Introduction

I had an email recently from Gordon Mylchreest – some of you may have seen it too. It was to ask for prayer for a Christian couple arrested recently in Iran. Amir & Ferishte come from the town of Mashad near the border with Turkmenistan. Ferishte’s father was martyred some years ago. Amir converted to Christ from a Muslim background when he was in his twenties. Both are leaders in their local church in Mashad and have been actively sharing the gospel with people in their country. On September 26^th, at 8:30 am, they received surprise visitors who did not even introduce themselves as they demanded entry. The men only said they were part of the authorities and proceeded to search the apartment, confiscating all Christian literature, computers and anything they thought was of interest to them. Thankfully Amir had a chance to quickly phone his mother to ask her to come and take their 6 year old daughter, Christine. The men then forced Amir and Ferishte into their car and took them away.

Gordon has since told me that after being held for 8 days Amir & Ferishte were released on bail, but added that only last November Pastor Ghorban from a neighbouring locality was murdered after being warned by the authorities to renounce his faith. These are dangerous times for Christians in Iran.

Persecution like this still goes on in many parts of the world. A dreadful situation, we say, and though we may promise to pray about it, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with our situation in Britain. Or does it? Well I expect we’ve all heard the story in the news about the woman who works as one of British Airways check-in staff. She’s been suspended by BA for refusing to stop wearing a cross at work. The company rules, apparently, forbid the wearing of visible jewellery. She told the Daily Mail, “I will not hide my belief in the Lord Jesus. British Airways permits Muslims to wear a headscarf and Sikhs to wear a turban.” And then there was a case I read about recently of a Christian couple who wanted to start fostering children in care. They went on a training course and found that they were viewed with mistrust because of their Christian lifestyle, whereas someone with a lesbian lifestyle, who complained that the content of the course was far too heterosexual, was met with an apology. The husband at one point expressed a specifically Christian point of view and was jumped on. “You can’t express those kind of views here!”

I’ve recounted these stories because there are parallels with our readings from 1 Peter (page ???). If you look at verse 6 you’ll get the picture. The Christians Peter was writing to were having to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. In all probability this letter was written in about 63AD, shortly before the great persecution of Christians instituted by the Emperor Nero – the same persecution that soon led to Peter’s own death. Even though it was before this time of dreadful trial, there was still a great deal of Christian persecution. Peter is writing to God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia – Roman provinces that made up most of what we now call Turkey. They were probably in a considerable minority – as we are – and they were most likely made up of a few Jewish converts, plus Christians from other parts of the Roman Empire who had fled there to escape persecution, and some local converts – a pretty disparate bunch, but predominantly Gentile.

The wonderful thing about this letter is that its message speaks through the centuries, right through to the present day. Peter’s message is a mixture of encouragement and challenge. The encouragement comes through reminders, particularly powerful because Peter was a witness of the events he describes – Jesus’s life, death, resurrection and ascension. He walked with Jesus from the start of his ministry and saw all these things happen. And they form the basis of our hope, and they encourage us to go on trusting that God will continue to work out his purposes - in the world and in our lives. And how we need to hear that encouragement in the face of all the difficulties and trials we have. But, there’s also plenty to challenge us. Peter is widely thought to be the main source that Mark drew on when he wrote his gospel, and in it these words of Jesus are recorded: If anyone would come after me he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Challenges don’t come much bigger than that! That’s why in this letter, every time Peter encourages us to remember Jesus and to cling on to the hope we have in him, he is also challenging us to live like Christians – because he knows how easy we find it, when times are hard, to give way to temptation and let Christ down. In fact, throughout the letter he keeps moving from encouragement to challenge and back again so it’s not always easy to work out his exact train of thought. But that doesn’t really matter so long as we rejoice in the encouragements and listen carefully to the challenges! The rest of this series will follow over the next few weeks, and I would like to suggest a phrase as a kind of title to this series: Strangers in the world. It comes in v 2, v 17 and again in chapter 2, and permeates the whole letter. So why is Peter telling these persecuted Christians in Turkey that they are to live like strangers in the world? It doesn’t mean that they (and we) are to live in such a way that we don’t really integrate with the people around us, never putting down roots in the place where we live. No, “we’re here for the long haul”, I’ve heard it said, and that means being actively involved as Christians in our communities, in one way or another. So, in what way are we strangers in the world? I’m reminded of a man called Demas. When Paul was imprisoned at the end of his life he wrote a letter to Timothy and said this about his former friend and companion: Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me. To be a stranger in the world means that we won’t consider career, money, status and the like to be the most important things. The most important thing for us will be our faith, our walk with Christ. If this is our goal then we will find that we have a wholly different set of objectives from those around us, and in that sense we are strangers in the world.

