This week, Pastor Matthew led us through 1 Peter 2: 1-10.
We need to be people who taste that the Lord is good, and having tasted it, we need to want and crave it more and more.
The people that Peter was writing to had been born again. They had heard the Word, and responded. He was encouraging them to continue to study the Word, to read the Word, to devour the Word and to crave the Word. To continually deepen and strengthen their relationship with the Lord.
He tells them to do this via two things:
Taking off the old clothes.
They, and we, need to die to the old and come alive in the new. We need to get rid of all that is dirty, ruined and soiled as the “clothes” that we wore before Christ are not salvageable. Sometimes our old clothes are familiar and comfortable, but we must be rid of them as they kill and destroy us and our community.
Peter lists the five divisions (“old clothes”) of the church at the time: malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander.
The church is so powerful because we can be unified in Jesus as we lay down our lives, preferences and opinions for the sake of one another. Our inability to do this today is killing us, as we do not have a message to preach to the world if we as a church are not unified. We need to lay aside the things that disunify us, and we need to pursue relationships with one another.
If we are not hungry for God, we need to check our hearts for these things and get rid of them, living lifestyles of forgiveness to stop bitterness from creeping in. We need to have the mind of Christ and eliminate envy from our lives and hearts.
2.We need to come to Him, and keep coming to Him
We are to continue to come to Jesus. This is what it takes to grow up. The secret to this growing is to keep coming to Him through seeking, repenting and returning. We need to be firmly anchored in who He is, and then who we are out of that.
