1 Peter 1:1I. Election in its source: "elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father." II. Election in its means: "elect through sanctification of the Spirit." (1) Election first shows itself in a man's separation from the world, which lieth in wickedness. (2) But more than separation from or nonconformity to the world is here intended: the moral purification of our nature. (3) The wording of the text leads us still further: this holiness is not a limited, circumscribed result of the inward operation of the Spirit, but an infusion into our nature of the very quality or attribute of holiness inherent in Himself. III. Election in its end: "elect unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ." (1) Election has for its object our obedience, obedience in a twofold sense: (a) the obedience of faith; (b) the obedience which faith produces. (2) The sprinkling of the blood is necessary not only at the beginning of the Christian career, but all along to the very end. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter; p. 1. References: 1 Peter 1:1, 1 Peter 1:2.— G. E. L. Cotton, Sermons to English Congregations in India, p. 283; J. S. Howson, Church of England Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 259. 1 Peter 1:2 Who would take happy views of religion, whoever would have full assurance of his own salvation, must be accustomed to look for his evidences, not in himself, nor in any abstract truth, but in the character, and the work, and the person of God. In this respect, the doctrine of the blessed Trinity is a very tower of confidence and strength to a Christian. The offices of the Holy Three are so full, they so fit into each other and make a harmony, they are so appropriate, each in its distinctness, and they are so sufficient, all in their completeness, that they seem made for this very purpose: to assure a man's soul and to leave no place for the weakest doubt. I. The beginning, the foundation, of the whole scheme of salvation, is the electing grace of the Father. The election of the saved ranges without the slightest reprobation of the lost; and the right application of the doctrine is always an application of comfort. So St. Peter here implies, in like manner St. Paul, always to strengthen and assure, and stir up to holiness, afflicted Churches and tried believers. II. Look at the path which election takes, by which it always travels, without which it is no election at all: "through sanctification of the Spirit." The great object of all election is the glory of God. The glory of God is a happy, holy thing, the reflection of Himself. The Spirit carries on His sanctifying work by implanting a new life, new principles, with new affections, within a man's breast, which then act with a threefold influence. First, they occupy the heart; then they keep down and restrain the evil that was and still is there; and then they gather up and absorb the bad nature, purify and elevate it towards the character of the Divine: this is sanctification. III. "Obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Christ." In that obedience we were elected; for it we were created in Christ Jesus; God willed it, God purposed it, and God means it. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 5th series, p. 294. References: 1 Peter 1:2.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii., No. 434; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 194. 1 Peter 1:3 To the question, What has the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead done for us Christians? a great many answers may be given. I. Of these the answer which is, perhaps, of the first importance, the answer which Christ's own Apostles would have given, is this: that by rising from the dead Jesus Christ proved that He had a right to speak about God, a right to speak about the old religion of His countrymen, a right to speak about the religious conduct of the most influential classes among His countrymen; above all, that He had a right to speak about Himself as He had spoken. When He was asked to give a sign— that is, a something which might be accepted as evidence— of the commission which He had from heaven, He gave this: He said that just as the old prophet Jonah had been buried out of sight in the whale, and yet had been restored to his ministry and to his countrymen, so He Himself, though He should be stricken beneath the pangs and convulsions of death, though laid in the darkness of the tomb in the very heart of the earth, yet would at a given time burst the fetters of the grave and would rise again. Accordingly, when this prediction had been actually realised, the fact was appealed to, as we see from the Acts of the Apostles, by the earliest preachers of Christianity, almost in every single sermon. It was the fact which evidently did their work, in compelling men to listen to what they had to say about their risen Lord and in making faith in Him at least easy, better than any other topic; and St. Paul puts it forward when he begins his great Epistle to the Romans by simply saying that Jesus had been "declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead." II. But the Resurrection has done other things for us besides this its great evidential achievement. It has endowed Christians, who treat it as a serious matter of fact, with the grace, the great grace, of hope. St. Peter feels the preciousness of this when he exclaims that God, the Father of our Lord, is blessed, if only because, from His abundant mercy, He has begotten us again unto a lively hope by His Son's resurrection from the dead. No man who has not a clear belief in a future life can have permanently a strong sense of duty. A man may, indeed, persuade himself during various periods of his existence that this sense of duty is the better and purer from not being bribed by the promise of future reward or stimulated, as he would perhaps say, unhealthily by the dread of future punishment. But, for all that, his moral life, if he has not an eternal future before him, is, depend upon it, feeble and impoverished. It is not merely that he has fewer and feebler motives to right action; it is that he has a false estimate, because an under-estimate, of his real place in the universe. He has forfeited, in the legitimate sense of the term, his true title to self-respect. He has divested himself of the bearing, the instincts, and the sense of noble birth and lofty destiny which properly belong to him. He is like the heir to a great name or a throne who is bent on forgetting his lineage and responsibilities in a self-sought degradation. Man cannot, even if he would, live with impunity only as a more accomplished kind of animal than are the creatures around him. Man is by the terms of his existence a being of eternity, and he cannot unmake himself; he cannot take up a position which abdicates his higher prerogatives without sooner or later sinking into degradations which are in themselves a punishment. He needs a hope resting on something beyond the sphere of sense and time, and God has given him one by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. III. There are three forms of interest which must be accorded to such a fact as the Resurrection. The first is the interest of curiosity in a wonder which is altogether at variance with the course of nature. This interest may exist in a high degree, observing and registering the fact, yet never for a moment getting beyond the fact. Then there is the interest of active reason which is satisfied that such a fact must have consequences, and is anxious to trace them, an interest which may lead a man to say that the Resurrection does, intellectually speaking, prove the truth of the mission of Christ, although the man may know nothing of the power of Christ's blood and of His Spirit. The third kind of interest is practical, moral, spiritual. It is an effort to answer the question, What does Christ's resurrection say to me? what does it mean to me? If it is true, if Christianity through it is true, what ought to be the effect on my thoughts, my feelings, my life? And St. Peter would answer all these questions. Thought, feeling, life, should be invigorated by the force of that living hope. But then this absorbing moral interest does not come of any ordinary process of observation and reason, like these two earlier forms. St. Peter says, using a remarkable expression, "We are begotten unto a lively hope." It is not the outcome of our natural mind or of common-sense, though it does not contradict it; it is the product of the Divine breath playing upon the soul and giving it the new birth, the new capacity for life. Of this birth the Father is the Author; the Eternal Spirit is the instrument; union with Jesus Christ, the perfect Man, the essence and the effect. H. P. Liddon, Church Sermons, vol. i., p. 309. 1 Peter 1:3 The Hope of the Resurrection. The religion of Jesus Christ presented one great contrast to the heathen religions with which it found itself in conflict: it pointed steadily forward, while they looked wistfully backward. The religions of classical heathenism were religions of regret; the Gospel is a religion of hope. Two great ideas are involved in the fact of the Resurrection, ideas influencing human thought and action at every turn, ideas coextensive in their application with human life itself. I. By opening out the vista of an endless future, it has wholly changed the proportions of things. The capacity of looking forward is the measure of progress in the individual and in the race. Providence is God's attribute. In proportion as a man appropriates this attribute of God, in proportion as his faculty of foresight is educated, in the same degree is he raised in the moral scale. The Christian is an advance on the civilised man, as the civilised man is an advance on the barbarian. His vista of knowledge and interest is not terminated abruptly by the barrier of the grave. The Resurrection has stimulated the faculty and educated the habit of foresight indefinitely by opening out to it an endless field of vision over which its sympathies range. II. The Resurrection involves another principle not less extensive or less potent in its influence on human life. The Resurrection does not merely proclaim immortality. It declares likewise that death leads to life; it assures us that death is the portal to eternity. Thus it glorifies death; it crowns and consecrates the grave. Death issuing in life, death the seed and life the plant, and blossom, and fruit— this is the great lesson of the Gospel. III. See how far-reaching are the applications of this lesson to human life. Through darkness to light, through sorrow to joy, through suffering to bliss, through evil to good— this is the law of our heavenly Father's government, whereby He would educate His family, His sons and His daughters, into the likeness of His own perfections. Accordingly we find this same principle extending throughout the Gospel teaching. Everywhere it speaks of renewal, of redemption, of restitution— yes, of resurrection. IV. So to the true Christian all the ills of life have an inherent glory in them. Not only do they deserve our pity, deserve our respect, deserve our alleviation. There is a great potentiality of future good in them. No degradation of human character, no abasement of human life, no depth of human vice, is so great as to forfeit its claim to the consideration of the Christian. How can it forfeit this claim when hope is shut out from none, restitution is denied to none? It was the common taunt of the heathen against the Christians in the early ages that they gathered about them the lowest of the people, the outcasts of society, the scum of mankind. They proudly accepted the reproach; they avowed that their shame was their glory. Had not their Master been taunted with the companionship of publicans and sinners? Was it not their special mission, as it had been His before them, to call not righteous men, but sinners? J. B. Lightfoot, Sermons on Special Occasions, p. 233. References: 1 Peter 1:3.— H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. i., p. 376; W. Hubbard, Ibid., vol. xxiii., p. 163; M. G. Pearse, Ibid., vol. xxx., p. 85. 1 Peter 1:3-4 The Lively Hope. I. Whence does it spring? Hope is popularly defined to be the expectation of future good; but, to render the definition complete, the good should be an object which the mind affects and which the heart desires. It has been implanted in the breast of universal man, and is one of the chiefest displays of the loving-kindness of the Lord. Without it the world were a sepulchre and the conscience a hell. There is hardly a condition of human adversity which it cannot soothe and sweeten. But the hope to which the text refers is not an instinct. It is a gift, and is not, therefore, the common heritage of all mankind; it is the hope of heaven, which the world knoweth not, and to which the sinner is of necessity a stranger. Such a hope can only be of Divine bestowment; it is at once too lofty and too lasting to come from meaner hands. And it is the gift of God to those who receive the Gospel of His Son. II. What is the medium by which this hope is certified to us? The Apostle says it is "by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead." The resurrection of Jesus is fitly put here for His whole atoning work, as it is at once the proof of the reality and completeness of His death as a sacrifice and the token of its acceptance as a satisfaction by the justice of the Father. III. Note the recompense in which this hope of the Christian is fulfilled: "to an inheritance." The word at once traces the blessing to its source, and humbles at the outset all the vapourings of human pride. An inheritance is neither reward of industry nor meed of valour. Believers cannot purchase heaven. They may not win its honours, as a knight his spurs, by bravery; they are heirs because of their sonship, and their sonship is by adoption of grace. Boasting is excluded, and gratitude inspired by the boundless love of God. (1) This inheritance is incorruptible; it does not contain the seeds of dissolution. (2) It is undefiled. Herein is the secret of its incorruptibility. (3) It fadeth not away. There comes upon it no whisper of a change. There will be neither consuming memories nor boding fears. Once pass the portals of the inheritance, and you are safe for ever. W. M. Punshon, Sermons, 2nd series, p. 80. 1 Peter 1:3-5 The Heavenly Inheritance. I. The greatness of God's mercy is to be seen in the great number of the saved. II. The greatness of God's mercy is to be seen in the great change which takes place in the great multitude. III. The greatness of God's mercy is to be seen in the greatness of the inheritance which He confers on the great multitude which have undergone the great change. IV. The greatness of God's mercy is to be seen in the greatness of the expense to which He went to be able to confer this great inheritance on the great multitude that have undergone the change. V. The greatness of God's mercy is to be seen, lastly, in the greatness of the power that is pledged to bring the great multitude to the possession of the inheritance secured for them at such a cost. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 15. References: 1 Peter 1:3-5.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvi., No. 048; W. Boyd-Carpenter, Church of England Pulpit, vol. v., p. 263; Ibid., vol. xxi., p. 267; F. D. Huntingdon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. i., p. 232. 