Nepaug Bible Church - http://www.nepaugchurch.org - Pastor's Evening Sermon Notes - http://www.nepaugchurch.org/ev/ev20110605.htm

THRU THE BIBLE EXPOSITION
1 Peter: Effective Christian Living In A Spiritually Hostile World
Part V: Living In Powerful, Christian, Brotherly Love
(1 Peter 1:22-25)
  1. Introduction
    1. Jesus said the world would identify His disciples as His own by their love for one another, John 13:35.
    2. Sadly, sometimes that love wanes or disintegrates into malice or even hatred, a state far from the holy living God demanded in 1 Peter 1:15-16. Because of this failure, church splits, denominational splintering and other divisions have arisen and continue to arise even among professing born again believers!
    3. 1 Peter 1:22-25 shows the dynamics of living a powerfully loving life in relation to one another in victory over such a failure, and we view the passage for our insight as follows:
  2. Living In Powerful, Christian, Brotherly Love, 1 Peter 1:22-25.
    1. In 1 Peter 1:22b NIV, Peter urged his Christian readers to "love one another deeply" (ektenos, "eagerly, fervently, constantly," Arndt & Gingrich, A Grk.-Eng. Lex. of the N. T. , 1967, p. 245) as they had a "sincere (anupokriton, Ibid., p. 76) love" for one another from obeying the truth of God.
    2. One must function on the supernatural spiritual plane to achieve such an eager, fervent, constant, sincere love that surpasses the experience of unsaved man, and these provisions are suggested in 1 Peter 1:22a,b and more extensively explained elsewhere in Scripture (as follows):
      1. First, one's "soul" (KJV), the Greek word being psyche and here meaning "the center of personality," a reference to the inner man (Henry Alford, The Greek Testament , 1861, vol. IV, p. 343), is purified by the believer's obedience to the truth of God's Word, 1 Peter 1:22a,b.
      2. This obedience first occurs when one believes the Gospel unto salvation and he becomes indwelt by the Holy Spirit that equips him to live a godly life, Acts 17:30; Titus 3:5; Romans 8:9b.
      3. Then, in reference to our walk as Christians, the focus of 1 Peter 1 that we noted in a past lesson in this series, the focus intimated in the believer's "sprinkling" by Christ's blood (1:2), by consciously relying on the Holy Spirit to live rightly (Rom. 8:3-4), the believer loves fellow Christians, Gal. 5:16, 22-23.
    3. Lest the believer doubt the capacity for him thus to love other believers, he needs only to reflect on the fact of his true conversion to Christ when he was "caused to be born again" (anagennao , Ibid., Arndt & Gingrich, p. 51) not by perishable seed, but by the imperishable seed of the "living and enduring word of God," 1 Peter 3:23 NIV.
    4. Verification that this Gospel of God's Word is powerful in its effectiveness, Peter then cited Isaiah 40:6-7a, 8a,b to note the power of God's Word, 1 Peter 1:24-25a,b:
      1. God's Word is not like mortal men who, like the grass of the field in all its fleeting glory withers and its flowers fall, 1 Peter 1:24 in citing Isaiah 40:6-7a, 8a.
      2. Rather, God's Word stands forever as relentlessly powerful, 1 Peter 1:25a in citing Isaiah 40:8b.
      3. So, what God's Word does, it does in endless power as in the salvation of Peter's readers, 1 Pet. 1:25b.
    5. Thus, the believer need not doubt God's capacity to cause him to love other believers, for the new birth within him was performed by God through the power of His Word so that when the believer trusted the Gospel of Christ, God transformed him, making him born again into a life backed by God's relentless power. That power applied to loving other believers, as harnessed by the believer's dependence upon the indwelling God the Holy Spirit, equips him to love other believers with a pure heart in relentless power!
Lesson: God calls us Christians who have been truly born again by the Holy Spirit's regeneration of the inner man through faith in His relentlessly powerful, superhuman Word, to rely on the Holy Spirit's power in our lives to love one another deeply, fervently, and constantly in sincerity. The supernatural new birth and equipping of the Holy Spirit equips us to achieve this objective.

Application: (1) If we have no such capacity to love, we are not truly born again, and we must trust in Christ as Savior to be saved. (2) If we are saved but do not love fellow believers, we are living by our sin natures, and must confess this as sin and rely on the Holy Spirit for godly living, 1 John 1:9; Galatians 5:16-23. (3) May we rely on the Holy Spirit for effective expressions of brotherly love in the Church!