1 Peter 4:1-11
It is often the times we suffer most that we draw nearest to God.
Something about the experience of suffering moves us away from living for pleasure, comfort or security. When we suffer well, we become fully focused on God, pursuing and submitting to him rather than chasing what we think benefits us most. Perhaps this is because our focus changes in suffering, our priorities shift. The things that once seemed so important no longer carry such weight.
In this way, suffering can cut through the sin in our lives (4:1). It rearranges what is most important, what we think we need. We learn a little more to honor God in every experience and in everything we do. As we learn and grow, our faith expands and we take another step toward sanctification.
We move forward knowing human passions aren’t the goal (4:2). We choose not to engage in the chase for pleasure that the world is racing – sensuality, drunkenness, sex, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry (4:3). We move in another direction as we choose to pursue God.
Of course we don’t have to suffer to learn this, but suffering often hastens the lesson.
As one who pursued many of the worldly pleasures, I can attest that culture sells us that this will bring us joy, contentment, freedom, gratification, fulfillment, and acceptance. But what a wicked lie. The brokenness in us cannot be healed, the holes in us will not fill with such base and fleeting pursuits. If anything, these only pepper us with more holes, shattering us all over again.
No, we were made in God’s image for the eternal. We were made for so much more. And our hearts and our souls will never find rest until we find it in him.
He is the God who is restoring all things. He is the one who fills us and heals us. He knits us back together, sometimes with the pain of his needlework coming through, only to breathe life into us once again, making us wholly new, wholly his.
No night of drinking or sex, nor any idol can do that.
This is the way. We who were dead in our sins, decaying though alive, we have received this immeasurable, incomprehensible, completely undeserved grace from the one who loves us so thoroughly and unconditionally. We receive this grace that not only squelches the allure of sin, but that whets our desire for righteousness. This grace seeps into every crack and fissure, every break and gaping hole. It fills us and, in so doing, transforms us. It gives us a hope and a future, births new life abundant and eternal. We are healed, changed, and marked by this magnificent grace.
And then we go bearing this grace into the world, like Oprah giving away cars. Enthusiastically, no joyously, gifting this grace to others because we have so ridiculously much of it. What could we do but give it freely away? There is no hoarding grace, after all.
So we give it in love, in forgiveness, in hospitality, and in serving others (4:7). We give it in our words, actions, and attitudes. We give it in everything, in every single little thing.
And all of it is a sweet aroma of God’s glory to a wearily desperate world, to people so dry and parched they are desperate for a trickle, a mere taste of this fountain of joy we have. Shower them, drench them with grace.
A funny secret emerges when we do.
God will never stop filling you with his grace. So you will never run out of more to give away. You’ll never run out of opportunities to glorify him in your lavish grace-giving (4:11).
Because his is the glory forever and ever. Amen. Lord, you are the one our souls long for. Nothing of this world nor in this world can heal us like you. It’s your joy to fill us to overflowing with your grace, and there we know delight, like a child splashing in the rain. Teach us to shower your grace on others, Lord, not to hoard it like beggars but to lavish it on others while trusting you for endless refills. May we bear your grace boldly, unapologetically, and generously so you, Lord, get all the glory. Amen.