1 Peter 1:4.— W. Marshall, Ibid., vol. x., p. 315; Homilist, 2nd series, vol. iv., p. 375. 1 Peter 1:6.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iv., No. 222. 1 Peter 1:6 The Theology of Suffering. I. Temptations or trials reveal faith. (1) Trials, on the one hand, show us the evil that is in us. (2) Afflictions further serve to evoke our good, to lead forth into visibility the faith, the hope, and the charity God, in His loving-kindness, has infused into our souls. II. Temptations or trials strengthen faith. (1) Bitters are the best tonic for the spiritual man, as for the physical; (2) sorrows further invigorate faith because they call it into frequent, yea constant, exercise. III. Temptations or trials purify faith. (1) Trials release it from the impurities attached to it; (2) adversity throws faith more upon its proper resources, making it draw its aliment and inspiration more directly from God, from God as revealed in His book. IV. Temptations or trials beautify faith. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 29. References: 1 Peter 1:6, 1 Peter 1:7.— R. W. Dale, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxv., p. 102 1 Peter 1:6-9.— H. S. Brown, Ibid., vol. xii., p. 230. 1 Peter 1:7.— Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 317; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 147. 1 Peter 1:8 Love a Way to Faith. I. Love to Christ is the usual way to faith, both to belief in His reality and trust in Him. Of course I do not question that men may attain to faith through investigation. Inquiry and search cannot be otherwise than favourable to faith; what I mean is this: that for men in general, for men and women of all sorts, the way that leads through love to faith is the practical, the usual, the reasonable, and the sufficient one. In the Gospels Christ is presented specially and directly in a way to awaken love rather than to meet the questions of the reason. The great qualities of Christ have the effect of rousing some answering feelings in the souls of men. Every truly elevated life has such an influence, and that of Christ in an altogether peculiar and transcendent manner. II. Let us notice one or two inferences from this line of thought. We see how love to an unseen Christ operates in keeping Him near to the soul in spite of the lapse of centuries. It seems at first sight as if it would be well-nigh impossible to resist the influence of time. It has such a dissolving power; all things crumble before it. But when souls love Christ and are in constant fellowship with Him, what matters the first century or the nineteenth? There are humble, earnest souls today in myriads that feel Christ more real and near than many who had seen Him in the flesh. How finely the natural and the spiritual blend in love to Christ. There are those who never seem to get beyond the natural. They love Christ as they love any great benefactor of the world. And who can tell just precisely when his love to Christ rose out of this sphere and became spiritual, or when any such love becomes spiritual, aspiring, and active? There are those who do not take the name of Christ, or call Him Master, who have an enthusiasm for Him that might make many Christians blush and bring tears to their eyes. Can any men draw the line between the natural and the spiritual, and say, Here the natural ends, and the spiritual begins? Is not all this love to good and right at bottom ultimately a love to God, if only it knew itself? Is not the immense power that Christ has over the natural admiration of men one of His own greatest weapons and one of the things which the Spirit of God most uses? J. Leckie, Sermons, p. 147. 1 Peter 1:8 Loving the Invisible Christ. The place occupied by any on the ledge of fame and genius is very narrow indeed. Forgetfulness soon grows over us, and we are less than shadows after the sun has passed. "I am clean forgotten," says Swift, "as a dead man, out of mind and out of loving hearts." Contrast this with the influence of the unseen Christ. "By His death," Paul says, "we see the resurrection and ascension." Not only is our Lord Jesus Christ known to countless millions, but He is loved wherever He is known. The proof of love is sacrifice. The martyrs have been dying for Christ for over eighteen hundred years. The noble army is added to year after year by fresh recruits ready to seal with their own blood their devotion to Christ. On our university classes and Toynbee Hall Christ looks down from His holy heaven, and strikes into life and arouses the chivalry and enthusiasm of those who work in the mission field of the East of London. This is a power we cannot but love. Amongst those who have never seen Him, Christ has power to perpetuate His love through all ages. The first Napoleon, who trusted rather to the effect of his own fascination, awoke to the continued fascination of the love of Christ, and said, "I am a judge of men, but I tell you that this was more than a man." That was Napoleon's commentary upon St. Peter's words, "Whom having not seen, ye love." Let me point to two applications. I. The text lies at the heart and root of the whole Christian life. Remember the Epistle and portion of Scripture for St. Barnabas's Day. A great writer has told us, in his own picturesque way, that Antioch was the capital of vice, the sewer of all sorts of infamies, the house of moral and spiritual putrefaction; yet the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch. It is a solemn time when a new influence gets its name, for the name is a distinct sign of separate existence. Many will in all probability say that that was the name by which believers were known to the Roman police. But this step was now taken; they were now no longer merely disciples, brethren, saints, and believers, but Christians. It may be that, as we have been told, the name was founded upon the misconception that Christ was a proper name; but, at all events, ten years after the Resurrection and Ascension our Lord's disciples called themselves by the name of One whom they loved, and that name will never die— that beautiful, that worthy, name by which we are called. Yes, save in the Gospels, there is no authentic likeness of Christ by one who had seen Him. In the long, worn features seen in the Lateran mosaics many Christians are able to perceive the hands and feet, the wounded side, and the awful circle of the crown of thorns; among all the pictures in galleries, and in all its forms, the crucifix stands out in distinct isolation, as if challenging the attention of those who believe the Gospel story; but none can claim to be the original and authentic likeness of Jesus, the Son of Mary and the Son of God. And yet, said St. Barnabas, that name of Jesus is not the name of a man, but of One who is true, gentle, pure, holy, and sympathising, and who is also the true and Eternal God. This idea, in all the Gospel and creeds, is fixed again and again by the reign of the Holy Ghost upon the sensitive plate of the human heart, and is a proof of the reality of the object which it represents: "Whom having not seen, ye love." II. The text no doubt affords a personal test: "Whom having not seen, ye love." People are all too ready to put to others trisyllabic questions to which they must have monosyllabic answers. "Are you saved?" "Yes." Another question put in this form is, "Do you love Jesus?" That is a question to put to ourselves rather than to others. Imitate the sensitive delicacy of St. Peter in our text. He tells us we have not seen Christ, but he had seen Him in the guest-chamber, on the long summer evenings by the lake of Galilee, and it is an exceedingly reverential statement to make when he says, "Whom having not seen, ye love." Do we love Jesus? The answer, after all, does not depend upon what we say. Who does not remember that sublime passage in dramatic literature where the aged king intends to make a trial of the love of his three daughters? Two of them, when asked if they loved him, heaped word upon word, hyperbole upon hyperbole. The third was the one alone whose heart was richer than her tongue. Who loved the old man best of all? We can read the answer upon the heath where the old man's form stands out in the flashing lightning, and his white hair is drifted by the storm. Our answer to the question is to be measured not by what we say, not by what we think we are enabled to do, but by what we do when the hour of trial comes. Bishop Alexander, British Weekly Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 89. References: 1 Peter 1:8.— A. M. Fairbairn, The City of God, p. 335; Homilist, 1st series, vol. v., p. 107; R. Tuck, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiv., p. 72. 1 Peter 1:8-9 Salvation: its Subjective Elements. I. Faith. (1) Faith is the first Christian grace; (2) faith is a personal trust in a personal Saviour; (3) faith is trust in an invisible Saviour. II. Love. (1) Love is one essential element of the Christian religion; (2) Christ claims and gets our supreme love; (3) these strangers of the dispersion evinced their love to the Saviour by suffering themselves to be despoiled of all their possessions rather than deny Him. III. Joy. This joy defies philosophy to explain it, or language to express it. It is already glorified or full of glory. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 50. References: 1 Peter 1:8, 1 Peter 1:9.— F. Ferguson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxiii., p. 193; A. Rowland, Ibid., vol. xxxiv., p. 88; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. i., p. 120; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xii., No. 698. 1 Peter 1:10I. The prophets are an example to us in the study of salvation— (1) in the intention of their study; (2) in the subject of their study; (3) in the noble spirit of resignation they evinced in presence of intellectual difficulties which they were not able to surmount. II. The Apostles are examples to us in the proclamation of the Gospel— (1) in subject matter; (2) in manner of preaching; (3) in the power which accompanied their preaching. III. The angels are examples to us in the wonder and adoration that should fill our minds in the contemplation of this salvation. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 71. Reference: 1 Peter 1:10-12.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi., No. 1524. 1 Peter 1:11 The Suffering which Fruits in Glory. I. The sufferings of Christ. From what source did they spring? What was their deepest and most essential characteristic? There will be many answers. (1) They were vicarious; (2) they were extreme; (3) they were unmerited; (4) they were according to the will of God. II. The glory that should follow. Language and imagination alike stagger in the Apocalypse under the revelation. It is called the glory of the Father, the glory at which the Father has been aiming through all the sin and sorrow of the world, for the sake of which He saw Eden broken up and the pall of sin settling over the earth. It is the glory which God saw beyond all the unutterable anguish of the great experiment of freedom, and which we shall behold, if we believe in Him who hath overcome the world, in the day of the manifestation of the Cross. J. Baldwin Brown, The Sunday Afternoon, p. 243. Reference: 1 Peter 1:11.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. vii., p. 199. 1 Peter 1:12 Advent Tidings. Our text speaks of angel students, and it speaks of them as being engaged in their eager and, if I may use the word of such high, and blessed, and holy intelligences, in their curious, research; for in the original the term which is translated "desire to look into" conveys the idea of bending, stooping over, in order that they may eagerly peer into those subjects which are the objects of their investigation. Those subjects are the great Advent tidings. I. The Apostle first brings before us those Advent tidings, or this Gospel report, in its great aim of salvation. This is the keynote of the passage— salvation first introduced to us, not in its primary stages, not in those stages of salvation which some of us are now enjoying, and which are within the reach, through God's mercy, of all of us, but salvation in its consummation. Never take a low view of this term "salvation." Remember that, while the salvation which you are called upon to seek is a salvation from the masterful tyranny of the devil, and of the world, and of indwelling sin, the crown of salvation, the full accomplishment and development of salvation, is never attained until the body is glorified by its resurrection at the second coming of the Lord. And this is the salvation of which the text speaks. II. And mark again that we not only have the great aim of these Advent tidings, but we have also their great characteristic. The great characteristic is presented to us by the Apostle when he says, "the grace that should come unto you." Grace in this particular phase is love: love to the guilty; love to the fallen; love to those who have forfeited all right and title to God's favour. There is a combination of characteristics in the Gospel which shows how it bears the stamp of adaptation to our wants, while it bears the impress of the mind of Deity. It is the wonderful combination of depth and simplicity. There is such a combination of depth and simplicity in the Gospel that I may sit down to study it with an angel for my fellow-student, or I may sit down to teach it with a little child for my pupil. J. C. Miller, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 617. References: 1 Peter 1:12.— T. J. Crawford, The Preaching of the Cross, p. 38; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iv., p. 131; vol. xiii., p. 321. 1 Peter 1:13 Hope. I. Christian hope, as St. Peter tells us, is seated in God. It is, as it has been called, one of the triad of virtues specifically theological. It takes its stand on Divine revelation; it looks on to the attainment of Divine promises; it draws its life-blood from no mere surmise as to what is possible for humanity in the race at large or in the individual, but from the manifestation of Divine truth and goodness in the Incarnate, whom St. Paul in one passage calls our hope, because our hope is grounded on Him and centred in Him. St. Paul, indeed, cannot think of hope without thinking of Christ. II. A hope which is thus essentially religious, thus Christian, from the root upwards, and impossible except on the terms of Christian belief, is strong enough to face all facts, even such as are unwelcome or austere. Life must, after all, be taken seriously; the hope which is a Christian's privilege involves a wakeful collectedness of mind. When trial comes we are not to say, "It is more than we bargained for," but rather, "We were duly forewarned." Certainly there will be temptations to unhopeful-ness; there must be the discipline of hopes deferred, of successes marred, of apparent defeats and disappointments, of much that might tempt impatience to despair. A hope thus trained, while resting on august realities, is strong, because it is not fanciful. III. Hope is a great instrument of moral and spiritual discipline. The hope which maketh not ashamed is always humble and always active. It remembers the terms of its existence: "We are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end." W. Bright, Morality in Doctrine, p. 141. 