You have been redeemed from this world’s futility with the precious blood of Christ, who gave his life as the perfect, sinless sacrifice for sin. God the Father raised him from the dead, and through him you believe in God and have been made children of God. Therefore, your faith and hope are no longer in this world or the things of this world, they are in your Father in heaven. This is Peter’s summary of the gospel in our passage from last week. As he makes clear, it’s not enough for us simply to agree with this in our heads. We need to agree with it in our hearts, our mouths, our hands, and our feet as well. If we nod and smile and say, “Yes, that’s true,” then go on as if we’d never heard any of it, we’ve missed the point.
This is truth we need to obey. That might sound like a strange way to put it, but it’s a normal part of life. We obey the law of gravity: we know if we hold something out and let go of it, it will fall, so we don’t intentionally do that unless that’s the result we want. We know the law of gravity is true, and we act on that knowledge. We make our plans and our decisions with the understanding that gravity is in effect. I am married, I have four children, and I obey that truth—I don’t do things the same way I would if I were single. (Partly because I don’t want to be single.) These truths define and limit us. They tell us this is how life is, this is what we can do and what we can’t, and this is what will happen if we defy them—not because God made rules to justify punishing us for breaking them, but because ignoring reality has consequences whether we want to believe it or not. As with gravity, so with the gospel: it’s not enough to believe it with our mouths, we need to believe it with our hands and feet and hearts. We need to live the truth we say we believe.
Put another way, the goal of our faith is not merely good theology. Good theology is important because speaking the truth is part of the picture, but as we saw in Ephesians 4, our call is to be speaking the truth in love. You can’t have one without the other, because alone, they are incomplete and will not endure. Peter is clear about this as well, as we’ll see in a moment. With that properly understood, he tells us, the goal of our faith is love.
He lays the foundation in the first part of verse 22, and I have a couple disagreements with the ESV here. “Having purified your souls” is a bit misleading, for a couple reasons. One, the verb here means “to make holy”; it was used for a religious ceremony of consecration in which you voluntarily dedicated yourself to God (or the gods, if you were a pagan) and his service. Two, when we hear the word “souls” we tend to think “spirits” and envision an internal spiritual reality, and that’s not what’s in view here. The Greek word is not pneuma, which means spirit or wind and is the word used of the Holy Spirit. The word is psuche, which the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, used to render the word nefesh. You may remember I talked about this when we were looking at the armor of God in Ephesians 6: the metaphorical use of nefesh was “soul,” but its root meaning was “neck.” This isn’t referring to your spirit but to your whole self, body and spirit, and your whole life. Having consecrated yourselves, Peter begins—you’re not perfectly holy, we all know that, but you have set yourself apart from the world to follow God and do his will. This isn’t the sum and completion of all holiness, no, but it is the beginning.
So , having consecrated yourselves—how?—by your obedience to the truth for a brotherly love which is not hypocritical. (I’m not questioning the ESV here; “sincere” is the natural translation of that last word. It’s the same root word as “hypocrisy” in 2:1, though, just with the prefix meaning “not” stuck on the front, and it’s good to see the connection.) Peter says we’ve set ourselves apart from the world by our obedience to the truth. Again, Peter is linking truth and love just as Paul does and emphasizing that truth is to be put into practice, not just agreed with. As the Christian musician Charlie Peacock put it, “Truth to be understood must be lived.”
From one angle, this means speaking truth lovingly; from another, it means loving truly. It can be easy to fake love, and we find it convenient to do so for a lot of different reasons. One big one is cowardice disguised as compassion and care. Sometimes the loving thing to say or do is going to result in the other person getting mad at us—telling someone addicted to drugs they need to go into treatment to help them quit, for example, or a friend in an unhealthy relationship they’re being used by someone unworthy of their trust. Standing up, speaking the truth, and being called a hater for acting in love is hard, and it’s painful; it’s also awkward, which is its own kind of pain. The path of least resistance is to shy away from the pain and do whatever the other person will perceive as loving in the moment, whether it truly is or not.
We should also note the implications of “brotherly love.” If we’re all children of the Father, then we’re spiritual siblings. In Jesus Christ, we are family. Just as our allegiance to Christ should supersede any worldly allegiance, so should the resulting allegiance we owe to one another. This is a point which would have landed differently for Peter’s hearers than it does for us, because the meaning of family has changed in the modern world. We think of family primarily in relational terms, and there are some families which seem to exist only to hurt their members. I thought it was strange when it came out that former Jeopardy! guest host Aaron Rodgers had cut ties with his family—he was still with the Packers then, and we didn’t really know what an odd human he is—but it turns out it wasn’t so strange after all. People ghosting their families is a trend; Rodgers was just on the cutting edge.
In the ancient world, families were first and foremost about survival. The rich and powerful were exceptions, as they usually are, but life was much closer to the margins even for the rich. The great majority of human wealth was in land, as we noted a couple weeks ago, the land was held by the family, and unless you could afford enough slaves to do all the work that had to be done, everyone in the family had to pitch in because everyone’s labor was needed to keep life going. When you were too old to work anymore, there weren’t pensions and IRAs and retirement homes, you depended on your children and grandchildren to provide for you. If you had to make it on your own without that support, you were in trouble. That’s why Scripture holds up “the fatherless and the widow” along with the alien and the stranger as the most vulnerable among us. It’s also why family loyalty was extremely important and fathers held such great authority, because your life might just depend on it. This is how deep and strong our allegiance to our brothers and sisters in Christ, and our commitment to love one another, should be.
We’ve been consecrated for love, Peter tells us, but we need to understand that in God’s terms, not those of the world. The world’s understanding of love is essentially sentimental. On its terms, what matters is if someone feels loved. As a result, challenging, questioning, rebuking, or correcting someone will only be recognized as loving if, and as far as, that person is receptive to what you’re trying to tell them.
