Sermon Transcript
We’ll be in verses 12 through 19. That’ll be up on the screen. It’s also in your bulletin insert. But if you would like to swipe there or actually turn pages to 1 Peter 4, we’ll start in verse 12 for this morning. Verse 12, Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you, as though something strange were happening.
You. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s suffering, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler. Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.
For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God. And if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And if the righteous is scarcely saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner? Therefore, let those who suffer according to God’s will, entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.
One of my favorite seminary professors, who was a bit eccentric, and that’s why we loved him, he would often say, life is hard, and then you die, but Jesus is good. Life is hard, and then you die, but Jesus is good. He meant, of course, that in this life we will have trouble, that this place is a grind, that simply existing can take a lot out of you. It is a struggle, and it will be that way until we die. Now, basically, all of us, when we hear that, we, to some level, say, uh-huh, yeah, that’s true, or, at least, I can relate to that.
Life is hard. We are basically on board with that premise. But then for some reason, and this is always the surprising thing to me, especially when I do it myself, when life actually is hard, when our premise is confirmed, when what we thought would happen actually ends up happening, we’re upset about it. Right? Like, we all agree this place can be rough, but then we have a day And it doesn’t even have to be that bad of a day, like no one is sick, no one’s betrayed, everyone is employed, but then 16 little things go wrong.
You lost the keys, you spilled the coffee, you stubbed your toe, you’re 2 minutes late for the important meeting, and then the vending machine is out of the one thing that could have been on your diet, right? And you just snap. You either burst into tears or you crumple on the floor or you start like shaking the machine in a furious rage. As if we think something strange is happening to us.
Did we forget? This is the way that it is. Life is hard. Relationships are hard. Family is hard.
Work is hard. Making enough out of yourself to support what you want to do is hard. Staying healthy is hard. There are seasons when even breathing can be hard. And this is where we live.
This is the place that we get to call home for now. There is nowhere else to go. So here we are until it ends. Life is hard, and then you die.
But Jesus is good. So let’s try to get to that part. This morning. In this passage, we’re going to see a progression of— maybe we’d call them 3 steps— which teach us that Jesus is good even in, or perhaps he’s good especially— he might especially be good in the midst of suffering. So the 3 steps, which are the blanks in your sermon outline, but don’t worry about writing them all down at the beginning, we’ll cover them one by one as we go through it.
But in this passage, we will see that God is in control of suffering. We’ll see what God is doing in our suffering. And finally, we will see how it makes us rejoice. So God is in control of suffering, what he’s doing with suffering, and how it will make us rejoice. So first, God is in control of suffering.
We see this explicitly down in verse 19 where it says, suffering according to God’s will. That makes it pretty clear that suffering must be part of God’s will. But we also see it implicitly up in verse 17 where Peter refers to the judgment beginning on the household of God. And from context, we can understand, if you’re interested in this thing, the judgment is some kind of suffering because it, like, parallels sentence structure. It was talking about suffering, now it’s talking about judgment.
So judgment is suffering, or suffering is judgment. We learn that. And we learn that God is the one executing the judgment. Which means God is not only in control of the suffering, but He is also the one instituting it, because no one else brings judgment on the world in the Bible except God. So, God is instituting the suffering, and He’s even the one instituting it if it’s coming through the actions of people.
Verse 14, if you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed. Insults do not come from some kind of natural calamity. We might be able to wrap our minds around something like hurricanes or earthquakes or acts of God, we call them, but hurricanes and earthquakes cannot insult us.
Insults only come from people. And yet, here we see that even that type of suffering is instituted by God. So no matter what is happening, if it’s a natural calamity or if someone is insulting you or if someone’s mistreating you, God is in control of the suffering. Now, depending on your background, it may or may not make you uncomfortable to think that God is behind your suffering. It may be even harder to believe that God could be behind it if people are mistreating us.
