleshly passions. “Fleshly lusts war against the soul; and their war is made up of stratagem and sleight, for they cannot hurt the soul but by itself. They promise it some contentment, and so gain its consent to serve them and undo itself; they embrace the soul that they may strangle it.” –Leighton
No wonder Peter tells us to stay far away from these passions of the flesh that promise gratification, the life of the soul, our inner self, our mind, our thoughts, our true being, our hearts, is hidden inside and is hurt and killed by these fleshly lusts.
Warren Wiersbe said, “Our battle isn’t with the people around us but with the passions within us.”
Our phones, our newsfeeds, our TVs, our perception of others opinions of us, these are all this same kind of distraction and they keep us fixated on the things that have cozied up to our hearts in order to strangle them.
But winning this war for our souls is not just about us, it’s also about those around us.
12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
We have the word, “Gentiles,” used here, but the word is the same Greek word for, “nation,” earlier in this chapter. Peter simply means unbelievers, or unbelieving nations and peoples, the ungodly world.
Peter charges the church to keep our conduct honorable, exercising good moral character. Christians are to stand out from the unbelieving world because we have a different set of standards. Especially in our day hen wrong is praised as being right and right is decried as being hate. Our conduct must remain honorable, treating others as we would like to be treated, loving our neighbors, honoring the Lord in all we do.
The world is closely watches Christians, always on the lookout for opportunities to slander the Church and our Savior as a result, unfortunately we give them way too many opportunities to do just that.
We must watch our walks closely! And each other’s walks as well, correcting and rebuking as necessary so that we can all maintain God honoring walks with Jesus through this life. Accountability is unpopular in every circle but it is necessary in the church family because the world is watching.
In Peter’s day the church was blamed for all sorts of things any time something went wrong. Christians were falsely accused of being revolutionaries and blamed for every natural disaster and calamity.
Tertullian said, “If the Tiber rises to the walls of the city, if the Nile does not irrigate the fields, if an earthquake takes place, if famine or pestilence arise, they cry forthwith: away with the Christians to the lions!”
Now this may not be your experience but the church has certainly been blamed for our share of calamities even in modern times.
I’m sure you’ve met as many people as I have that have had bad experiences with the church in the past or have been turned off by stories that they’ve heard and have decided to write the church off as a whole instead of dealing with individuals or with the specific groups that caused the problems or hurts.
On the other side of the coin, you may have had experiences with what Peter says about the watching world and its reaction to your good deeds, seeing your good deeds and glorifying God on the day of visitation.
Understanding the phrase, “day of visitation,” is the key to understanding whether or not you can relate to what Peter is saying here.
My first thought was that the day of visitation meant the day that Christ returns but I don’t think that’s it. In truth, the day of visitation is any day that God visits the lives of people, believers and unbelievers alike, with great difficulty or difficulties.
We’ve talked about these experiences before as God’s refining fire for Christians but for unbelievers these days of visitation are the Father’s attempt to get people’s attention and call them to Himself.
When these days of difficulties come often times our unbelieving friends come to us for help and look to us for answers because they have observed our lives and know that we have answers to their problems.
It may be convenient for people to speak evil of the church as a whole, or to blame the whole church for all time for the actions of a few misguided souls, but when it comes to individual lives and individual people, those apart from Christ will look to their Christian friends, if they have any, when life goes sideways.
I guess the best thing we can do is make sure everybody has some Christian friends that they can count on for help in times of trouble. This is perhaps the best way that we can witness to people.
So if we think about these two verses they can easily be summarized, “watch your walk, don’t be a jerk, and do good works.” Is that it? Sounds kind of nebulous to me. Just be nice and that is enough to show the world that we are different and people will see Christ in us? Haha, nope.
Peter actually gives us some very specific ways in which the church is to stand apart from the world, and it is far from a popular strategy… The Church’s dirty word… Submission.
13 Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, 14 or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. 15 For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. 16 Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. 17 Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.
There is a lot to be said about this topic, and Peter gives the rest of this chapter and half of the next dealing with it and we’re going to be taking a closer look at it over the coming weeks.
I saw a t-shirt advertised this week with the phrase, “Honor God, Defy Tyrants,” on it by a company that claimed to speak for the Reformers, those are the guys I quote all the time, Luther, Calvin, guys like that.
The shirt had the reference Acts 5:29 at the bottom as its proof text. This is a quote from the Apostle Peter, “We must obey God rather than men.” Sounds good right?
Only if you ignore the context of that verse in Acts as well as its context in the rest of the New Testament.
The same Peter that said, “we must obey God rather than men,” also said, “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution…”
We are going to deal with this in depth next week but for now we can simply say that we are duty bound to obey civil authorities so that we are good citizens although we are exiles and that our duty of obedience ceases where God decisively forbids it. We are bound to the laws of man until they command us to violate the laws of God.
Submission is very unpopular because it flows in the opposite direction of selfishness and as disciples of Christ we should be shining examples of that flow that the unbelieving world will see our good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. 12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
13 Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, 14 or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. 15 For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. 16 Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. 17 Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.
Amen.
