“Long for the pure spiritual milk,” Peter writes—by which he means the “milk of the word,” as the King James puts it. In other words, as God’s children, we should long for the gospel, for God’s Word, and for God’s kingdom. As I discuss in this sermon, we can’t fake “longing for” something. Either we do or we don’t. And if we don’t, then that’s a symptom of a spiritual problem. See, when Peter tells us to “put away” these various sins in verse 1, my temptation is to preach a “try harder”-type sermon: “Try harder to be a better Christian. Work harder on the ‘spiritual disciplines.’ Pray more. Study the Bible more.” But as I make clear in this sermon, our problem isn’t that we’re not trying hard enough; our problem is that we’re not believing the gospel wholeheartedly enough. We need to learn to apply the gospel to the problems in our lives. This sermon talks about how to do that.
Sermon Text: 1 Peter 2:1-10
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There was a lot of heartbreaking news last week: First, there was the terrorist bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England—an attack designed to kill children, and teenagers, and their parents. Twenty-two people died. Many more were injured. President Trump referred to the terrorists as “evil losers,” and I couldn’t agree more! Evil losers. I like that. When we hear about this sort of thing, it is perfectly good and even Christian for us to remind ourselves of Paul’s words in Romans 12: “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.”[1] We can thank God for that.
We can also thank God, especially on this Memorial Day weekend, that God has called men and women in our armed forces to be what Paul describes in Romans 13 as “God’s servants”—avengers, he says—who carry out God’s wrath on wrongdoers.[2] And on this weekend especially we thank God for those who gave “the last full measure of devotion.”
By all means, we Christians are supposed to live our lives as peace-loving and peace-making, inasmuch as it depends on us, but we do so with the certain knowledge that in the end, God will ensure that no sin, no evil, will ultimately go unpunished. There will be a Day when justice will be done—completely and perfectly. God will see to it! And for those of us who have trusted in Christ, we are thankful that on the cross, God in Christ has taken the punishment that we deserve for our sin and our evil.
Now on Friday, there was another horrifying event in the news. In Egypt, a busload of Christians, on their way to worship Jesus, were stopped on a dusty desert highway by masked men carrying automatic weapons—who sprayed the bus with bullets killing 28 men, women, and children—and injuring many more—for no crime other than this: they followed Jesus and were seeking to be faithful to him.
So here’s what I want to know: Is Jesus so precious to us that we would be willing to get on board that bus—out of obedience to him—even if doing so meant our death? Is Jesus so precious to us that we would be willing to pay that price? Is Jesus worth that much to us? Because make no mistake: that’s what Jesus asks of us. God forbid that what happened to those Christians would ever happen to us. But when we become followers of Christ we accept this as a possibility. Don’t we? “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”[3] “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”[4]
I’m helping to teach confirmation class on Sunday nights, and I’m trying to get this across to these young confirmands—I’m trying to get across the scope and the seriousness of the commitment that God is asking these young people to make—if they want to be lifelong followers of his Son Jesus. I wish our confirmation liturgy included a question that the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod asks their confirmands when they make their vows: “Do you intend to continue steadfast in this confession and church and to suffer all, even death, rather than fall away from it?”
Are we willing to say, “I’d rather suffer all, indeed I’d rather die, than to fall away from my Christian faith”? How would we answer that question?
I bet I know how most of those 28 Egyptian Christians on that bus last Friday would answer that question.
See, we rightly honor our men and women in uniform who, out of loyalty and love for our country, sacrifice their lives, but make no mistake: Jesus is worth infinitely more than that to us. Or he ought to be. Yet each one of us can look at our lives and easily find other people and other things who compete for the love and loyalty that we owe to him alone! Right?
And I promise, as a preacher I am tempted to turn this into a guilt-inducing message, a shame-inducing message: “We must be more like those Egyptian martyrs! We must try harder! We must be more faithful, more committed. We must do better!”
And indeed, when we consider what Peter says in verse 1, we might think that Peter is going to take a similar tack: “So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.” We might expect him to try tough love: Put it away or else… or else this bad stuff will happen to you. No, he doesn’t take that “tough love” approach. Instead, with great compassion, he tells them, “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.”