We might want to believe something like, we say things like, hey, God’s not doing that. It’s people that are doing that, right? But if we are students of the Bible, we’ve seen this kind of thing before. Actually, we’ve seen it a bunch of times, but I’ll just give you 2 this morning. So, first, remember in the Old Testament, Israel isn’t doing what Israel is supposed to be doing.
And God has sent them prophet after prophet saying, hey, Israel, cut it out. And they didn’t listen, of course. So God says, Jeremiah 25, this would be great homework for you, okay? Jeremiah 25. God says in Jeremiah 25, I’m going to send Babylon over here to you to wipe you out.
God says, I will summon my servant Nebuchadnezzar. He was the king of Babylon, if you didn’t take your ancient history or don’t remember it. I’m going to summon my servant Nebuchadnezzar, and Babylon will come over here and completely destroy everything and make Israel an object of horror and scorn. Notice, if you go read Jeremiah 25, which I encourage you to do later today, God does not say something like, hey, I’ve received some intel that Nebuchadnezzar is thinking about attacking Israel, and I could stop him if I wanted to, but instead, I’m just going to let it happen. That’s not what He says.
God says, I am going to summon My servant Nebuchadnezzar, and he is going to come over here and destroy you. God was in control of the suffering Israel received at the hands of the Babylonians. They, Israel, suffered, according to God’s will.
Second example, of course, is Jesus’ suffering at the hands of the religious and political leaders of His day. Jesus was falsely tried in a sham of a judicial system. He was beaten. He was ultimately executed as a completely innocent man. Now, that is suffering at the hands of people, right?
Like, a tornado didn’t take out Jesus. People took out Jesus. Some of those people were full of lies and sin and deceit, and yet all of it was completely according to God’s will. Isaiah 53, it’s the Lord’s will to crush Him. Or Acts 4:28, that was Acts 4:28, Acts 4:28, because I know you’re going to want to look it up later, Acts 4:28, they, meaning all the people who conspired against Jesus, all the people who conspired against Jesus did what God’s power and will had decided beforehand should happen.
They did what God’s power and will had decided— what God’s will and power had decided beforehand should happen. God is in control of suffering. Even if someone’s mistreating you, God is in control of the suffering. Even if you get fired because somebody lied, Even if the kids are so disobedient your blood pressure is now setting medical records. No matter how a stranger has wounded you, no matter how a spouse has wounded you, God is in control.
Now, they didn’t tell you that that’s what you were singing about when you were a little kid and they taught you the song, right? They didn’t tell you that He’s got the whole world. I don’t know when to clap. If you could do that, that’d be very helpful. He’s got the whole world in His hands.
He’s got the whole world in His hands. He’s got the whole world in His hands. He’s got the whole world in His hands. Thank you for clapping. That was my first public performance ever.
They didn’t tell you that that’s what you were singing about. But that’s what you were singing about. You were singing about the sovereignty of God. And if people are terrible, God is still in control. Now, that immediately makes us ask a whole bunch of questions, right?
Most of which we can’t iron out in the few minutes that we have this morning. So, come ask me later. Seriously, you can tell me your thoughts. You can ask me my thoughts if you’re still interested in those. I’ll be around after the service.
I’m easy to find. You can email me. You can call me. So feel free, okay? But what I will say right now, because it’s always what’s on the forefront of our mind when we start talking about this, is that just because God is in control of the suffering, that does not mean that people’s evil behavior is excused.
It’s not. Evil— people’s evil behavior is never excused. In fact, later in Jeremiah 25, again, homework, Jeremiah 25, read the chapter, read all of Jeremiah, read all your Bibles while you’re at it, okay? Just read, read, read, but maybe start with Jeremiah 25 today. God says, God says that He will judge Nebuchadnezzar for destroying Israel.