1 Peter 1:13 The Christian's Hope. I. First of all, let us deal with this very remarkable statement: "the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ." Now, there are two or three very large principles which will come, I think, out of a careful observation of the theology of these words; and the first of them is this: "the grace that is to be brought to us." I don't want to deal with theological technicalities; but we all know in the common language of religious life and education, as well as in the language of scientific phraseology, that the grace is distinct from the glory, in the same way as we distinguish the present from the future. It is here obvious that the thing which the Apostle is speaking about is on the other side of the grave, because he tells us that it is the constant object of our hope. And thus he tells us that it is all involved in the revelation of Jesus Christ, and that it is definitely fixed when He shall come to be manifest in His saints and glorified in them that believe. This grace, undeserved by us, rises from the deep fountain and artesian well of His own nature. It is grace when He comes to you and me and forgives us our sins; it is grace when into our broken feebleness step by step, according to our capacity, He infuses and communicates His own strength in temptation, and gives us hope in sorrow and triumph in conflict; and it is grace when our palm-bearing hands shall be folded in rest, and the fight shall be behind us, and the victory in our hearts. Then we shall sit down, with the Saviour who has overcome, in the kingdom, and dwell there. II. And then there is the other side. He would have us hope— it is a somewhat unusual and yet perfectly significant word— he would have us distinctly comprehend that that which is the object of our hope, whatsoever superlative degree of brightness and of wonderfulness we may attain to, is in essence and in kind the very same as the feeble beginnings and dull communications of love and goodness which we get from God here. The golden thread of unity ties together all the experiences and all the possessions of a redeemed man, from the first moment of the change that delivers him from the kingdom of darkness right away on through the endless pulses of an unbroken eternity. Grace is glory in the bud; glory is grace in the flower; and all which we hope for in the future is but the evolving of that which is planted in our hearts today if we love God, though it may have to fight with much antagonism to itself both without us and within. The grace comes all from the one source; and glory is but the superlative degree of that of which we already have possession. III. And then there is another point which I wish to make about the simple language used concerning this great object of Christian hope, which also you will find, I have no doubt, in the Revised Version— about the grace that our Bible says is "to be brought." The original has it literally and strictly rendered, "the grace which is being brought." If I remember rightly, it was the saintly Archbishop whose commentary on this Epistle of Peter will always be held in great esteem and respected as honest and sound— I mean Archbishop Leighton— who rendered it, "the grace that grows, that has a being." It is being brought, it is on its road, as if some strong choir of angels had already left the throne and were coming towards us, and, like those who bear the Holy Grail, were flitting nearer and nearer and nearer to us; with all the power of the strong winds and the wave lifting them on, it is bearing down upon us as a ship at sea; travelling to us, it has already set out, as light has done years ago, from the far-off stars, and is on its road to us through the great abysses, and presently it will strike with sunshine against the darkling surface of this dull earth. It is the grace that is being brought to us floating down through the ages, the one great, far-off, Divine fact to which the whole creation is moving. And so let us cherish the solemn thought that it is ready to be revealed, and that it is coming to us with every pulse of diminishing time, with every grain of the past running out of the sand-glass; the day of the Lord is hastening on its course. IV. This grace perfected, which is on its way to us, is given to us all, involved and implicated, or, to put it into plainer words, wrapped up— as the literal rendering would be— in the revelation, the apocalypse of Jesus Christ. When He comes, it comes. The two things are twisted together, like the fair jewel set in a golden setting is surrounded by stones and pearls; so for us our grace is all included in that encyclopædiacal glory the manifestation of Jesus Christ Himself. When He who is our Life shall be manifested, says the other Apostle, then shall we also appear, shall be manifested, with Him in glory. V. And notice the brief reference to the quality of the hope which you and I have to cherish. You cannot build a fortress-home of hope in the future when you have nothing but the uncertain external foundation to build upon; but here is a rock for us. What rock? My Master's word. Here is another rock. What rock? My Father's character; and on this, and most of all, I believe, upon that historical fact that our Brother Christ hath died and risen again and is ascended up on high, we may build with absolute certainty the fair fabric of a perfect hope, erected upon a rock, and may have done with "peradventures" and "maybes" and change them into "verily, verily." He says that of us, and we believe that is true. Wherefore set your hopes on Christ, that you may prove all things. "Gird up the loins of your mind"—i.e., brace up yourselves to make an effort that is not an easy one; for there are plenty of difficulties in the way of any man keeping the light of hope burning in the watch-tower through the darkness of the night and the fury of the storm. "Gird up the loins of your mind"; fix your attention and concentrate your thoughts on the points on which the hopes are built. No man can cherish any hope about any poor miserable thing in this world unless he keeps thinking about it; and no Christian man or woman can cherish hopes for another world unless they keep thinking about it, and you cannot keep thinking about it without a dead lift of faith. A. Maclaren, British Weekly Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 553. Christian Hope. I. Hope in its auxiliary conditions: girding up the loins and being sober. II. Hope in its operation: "Hope perfectly unto the end." (1) Hope is natural to the human mind, nothing more natural; (2) we must persevere in the face of difficulties, however great, for he that endureth to the end shall be saved. III. Hope in its immutable foundation. (1) Our hope is based on Divine grace as brought to us in the past at the first revelation of Jesus Christ; (2) fresh supplies of grace are being brought for us in the present; (3) our hope looks forward to the future. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 94. 1 Peter 1:13 The Place of Mind in Religion. The phrase may have lost something of its picturesqueness in its transfer from the East to the West and from the first century of the Gospel to the nineteenth. But if St. Peter stood amongst us at this moment here in England, in London, at the exact point of thought and talk and writing which is our position today, I doubt if he could find a word of counsel more suitable or more suggestive than that which speaks in this brief text: "Gird up the loins of your mind." What can be more striking than St. Peter's application of this figure to minds, and to minds in their religious aspect? He sets before us the figure of an ungirt, untidy, slovenly mind, and bids us beware of it in ourselves as religious men and Christians. One thing is presupposed; St. Peter counts it self-evident: that mind has place in the things of God. St. Peter does not fear the too much mind, but the too little. What St. Peter dreads is the half-mind; what he rebukes is the slovenly, the untidy, the dissolute mind. He does not fear the practised, the disciplined, the intense intellect. He bids the mind gird itself up as for a task requiring all its exertion, a task desperate without it. Mind has place in the things of God, and must gird itself up to handle them. Just in proportion as it is earnest and active, it will know and keep its place. Let us try to sketch one or two of the particulars of that girding of the text. I. "Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty. Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul, like a weaned child on the breast of its mother." Humility, queen of graces towards God and man, but chief element of that mind-girding which is our subject. Gird up the loins of your mind, first of all, by a deep humility. "Thou art near, they tell me, O Lord; but I am so far off— so ignorant, so stupid, so sin-bound— oh quicken me." II. But next to it I would place its sister grace, which is patience, that Divine ὑπομονή of which we speak so often, made up of two ingredients: submissive waiting, that upward look which acknowledges dependence and that onward look which believes in eternity, which knows that with the Lord a thousand years are as one day, which therefore is "willing to wait." Be willing to wait, not indolently, not in indifference, not as those who wrap themselves in their virtue or wrap themselves in their faith, careless of the multitude, careless of the race, but in the twofold definition of the grace which we are magnifying: a submissive waiting. III. Humility; patience; last, hope. Hope is the expectation— more or less confident, for it admits of degrees— of a pleasant future. It cannot be that this scene of confusion should be for ever. Hope, which is faith's foresight, sees things which are not as though they were, and hears a voice say from the excellent glory, "Behold, I make all things new." "We, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." C. J. Vaughan, Restful Thoughts for Restless Times, p. 264. References: 1 Peter 1:13.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii., No. 1909; Preacher's Monthly, vol. ii., p. 422. 1 Peter 1:13, 1 Peter 1:14.—Homilist, 2nd series, vol. iv., p. 483. 1 Peter 1:14.— H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxiii., p. 257; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 83. 1 Peter 1:14 Holiness. I. Holiness in the heart, or as it works its way down to the depth of our nature. (1) In their unregenerate state men always fashion themselves after the pattern of their lusts or inward sinful desires; (2) the power of evil, though not expelled, is dethroned in the believer's heart, and the principle of dutiful obedience takes its place. II. Holiness in the life, or as it widens out over the whole area of conduct. This enjoins holiness— (1) in all our reading and thinking; (2) in all our conversation; (3) in all our acts. III. Holiness in its standard: "Be ye holy, for I am holy." J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 111. References: 1 Peter 1:14-16.— W. Landels, Christian World Pulpit, vol. viii., p. 404. 1 Peter 1:15.—Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iii,. p. 207. 1 Peter 1:15, 1 Peter 1:16.— J. Burton, Christian Life and Truth, p. 67; W. Simpson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxi., p. 390. 1 Peter 1:16 God's Holiness and Man's. I. The nature of God is the foundation of moral obligation. When we travel in thought to the cause and origin of all things, we perpetually fall back on God as the only solution of the mystery of the universe. In God's nature we find all moral principles, just as in His duration we find eternity, in His omnipotence all the forces of external nature, and in His thought absolute reality and truth. God's holiness is that which has made holiness desirable to every intelligence in the universe; His character is the rule of all mind. II. The nature of man makes resemblance to God possible. It is a sublime truth that there is such resemblance between God and our poor hearts that even in our fallen condition there is enough of the Divine image left upon us for us to hear this heavenly voice and to know that it has a triumphant message even for us. We are not so smitten but that these words appeal to our conscience and are verified by our experience. It is possible for us to yield ourselves unto God, because He is God, and we are made in His likeness. III. All the essential perfections of God, even those in which we cannot resemble Him, add force to this appeal. (1) He who is omnipotent is holy. He has resolved to bring His omnipotence to bear upon the extermination of sin, for He is holy, and it is He who says to us, "Be ye holy." (2) He who is omniscient is holy; He who knows all the recesses of your heart, all the excuses to which you resort, all the palliations that you can make for yourself, all your thoughts, passions, fears, and joys, is holy. (3) He who is merciful is holy; therefore "be ye holy." His mercy is a manifestation of holiness; it is not a random or an arbitrary affluence of pity for our misery, but it is the transfiguration of holy law into heavenly love, so that from nature and from Calvary, as well as from Sinai, is heard the voice which says, "Be ye holy, for I am holy." H. R. Reynolds, Notes of the Christian Life, p. 165. 1 Peter 1:16I. We must not think we have exhausted the subject of righteousness when we have merely taught men the more obvious of the elementary lessons: to maintain an external respectability of conduct and to have a general preference for truth and justice. Christ came to supply a remedy that reaches deeper than this. The term "righteousness" implies that we must endeavour to maintain a more equitable balance than we often witness among the varied rights and interests which contribute to make up our social system. Our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees by founding itself, not on some rigorous definition of abstract right, but on equity inspired by love. II. But if it were one object of our Saviour's coming to deepen and extend our moral regeneration, a still greater revolution is implied in our restoration to holiness, the character which is so emphatically claimed by God Himself, and which had been still more completely forfeited by sin. It is one of the foremost conditions of our sacramental union with Christ that His grace should cleanse our hearts from evil tendencies and should make and keep them pure and holy. III. The third of the three great gifts which are to renew us in the image of Christ is that of knowledge, the marvellous extension of that spiritual knowledge which ranges from this world to the next. It is a revelation which appeals to the highest instincts of the spirit, lifting up the cloud which hung with equal mystery over the beginning and the end, showing us how man was created after the image of God and in what way he departed from his fellowship with God, opening out the prospect of that Divine contemplation which will form the highest reward and occupation of the saints hereafter in the eternity wherein the faithful shall be finally made perfect in Christ's image. Archdeacon Hannah, Cambridge Review, Feb. 17th, 1886. References: 1 Peter 1:16-20.—Expositor, 1st series, vol. i., p. 69; vol. iv., pp. 372, 496. 