Have A Good Day - 1 Peter 3:8-11a Series

1 Peter 3:8 Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble. 9 Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. 10 For, "Whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech. 11 He must turn from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it. 12 For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil."

Introduction

Are you having a good day? Have you ever thought about what that question actually means? What is a good day? And how do you know if you are having one? Everybody wants to have good days, right? In fact, they want me to have them too. Almost everyone I ever meet tells me, “Have a good day.” But what does that mean? How do you measure the goodness or badness of a day? When you put your head on the pillow at night, and you make an assessment of whether or not you just completed a good day or bad day – what is your standard for determining that? What are good days, and what is the secret to having more of them? You might say, “I’m not sure exactly what constitutes good days; I just know that whatever they are, I’m not having them.” If that is you, then today’s text is for you. Take a look at verse 10.

1 Peter 3:10 Whoever would love life and see good days must…

Then he goes on to tell us what we must do in order to have good days. But before we jump in to verse 10, let’s back up and make sure we remember the context.

The Attitude of Harmony

This section of 1 Peter is all about harmony in the church. We are God’s family, and our Father does not want discord in His household. If I went through and read you all the passages in the New Testament about the importance of harmony and peace and unity within the body it would take all morning just to read them. This is extremely important to God. Our family love for one another is the mark of our authenticity as believers.

John 13:35 By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

The creation of the Church was a matter of God taking two groups that were hostile toward one another – Jews and Gentiles, and abolishing that hostility, bringing us together in love with a supernatural unity created by the Holy Spirit. And we are commanded to guard that unity.

Ephesians 4:2 Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3 Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

So starting in verse 9 Peter is teaching us how to keep that unity of the Spirit and harmony in the church, and we learned last week that it all starts with our attitudes. In verse 9 Peter commands five virtues that we all must have in order for there to be harmony in the household of God, and none of the five are actions. They are all attitudes.

Harmonious

The first one we looked at last week – homophrones. It means to have relationships that are not strained. It is the opposite of being at odds with each other or against each other.

Sympathetic

The next word is sympathetic. The Greek word is sympathes. Sym means with, and pathos means to feel, or to suffer. So sympathes refers to feeling something along with someone else. You feel what they feel. It is not when you see someone suffering you think, “Aw, poor guy. That’s too bad.” It is when you actually feel some of what he is feeling. He is feeling sorrow or some kind of emotional distress, and now you are feeling sadness or distress along with him. Probably a better English translation for this word would be empathy, because that is the English word that focuses more on feeling the same way the person feels. It means rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep.

And in the kingdom of God that extends even to those who hurt us – like David, who wept when his enemies got sick (Ps.35:14). Our natural inclination is to be glad when the person who hurt us runs into trouble. They have hardship and in our flesh we are secretly thinking, “Good – he’s getting exactly what he deserves.”