There is a note of warning there: “if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” If you have… Peter knows that it’s possible—heck, it’s likely—that some of the people in his churches haven’t yet “tasted that the Lord is good.” And they may not even know it. But he says that one important mark, one characteristic, that should define us as Christians, is that we long for “pure spiritual milk,” which means we long for Jesus Christ, and his gospel, and his glory, and his kingdom—which we receive and experience mostly through the Holy Spirit as he speaks to us through God’s holy Word. We should long for those things! And if we don’t long for those things, Peter tells us, at the very least it means that we have a spiritual problem! We may still need to repent and give our lives to Christ and be saved; but even if we’ve done that, and if we are still saved, we at least have a problem that needs to be solved!
But mostly Peter gives us not a warning but an incentive for solving this problem: Because he tells us that once we experience the love of Jesus Christ, and his gospel, and his glory, and his kingdom—once we taste that pure spiritual milk of his word—we won’t be satisfied with anything else. Because what we receive from Christ is better than anything else in the world. As the Psalmist says, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”[5] We are meant to feel Christ’s love for us; we are meant to be “in love” with Christ. The truth of the gospel ought to penetrate our emotions—it’s not just something we think about. It’s not just something that lives in our heads. It’s not just something we agree with intellectually. We ought to experience it, emotionally. Emotion and intellect go hand in hand in the Christian life. Neither one by itself is sufficient, but together they help us long for Christ. They help us desire Christ.
Our problem with sin, Peter wants us to know, comes down to desire. We desire the wrong things. Or we desire them out of proportion to what God intends. What we need is the gospel of Jesus Christ to heal our desires, to tame them, to straighten them out, to bring them under the Lordship of Christ. What we need is to replace inappropriate desires with a desire for Christ.
Consider the sins that he lists here. These seem like small sins, in a way. I say “small” because, good heavens, they’re so prevalent in our church! Aren’t they? And they were prevalent in Peter’s churches. These sins seem small because we seem to have such a high tolerance for them! But let’s consider the desire underneath the sin: Why are we tempted to practice deceit, after all? Or why do we act like hypocrites? Because if people knew the truth about us, it would make us look bad in front of people—and well, maybe they would reject us. O.K., but what does the “pure spiritual milk” of the gospel teach us? That we’re all sinners—that church at its best is a hospital for sinners. That we recognize our powerlessness over sin, and that we need Christ to heal us. But we don’t have to fear being rejected because of what Christ did for us on the cross: he has forgiven us; he has accepted us. What else matters?
Or think about why you envy. Because someone has something that you think you need. And usually the sin of slander—which means to gossip or run someone down—comes from our resentment that other people have something we want; we’re not content with what we’ve been given. But how does the “pure spiritual milk” of the gospel heal these desires? By reminding us that God’s grace is sufficient for all circumstances; that there’s nothing that we have that we haven’t received; that God uses trials for our own good; that we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength; that compared to Christ, we should count everything else as loss.
Can I share with you a way that this hit home with me recently?
A couple of weeks ago, I had a difficult conversation with a clergy acquaintance. More like an argument. Of course, he was perfectly cool, calm, and collected. I was the one who felt my pulse racing and my heart pounding; that “fight or flight” instinct is so strong within me. He told me, in so many words, that he didn’t believe in many core doctrines and convictions of our Christian faith; that he doubted much of what the Bible teaches; worst of all, he seemed perfectly O.K. with it! I was beside myself!
At one point, I said, “Please don’t teach these things to your congregation!”—for the sake of their own souls—because in my view nothing less than heaven and hell hangs in the balance. But also for the sake of pastors like me who may be appointed to his church some day and who will have to clean up the mess that he made! I told him that…
I was angry. And I thought, “How dare he call himself a minister of the gospel when he doesn’t believe in much of what the gospel teaches!” What’s his problem?
And as I was reflecting on this, I promise it was as if the Lord were saying to me, “Not so fast, Brent… What about you?”
Recently, I was with a group of friends who were saying goodbye to a friend who was moving to the West Coast. I’ll call him Steve. Steve, in addition to being a successful and high-powered attorney, is a former Marine. And he gave each of us a “challenge coin” as a token of his friendship before he left. Here it is… [Show the coin.] I posted a picture of this on Facebook, by the way, and a friend of mine who’s overseas in the army explained the purpose of a challenge coin. He said the next time I see Steve, I’m supposed to pull out my challenge coin. And if he doesn’t have his coin on him, then he has to buy drinks. Isn’t that great? So I’ll be carrying this around all the time. Believe me!
One side of the coin is engraved with a smiling skull and these words: “Death smiles at everyone. Marines smile back.”
