1/17/2021
1 Peter 3:8-12
The Good Life
Have you ever baked something and left out a certain ingredient? When I was in high school I worked for Taco Bell. Those were the days of brown pants and orange shirts – I wish I had kept that uniform. On one occasion I was in charge of making the beans – at that point it wasn’t a reheat situation, but rather one of putting beans, water, salt and other things into a huge pressure cooker. This particular time I put in all the ingredients except for the water. After about an hour, I had a huge pot of smoking beans…it was a sad day at Taco Bell.
When you are baking, are all the ingredients important? Are some ingredients more important that others? What can you leave out and still enjoy the taste of what you are making?
We are in one of those sections today in which Peter is going to give us a list of ingredients to wrap up this section on submission…but it is not a list in we get to pick and choose a few things that we like, but rather if the recipe is going to work, you need all the ingredients.
Here’s our outline: 1. What is Peter ‘baking’? 2. What are the ingredients? 3. Why do we need all the ingredients?
1. What is Peter ‘baking’? Peter is actually baking what we might call a recipe for “the good life”. Quoting from Psalm 34, he says “Whoever desires to love life and see good days”.
Peter has been teaching the church that in order to have a good life, you have to live in submission to one-another; you have to eat submission pie. In other words, you can’t just do what is right in your own eyes and have a good life – you have to be submissive – that is the way that God created life to be.
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen the devastating consequences of people who don’t want to live in submission, even in the highest levels of government. The unwillingness to live in obedience to the way our society is structured resulted in the loss of life, and even more confusion for our black brothers and sisters – it is heartbreaking.
If you look at the way that God created in Genesis, there is an order, there is a surrender, and people who ignore or avoid that order and that surrender end up with very broken and lonely lives. Even if you are not a believer in God, you know that when you submit, when you work within the rules of society, when you respect the people around you, when you respect your employer and those that are you in relationship with, it makes for a much better life.
Consider examples like submission to traffic laws, or business laws – we all know society functions well when each person lives in submission to one-another. This is what Peter is saying.
And just to be clear, Peter isn’t saying this because he lives at an easy time in history where it is easy to bake submission pie. Peter is preaching to a church that has seen some of the greatest levels of persecution and hardship in history – unjust subjection from the narcissistic Roman Emperor Nero which as a result they are now scattered all over Asia, having lost everything. But what he is calling them to do hasn’t changed.
In fact, he has gone from saying submit to the emperor, to submit to your earthly masters (employers), to submit to each other as husband and wives, and now he is using a catch all phrase – “All of you”. If you had thought you had been excluded from submission, he just included you.
What is Peter baking – what are the ingredients for? The “good life” – an enjoyable life with many happy days by baking ‘submission pie’.
Discussion Question: How does living in submission to one-another make for a good life?
2. What are the ingredients of ‘submission pie’? Peter lists out seven ingredients here in verses 8-9, and all of them are necessary. Let’s look at these ingredients.
Sympathy. The first ingredient to submission pie is sympathy. Sympathy is the ability to have compassion for someone else. It’s the ability to have your emotions stirred as you see someone’s needs. Sympathy is what you feel when Sarah McLachlan SPCA commercials as they are showing all the faces of sad cats and dogs.
Sympathy is a very powerful tool that brings about hope and healing to almost any relationship. Recently Heather and I went to a conference in which they introduced me to the idea of sympathy by using the phrase ‘compassionate curiosity’. They did this exercise with us that helped us to sympathize. They asked us to share out loud about the silent voices that we each hear in our heads. As Heather was sharing the voices in her head, some that she learned in childhood and some that she has picked up in our marriage, I was so full of sympathy and it made me want to work so much harder to create a safe environment in our marriage where those silent voices can be drowned out.
Sympathy is a really strange first ingredient and I’m assuming that Peter puts it first because it is one of the most important and largest ingredients. Wouldn’t you have thought he would have put “correct thinking” or “wisdom” or even “truth” first as the primary ingredient? But while truth is crucial, the reality is that truth doesn’t give you compassion or enable you to come alongside someone and love them well – to live submissively to each other.
It is important to realize that if we are going to bake submission pie so that we can have the good life, sympathy is the first and main ingredient.
Brotherly/sisterly love: Brotherly/sisterly love is that the kind of love that you can be yourself and people still love you. It is the kind of love where you know that you can pick your friends so they will come and go, but you will always have your brothers and sisters. It is that kind of love that doesn’t set up any kind of pretense – it is authentic, raw and real.
Brotherly/sisterly love doesn’t have anything to prove, it is real and genuine…you don’t have to worry about motivations, getting caught off guard, but you know you are going to be accepted and accepting.
