Tasting, Craving, and Cleaning House
1 Pet. 2:1-3 Aug. 9, 2009
Intro:
Those of you who have been around Laurier for a number of years know that I like to attend a conference called “The Leadership Summit” each year, generally the first Thursday and Friday of August, and you might be used to me coming back from that conference with some excitement and rejuvenation and renewed energy and enthusiasm. I often come away a little disturbed, which is good, and also a little bit fired up.
This year was really strong – I’m looking forward to sharing some of the sessions in our Adult Sunday School after the DVDs arrive early in the winter. Before heading back into 1 Peter this morning, I want to share a few of the things that I left the conference with and am mulling over, and I think you’ll see that they tie nicely back into what we’ve been studying and what we’ll look at today.
Summit Highlights:
We heard a lot about how much things are changing at the moment, largely influenced by the “economic downturn”, and how this creates a new set of opportunities for leaders bold enough to embrace times of uncertainty, take advantage of the need to really establish what is really important, and then really be the church God designed by embracing the needs among us. It is helpful for me, because sometimes in the day to day of life and ministry I can get caught up in the little stuff and then see things wrongly – like instead of seeing a sermon as an opportunity to share my heart, share God’s words of life, and share dreams of God for us and our community that can challenge us to live the way God wants us to live, I can start to see it as 25minutes of telling people stuff they probably already know and will probably forget by Tuesday or Wednesday. Or I can start to see worship as 25minutes of singing karaoke together and hoping nobody is going to complain about too much repetition or too much old-fashioned organ music or too much drums, instead of seeing that really it is a group of people together learning to love God and one another, and expressing that love through the awesome privilege of walking together into the very throne room of heaven and standing before the Almighty God of the Universe, hand in hand, giving and receiving love through the act of worship, the highest good for which we were initially created.
There were some moments of strong affirmation – there are some things we do really well together. A session on hiring and firing affirmed our journey over the past 11 months. A session on changing how we measure success affirmed that obedience is a better measure than a growth chart of everything going high and to the right. A big focus on poverty and HIV/AIDS in Africa deeply affirmed our commitment to partnership with the poor in Bolivia, South America. We have felt God’s call to that partnership, and have obeyed, and we will continue.
One powerful session was led by Tim Keller, who talked through the parable of the two prodigals, pointing out especially how the elder brother was just as distant from the Father as the younger brother who took his inheritance and wasted it in a distant country. He was just as far from the Father’s heart of mercy and forgiveness as the rebellious son, the difference was that the elder brother’s distance from the Father’s heart was rooted in outward obedience without the same heart. He related the story to us, the “religious”, the “Christians”, who have maybe been doing lots right, been obedient, and so now feel like we’ve got some leverage on the Father because we’ve been so good. Keller called us to repent for the motivations for our right actions, as much as for our wrong actions. And reminded us that obedience that doesn’t come directly and solely out of our love for God, as our joyful response to Him, leaves us outside the feast, far from the heart of the Father, and full of spiritual immaturity and spiritual deadness and powerless ministry. I have to listen carefully and personally to that message – what really is in my heart? Do my actions really come as a joyful response to the love of the Father, or am I making it about me, looking for affirmation and recognition, and believing that because I’m so good (a pastor, even!!), God has to take special care of me… after all, I’ve done so much for Him… see the twistedness there?
I’m trying to squish 2 packed days into a few short minutes, but I’m excited by two other things as well. One was an African who called us to change the conversation from “Aid” for the poor to “Trade” with the poor, so that in dignity those people can learn to help and care for themselves. I’m committed to exploring that more with our missions team, and within our STEP partnership as well. The second I’m also very interested in exploring in the context of our STEP partnership, it is a project that facilitates direct personal microloans to entrepreneurs who need a small amount of capital invested in them so that they can care for themselves. Both of these are really tangible, practical expressions of the Kingdom of God among us. And they excite me.
Back to 1 Peter 2:1-3
All that excitement takes me back to our study of 1 Peter, where we’ve been seeing our identity as defined by God, and our actions that must flow out of that new identity. Actions as expressions of love and gratitude for all God has done for us, along the same lines as Keller’s message of the two prodigals. Calls to be different from our world, “strangers”, “holy”, and people of a deep and growing love for one another. All those messages I heard about being the true people of God in our changing times, with a special concern for the poor, and how this sets us apart in our world. Powerful messages of the Summit, affirmed by powerful messages we saw in 1 Peter 1.
This morning, I want to look at just the first 3 verses of chapter 2: “1Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. 2Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, 3now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
Working Backwards: vs. 3
I’m going to start at the end of the passage and work towards the beginning – in “forward”, Peter gives the command (“rid yourselves…”), then an analogy that gives us a vision of our new identity and thus activities that should replace what we get rid of (“like newborn babies”), and ends with the reason and motivation (“now that you have tasted”). Going backwards lets me start with the motivation and move to the command.
“now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” A direct quote from Psalm 34:8, which commands us to “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” Remember in chapter one when Peter said the ancient prophets longed to see what we see and experience what we have experienced? Here is example #1. NOW, you and I have tasted, NOW we KNOW that the Lord is good.
Do you remember what that was like for you, when you really tasted, really experienced the goodness of God? Think about it for a moment… when could you really taste it, know it, feel it, want to yell out, “God is Good!!!”. Christianity is and always has been an experiential religion – God is not distant and separate, but close and intimate, so close and so good we can taste it. But maybe most of us are remembering a time long ago, when we “tasted”, and are feeling empty now. Listen to this – I think our problem is not what we think it is… When we are distant from God, spiritually dead, not taking our faith seriously, we think our problem is that we need a new taste of God. Like God hasn’t done anything, you know, really amazing in our lives in a long time, so we’ve drifted, gotten stale and lazy, dabbled in sin, felt negative towards church because church hasn’t made us feel close to God lately, and so we think our problem is we need something new. Like a new fall wardrobe, or the latest new gadget. Our culture has programmed us to believe that new is all that matters, fresh is the only thing that counts. Higher and to the right, like that old chart. But the real problem is not that God hasn’t done anything for me lately, the real problem is that I haven’t properly valued what God has already done for me.