1 Peter 1:17 We collect from the language of the New Testament that fear formed a greater part of the state of mind in which the first disciples of Christ lived than it does now. Persons are described as being in a permanent and habitual state of mind which is called fear. It is not, of course, that state of disturbance and alarm which we are placed in by a sudden danger, not excitement and alarm. Still it is fear, and it has the natural and true characteristics of fear. It keeps people in earnest that they should be in the right way, apprehensive lest they should fail. They are solicitous about their own salvation, do not regard it as a matter of course. They always have it in their minds that they are going they do not know where; and while, on the one hand, they have firm hopes resting on God's promises, they still do not think of an unknown world and another life without fear. I. It must appear indeed, when we examine it, that this fear is part of the very life of Christians, and that we cannot have even our understanding quick and vigorous without it; it is part of our very understanding. Fear is the very mode through which we express the fact that we do believe; it is our perception of things being real. It is simple stupidity, it is being without ideas, to be without it. Persons may have quick parts, eyes and speech may be quick and ready, but their souls are dull, they are without the quickening faculty, if they are without fear. II. In the Christians of the Bible we see, as I have said, habitual fear, and this fear, far from depressing them, is rather a stimulus to their faith; and by giving strength to their faith, it confirms a happy experience of the effects of the Gospel upon them. With fear operating in them, they felt that they could not doubt. The faith of the early Christians was largely indebted to their fear for its rootedness and firmness. Fear planted it in their souls, and established it as a natural product of the soil, whereas under mere joy and hope it would have flourished prosperously for a season as an exotic, but its strength would have been a delusive one. While you fear, you believe; this, at any rate, is one effect. Fear is thus sustaining. While you fear God, you believe that God is, and that He is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. This is ever the accompaniment of fear in Scripture, and the great compensation; it settles, it tranquillises, it gives peace, and it breeds ultimately security and calm, and a reasonable assurance. All those quiet, settled views of the Divine government which fix and strengthen its hold upon the mind, and make it the great anchorage it is, from which to be unmoored is to lose everything, arise from fear, from seeing the awfulness of facts as they are and this whole world as it is around us. J. B. Mozley, Sermons Parochial and Occasional, p. 322. Christian Fear. I. The first reason why we should cultivate this fear is that the God on whom we call is a Father. II. The second, that He is a Judge. III. The third, that He judges according to every man's work. (1) Here the work, not the person, is the subject of judgment; (2) work, not works. God will judge our life as a whole. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 131. 1 Peter 1:17-19 Fear of Judgment to Come and of Redemption Accomplished. Note:— I. The sphere and operation of Christian fear. There are some to whom the importance attached to fear in this place and elsewhere seems in contradiction to the teaching of the Apostle John, who speaks of fear as being cast out by perfect love. But it is to be observed that it is perfect love to which this prerogative is assigned. When love is perfect, it renders fear in any other sense than that of reverence unnecessary and impossible; but with imperfect love fear has room, and an important sphere of action. It affords help and stimulus to imperfect love, and pushes it on to perfection. You may say that fear depresses, and sometimes even benumbs and paralyses. This may be true of fear that exists alone in the soul, but it is not true of that which coexists with faith and love, and hope and joy. The sharp east wind of spring is not a favourite; nobody speaks well of it; everybody grumbles about it; but still it dries the wet earth, and it is the accompaniment of lengthening days and strengthening sunshine. So fear goes along with the stirring of life. Fear of loss and pain, and every form of evil, is such an essential part of human nature and so bound up with man's progress in every direction, so necessary even to his very existence, that man cannot extirpate fear except by casting out the last vestige of belief in danger and every faintest foreboding of conscience. II. Fear in relation to the Father that judgeth. I believe in a Father that judges: that will certainly rouse me up; it will waken my slumbering energies; it will cause me to look well to the state of my heart and life; but the word "Father" will always keep the thought of judgment from overwhelming me. So long as the word "Father," is real to me, the thought of judgment will make life solemn and earnest, but never gloomy, never enduringly sad. III. In order to have a true Christian fear we must place together judgment by works and redemption by the blood of Christ. Let not this fear in view of redemption be deemed inconsistent with the joy and freedom which belong to the Gospel. It is precisely the man who has that realising sense of redemption which makes him afraid of not proving worthy of it who has also joy. These two, fear and joy, grow out of the same root of redemption. The more joy in Christ any man has, the more will he be afraid of not conforming sufficiently to Christ. Fear is inseparable from earnestness of purpose. It accompanies all the nobler feelings. If you love, you fear; if you strive and aspire, you fear. Whatever may be one's estimate of the fear of judgment, all must recognise the nobility of the fear that springs from thinking of the greatness of redemption. This fear is only possible to men who have spiritual sight, tender conscience, and gratitude. But who can fail to see how the thought of judgment to come enhances redemption? Is it not equally clear that the awe of redemption and the fear of not being worthy of it will always, in proportion as a man grows, come more and more to the front, and throw the other fear into the shade? Fear thus stands out as one of the main ways by which men pass from the life of self to the life of God, and the higher fear shines forth as the antidote to all that is selfish and narrow in the lower. J. Leckie, Sermons, p. 194. 1 Peter 1:18 The Ransom. Note:— I. The foreordination of the sacrifice. II. The preciousness of the sacrifice. III. The efficiency of the sacrifice in accomplishing its twofold object— (1) in satisfying Divine justice, for "God raised Him up from the dead, and gave Him glory"; (2) in effecting the emancipation of men from the dominion of sin and the corruption of their nature, redeeming them from their vain conversation, received by tradition from their fathers. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 149. References: 1 Peter 1:19.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi., No. 621; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 107; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year, p. 203; Homilist, 3rd series, vol. x., p. 286; A. C. Rice, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 108; J. Stannard, Ibid., vol. xiv., p. 232. 1 Peter 1:21.— L. D. Bevan, Ibid., vol. xxvii., p. 299. 1 Peter 1:22 Christian Love. I. Purity: "Love one another with a pure heart fervently." (1) The word for purified in this verse is not that denoting the infusion of virtue, but that which signifies the expulsion from the soul of all defilement, and especially of selfishness. (2) The way to secure this is by believing obedience to the truth as revealed in the Gospel. II. Unfeignedness: "unfeigned love of the brethren"— genuine love, without dissimulation, free from hypocrisy. (1) We read of faith unfeigned— that is, faith which is firm and solid to the core. (2) Love unfeigned is love which will not give way under trial, that will suffer a burden to be put on its back. III. Fervour: "with a pure heart fervently." This implies that our love of the brethren should be powerful enough (1) to overcome all sinful obstacles in our nature, (2) to overcome all national and sectarian differences. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 170. References: 1 Peter 1:23.— Spurgeon, Evening by Evening, p. 125; Homilist, 2nd series, vol. i., p. 325. 1 Peter 1:23 The New Birth. I. Man's inner and nobler life is not like his outer life, a life carried on in many of its most important functions unknown to himself. That lower life has its youth and its age, its vigour and its infirmity, its ruddy cheek and its grey hair, independently of him who lives it. These things follow a fixed law, and come upon us although we will not, and when we know not. But it is not so with the higher life of the Spirit. There is no unconsciousness here. No man lives unto God and knows it not. If you are made a son of God, by the power of the Spirit, through faith in Christ, you don't go about hoping and trusting you are God's, committing your eternal prospects to a miserable uncertainty; no, if you have this life, you know it, and you live it. The truth of love first softened, first warmed, first quickened, your hard, and cold, and dead hearts, first found its way, like a chance seed, under some broken bit of the surface, and obtained a lodgment there, so that the birds of the air snatched it not away, nor the foot of the passer-by trod it down. "The Father hath loved Me." Let this seed abide and work, and though little is done in comparison with what is to come, much is done in comparison with what is past. II. We want some Divine, abiding influence which may show us the wonders of that love; and so it was that when the incarnate and triumphant Son of God was taken from us He did not leave us orphans. He went up on high and received gifts for men, even God the Holy Spirit, who came down upon the assembled Church as the one fulfilled promise of the Father, the great result of redemption, the begetting, and enlivening, and enabling power of the new life in man. Without Him all were vain; without Pentecost Calvary were powerless. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iii., p. 324. References: 1 Peter 1:23-25.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii., No. 398; vol. xvii., No. 999. 1 Peter 1:24 The Frailty of Man. "For all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass." Disease is a democrat, like death. It makes no distinctions, and equalises all ranks in society, as the grave levels all mankind. For disease is no respecter of persons. It does not mind Cossacks on guard, or policemen on duty, or locks on doors; it has no awe of any king, or respect for purple and a crown, but invades a palace as well as a hovel. For we all go together in the main features of our wasting lives. We are all alike in weakness, in pain, in sorrow, and in death. Everything in the world is relative. Happiness is pretty evenly distributed. Fortune never comes with both hands full. In the main headings of our history you and I are alike; in sin and sorrow, in weakness and pain, by the open grave and with a broken heart, we are all alike— you and I, king and peasant. I. Now hear the argument and application. Since, as Simon Peter says, "all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass," since the longest life is such a pitiful span, since our days are flying before the pursuit of death, since you and I shall soon be "a kneaded clod in cold abstraction lying," since our little path across this world shall soon be overgrown with weeds and obliterated, and you and I forgotten— well, since that is so, what follows? "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die"? No. St. Peter and you do not agree. But since all flesh is as grass, since we die tomorrow, and we want to dream sweet dreams in the sleep of death, therefore— "wherefore" let us lay aside "all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil-speakings." Ah, that is better. We go with Peter. For since we are grass and live a brief day of years, what is the use of so much anxious care, of so much fretting and fussing? What is the good of hoarding money for other people to ruin themselves with when you are dead? What is the good of hating your neighbour? What is the sense of trying to act a part, of seeming other than we are, of being hypocrites? What is the gain of guile, or envy, or evil-speaking? Let us think no evil, and do no wrong; for this is the word of the Lord that endureth for ever: that all bitterness and wrath, that all anger and clamour, that all evil-speaking, that all malice, be put away from you. And let us be kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven us. Then, since I am grass, and disease is in the air, and I die tomorrow, I will have no dealings with malice, or hate, or envies; I will chide nobody in the world except myself, against whom I know most faults. And that is the moral. If all flesh is grass, let us remember it: no grudge, no guile, no hate, no evil-speaking, but to love one another, for we are only the dream of a dream anyway; we are only here a night and gone tomorrow. II. A man is only as big as his average deed— not an inch taller, not an ounce better— when it comes to assigning him his place among his fellows, or to rewarding him in presence of the judgment angels, before the throne of God; but a man is as big as his faith or his intention, thanks to Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice, when it comes to saving the soul of a dying thief on the cross, or, for that matter, the soul of you and me. The reward for deeds done in the body is one thing; salvation by faith in Jesus Christ is another thing. There shall be millions of people saved so as by fire. They won't take anything with them, not a bond, not a brick in a mansion, nothing. Everything but their little soul shall be consumed, and it saved so as by fire, as Lot was out of Sodom. But there are some thousands of people who won't go in through the gate empty-handed. No; they shall not merely be saved, but they shall have something in their hands. Like Vespasian coming amid triumphal acclaims up the Appian Way to the centre of the "Eternal City," with trophies won by conquests in many wars in far-away lands, so some heroes of God shall go through the gates, as Paul did, with stars of rejoicing in their crown. These are they who did Christ's works as well as confessed His name. J. R. Paxton, British Weekly Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 495. 