God will judge Nebuchadnezzar for what Nebuchadnezzar did to Israel. So, Nebuchadnezzar, somehow freely chose to go destroy Israel, and God held him accountable for that choice and the evil that was done. And at the same time, and this is probably where you’ll have trouble, God summoned Nebuchadnezzar to go destroy Israel. When we’re reading the Bible, we always must maintain 2 anchors. One, God is sovereign.
Two, people are responsible. Always. God’s sovereignty does not negate our responsibility, and our responsibility does not negate His sovereignty. You can think about— this is what’s helpful to me, so maybe it’s helpful to you— you can think about within every action there are actually 2 actors. Like, people are trying to hurt you, people are being evil, that’s what people are doing in the action, that’s one actor.
But then within the same action, God is also at work for a completely different purpose, and God is another actor in the action. We can see this a little bit in our passage today, verse 15, if you’re a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or a meddler, you suffer. Implication, you made a decision to do those things, and now because you made a decision to do those things, life is worse than it would have been otherwise. And that’s on you who made the decision to do it. You can’t be like, oh, God forced my hand to do it.
God’s sovereign. I’m not responsible. No. If you did these actions, you are now in suffering because you’ve done those actions. So, if someone has been evil to you, you can call it evil.
You can hold them accountable. You can call the police if that’s warranted. You don’t say— again, you’re not like, well, I guess God wanted that person to rob me, so I’m just going to let it happen. No, you call evil evil, and you work against it. And at the same time, you can believe that God was totally in control the entire time, even when you were getting robbed, for example.
And God was working in those actions to do something specific in your life. That is true no matter what the suffering is, even if the suffering comes through the hands of other people, even if the suffering is, say, something like persecution for our faith. Which seems strange, of course, right? Like, how could God be at work in the actions of people who are trying to bring down our faith? Wouldn’t God want to build up our faith?
If we can count on Him for something, wouldn’t He be doing that? Then how could He be involved in these actions to bring down our faith? But this is verse 14, right? If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed. God is there.
He is doing something. Now, I’ll be transparent with you. If you want a window into what goes on inside of my head, which I realize is a big if. If you want a window into the side of my head, you may not want that, so feel free to just tune out if you hadn’t already this morning. But here’s what’s on my mind as far as what persecution— as far as persecution goes in our country.
I don’t know what direction our country is going. I mean that legitimately. I have no idea what will happen. I am not a doomsdayer. I don’t really feel like the sky is falling for Christians in the US.
I read about what happens in other countries where the government or the pseudo-government actually imprisons or even executes people for proclaiming Christian faith. I just don’t believe that we’re anywhere near that here. That seems like an infinite distance away from where we are. Of course, on the other hand, I’ve seen this country completely change its mind, like 180 degrees change its mind, within the time period of just a few years on certain issues. So, who knows?
Seriously, who knows? Just because it’s not happening right now, who knows what will happen in the future? What I think likely could happen in the future in this country, in the very foreseeable future, is that all the tax incentives for churches and religious organizations go away. And there are already some actions in courts kind of in that direction. So, that might happen.
But here’s the deal. Even if that happens, or even if you are a Christian in a country where your faith puts your life at risk, God is in control and is working in that circumstance. Again, that doesn’t mean it’s okay for people to be doing what they’re doing. People are always responsible for their actions. Yet, within the exact same action, God is up to something as well, which brings us to point number 2, what God is doing in our suffering.
Again, people may be up to evil in our suffering. They might be evil, and God will hold them accountable for that. I can’t say that enough this morning. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. He’ll take care of it.
All right? He’s got it. But also, in our suffering, God is doing something, and it’s not evil. So what is it? There’s probably more than one answer to that.
There’s actually more than one answer to that in our text. So we’ll just look and see the many results of suffering that show up in our text this morning. And they are: 1, blessing. If you are insulted, you are blessed. That was verse 14.
2, suffering leads to glorifying God. That’s verse 16. If you suffer, don’t be ashamed, but glorify God. 3, the judgment that comes leads to salvation. It does not lead to destruction.
