Ep. 111 | An Imperishable Hope and Reward
Speaker: Anne Roth
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Available on all podcasting platforms -
Summary
Anne shares reflections on 1 Peter 1, noting the imperishable nature of our salvation and the hope we have in Jesus.
Scriptures Explored: 1 Peter 1
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Music created by Chad Hoffman
Artwork created by Anthony Kuenzi
Speaker’s Bio
Anne Roth works as an English teacher and has a lifelong passion for learning. She worked for 10 years at a Christian international school in Kampala, Uganda, and loved the chance to teach and disciple her students in their faith as well as their academics. She is now based in Oregon again, and gratefully continues to share the truth of God's word whenever the opportunity arises.
Transcript
Intro:
Hey there, welcome to Pickled Parables. This podcast is presented by Parable Ministries as a Bible teaching resource. Thank you for joining us. Pickled Parables is a podcast about taking in and living out the Bible. Here we will study, contemplate, and testify to the Bible's incredible teachings and how it leads us to live better lives. To stay up to date with all things parable, follow us on Instagram at parable underscore ministries and visit our website at parableministries.com. We hope today's message finds you well.
Message:
Hello, my name is Anne Roth, and I'm going to be talking about 1 Peter 1 today.
So I just thought I would start with reading the chapter.
So this is 1 Peter 1.
Peter, an apostle of jesus Christ, to God's elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces of pontius, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with His blood, grace and peace be yours in abundance.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In His great mercy, He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade.
This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.
In all this, you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.
These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith of greater worth than gold, which parishes even though refined by fire, may result in craze, glory and honor when jesus Christ is revealed.
Though you have not seen him, you love him.
And even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
Concerning this salvation, the prophets who spoke of the grace that was to come to you searched intently and with greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow.
It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven.
Even angels long to look into these things.
Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Christ jesus is revealed at his coming.
As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance, but just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do.
God has written, be holy because I am holy.
Since you call on a father who judges each person's work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.
For you know that it is not with perishable things, such as silver or gold, that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors.
But it was with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.
He was chosen before the creation of the world.
But was revealed in these last times for your sake.
Through him, you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him.
And so your faith and hope are in God.
Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth, so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply from the heart.
For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable.
Through the living and enduring word of God.
For all people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.
The grass withers and the flowers will fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever.
And this is the word that was preached to you.
So one of the things that I really love about this passage is all the juxtaposition.
There's so much stark contrast in this chapter between when Peter is pointing out the things that last and the things that don't.
He's pointing out this difference between what is eternal and what rots.
And it's an easy metaphor for us to picture, isn't it?
That idea of rot and decay.
We've probably all turned over an old log out in our gardens, or maybe even found a forgotten container of who knows what that was in the back of the fridge, or you've smelled that old potato that rolled to the back of the pantry.
And I taught this passage for a chapel at the school where I taught in Uganda.
And Uganda is quite a tropical climate right on the equator.
So those students had all sorts of ideas of things that rot.
So what comes to mind when you hear rot, they said things like old tomatoes or mangoes that fall off the tree and they attract flies.
Meat that you had in the fridge when the power went out.
You can imagine that sort of old meat stink.
Milk that goes sour and you didn't realize it, but you put it in your cereal already.
There's something that is just really so gross about all this rot.
And we know it really well, right?
We can imagine it really clearly.
I've had many a zucchini or a loaf of bread that went squishy or moldy.
And that's the sort of thing we think of when we think of perishable, right?
When we're thinking about what's a perishable item, we're thinking of something that's really susceptible to rot and it's likely to decay.
But in this chapter, there's a very different thing that's talked about as perishable.
What does Peter say is going to rot?
He says that it's gold and silver, so precious metals, things that are what we call precious metals.
And in our perspective, with our view of time, gold is very lasting and silver sticks around for ages.
There are Egyptian artifacts made of gold that we still have around today, and they were made when Moses was alive.
And there are silver coins that were minted in India 500 years before jesus was born.
So we, with our human perspective on time, don't see silver and gold as something that decays.
Fruit and vegetables, maybe, organic matter, all that, for sure, is something that seems very perishable.
But look at the things Peter points out as short-lived versus the things that he says are lasting, things that will stand the test of time.
We're going to start with verses 18 and 19, which is a bit out of order.
just bear with me.
But we're going to look at all the different contrasts he gives between what rots and what doesn't.