1 Peter 1:24 The Great Contrast. Like the sway and swell of Christmas bells across the snow, like mournful music heard across the hurrying waves, like the haunting refrain of an enchanting song which refuses to be forgotten, come the words of this Apostle of human feeling chastened by penitence and sorrow, "All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass. The grass withereth; the flower thereof faileth." I. St. Peter is writing to the scattered congregations of the Lesser Asia. He is writing to comfort, to stimulate, to encourage. These poor struggling bands of Christians, surrounded by vast and unsympathetic heathen populations, needed all the assistance which could be given them by apostolic strength, and insight, and enthusiasm. St. Peter has his feet on the track of the greatest of the prophets; and just as the children of captive Israel must have found it hard to think of the vast Babylonian power which held them as anything but invincible, just as the spectacle of the immense material splendours of that ancient empire of palaces and temples must have overwhelmed their imagination, and therefore it was necessary for the prophet, gazing forward through these years of trial and sorrow, to leave them a certain assurance that all this earthly splendour was as passing as the withering grass or the fading flower, so it was now. II. "All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass." Here, then, under the pathetic image of the withering grass and the fading flower, the Apostle illustrates the passing character of that group of phenomena which he characterises as man and his glory. The glory of man! Yes, man, in many departments of his wide-reaching activity, has the glory which thrills and excites him in this mortal life. (1) There is, for instance, his glory in relation to nature. How marvellous have been at once the discoveries and the consequent achievements in the fields of science. (2) Think, again, of the development of those arts and inventions, side by side with a more enlightened social sentiment, which have made this scene of sense and time more suitable, less painful, to man as a passing home! We are not foolish if these are viewed as among God's gifts. (3) Or think of the beauties of art, the sweet songs of sweet singers, the entrancing tones of music, the triumphs of architecture, or the development of principles of loyalty to love and duty which have created or guided the immeasurable blessings of a civilised society and a Christian home. The mind has only to rest for a moment on any of these very real blessings to feel how real, how attractive, is "the glory of man"! This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/sermonbible/ 1 Peter 2:1 The Milk of the Word. This subject divides itself into three parts:— I. Healthy appetite, or, in other words, an earnest desire for spiritual nourishment: "As new-born babes, desire" earnestly, covet eagerly, "the sincere milk of the word." II. Healthy food, or, in other words, God's truth as contained in Holy Writ: "Desire the sincere milk of the word." The milk of the word, or, according to a better translation, rational milk, the sincere milk, i.e., milk free from all deleterious admixtures. III. Healthy growth: "that ye may grow thereby unto salvation." Growth unto salvation implies (1) growth in knowledge, (2) growth in holiness. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 214. References: 1 Peter 2:1-3.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii., No. 459. 1 Peter 2:2.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. iv., p. 139. 1 Peter 2:2 The Baptismal Vow. I. In our hearts and lives, the evil which we cast away is for ever returning; the truths which we have learned we are for ever forgetting; the good which we should do we are continually leaving undone. Wherefore our baptismal promise requires to be renewed, not once only at our confirmation, but continually all our lives. We never can hear another renewing it with his lips without having great cause to renew it ourselves also, for his need of renewing it is not greater than ours. And as the three parts of our vow, although distinct, are yet all renewed together at our confirmation, so do they need to be also by us all. Repentance, faith, and holiness are joined inseparably in all our earthly life; it is only by keeping them so joined that we shall come to that blessed division of them when, there being no more sin, there will be no more repentance, when sight will leave no place for faith, and holiness shall then be all in all for ever. II. Every day we need repentance. Our baptismal vow promised to renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that we would not follow or be led by them. It is either by the temptations of the flesh, or by those of the world, or by both, that by far the greatest number of souls, and in by far the greatest portion of their lives, are tempted and are overcome. The evil, then, not renounced, but allowed to overcome us, is a thing which requires of us indeed a deeper thought and a deeper sorrow than to many of us may seem even possible. We shall not care to believe God's truths, nor shall we care to follow His holiness, unless we do earnestly desire to renounce our evil, unless we watch for it everywhere, and fear God's judgment upon it, and believe that it is as great and as abiding as His word and as the death of His Son declares it to be. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. v., p. 122. 1 Peter 2:3 The Spiritual Temple of Priestly Worshippers. I. We have in the text a spiritual house: "Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house." Christ is the foundation; and as stone after stone is placed on Him, He, being a living stone, infuses His life right through the entire mass. Evidently no one can be a member of the Church unless he has come to Christ, for the Apostle distinctly says that the spiritual house consists of those who have come to the living Rock, Christ Jesus. (1) Now where are the stones formed? They are cut out of the quarry of nature; stone by stone is brought out of that deep cavern, placed upon the living Stone, and each united to the others. The Spirit of God goes into the deep, black quarry of human nature, and there hews out the hidden stones, and by His own almighty power bears them to the foundation-stone and places them in a living temple, to go no more out for ever. (2) The stones must be brought to each other. There must be union existing between all the stones of the spiritual temple, ay, and not only union, but also mutual support. While all rest on the foundation, each stone touches, and serves to strengthen and support, the others. (3) The Church is spiritual also in its glories. There was an external magnificence about the temple of Solomon, although the external glory even of that material temple was nothing compared with the internal beauty. But what is the beauty of the Lord's temple now? Is there anything external about it? You will find, generally speaking, that the majority of Christians consist of the poor. II. Within this spiritual house we have priestly worshippers— "a holy priesthood." The death of Christ abolished all earthly priesthood by making every believer a priest. In the old dispensation the priesthood was limited to one tribe; I should be correct if I said it was found in one family: but when Christ died, invisible hands took hold of the veil of the Temple and rent it in twain from the top to the bottom, and now, by virtue of union with Christ, every believer is a priest. It is this doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers that is the very core and centre of New Testament teaching. All believers in the world are kings and priests unto God; and though apparently without robes, yet are they all decked in the glorious garment of the Lord our Righteousness. III. Spiritual sacrifices. There can be no priesthood without sacrifices. The two things were correlative, and the chief employment of the priest was to offer up sacrifices. Now, although the work of sacrifice is changed in its nature, it is not done away with. In a spiritual house, and by a spiritual priesthood, there must, for the sake of conformity, be a spiritual sacrifice. What is the sacrifice that the holy priesthood offers? Surely (1) communion in prayer, (2) also communion in praise; and (3) we offer ourselves in sacrifice. A. G. Brown, Penny Pulpit, No. 1093. References: 1 Peter 2:3.— Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 142. 1 Peter 2:4.—Ibid., Sermons, vol. xxiii., No. 1334. 1 Peter 2:4 The Living Stone. I. Note the Church, or spiritual temple, in its foundation: Christ. II. The Church, or spiritual temple, in its superstructure. III. The Church, or spiritual temple, in its service: "a holy priesthood." J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 233.The Spiritual Church. Believers in Jesus are here presented in two aspects: they are called a "spiritual house" and "a holy priesthood," two phrases which, if you translate the word here rendered "house" into the more sacred word "temple," will be found to have a very religious significance and a very close connection with each other. "Coming to Christ as a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious," believers rise into a spiritual house from Christ, the great High-priest, consecrated after no carnal commandment; believers rise into a holy priesthood by a majestic investiture that is higher than the ordination of Aaron. There are two points especially presented to us here: spirituality and holiness. Let us take those and dwell upon them for a moment. I. Any thoughtful observer of the successive ages of the world's history will discover that each generation has in some remarkable particulars progressed upon its predecessor. This progress is inseparable from the creation of God; is present everywhere, from the formation of a crystal to the establishment of an economy; is seen in the successive dispensations in which God has manifested His will to man. You can trace through all these dispensations the essential unity of revealed religion. Believers are the stones in the spiritual temple, broken, it may be, into conformity or chiselled into beauty by successive strokes of trial; and wherever you find them, in the hut or the ancestral hall, in the climate of the snow or the climate of the sun, whether society hoot them or whether society honour them, whether they robe themselves in delicate apparel or rugged home-spun, they are parts of the grand temple which God esteems higher than cloister, crypt, or stately fane, and of which the top stone is to be brought on with shouting of "Grace, grace, unto it!" That is the first thought: a "spiritual house," and also of these lively stones is built up a "spiritual house." II. Then take the second thought: holiness: "a holy priesthood." In the Jewish dispensation these words often meant nothing more than an outward separation of the services of God. Thus the priests of the Temple and the vestments of their ministry were said to be ceremonially holy; but there is more in that word, surely, than this ritual of external sanctity. There is the possession of that mind which was in Christ Jesus the Lord; there is the reinstatement in us of that image of God which was lost by the foulness of the Fall. Many are the passages of Scripture in which holiness is considered as the supreme devotion of the heart to the service of God, and is represented as the requirement and the characteristic of Christianity. "What manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness?" "Be ye holy, as I am holy"; "As He which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation"; "For God hath not called us to uncleanness, but unto holiness"; "Having, therefore, these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God." W. M. Punshon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 161. References: 1 Peter 2:4, 1 Peter 2:5.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiii., No. 1376. 1 Peter 2:4-6.— W. Spensley, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xx., p. 268. 1 Peter 2:5 Trifles to do, not Trifles to leave undone. I. It was a great saying of the Psalmist when he said, "I am small and of no reputation, yet do I put my trust in Thee." A very great saying; for, indeed, nothing makes man yield to temptation so easily as the thought of being insignificant, and that what he does matters little. If you are so small that nothing you do makes much difference, and of no reputation, so that your actions will not be known, why not do as you please? insinuates the devil. Take your own way; no one will be the worse for so unknown and obscure a person. Satisfy your own will; God does not care, or man either, for you and yours. And so the deed is done which makes the leak; the little hole, as it were, is bored which lets the water through the dyke; the loosening has begun, and, small though it be, all will break up. It is the bad work of the small, the idle sins of the many of no reputation, that ruin the world. For, indeed, every life as a life is equally valuable. The progress of the world is marked by the level the many get to, or, in other words, by the goodness of the small and those of no reputation who nevertheless, like the Psalmist, put their trust in God. This main truth is stamped in characters so broad and large everywhere that, like the daily miracle of nature, no one heeds it. II. Never neglect in yourself or another what comes every day. Many a great love has been overthrown by a little disagreeable habit always recurring. The dropping of water has passed into a proverb for the transcendent power of this seeming weakness. And how do little, vexatious, and mean offenders, like the flies in summer, sting all the more because they are mean. That is great to us which touches us greatly. and small things touch us most; and our being small does not prevent us from being powers. E. Thring, Uppingham Sermons, vol. ii., p. 177. Society. I. The measure of a man's excellence is his power of uniting with others for good; the measure of a nation's excellence is the obedience and co-operative power that are in it, freedom from abusive language; freedom from violent acts; the sense to see great men; the sense to see great laws; the sense to appreciate good work and despise talk and self-glorification. The end of the world's existence is that this iron fact of society's linked chain shall become a glorious perfection of many in one and one in many, an image of the perfect unity of God. II. We all know that man does not live alone. How few consider the deep, the terrible meaning of this great fact. Take, for instance, Abraham and his race. How for thousands of years the Jew has been a marked man in feature, a marked man pre-eminent in patience, perseverance, intellect, in a word, in intense vitality, shown all the more as being the vitality of a fallen race, whilst all other fallen races have practically disappeared. What a grand inheritance Abraham, the faithful, the true, the temperate, the hardy man of God, passed on to his children taken as one body! Society means that good and evil are ever intermingling with unfailing energy, and that, as one or other prevails, the society lives or dies. This is as true on a large scale as on a small, true in a nation, true in a man. E. Thring, Uppingham Sermons, vol. ii., p. 171. References: 1 Peter 2:5.— E. Thring, Church of England Pulpit, vol. xiv., pp. 90, 103; J. G. Rogers, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 409; W. Skinner, Ibid., vol. xi., p. 225; A. Mursell, Ibid., vol. xxvi., p. 89; J. Keble, Sermons from Christmas to Epiphany, p. 313; Ibid., Sermons for Saints' Days, p. 415; J. Natt, Posthumous Sermons, p. 234; Homilist, 4th series, vol. i., pp. 296, 297. 1 Peter 2:6 The Divine Foundation. I. Jesus Christ as the foundation-stone. This means that Jesus is (1) the cardinal truth of the Christian system; (2) the central truth of Christianity; (3) the all-comprehensive truth of Christianity. II. Jesus Christ is the corner-stone, or the harmonising truth, of Christianity. He is the corner-stone (1) of the religions of the world; (2) of Christian doctrines; (3) of Christian Churches. III. He is the sure foundation. "Whosoever believeth in Him shall not be confounded." J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 251. I. Jesus Christ is the corner-stone, uniting Jews and Gentiles. (1) Jews and Gentiles met in His person. (2) They had a place in His ministry. (3) They are united in the Church He established. II. Jesus Christ is the corner-stone, uniting men and angels. III. He unites God and man (1) in His person; (2) in His ministry; (3) in His Church. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 271. Reference: 1 Peter 2:6.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiv., No. 1429. 1 Peter 2:6-7 Christ the One Foundation. Let us consider a few of the senses in which Christ makes good this title of corner-stone. I. How, do we think, did the first preachers to the heathen win converts? By appealing to men's deepest sense of need, to the felt necessity of a centralising, consolidating principle of human life. Two things, at least, we must secure if life is not to be a failure. (1) One is something certainly true, a truth to stand by amid uncertainties. As we advance in our earthly journey, perplexities gather round on all sides; life has not verified our first expectations; it raises questions which it does not answer; there is a confusion and discord of theories, but where is that which we can depend upon and grasp firmly, looking life and death in the face? The answer is in the words of Jesus, "I am the Truth." (2) Again, man needs a power of moral and spiritual rectification. He wants to be cleansed from his own unholiness, relieved of his own sense of guilt, otherwise he cannot build in peace; how should he? Life, to be worth having, must be a life with a quiet conscience. To believers in Christ He is all-precious, because He can and does help them to become pure and single-hearted, high in aim and active in duty. II. In His relation to the several doctrines and institutions of His kingdom, Christ sustains the character of the one foundation. (1) It is so in regard to doctrines; He is the one object whom they set before us. (2) He is also the foundation of all His ordinances. (3) If Christ be in these ways the foundation of our spiritual life in all its aspects, should He not be also the foundation of all that we do? Let us "consider our ways," and resume the building of the spiritual house within us, being assured that the promise will be abundantly verified to us, "Be strong, and work, for I am with you." W. Bright, Morality in Doctrine, p. 291. 1 Peter 2:7 The Preciousness of Christ. The writer, in some four or five verses of the chapter, has been employing the image of a building, or rather of a temple, to describe the relation existing between Christ and His Church. According to this image, the Lord Jesus Christ is the solid foundation-stone, which bears the weight of the entire superstructure, and upon which the firmness and solidity of the edifice depend. This stone has been selected by God and placed by Him in its appointed situation; this stone, moreover, is a living stone: it has the property of communicating life to that which is brought into contact with it, and to it are drawn in rapid succession the other living stones, the members of the mystical body of Christ, who are to be built together into a spiritual house. The main thought of the passage— that Christ, the personal Christ, is the foundation-stone of the sacred structure, and that as such He is precious to a certain class of persons, though undervalued and contemned by others— is simple and obvious enough. I. Christ is valuable, or precious, when considered in Himself. The rarity of an article or of a substance is one of the constituting causes of its value. The one last copy of a remarkable edition of a remarkable book; the one picture of a famous artist, who deviated for once from his ordinary style, and left behind him a singular production of his genius; the one gem, which surpasses all other gems in size and brilliance, or even, it may be, in the peculiarity of its defects— these things, and such as these, are frequently the subjects of an earnest and eager competition, and happy is the man considered to be who can succeed in making himself the possessor of a coveted prize. Rarity, then, makes a thing valuable. And if so, how valuable must He be whom the Scripture calls wonderful, He who is the only-begotten of the Father, the incarnate Son of God. (2) Our foundation-stone is precious also on account of its own intrinsic worth and excellence and its perfect adaptation to the purpose which it is intended to subserve. (3) Christ's preciousness is enhanced by that training and discipline, that process of intellectual and spiritual preparation, which it was the Father's good will that He should be called upon to undergo. II. Christ is valuable, not only in Himself, but also in the estimation of His people. They think much of Him. There is nothing His people would not consent to part with, if the parting were necessary, in order to retain their possession of Christ. And Christ is more precious to His people the longer and the better they know Him. I have heard it said that the feeling of many persons, when they first see the far-famed cathedral of St. Peter at Rome, is one of disappointment. The building seems neither so large, nor so grand, nor so imposing, nor so beautiful as they had expected it to be. But when they become better acquainted with it the feeling of disappointment passes away; the beauty, the glory, grow upon the visitor. So what we knew and appreciated of Christ when we first put ourselves into His hands is as nothing when compared with what we know and appreciate of Him upon further acquaintance. G. Calthrop, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 1005. 1 Peter 2:7-8 Believers and Unbelievers. I. The relation which Jesus Christ sustains to believers: "Unto you therefore which believe He is precious." (1) The first element in our idea of preciousness is rarity. (2) Another important element in our idea of preciousness is usefulness. (3) There must also be real intrinsic worth. All these we have in Christ Jesus. II. The relation which Christ sustains to unbelievers. (1) He is by them rejected. (2) He becomes to them a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. (3) Those who through unbelief crucify to themselves afresh the Son of God do themselves incalculable moral hurt. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 288. References: 1 Peter 2:7, 1 Peter 2:8.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v., No. 242; vol. xvi., No. 931; vol. xxi., No. 1224; Ibid., Evening by Evening, p. 61; H. Allon, The Vision of God, p. 75; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 124. 1 Peter 2:9 Predestination. I. It is impossible to read the Scriptures and not to see that there are some persons predestinated to glory. There are persons who, in the words of St. Paul, are vessels which God hath aforetime prepared unto glory. It is a fact— we see it with our eyes— that God makes a distinction between the heathen who have never heard the name of Christ and the Christian. The latter has high privileges which the former has not. The Christian has God's word to guide him, but not only this: he has the Holy Spirit dwelling in him; he can reach to higher degrees of excellence here; and reason would surmise that he is intended for higher enjoyments hereafter. What reason surmises, revelation asserts. This, then, is the first, the foundation blessing of Christianity, in which we may humbly rejoice, and according to which all spiritual blessings are to be dispensed; it is the first link in the golden chain of glory which is to raise man from earth to heaven, the first round of that ladder up which man is to ascend to God, as angels descend to man. II. But we may proceed yet farther. Our blessed Saviour tells us that there are many mansions in His Father's house, comparing the house that is to be to that which existed on earth while He yet tabernacled with men. In the temple of the first Jerusalem there was a variety of chambers or mansions, employed for different purposes, though all relating directly or indirectly to the services of the sanctuary. In the new Jerusalem, which will itself be the temple of the universe, there will in like manner be many mansions or chambers. It is very possible that we are not only each of us predestined to heaven, but predestined also each to our particular place in heaven, that our very mansion is fixed. Let the glory which is awaiting us, and to which we are predestined, elevate our characters, ennoble our thoughts, extend our views. Co-heirs we are with Christ Himself, who is our Head; vessels we are designed for high honour; we are of the household of the King of kings; we are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, called out of darkness into His marvellous light. W. F. Hook, Sermons on Various Subjects, p. 48. References: 1 Peter 2:9.— R. Flint, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxiv., p. 216; Preacher's Monthly, vol. x., p. 284. 1 Peter 2:9-10 The True Israel. I. "Ye are a chosen generation," the word "generation" here meaning, not contemporaries, but the offspring of one common parent, the offshoots of one original stock. The Israelites were a special "generation." (1) They had sprung from Abraham as their common progenitor. (2) The Jews were, moreover, a "chosen generation"— called out of the darkness of Chaldæan idolatry to the marvellous light of Divine revelation. II. "Ye are a royal priesthood." (1) The Jews were a nation of priests. (2) "A royal priesthood." "Ye are kings and priests," kings over yourselves and priests unto God. A grand spectacle to see men monarchs of themselves, ruling their own passions and keeping their lusts in subjection. (3) "Ye are a royal priesthood, to show forth the excellences of Him who hath called you.". By your holy conversation, upright demeanour, you are to show forth the character of your God. III. "Ye are a holy nation." As a people bound together for the purposes of holiness, we should show forth the excellences of God. J. C. Jones, Studies in First Peter, p. 307. References: 1 Peter 2:12.— Archbishop Thomson, Church of England Pulpit, vol. i., p. 273. 1 Peter 2:12, 1 Peter 2:13.—Clergyman's Magazine, vol. ii., p. 98. 1 Peter 2:15.— W. Walters, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xviii., p. 358; J. Keble, Sermons from Easter to Ascension, p. 303. 1 Peter 2:16I. The designation "servant of God" embodies an opinion or theory about human life. When a being like man finds himself in this present sphere of existence, with the endowments of thought and of passion which go to make up his nature, he naturally asks himself how he may make the best of his opportunity. For some men life is pleasure; for others it is energy; for others it is active thought; for the last class it is moral excellence. In all these cases, man lives within the compass of his own being, for something which it yields, or which, as he think, satisfies and completes it. His pleasure, his energy and thought, nay, his very virtue, are parts of himself. They exist as sensations, moods, facts, satisfactions of his being; they have no existence apart from him. The servant of God, too, may— nay, will sooner or later— taste exquisite pleasures, may exercise his thought on the highest subjects, may achieve real excellence in character and conduct; nay, in different degrees he cannot help doing this: but for him these things are not ends of action; they are only the accompaniments of his real object. He thinks of life only as service; he conceives of it as the surrender of his will, of his time, of his affections, of his intellect and memory, of his goods, if needs be, of his friendship, reputation, and health, and life, to a perfectly holy Being, who exists in utter independence of himself, who has the very highest claim upon his obedience. For him life is a constant sense of having upon him a Master's eye; it is a constant reference to what is known or may be inferred about a Master's will. II. The right and property which God has over all men, as based on creation, is in the case of Christians reinforced by a second right based upon redemption. When all had been lost by abuse of that free will which is man's highest endowment, the infinite mercy stooped from heaven in the person of the Eternal Son to rescue us from misery and from shame, to endow us with the means of grace and with the hope of glory. If it is maintained that the service of God is unworthy of man's dignity, the answer is, first, that God made man, and, secondly, that He has made man to know and to serve Himself. Our human nature, notwithstanding its ancient error, does when cross-questioned point upwards; and experience confirms what reason and observation suggest. Those who have served God, though amidst imperfections and failures, yet do know that this service expands, satisfies, completes, all that is best and strongest in their thoughts and affections; above all, that it corresponds with the facts of their being, that it is based on truth. H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit, No. 821. 1 Peter 2:16 The text sets before us the limits of Christian liberty, the responsibility which lies upon every Christian for the right government of his private individual will, according to what he knows, or ought to know, or might have known, of the will of God. I. The love of liberty is generally said to be a feeling implanted in the heart of man. It begins to show itself in his earliest years. Even in our childhood we are all apt to show impatience at the control exercised over us by our parents and guardians, and in our strong manhood we chafe under the restraints of law and the commands of our superiors whenever they happen for the moment to cross or impede anything we desire to do. The sense of freedom is itself pleasure. II. And yet, notwithstanding this hearty love of freedom, which appears so natural to us, the very earliest lesson we have to learn is that we are not free to act as we please even in earthly matters; that our will is not our own, but that of our parents and governors. Even when we are grown up and think we are about to taste the desired fruits of the liberty of manhood, the disagreeable conviction is forced upon us that if we would live happily and creditably here, we must prevent our desires and wills from ranging too widely. It is our highest interest, as it is our bounden duty, to consider in all our actions how far they will be for the general good as well as for our own good. III. This, then, is the measure of the Christian's liberty in the world. We are free agents within the limits of God's laws, and of human laws also, as deriving their force and value from God's permission. The true Christian is the only man who is free upon earth because he will never desire to do more than God's law permits him, and that, indeed, in glorious liberty. There is no such freedom as serving God. P. Williams, Oxford and Cambridge Journal, April 24th, 1884. Freedom and Law. I. Christ has given to us men, first of all, political or social freedom. He has not, indeed, drawn out a scheme of government and stamped it with His Divine authority as guaranteeing freedom. The New Testament only notices two elements in man's life as a political or social being. One is the existence of some government which it is a duty to obey, be it assembly, president, king, or emperor; the other element is the freedom of the individual Christian under any form of government whatever. The whole social fabric totters to its base when there is a conflict between human law and Divine law enthroned in conscience, when law and the highest liberty are foes. To avoid such a misfortune must be the aim of all wise legislators, to deprecate it the heartfelt prayer of all good citizens. II. Christ gave men also intellectual freedom. He enfranchised them by the gift of truth. He gave truth in its fulness, truth absolute and final. Until He came the human intellect was enslaved. The religion of Christ gave an immense impulse to human thought. He led men out into the great highways of thought, where, if they would, they might know the universal Father, manifested in His blessed Son, as the Author of all existence, as its object and as its end. III. Christ has made us morally free. He has broken the chains which fettered the human will, and has restored to it its buoyancy and power. Man was morally free in paradise; he became enslaved in consequence of that act of disobedience which we name the Fall. How was he to be enfranchised? What had been lost was more than regained in Christ. A Christian lives under a system of restrictions and obligations; and yet he is free. Those obligations and restrictions only prescribe for him what his own new, heaven-sent nature would wish to do and to be. They are acceptable to, they are demanded by, the "new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness." H. P. Liddon, Easter Sermons, vol. ii., p. 211. References: 1 Peter 2:16.