That’s verses 17 and 18. The righteous are scarcely saved, saved being the key word there. 4, suffering according to God’s will leads to trusting God and doing good. That’s verse 19. So suffering is a blessing that leads to glorifying God, to salvation, to trusting God, and to doing good.
That’s what God is up to in our suffering. Since it wasn’t a slide, I’ll say it one more time. Suffering is a blessing, verse 14, that leads to glorifying God, verse 16, to salvation, verses 17 and 18, to trusting God and doing good, verses 19. So, let’s see this in action. We’ll go back to Israel and think about after they were decimated by Babylon.
Now, God had said before the Babylonian attack happened that not only would Israel lose, but that Israel would also spend 70 years of captivity in in Babylon. So sure enough, that is exactly what happened. Babylon comes, Israel falls, the temple’s destroyed, and prisoners are taken back to Babylon where they remain until Babylon falls, and the new superpower, Persia, starts sending Israelites back to Israel to rebuild the temple and rebuild Jerusalem. Here is one of the interesting storylines from that time period. Before the Babylonian invasion and exile, Israel had a recurring problem.
It was idolatry. Israel would worship other gods. They looked at the nations around them and followed along with the gods the other nations worshiped, which sometimes meant worshiping some kind of image, sometimes it meant witchcraft, sometimes it meant very demonic worship, even making human sacrifices. All of that was before exile to Babylon. After exile to Babylon, Idolatry doesn’t really happen like that in Israel anymore.
The nation of Israel apparently collectively learned there is one God and we worship Him alone. You may have noticed in the New Testament Jesus doesn’t really call out Israel for idolatry. Now, there’s still idolatry in that time period, but it’s not by Jewish people, or this type of idolatry is not by Jewish people. And you see Jesus bringing up all other kind of issues with Israel when He’s talking to them, but witchcraft and bowing to a carved image are not really a problem anymore. And here we see partially what God is up to in our suffering.
He is forming us. He is purifying us. He’s using the suffering to get sin and evil out of our lives, and He’s using it to get Him and following Him into our lives. In our 1 Peter text, we read the same sufferings come on both the Christian and the non-Christian. So, everyone suffers.
Have you noticed this? Everybody suffers, no matter what your faith is. He says, don’t be surprised when the fiery trial comes, for it’s time for judgment to begin on the household of God. And if it begins with us, what will become of those who do not obey the gospel of God? Implication is that both groups are going to suffer, right?
Which is why we know this passage isn’t exclusively talking about persecution. That’s part of it, sure, of course, but if the household of God and outside the household of God are both experiencing the same thing, then we know that we’re talking about something broader than simply persecution. We’re talking about suffering in general that everyone experiences. Both the Christian and the non-Christian experience the same general suffering, but the outcome, the outcome is very different for the 2 groups. For the Christian, suffering produces glorifying God, salvation, trusting God, and doing good.
Just like it did for Israel coming out of the exile. For the Christian, suffering at the hand of God is not condemnation. It’s not some kind of God’s wrath coming on you. It’s purification.
So if we ask, what is God doing in our suffering, our suffering, what is God doing in our suffering as Christians, one answer is that He is purifying us. Like when you find a piece of gold in a stream or a field and it is not pure gold, of course, it is mixed in with all other kind of rock and metals. I have never found a piece of gold, so I don’t know what that would look like, but just imagine with me. So, you throw it into the furnace, or somebody does, and you burn off everything that is not gold, which, hey, good for you if you are the owner of this hunk of metal. Now you have a piece of pure gold.
But on the other hand, what if instead of being the person who found this unprocessed gold out in the field. What if you are the hunk of unprocessed gold? And what if you had to be thrown into the furnace to become pure gold? Not as fun, but certainly, undeniably, it’s for your good. That’s what God is doing, purifying us, refining us, forming us.