The Broadway songwriter Jason Robert Brown, who was at times a protégé and friend of Steven Sondheim, tells the story of how he lost Sondheim’s friendship for some years by telling him the truth. Sondheim attended the premiere of one of his musicals with Brown as his guest; when he asked Brown if he liked the musical, Brown said no. He called Sondheim the next day to grovel; among the things Sondheim told him in response was this:
If you come to my show and you see me afterwards, say only this: “I loved it.” It doesn’t matter if that’s what you really felt. What I need at that moment is to know that you care enough about me and the work I do to tell me that you loved it.
A different sort of example comes from my last year in Winona Lake. There, each of the elders had a specific portfolio, and the elder who was supposed to be convening and leading the outreach committee was completely ignoring that area of responsibility. When I tried to point that out to her and encourage her to do what she had said she would do, it devolved quickly into a shouting match on her side. (I did not shout, and I did my best to stay calm, but that didn’t result in her calming back down in response.) I quickly gave up and walked away. At the next Session meeting, she ripped into me for not being “pastoral”—by which she meant, not affirming her in doing exactly and only what she wanted to do.
If you tell people truth they don’t want to hear, no matter how lovingly you do so, they won’t always thank you for it. Sometimes you’ll even get the same reaction Jesus got and they’ll want to kill you for it. By God’s definition—which is the one that counts, because he is love—we need to speak the truth anyway. On his terms, love isn’t about doing whatever people want to make them happy. It’s not about warm fuzzies, though they often do result, and it’s not about sexual desire, either. Love is about being righteous in our relationships with others.
That might sound odd to you, but the Hebrew word for “righteousness” is a relational word. Every relationship we have involves and creates commitments to the other person. Righteousness asks the question, are we being faithful to those commitments? If we are, then we’re righteous in that relationship. Giving people truth even when they don’t want it is one of those necessary commitments. Again, we are responsible to speak the truth in love—only to build people up and draw them closer to God, never to triumph over them or tear them down, never at their expense in any way—but love never includes or honors what is false. Love means renouncing and setting aside all deceit and slander, as well as all malice, hypocrisy, and envy; it means speaking and acting toward others in a way consistent with God’s character.
That’s not easy, which may be why Peter calls us to love one another earnestly. As we’ve seen, our love must be sincere, not hypocritical; true love is neither self-serving nor self-protective. Love is a matter of serious intent and dedicated commitment. The world often sees and portrays love as wild, irrational, and primal, and sometimes as almost frivolous. True love, Peter shows us, while it does have its primal aspects, is not irrational but sober-minded; it’s associated with self-control, not dissipating our lives but concentrating them.
Peter also calls us to love one another from a pure heart. As some of you probably recognized, this is a callback to Matthew 5:8, the sixth Beatitude. It is, in fact, the exact same two-word phrase Matthew uses there. Now, as we talked about some weeks ago when we were in Ephesians 1, the Scriptures don’t refer to the heart as the seat of the emotions; that was the kidneys for the ancient Hebrews, and the bowels for the Greeks. The heart, in Scripture, was the core and center of the self, the nexus of intellect, emotions, and will; it’s the seat of identity and the place where the wisdom of God is grafted into our souls.
What does it mean to have a pure heart? Look first to Psalm 86:11-12: “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name. I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify your name forever.” Then consider James 4:7-8: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” Those whose hearts are impure are divided in their loyalties and allegiance. They want to be friends with God and still be friends with the world, and so they’re divided against God and against themselves. This is why Søren Kierkegaard declared, in the title of one of his works, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” To love with a pure heart is to be able to love wholeheartedly.
We’re being made able to love in this way because we have been born again, born anew, from above. We are no longer who we once were. We have been reborn from imperishable seed—that’s the same word used in 1:4 to describe our inheritance—and so we have a new heart and have been given a new life. That imperishable seed is the word of God, which means the same thing for Peter here as it does for Paul in Ephesians 6: the gospel of Jesus Christ. By that, we have been raised to new life by a new birth, and that new life is the love of God.
Peter pulls in Isaiah 40 to draw a strong contrast between the imperishable word of God vs. the fleeting glories of humanity. He encourages his hearers to fill themselves with the pure spiritual milk of the gospel instead of the spiritual junk food of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander; the implicit contrast there is between those who have tasted that the Lord is good, as Psalm 34 summons us to do, and those who haven’t. Our part is to seek to develop a taste for the things of God—to commit ourselves to learning to taste and see that the Lord is good. To learn that he is good, that the food he gives us really does taste better, and to learn to desire his goodness instead of the evils of this world, takes time, and a certain degree of commitment. There are exceptions, but generally, you have to want to taste that the Lord is good before you will.
The Lord has redeemed us from the temporary, passing, perishable world through a new birth into the permanent, eternal, imperishable life of God; the world is temporary, but that’s no longer true of us. This is critical because if all you have is the life of this world, you will never taste that the Lord is good. The food of God doesn’t taste good to this world because it doesn’t feed the life of this world, it starves it to feed something better. When we turn away from that to the spiritual junk food of this world, we’re spending something permanent—the life of God within us—to buy something temporary.
Peter tells us we are permanent people in a temporary world, then challenges us to live like it. Our time and our money are passing, but we have the chance to spend them on things that will last, carrying out God’s work on earth and storing up treasure for ourselves in heaven, instead of on things which are here today and gone tomorrow. Our talents and skills are gifts God has given us for his service, meant to do things which matter eternally; let us not spend them on things which only matter ephemerally. If we use them merely to gain the goods of this world which do not last, aren’t we wasting them?
Photo from PickPik.com. Free for use.