— H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty, vol. i., p. 227; E. Bickersteth, Church of England Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 221; Preacher's Monthly, vol. vii., p. 295. 1 Peter 2:16-17 Christian Freedom. I. We are here warned against two great enemies of our souls, which are ever seeking to bring us into bondage, and to substitute for the true Christian liberty the fancied freedom, but real slavery, of self-indulgence. These two enemies are (1) the lust of the flesh, and (2) pride. Our own consciences will tell us that they are not enemies whose hostility is limited to persons placed in particular circumstances or to one particular period of Christian history, but that they make war upon all classes at all times. One proof of their universal enmity to Christ's servants is that they are two of the temptations through which the devil assailed Christ. It well becomes us, then, to take heed against snares so subtle that they were chosen by the great enemy for his own evil purposes; and, at the same time, if we tremble at our own experience and recollection of their power, we shall be comforted by the thought of One who, in that He Himself hath suffered being tempted, being tempted by those very inclinations, is able to succour them that are tempted. II. Selfishness and pride are here set before us as the two great enemies which war against the soul, and are ever seeking to bring it into bondage. And how are we to be delivered from their fetters, or from their assaults? The true reason why we remain slaves to these passions, in some one or more of their various manifestations, is that we are still strangers to the love of God. It is only in Christ that we can find safety or deliverance. Seek for true freedom in forgetting yourselves and remembering Him; think of the witness borne by His life and death against all self-seeking and self-exaltation; and learning to see all things and all persons no longer through the mists of pride and selfishness, but in the pure, heavenly radiance of His Gospel, let each offer up to Him the thoughtful prayer,— "Give unto me, made lowly wise, The spirit of self-sacrifice; The confidence of reason give; And in the light of truth Thy bondman let me live." G. E. L. Cotton, Expository Sermons on the Epistles, vol. ii., p. 1. 1 Peter 2:17 The Obligation of Christians to the World and the Church. I. "Honour all men." Christians in deed and truth, called by the grace of God to be a peculiar people, separate from the world, have this rule laid upon them. Why? Because in all men, even in those who refuse the Gospel, in the worshippers of the world, in those who are strangers to the family of Christ, there is something worthy of honour. The most depraved of the human race has an infinite price set upon his life; the blood of the meanest does not fall to the ground unavenged. There is a Divine light, "which lighteth every man that cometh into the world"; and for the sake of that, honour is due unto him, though by choosing darkness rather than light he has dishonoured himself. You owe to all men courtesy, generosity, charity, respect, and (what is perhaps harder than all) justice. II. Having fulfilled this law, draw the line broadly and distinctly between it and the second rule: "Love the brotherhood." Remember where you are, if you be lively members of the body of Christ. You have been chosen out of the world, gathered into a fold of which Christ is the door, adopted into a home for the members of which He prayed to the Eternal Father "that they may be one, as We are." If you be true to your character, you will find in the peace of love and unity of your Christian home not only a solace for the troubles of the world, but a counterattraction against its sinful pleasures and shelter against its dangers. And, moreover, that love and union, which ministers to your joy, serves to the glory of God, and wins souls from the world into the Church. C. W. Furse, Sermons at Richmond, p. 143. References: 1 Peter 2:17.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. i., p. 405; vol. xiii., p. 274; R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons, 4th series, p. 51; Homilist, 3rd series, vol. iv., p. 25; F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xix., p. 17; R. Duckworth, Ibid., vol. xxiv., p. 211; J. G. Rogers, Ibid., vol. xxvii., p. 117. 1 Peter 2:19 Patience under Undeserved Wrong. I. St. Peter teaches that suffering is thankworthy, a gift from God, and acceptable in turn to Him, if it be accompanied by two conditions. (1) It must be undeserved. A slave, too, might be punished for doing what would merit punishment in a free man; a slave, too, might be violent, or abusive, or careless about that which belonged to others, or intemperate, or dishonest, or treacherous. If punished for offences of this kind, he might not complain. "What glory is it," asks St. Peter, "if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently?" The law, the eternal law, that punishment follows wrong-doing, is not suspended in the case of the slave. (2) And such suffering must be for conscience toward God. It must be borne for God's cause and sake, and with a good hope of God's approval. This it is which makes pain at once bearable and bracing, when the conscience of the sufferer can ask the perfect moral Being to take note of it, just as David does in so many of his psalms. "Look Thou upon me, and be merciful unto me. Lord, be Thou my Helper." Mere suffering which a man dares not offer to God, though it be borne patiently through physical courage, through "pluck," as we term it, has no spiritual value. "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." This is the Consecration Prayer, uttered on the cross, uttered, if in other language, wherever men suffer for conscience toward God; and by it suffering is changed— changed assuredly into moral victory. II. And here it may be asked, "Why did not the Apostles denounce slavery as an intolerable wrong? Why did they trifle with it, and allow the Church which succeeded them to trifle with it? Why did they seem, indirectly at least, to sanction it by advising slaves to honour and obey their owners? Was not this of the nature of a compromise between good and evil— between the high principles of Christian morality on the one hand and the debased institutions of heathen life on the other? Would it not have been better to break with slavery at once and altogether,— better for the honour of the Christian revelation, better for the best interest of man?" Certainly, nothing can well be more antipathetic than the spirit of the Gospel and the spirit of slavery; for slavery postulates an essential distinction between man and man, which is unknown to the Gospel. The Gospel proclaims the unity of the human race and the equality of all its members before God. The Gospel is based upon, and it consecrates, the laws of God in nature; and slavery, on the other hand, is distinctly unnatural: it is a rejection of the fundamental equality of man. It often, and very consistently, professes to reject belief in the unity of the human race. To slavery the deepest of all distinctions between human beings is the distinction between the man who is his own owner and the man who is owned by another. "In Christ Jesus," exclaims the Apostle, "there is neither bond nor free." But the exact question which the Apostles had to consider was not whether slavery was a bad social institution or theoretically indefensible, but this: whether slavery necessarily ruined the prospects of the human soul. A slave might be a Christian— he might be the best of Christians— easily enough. If he were harshly treated, that was not peculiar to his condition of life; it might even promote his sanctification. If he were tempted to do wrong, St. James would tell him that he should count this all joy, knowing that the trial of his faith worked endurance. If he had to choose between sinful compliance with a master's will and punishment, though that punishment were death, he, with his eyes fixed on the Divine Sufferer, would know his part. The grace of God may make the soul of man independent of outward circumstances; and there is no real slavery when the soul is free. At the same time, although the Apostles were working, as I have said, for another world, in the course of doing so, and, as it were, incidentally, they were destined to be, from the nature of the case, great social reformers in this. They could not but detest slavery, but how was it to be done away with? Was it to be by some sudden revolutionary effort, supposing the thing to be possible? Was it to be by the influence of new principles— first upon the opinions of men, and then upon the structure of society? The Apostles chose the latter method, but it was a method which took time. The Apostles trusted to the infiltration of new principles into the thoughts and actions of men, and not to those violent and tragical catastrophes which, even when they succeed, succeed amid ruins. It was not the duty of the Gospel to proclaim a social war. There were sects at that time nearly related to Judaism. The Essenes and Therapeutæ they were called, and their teaching was certainly very familiar to St. Paul— sects which held that the slave should at once refuse all obedience to his master, in the name of human rights. But slaves, maddened by oppression into rebellion against order, would not, in that age at least, have put an end to slavery. It was better to teach a higher ideal of life, both to the slave and to the master, and meanwhile to proclaim the truth, "This is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully." In Christian households, a hundred courtesies softened the hardship of the legal relation between master and slave. The sense of a common brotherhood in Christ had already sapped the idea of any radical inequality between them. H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 943. 1 Peter 2:20 Writing probably from Rome, certainly in one of the closing years of his life, St. Peter saw the great tendency of social and political circumstances around him towards that outbreak of violence against the worshippers of Christ which is known in history as the first persecution, in which he and St. Paul laid down their lives. He is anxious to prepare the Asiatic Christians for the trials which are before them. Then, as now, there were bad Christians who fell under the just sentence of the criminal law, and St. Peter reminds them that there is no moral glory in suffering that which we have deserved, even though we take our punishment uncomplainingly. "What glory is it if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently?" But he knew also that cruel and aggravated sufferings awaited numbers of inoffensive men and women, whose only crime would be that they were worshippers of the meek and lowly Jesus and centres of light and goodness in a corrupt and demoralised society. When the storm burst, as it would burst, they might be tempted to think that the government of the world was somehow at fault in this award of bitter punishment to virtuous and benevolent persons, conscious of the integrity of their intentions, conscious of their desire to serve a holy God, to do any good in their power to their fellow-creatures. Accordingly St. Peter puts their anticipated trials in a light which would not, at first sight, present itself, and which does not lie upon the surface of things: "If, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God." There is no glory in submitting to deserved punishment; there is a peculiar moral glory in patience under unmerited wrong, if not according to any human, yet certainly according to a Divine, standard. "This is acceptable with God." Now, many men have said, and more, perhaps, have thought, about such teaching as this, that it is a splendid paradox. That a criminal should suffer what he has deserved satisfies the sense of justice; that a good man should suffer what he has not deserved violates the sense of justice: and if he submits uncomplainingly, he acquiesces in injustice. Nay, he does more: he forfeits the independence, the glory, of his manhood. His business as a man, knowing himself to be innocent, is, we are told, to resist to the last extremity, and to submit at last, if he must submit, under protest against the violence which deprives him of his liberty or his life. The precept to take it patiently is, in a word, objected to as effeminate and anti-social. I. Now, here it must be remarked that for serious Christians this question is really settled by the precepts and example of our Lord Himself. "Even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow His steps: who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth: who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not; but submitted Himself to Him that judgeth righteously." In His public teaching our Lord made much of patient submission to undeserved wrong. He pronounced those men blessed who suffered for righteousness' sake. "Blessed are ye," He says, "when men shall revile you and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely. Rejoice and be exceeding glad." Not in exemption from suffering, but in truthful endurance, would His true followers find their peace. "In your patience possess ye your souls." Nay more, Christians, He says, are to welcome such trials. They are to meet the persecutor half-way. If smitten on one cheek, they are to present the other. They are to do good to them that hate them, to pray for their persecutors, for their calumniators; and their example is the all-merciful God, who sheds the light of day, who sends down the rain, upon those who set Him at defiance, upon the just and the unjust. For Christians the question whether patience under undeserved wrong is right, is a duty, is not an open question. It has been settled by the highest authority— our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. From His teaching there is no appeal. In His example we