Now, the big question is, does that actually lead to our rejoicing? Because remember, our 3rd point is that whatever God is up to in suffering, it will make us rejoice. How will it make us rejoice? That’s our 3rd point. Because maybe we believe that we could be happier in our unrefined state, right?
If we’re Israel and we’re enjoying worshipping our demon god carved image that makes us do weird things, Maybe we don’t really want to be refined. Maybe we look at God’s offer of purification and be like, you know what? You keep that. No thanks on the purification. That doesn’t sound like fun at all.
Maybe we would prefer the day that we aren’t thrown into the furnace. Yet, we are told to rejoice and that we can rejoice and be glad Which must be intriguing for all of us, right? Because it’s not like we can actually just refuse the offer to suffer and that will work, because we’re going to suffer anyway, right? We can’t get out of it. This was Israel’s air coming out of the exile, actually.
They thought, maybe if we’re really, really good, God won’t make us suffer anymore, and then they couldn’t square this with the, like, Roman occupation. They’re like, what’s going on? We’re being good. It’s like, well, you’re always a mess, So, whatever’s happening, there’s always going to be suffering, but I’m doing something in it to refine you and purify you, God would say. So, if you’re thinking, why did this happen in my life?
If I had been better, it wouldn’t have happened, that’s the wrong thing to think. That’s actually what Israel thought when they were coming out of the exile. They didn’t look at it as, hey, God was doing something good in us, forming us, purifying us. So, I think since we cannot get out of suffering, It might be intriguing to us if we’d say, hey, if I can rejoice in the middle of it, like, tell me how to do that, right? Like, give me that information.
That seems like that would be useful. So our first clue is that rejoicing in suffering has something to do with God’s glory, because each time rejoicing or gladness is mentioned in verses 13, 14, and 16, God’s glory is also mentioned. We will rejoice when his glory is revealed. You are blessed because the Spirit of glory rests on you. If you suffer, glorify God in it.
So here’s the beginning of an answer for how to have joy during suffering. So first, an observation. I told you it was the beginning of an answer, okay? Beginning of an answer for how to rejoice during suffering. Observation: our greatest moments of joy do not come when life has been perfect for a long, long time.
Have you noticed this? Our greatest moments of joy do not come when life has been perfect for a long, long, long time. That is not when our greatest moments of joy happen. Likewise, our greatest moments of joy are not in self-indulgence as we think they would be. They aren’t when we have acquired something that will benefit us, like the house, the car, the job, the vacation, the meal.
Sitting on the couch while somebody else cleans your house. All of that’s fine, right? But think about it. That’s not what has taken your breath away in this world. Our greatest moments of joy are actually self-forgetfulness, not self-indulgence.
They were times something happened or we saw something that made us completely forget about us. You see your kid accomplish something you didn’t think he was capable of doing, and you just weep. Your team emerges victorious after a grueling back-and-forth battle in the championship game. It’s down to the last second or the last out. They get the hit or they split the seam down the middle of the defense and they run to glory.
We even call that glory. Isn’t that interesting? You’re jumping up and down, you’re hugging people you’ve never seen before. It’s when you hear the piece of music that brings you to your knees. It’s like an involuntary reaction.
Something so much more than you is before you, and you just fall in amazement. You see the painting for the first time that you would later say changed your life because the depths of your soul had such a reaction to it. Our greatest, most rapturous moments of joy are when we aren’t thinking about us at all. There is an accomplishment or a scene, a landscape so magnificent so glorious in front of us that it’s as if our minds are taken to a completely different state of being.
Those are our best moments, and those moments can happen in the middle of suffering. Now, what does that have to do with God?
Christians have recorded for millennia that somehow we are able to see God as most glorious in the midst of suffering. We’ve said seeing glory, even if it’s a small glory like a football game, we said seeing glory brings us joy, and now we’re saying there’s something about suffering that enables us to see God’s glory more. There’s something about losing everything that allows us to see God for who He really is. When we don’t have any accomplishments to distract us, when we aren’t chasing some smaller dream because it has all been taken away, we can see him.