1) Encouragement

All that I’ve said so far is by way of introduction to this great little letter, so I’ll have to be brief in what I say about chapter 1 which Reg has read to us today. To do this, I would like to enlarge a bit from what I said earlier about encouragement and challenge. Roughly speaking our first reading, from v.1 – 12, was about encouragement, while the second half of the chapter is about challenge. When I was preparing for today, I printed out a copy of the reading (on this bit of paper) and underlined all the encouraging words and phrases in the first 12 verses. Here are a few: v.3 praise, mercy, new birth, a living hope. V.4 an inheritance that never fades. V.5 faith, God’s power, salvation. V.6 greatly rejoice. V.7 praise, glory and honour. V.8 inexpressible and glorious joy. V.9 the salvation of your souls. You can see how urgently Peter feels about his task of encouragement, and as I read his words I was myself encouraged, because I was reminded again of God’s love in lavishing all these things on us. But some of you know that I have tendency to focus on the negative – someone who always reckons his glass is half empty rather than half full, so I was also challenged by these words to leave behind the negative thoughts and focus on the positive. There’s one phrase in these first 12 verses that stands out for me: it comes in v.4 where Peter reminds us that we have an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade, kept in heaven for us. There was an item on a BBC News programme on Monday about a man called Vic Wright whose 90 year old aunt died 4 years ago. She was quite a wealthy lady but she’d written her own will without legal help and it was a mess – undated, and with names crossed out, other names scribbled in the margin, and so on. It was a bonanza for the lawyers who had to sort it all out. Most of the aunt’s money went on legal fees and VAT, and what was left - £100,000 - went to distant relatives all over the world; in fact it went to almost everyone except her close family who were the ones she wanted it to. If ever there was an inheritance that perished, was spoiled or faded that was one. I wonder if you sometimes envy those people whose financial future seems secure because of their birth; sons or daughters of a wealthy family, they are heirs of a fortune. Well, Peter tells us in v.23 that we’ve been born again into God’s family and with it comes our inheritance. But it’s not all about our financial future – much better than that, it’s our eternal future. And it’s much more secure. In the Wall Street crash of 1929 thousands of wealthy people lost all that they had. But our inheritance can never perish. Jesus once said, I give them eternal life and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. Nor will our inheritance ever spoil or fade. Our wealth (if we have any) can spoil by being misused, and it can also spoil us by making us dependent on it instead of on the Lord, but our spiritual inheritance can never be spoiled and the joy of it never fades.

But what exactly is our inheritance? It’s all made clear in v. 5 – the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. Salvation of course means being saved or rescued. We usually use it in the past tense – you sometimes hear people say, “I was saved on 10^th August 1955” (or whenever), but here in this verse the salvation Peter is talking about is clearly future. I wonder if you’ve ever heard about the 3 tenses of salvation that the Bible talks about.

1. Past: we have been saved from the penalty of sin. If anyone here is not sure that they can say this do have a word with my afterwards and I’ll give you this little booklet which has been a great help to many people.

2. Present: we are being saved from the power of sin. God’s Spirit is at work in our lives helping us in our daily fight against temptation.

3. Future: we shall be saved from the presence of sin. In heaven there will be no sin to drag us down. What a wonderful inheritance is that!

2) Challenge

And so finally to the challenge. This comes in v 13 – 14 where Peter urges us to do 4 things: prepare our minds for action, be self-controlled, set our hope on what we are to receive when Jesus returns and to avoid conforming to sinful personal desires. There’s also a fifth which really sums up all the others: be holy in all you do. And Peter emphasises the importance of this by quoting from Leviticus, Be holy because I am holy. The reasoning is obvious: God is holy, therefore he demands a holy people. Isn’t it interesting that in Christian circles these days there is so much emphasis on what God is calling us to be. The CoE has nine criteria to help it decide whether a person is suitable to be ordained, and the most important of these is, Does he or she have a sense of vocation, of God’s call? Discovering his plan for our lives can be a major personal headache for many Christians, but I wonder if we’ve ever thought that God has set us apart to be holy – that is our primary calling, the goal we should always be aiming at. But how do we achieve holiness? It’s often been said that the closer we draw to God, the more conscious we are of how far short we fall of his holy standards. Or, in other words, if I was to give you a talk with (say) 10 infallible steps to holiness, you could be quite sure that I was either a liar or hypocrite! Peter’s 4 steps in v 13 & 14, though, are useful in getting us started. The primary battle-ground is in our minds – so we need to prepare our minds for action by filling them with good things and fleeing anything that’s evil. Whatsoever things are good, true, pure or lovely, think on these things, Paul once wrote. Self-controlled: Are there any areas of our lives where we know we are out of control – temper, drink, and so on? In these areas we not only need to bring them to God, but most likely we need to seek help from others, too, to keep us on the straight and narrow. Then there’s the phrase about setting our hope on Jesus; seeking to involve him in every part of lives. “What would Jesus do?” is a good question to ask ourselves about our working lives and about our leisure time. And not conforming to the way we used to live, or for that matter to the way of the world around us. If you don’t like “Strangers in the world” as the title for this letter of Peter’s, why not try “Dare to be different”? We all struggle with holiness. But let me encourage you: if you look back over your life to the time when you first trusted in Christ, can you see an upward progression? Maybe at times there have been blips when we’ve let God down big-time, but hopefully we can all say, “I can begin to see how God has been changing me” (sometimes kicking and screaming, perhaps).

So, Strangers in the world – that’s what we all are. “In the world, but not of the world”, as Christians have often been described. And chapter 1 is full of encouragements to us to persevere in our walk with Christ, and challenges to start measuring our lives against God’s holiness. I’d like to finish with one final encouragement from the last few verses of the chapter. Look at that phrase in v19 – the precious blood of Christ – God loves us so much that he was prepared to sacrifice his son, the one most precious to him, to rescue us from our old ways. It’s only because of him that we can have a hope and a purpose in our lives.

May God encourage us to realise afresh how much it cost him to rescue us from our sins, and may we rise to the challenge of living more wholeheartedly in his service. For Christ’s sake. AMEN

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