Tenderhearted: Tenderhearted has a lot to do with our expectations of each other. I imagine a tenderhearted person being a like a mom who looks at their kids and knows how far she can push them, how much they can endure, and knows when to call it quits for the day. Think of when a child is young and you are out on a walk and the kid is doing their best to keep up but they have such little legs, and finally they say “hold me”, and the tenderhearted person swoops in a picks them up – realizing the need of that moment and coming alongside.
Humble attitude: The next ingredient of submission pie is a humble attitude. Humility isn’t the idea that you don’t know anything, but rather it is the attitude that you don’t know everything. Someone said that humility is the delicate balance of knowing who you are and knowing who you are not.
If you are going to live in submission, you must realize what you bring to the relationship but also what others bring to the relationship. Paul constantly uses the illustration in the church of the members being like body parts – not one being more important than the other, not one saying to the other ‘I don’t need you’, but rather when one part is hurt or wounded, the rest of the body comes alongside that part of the body and does everything it can to bring comfort and healing. The humble attitude is the ability to value the other parts of the body – honoring them, and know that this is their turn for the kind of honoring.
The last three: Not repaying evil for evil, Not retaliating with insults when people insult you, Paying back with a blessing: Peter gives us the last three ingredients of submission pie and they have to do with our interactions with each other. It’s about taking the way you want to respond, and consciously responding differently.
We are instructed not to be unkind when we are treated unkindly, but rather to pay back with blessing. If someone does something bad to you, bless them.
But there is a bigger picture here than just responding well – it is doing what is right in every situation…not just when people treat you well, but when you are treated unjustly. Are you able to be the bigger person? Are you able to respond with integrity?
So Peter has laid out for us seven ingredients of submission pie, which he tells us is the pathway to ‘enjoying life and seeing many happy days’, but we also need to see that all these ingredients are important – if you leave one of these out, you will not have submission pie.
Discussion Question: Which ingredient of submission pie is most surprising to you?
3. Why are all the ingredients important? The ingredients for submission pie typically fall into two categories: grace and truth. Sympathy, brotherly/sisterly love, tenderheartedness and a humble attitude are more on the grace end of the spectrum, while repaying evil for evil or giving insult for insult, but repaying with a blessing is more under the heading of truth. The first group is about mercy and kindness of heart, but the second is about being a person who does what is right no matter the circumstances.
As you think about submission, can you think of people who are all grace and no truth that are really hard to submit to? Can you also think of people that are all truth and no grace that are really hard to submit to?
I think about preachers who would speak truth, telling me what is right to do and giving me the moral imperatives for why I should behave a certain way, but if they don’t have sympathy or tenderheartedness towards me, sharing with me the struggle it is to live out that moral imperative, then I’m more than likely going to dismiss that preacher.
On the other hand, if you have a person who just lives with grace but has no ability to do what is right in a particular situation – always giving excuses and never being held accountable for anything, that person is also hard to submit to.
For us to enjoy life the way God created, we must live in submission to one-another and the ingredients for submission must include grace and truth. We must have sympathy for each other, we must have brotherly/sisterly love, be tenderhearted and keep a humble attitude. But we must also do what is right, no matter how we have been treated. You need all the ingredients!
The examples of broken relationships because people have baked submission pie with all the elements of grace and all the elements of truth are everywhere. I think of parents who raised their children to do what was right but did not give them empathy or where not tenderhearted watching their kids leave and never come back. I think of wives whose husbands demand submission and never for a moment stop to consider to be tenderhearted, have a humble attitude, or have sympathy – and the marriages are over. I think of employers who knew how to have sympathy and tenderheartedness but didn’t know how to keep boundaries or hold people accountable, and they are now no longer in business.
When Peter is telling this to the church, he knows that he is not giving them an easy recipe – submission pie is a high standard – it’s a tricky recipe! But I can imagine him as he writes these words thinking “this is exactly what Jesus has done for us”. Jesus showed us sympathy – his heart broke for us even when we were trying to stay awake in the Garden of Gethsemane. He loved us as brothers – he even served Judas all the way to the end. When there was 5000 people far from home, he was tenderhearted towards them and fed them all. When evil was done to him, he only responded righteously. When he was insulted, he never retaliated, but did what was right. No matter how he was treated, he always blessed. Jesus was completely full of grace and truth, and therefore, he is easy to live in submission to.
And if Jesus embraces all these ingredients of submission pie when it comes to relationship with us, does this not enable us to embrace the same ingredients to others? Have you stopped to consider the kind of empathy and tenderheartedness that Jesus has for you? Have you know his grace towards you? Have you stopped to think how he responds perfectly even when you are unfaithful or unkind? Jesus is the ultimate in embracing all the ingredients of submission pie, and we are healed, and we can live in submission to others.
Discussion Question: Are you missing any of the ingredients for submission pie?