Suffering produces sight that may not happen any other way. There’s a correlation between the two. And when you see him for who he really is, when we see him for who he really is, we are swept away on our most self-forgetful and therefore, our most joyous moments. Paul said it like this in 2 Corinthians, we, he and some people he was with, we were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death.
But this happened, that we may not rely on ourselves, but God.
He goes on to say in the same letter that he delights, he delights, he thinks it’s great, he loves it when he has weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, difficulties. For he has found that when he is weak, that is when he has strength, because God’s power is made perfect in weakness.
Some contemporary examples, I’ll mention 2, Joni Eareckson Tada and Elizabeth Elliot. Who some of you may be familiar with these ladies, and if you aren’t, I would encourage you to get up to speed. So as a teenager, Joni Eareckson Tada dove into a river that was too shallow and fractured some vertebrae in her back, and she became quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down as a teenager. She’s 68 now. She’s been completely paralyzed for 50 years.
And she has said, just like Paul said, the weaker I am, the harder I must lean on God’s grace. The harder I lean on him, the stronger I discover him to be. She says, heartache forces us to embrace God out of desperate, urgent need. God is never closer than when your heart is aching.
She says, He has chosen not to heal me. He has chosen not to heal me, but to hold me.
The more intense the pain, the closer His embrace. She says, My wheelchair was the key to seeing all this happen, especially since God’s power always shows up best in weakness. So here I sit, glad. She says, glad, just like Paul did, rejoices in weakness. She says, I’m glad that I have not been healed on the outside, but glad that I have been healed on the inside, healed from my own self-centered wants and wishes.
Elizabeth Elliott is the widow of Jim Elliott, And Jim Elliot was murdered by tribesmen in the jungles of Ecuador. Their goal, Elisabeth and Jim’s goal as a couple, was to go share the message of Jesus with this tribe in Ecuador who was previously an unreached group of people. They wanted that before they got married. They got married. They went to go do it.
Jim went into the jungle and was murdered by the tribesmen. Elizabeth completed their goal. She eventually went and shared with the tribesmen who had murdered her husband the message of Jesus. Elizabeth has said the following: God never withholds from his child that which his love and wisdom call good.
God’s refusals are always merciful. A refusal like, I suppose, please let my husband live. God says, no. His refusals are always merciful. Severe mercies at times, she says, but mercies all the same.
God never denies our heart’s desire. God never denies our heart’s desire except to give us something better. She also says, leave it all in the hands that were wounded for you.
Here’s my question for you if you are not a Christian.
What do you make of people like that?
Are they crazy?
Are they fooling themselves? Have they been duped by some lie?
Or down there in the depths of despair, did they find someone real?
Is it perhaps possible their suffering led them to discover the true glory, the glory that surpasses every last-second victory, the glory that surpasses every piece of music, the glory that surpasses every painting?
Did they see the one, as unbelievable as it may sound, did they see the one who could enable them to call a wheelchair and a murdered husband a mercy?
Maybe they saw Him. For Christians, here’s my question for us. Have we seen God as that good?
Is the One who gave up everything for us on the cross sufficient enough for us to have joy no matter what?
Or are you like me, still getting intensely frustrated when the 16 little things go wrong in a day?
Perhaps we haven’t seen Him.
Perhaps we haven’t suffered enough.
Perhaps this judgment needs to come purify us.
Let’s pray. Father, you are good, and you are out for our good, for our forming, for our purification.
Lord, I pray that we could trust you, we could put everything in the hands that were wounded for us. Lord, give us that faith and then give us that joy. Let us see you as glorious as Paul does, as Joni does, as Elizabeth does. Lord, let us see you as that glorious, because You are that glorious, Lord. Take away the clouds if that’s what’s needed, even if we happen to really love the clouds, Lord.
Take them away so we can see You. We ask those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