Peter says we’ve already tasted. We’ve already experienced God’s acceptance and forgiveness and reconciliation, and just because you don’t feel it emotionally does not negate the fact that it already happened, and maybe we’ve just not valued it highly enough recently. We’ve taken our eyes off Jesus and put them on ourselves. It is true that God wants an ongoing relationship of intimacy and love with us, God is not the husband in the bad marriage whose wife complains, “you never tell me you love me”, and the husband replies, “I told you I love you 30yrs ago when we got married, and if anything changes I’ll let you know…”. That’s not God, read His Word and see He’s constantly speaking His love for us, but God does want us to look back to the day we covenanted with Him, when we tasted His goodness, and cling to that.
Crave It: vs. 2
That initial taste starts something deep within, a craving. This is in verse 2. In June, when I was in class at the U of A, I had lots of opportunities to provide little tastes of the real character of God through my participation as a Christian man in a small, highly interactive class. One day after class I was walking with a classmate towards our cars when she picked up on a conversation we’d had in class to share a story. She began by saying, “I’m quite spiritual, but I’m not very religious”. I replied, “depending on what you mean by those terms, I’m probably exactly the same…”. Then she continued with her story: she was just coming out of a really rough patch of life, feeling rejected and hurt and betrayed, and she’d closed herself off from most people around her. Just as she started to emerge from this isolation, she and her husband went out for dinner with some friends, and as they left the restaurant they were approached by what looked like a homeless man who was going to ask for money. She explained she didn’t hand money out like that, but this day there was some really strong grab at her spirit, and instead of ignoring this man and walking away, she reached into her purse – to the great surprise of her husband and friends – and pulled out a few dollars. She reached out to the man, and said “I never do this, but I’m going to give you some money.” Her voice started to break as she told me the story, and she said, “He looked me straight in the eye and smiled a warm, genuine smile, and said, ‘I guess you never know who your angels are going to be’.” My spine tingled as she said that line, and I knew exactly what she was going to say next: she said, “He was exactly right. I never would have known that he would be an angel to me.” That encounter completed the healing she was already experiencing, affirmed her value and place among humanity, restored her as she shared with the poor, and deeply impacted her. I didn’t need to say much, except affirming that I believe she’d met the God I’d been talking about in class, and I just tried to affirm and encourage that in the prayer and the belief that the initial taste develops a craving.
Peter brings this craving right home in the analogy of a newborn baby craving milk. Now while in other places “milk” is contrasted with “meat” and the call is to go on to maturity, Peter uses the image differently here. In this analogy, “milk” is the pure, wholesome, essential ingredient of life, which a newborn desperately craves. You get the picture – middle of the night, middle of the day, the infant begins to cry, to crave with every part of its small body that life-giving milk. Do you crave God like that? By “milk” here, Peter is really talking about God’s Word – do you have that craving to know God through His Word? Or have you forgotten that initial taste you had of salvation, devalued it, and been conformed again to the old ways of life before our re-birth as God’s children?
Ministry is like that also. Once you get a taste for what it is like to see God working through you to love others, you are going to start to crave that more. And that will make you crave more of God, as you see how helpless and powerless you are on your own, and so you’ll crave prayer and Scripture and more opportunities to live for God.
My friends, if you and I don’t have that craving, something is wrong. Very wrong, deep inside of us. We’ve lost our first love, allowed it to be squeezed out of us, filled ourselves with other junk rather than God. We have tasted. We have known God and heard Him speak, we have a new identity to live out. And it starts with God, remembering His heart of love for us, remembering our covenant with Him, and beginning anew to live in obedience.
Cleaning House: vs. 1
The first verse in chapter 1 makes this really practical for us. It actually refers back to the command in the previous chapter to “love one another deeply, from the heart”, which “therefore” requires something of us – getting rid of the junk that gets in the way of love. Peter lists some specifics, each of them are things that get in the way of our love for others. They are symptoms of a lack of love, symptoms of pettiness and selfishness and older-brother prodigals who even though might be doing outwardly “right” things have hearts that are far from God’s heart. Each of those, malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander, are community and love killers. And we’ve got to get rid of them. Tasting God, craving more of God, results in the exact opposite of these things. “Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.” (1 Cor. 13).
If you are guilty of any of those in your life – envy of others, saying negative and hurtful things about others behind their back, telling less than the whole truth, lying or twisting perceptions, or of saying you follow Jesus but then not living by following Jesus, then do what Peter says here: get rid of that stuff. Clean house. Recapture your previous taste of God, crave more, and get rid of the stuff that gets in the way of living out who you really are.
Conclusion:
The reason I really love the Leadership Summit is because every time I attend, I’m reminded of who God is and what God has done in saving me – that “tasting” Peter talks about. I get excited again that God still works through His Church that loves Him FIRST, that the local church is the hope of the world, and I start to crave that for us. I’m challenged by my sin, confronted with the stuff I need to “get rid of” personally, and the stuff we need to “get rid of” as a congregation.
And I’m renewed by the knowledge that we, the people of God together at Laurier Heights Baptist Church, matter to God. He loves us. He blesses us richly, beyond measure! And He expects us to multiply and pass that blessing, that love, that purpose, beyond ourselves. That, I believe is our growing edge – going in love to pass the love of God, the taste that we’ve received, to others. And as we do, we see His Kingdom come.