But verses 18 and 19, we'll start there.
For you know that it was not with perishable things, such as silver or gold, that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors.
But it was with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.
So I started out with this comparison because that's our foundation, right?
That's the crux of our whole salvation, is jesus.
We're redeemed with the blood of jesus.
He bought us out of our slavery to sin.
And he didn't buy us with something that's eventually going to rot away like silver or gold.
jesus' sacrifice is eternally and infinitely more valuable.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate that?
Silver and gold is something that we think of as so lasting and so valuable.
Silver and gold might as well just be an overripe banana in a hot kitchen counter compared to the precious blood of our Savior.
And what else does Peter say is going to last?
Well, in verses 3 and 4, we see that the inheritance that we received because jesus redeemed us is also lasting.
So verses 3 and 4 say, Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord jesus Christ.
In His great mercy, He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that will never perish, spoil or fade.
This inheritance is kept in heaven for you.
Isn't that incredible?
We have a living hope.
We have a resurrected savior.
And what we put our hope in is never going to rot.
In fact, not only will it not perish, it won't spoil even a little bit, and it's not even going to fade.
So when jesus redeems us, He gives us a future that is so secure, that is so 100% guaranteed.
It's just such a great way to put into perspective all the work and the woes and the worries that consume so much of our time and energy.
How much of that is going to last forever?
None of it.
But what is going to last is our inheritance through Christ jesus.
So then because we have that perspective, because we know what lasts is jesus' sacrifice for us, and then the inheritance that we get through that, because we know that we have those reminders, those really excellent truths, what do we do with it?
How does that inform our everyday?
Well, there's two more times that Peter contrasts perishable and imperishable, or two more instances where he brings up this same kind of metaphor, the same comparison.
And one of them is verses 6 and 7.
So, verse 6 says, In all this you greatly rejoice, though for now, in little while, you may have to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.
And verse 7, These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith of greater worth than gold which perishes even though refined by fire, may result in praise, glory and honor when jesus Christ is revealed.
So, here's another thing that is more lasting than gold.
It's our faith.
And gold might be refined by the fire, but even then, it's not eternal.
It doesn't last.
Our faith, on the other hand, also gets refined.
It's tested, right?
And it's shaped by the griefs that we suffer, by the trials that we face.
Then, when our faith is refined, it's much more valuable than gold.
So, rather than dwelling in our temporary griefs or letting these trials pull us down, we can rejoice that we have faith that's of greater worth than gold.
Having that perspective when we're up against those trials is a great way to apply the truths from these verses.
And then, there's one last call to action in the end of the chapter, verses 22 and 23.
It says, in verse 22, Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth, so that you have sincere love for each other, love each other deeply from the heart, for you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.
So this last really eternal lasting thing that we can put our confidence in is God's word.
God's word is also imperishable.
And this idea of it being a seed, it's a seed that's not going to just sprout and grow and die.
It's a seed that's lasting forever.
It's never going to change.
And when we let that word of God, that lasting and eternal word of God shape us, we obey the truth that comes from it.
And it results in sincere love for each other, is what it says in that verse.
So we should love each other deeply when we have that word of God flourishing in our hearts.
So my closing thoughts for you here are I guess a couple of questions to leave you with.
The first one is about that idea of what's perishable, right?
So let us consider what perishable things such as gold or silver sometimes might seem attractive to us or they might distract us.
Is there something that you need to leave behind or something you need to stop worrying about or something that you need to stop putting so much value on because in the end that something is just going to rot?
And then the second question, how can we show sincere love for each other?
How can we live out that call to action in the end of the chapter, where we're really showing and living out our faith, because that faith is more valuable than gold?
How do we let people see that precious blood of our Savior that's worth more than anything else?
How do we let people see that blood of Christ coming through in how we live, in how we act, in how we treat other people?
How are we doing it in a way that shows the blood of our Savior coming through?
because that is what is eternal.
That's what has value forever.
That is what is never going to rot.
Outro:
Thank you for listening to Pickled Parables. If you enjoyed this message, please rate us, subscribe and share with your friends. If you're interested in more things like this, check out our secondary podcast called My dusky Bible. To stay up to date with all things Parable, follow us on Instagram at parable underscore ministries and visit our website at parableministries.com. Parable is a volunteer organization and we would deeply appreciate your prayers. Thank you for joining us today, we'll catch you later.
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