I’m sure there’s a sermon illustration in there somewhere, but that’s not my point today. When he handed me the coin, he thanked me for my friendship and said, “Brent, you are consistently the nicest person I have ever known.”
You are consistently the nicest person I have ever known.
He told me this a couple of weeks ago. And I only realized on Thursday of last week that when he told me this, it’s like I didn’t even hear it; I couldn’t take it in as a compliment; it didn’t register. Why? Because, from my perspective, he couldn’t have meant it. He knows me too well. I’m a horrible person.
Not that I consciously thought these words at the time. I didn’t have to… They’re part of a tape loop that’s constantly playing in the background of my thoughts. And it’s telling me, “You’re not good enough. You’re not successful enough. You’re a loser.” The volume isn’t usually turned up very loud, but it’s always there—whether I notice it or not.
There are many interesting reasons why this tape loop exists. But it has to do with the fact that my parents—who were wonderful parents in so many ways, and I love them dearly—but they had a blind spot: I felt like they wanted me to be someone else—some all-American boy who excelled at sports; who was athletic, popular, good-looking, and just sort of a normal kid, you know? And I didn’t feel like I was any of those things. I never felt like I measured up.
I was really interested in music. And computer-programming. And—oh my goodness, Christianity. Once, my mom made an appointment with the youth minister at my church. I didn’t know about it until afterwards. She told him that she was worried that I was becoming a “fanatic.” A little religion is all well and good, she said, but all this Bible-reading, all this churchgoing, all this witnessing… it’s getting out of hand.
And I know she had this conversation because my youth minister told me about it. And I was upset. Once again I felt rejected. And he put his arm around me and said, “You’re fine, Brent. You just keep doing what you’re doing.” And there it was: that thing I desperately craved: Acceptance. Unconditional cceptance of who I was. It’s the greatest feeling. And God put a few other adults in my life at the time—a football coach, a teacher, an uncle—who helped me to feel this kind of acceptance and unconditional love.
But my point is, last week I noticed again that this tape was playing, and I thought: “Here I am feeling indignant because my fellow pastor doesn’t believe much of the gospel? But what’s my problem. Because here I am, listening to the tape loop and living as if I don’t believe it?” Don’t I preach this all the time: God loves us so much that he paid an infinite price to save us: He exchanged his righteousness for our unrighteousness. He forgave us through our faith in Christ. He clothed us with his Son’s righteousness. It’s like, I have no trouble believing he did that for y’all. But did he really do it for me? That’s my problem.
So I need to hear Peter’s words in today’s scripture: He says, “As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house…” Do you get the picture. He’s comparing us, the church, to a temple, and Christ, he’s saying, is the cornerstone—the first and most valuable stone at the foundation of the building. Peter says that Christ the living stone is “precious” to his Father. And when we place our faith in Christ, it’s as if we become “living stones,” too, and we are “cemented” onto this cornerstone.
But not only that: Verse 7 tells us, “So the honor is for you who believe.” That is Peter’s way of saying, “What is true of the Father’s relationship with Christ is now true for you. Just as Christ is ‘chosen and precious,’ so are you.”
And Jesus makes this same point in his prayer in John 17. He prays that the world will know that the Father loves us, those of us who’ve placed our faith in Christ, the exact same way that the Father loves Jesus—the Father loves us just as much as he loves Jesus.[6]
Can you believe it? Can I believe it? That’s the acceptance I so desperately crave. That’s what I desire so badly. That’s the “pure spiritual milk” that will heal my soul. And that’s the gospel! That’s what Christ offers us!
Last week, on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the band U2 performed their classic song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” It includes these words:
I have climbed the highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you
I have run I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you
And I promise I only just realized that the whole song is a prayer to Jesus. He’s saying, “I would do anything for you, Lord.”—because of how much you love me; because of what you’ve done for me; because of how precious you are to me. I would do anything for you, Lord.
Next week, I’m going to look at this scripture again, with an eye toward what it says about our church’s mission—what we’re supposed to be doing. But what Christ asks us to do shouldn’t be difficult. Because we long for him and his glory, and his gospel, and his kingdom. We crave it more than anything else. We won’t be satisfied with anything else.
1. Romans 12:19 ESV
2. Romans 13:4 ESV
3. Mark 8:34-5 ESV
4. Matthew 10:28 ESV
5. Psalm 34:8 ESV
6. John 17:23 ESV