Christians see the true ideal of human life. "As He is, so are we in this world," says St. John; "Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ," says St. Paul; "Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that we should follow His steps," says St. Peter. And for thousands upon thousands of Christians in every generation this has decided the matter, and will decide it. If He in whom the prince of this world had no part, who is fairer than the children of men, thus came among us wounded and bruised for transgressions and iniquities which were not His own, why should we discuss the question any further whether patient submission to undeserved wrong is or is not a duty? It is ruled by the highest of all authorities, by the first of all precedents. "As He is, so are we in this world." II. Although it is true that sin is followed by punishment, because God is righteousness, it does not follow that all human suffering in this life is a punishment for sin. The Jews came to think that, whatever sufferings befell a man, they must be in exact proportion to his personal sinfulness, and therefore that the very suffering and unfortunate among mankind were, so to speak, placarded by God's providence as the most conspicuous of sinners,— that misfortunes and agony were sure proofs of known or undiscovered crime. The Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices were supposed to be sinners above all the Galileans. The eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell were adjudged worse men than any of their contemporaries. Such a theory would have regarded a fire attended with loss of life, or a great railway accident, as God's revelation of a certain number of possibly unsuspected, but certainly very wicked criminals indeed. Against this idea the Old Testament itself contains some very emphatic protests. Thus the book of Job has for its main object to show that Job's misfortunes are no real measure of his sins. His unyielding resistance to his friends on this point, followed by the Divine verdict in his favour at the close of the book, shows that pain and misfortune are not to be regarded as always penal. And if the question be asked by some anxious soul, "How am I to know? Is this unjust humiliation, or this insult, or this loss of means, or this illness, or this heartache, a punishment for past sin, or a tender discipline?" the answer is, "Conscience must itself reply." Conscience reveals to man the true meaning of pain, not pain the contents of conscience. No outward sign marks one misfortune as a penalty, and another misfortune as a discipline; but conscience, with the map of life spread out before it, is at no loss for information. III. In this glad acceptance of undeserved pain we see one of the central forces of the Christian religion, by which, as a matter of fact, it made its way among men eighteen centuries ago and ever since. The religion of Jesus Christ, embodied in His own teaching, and illustrated by His cross, has brought to bear a mighty force upon human life: the force of passive virtue. Heathenism knew something of active virtue. Energy for good in many forms was highly rated by it; but the passive excellences of Christian character— love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness— were known very slightly, or known only to be despised as mean-spirited and effeminate. Yet, in truth, passive virtue often requires more courage than active virtue. In battle soldiers can often rush forward to the charge when they cannot keep their ranks under a heavy fire; and in life to do is again and again easier, far easier, than simply to bear. Patient endurance is, indeed, a moral accomplishment, in which, as a rule, women do better than men, but it is not, in the depreciatory sense of the term, effeminate. It belongs to the highest forms of human courage. Effeminate, indeed! It is the passive virtue which has conquered the world for Christ. In the early Church there was no great stock of those showy qualities which take society by storm. Not many mighty, we know, not many wise, not many noble, were called. Few could speak or act so as to control the attention of mankind at large; but there was a something that all could do. All— such was Christ's strengthening grace— all could suffer in such fashion as to show that a new power was abroad in the world— a power before which pain, man's ancient enemy, had ceased to be formidable. Literature, social prestige, political influence, were all against the Church; but in the long run the old empire was no match for a religion which could teach its sincere votaries generation after generation to regard pure suffering as a privilege, as a mark of God's favour, as a pledge of glory. And if this way of taking the troubles which are laid upon us supplies Christianity with its force, so it secures to human life its best consolations. It will not matter much in the long run, if by discipline the neck of our natural pride is broken, and our old sins are finally put away, and love to God is purged from earthly alloy, and an advance is made in sweetness, in humility, in self-denial, in submission to God's will, in all the points which are least easy, even for serious Christians, to acquire. "Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us an exceeding, an eternal, weight of glory." "Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 806. 1 Peter 2:21 The Great Exemplar. I. That which strikes us first in the example which Christ has left is its faultlessness. We are startled by His own sense of this. He never utters one word to God or to man which implies the consciousness of a single defect. Read the lives of the great servants of God in the Old or New Testament— of Abraham, of Moses, of Samuel, of David, of Elijah, of St. Peter, of St. Paul. They all confess sin. They all humble themselves before men. They implore the mercy of God. Think of any great man whom you have ever known, or whose life you have read. He has feared God, loved God, worked for God through long years; yet he is full of the sense of his inconsistencies, of his imperfections, pervading his life and his conduct. He is profuse in his acknowledgments of his weakness and of his sin. Nay, if he were not thus willing to confess his sin, you yourself would question his goodness, for what he says is, as you instinctively feel, no more than the fact. But Jesus Christ reproaches Himself for nothing, confesses nothing, regrets nothing. He is certain of all that He says and does. "I do always those things that please the Father." In this sinlessness He is, although our model, yet beyond our full reach of imitation. We cannot in our maimed and broken lives reproduce the complete image of the immaculate Lamb. The best of men knows that in his best moments he is beset by motives, thoughts, inclinations, from which Christ was utterly free. "If we say that we have not sinned, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." But this does not destroy— on the contrary, it enhances— the value of His ideal example. In all departments of thought and work the ideal is, strictly speaking, by man unattainable. Yet man may never lose sight of the ideal. In the Gospels ideal human life appears in a form of flesh and blood. It is the ideal, and, therefore, it is beyond us; yet it is not the less precious as a stimulus and guide to our effort at self-improvement. II. And then, again, we are struck by the balance and perfection of excellences in our Lord's human character. As a rule, if a man possesses some one excellence in an unusual degree, he will be found to exhibit some fault or shortcoming in an opposite direction. Now, of this want of balance in excellence, of this exaggeration of particular forms of excellence, which thus passes into defect, there is no trace in our Lord. Read His life over and over again with this object in view, and, unless I am mistaken, nothing will strike you more than its faultless proportions. III. Consider, again, a feature which runs through His whole character: its simplicity. In nothing that He says or does can we detect any trace of striving after effect. The number of men of whom anything remotely like this is true is very small indeed. The effort to create an impression is the result sometimes of timidity, sometimes of vanity, but it always impairs moral beauty, whether of speech or work. Our Lord always says what He has to say in the most natural and unpretending words. His sentences unfold themselves without effort or system, just as persons and occasions demand. Every situation offers an opportunity, and He uses it. He attends a wedding; He cures a paralytic; He stoops to write upon the ground; He eats with a Pharisee; He raises a corpse to life; He washes the feet of His disciples, just as it comes, just as is right from day to day, from hour to hour, from minute to minute. The most important and useful acts follow on with the most trivial and ordinary. There is no effort, no disturbing or pretentious movement. All is as simple as if all were commonplace. It is this absence of anything like an attempt to produce unusual impressions which reveals a soul possessed with a sense of the majesty and the power of truth. Depend upon it, in the degree in which any man becomes really great, he becomes also simple. IV. And one further point to be remarked in our Lord's example is the stress which it lays upon those forms of excellence which make no great show, such as patience, humility, and the like. As we read the Gospels we are led to see that the highest type of human excellence consists less in acting well than in suffering well. The ancient world never understood this. With them virtue was always active force. Yet the conditions of our human life are such that, whether we will or no, we are more frequently called upon to endure than to act; and upon the spirit in which we endure everything depends. Our Lord restored the passive virtues to their forgotten and true place in human conduct. He revealed the beauty, the majesty, of patience, of meekness, of uncomplaining submission. Experience has shown that Christ's Divinity is no bar whatever to an imitation of His life as man. And this imitation is not a duty which we are free to accept or decline. "The elect," says St. Paul, "are predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son of God." If there is no effort at this conformity, there is no note of a true predestination. We cannot enter into the designs of God in giving us His Son if we are making no effort to be like His Son. Like the law, the life of Christ is a schoolmaster to bring us to the cross of Christ. After gazing at Him we come to Him out of heart with ourselves, emptied, happily emptied, of self, crushed by a sense of our utter unworthiness to bear His name, to wear His livery; and He once more stretches His pierced hand to pardon, and offers the chalice of His blood to strengthen our souls for such work as may remain to make them more like Himself. H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 1091. References: 1 Peter 2:21.— R. Balgarnie, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxix., p. 407; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year, p. 152; Ibid., The Life of Duty, vol. i., p. 218; Preacher's Monthly, vol. v., p. 354; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. ii., p. 91. 1 Peter 2:21-22 Christ our Example. I. While our salvation is specifically described as the effect of our Lord's greatest obedience— that is, His death— yet, viewing the subject of redemption generally, our salvation is the fruit of His whole obedience. This is apparent from the plan itself of salvation, as revealed to the enlightened mind of a Christian in the Scriptures of truth. It was necessary that the High-priest of our profession should be holy, harmless, undefiled; that of Him, the Victim who suffered for us, it should be asserted and proved that He did no sin, and that guile was not found in His mouth. II. His history has been before the world for more than eighteen hundred years. For eighteen hundred years the world has frequently made the attempt to imagine a faultless character; but no faultless character has ever been exhibited to mankind but that of our Jesus. His charity, His piety, His purity, His fortitude, His self-possession, His self-denial, His self-government— all prove the perfection of His character and confirm the judgment of His very enemies. They could not even ground condemnation on the frivolous accusation of the false witnesses, but condemned Him at last for that fact which is the very foundation of our hope: they condemned Him because He declared Himself to be the Son of God, thereby, as they correctly and logically reasoned, making Himself equal with God. The Lord Jesus was condemned for asserting His Divinity. III. He is now held forth to us as an example, that we should follow His steps. The precise point marked out for our imitation is not obedience simply, but obedience attended with suffering. Our virtues are never to be trusted until they are tried, and they are never tried without suffering. The Christian, then, will bear his trials thankfully. He will thank God for removing from his heart even that which rends his heart asunder, because he knows that God does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men; that He only sends affliction to effect for us or in us some ulterior blessing; and that it is good for us to be afflicted, affliction working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. W. F. Hook, Parish Sermons, p. 226. 1 Peter 2:24 The Witness of the Apostles. I. St. Peter says of Christ, with whom he had lived in daily intercourse, He "bare our sins in His own body on the tree." Wonderful and unexampled assertion that He whom he called the sacrifice for human sin, the reconciliation of the world, was no person whose name had come down to him from the remoteness of time, but One whom he had himself known! He had known Him, and yet he proclaimed this unutterable mystery about Him. Had our Lord been mere man, do we not know what must have followed a constant, near intercourse with Him? How could a claim to a supernatural spotlessness, as the Lamb of God, had it not been real, have stood such an ordeal? It must have vanished with the light of day and the constant scrutiny of watchful eyes. Yet it was those who had the closest connection with Christ who announced to the world the tremendous mystery which attached to Him, the mystery which, as St. Paul says, had been hid from ages and generations: that He was the image of the invisible God, the Firstborn of every creature; that He was before all things, and that by Him all things consist; and that it pleased the Father by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, whether they be things in heaven or things on earth, having made peace by the blood of His cross. II. And were the Apostles men whose witness can be set aside upon any ground of weakness, want of judgment and proper strength of mind? I think it may be said that it would be difficult to point out any set of men in history whose judgment, so far as we can gather from their conduct and writings, upon a life and character would be more solid and more competent. Our Lord gathered about Him the choicest specimens of the Jewish mind, strong and vigorous men, as their after-life showed, men of solid character and understanding, who were able when left to themselves to carry on the work which He had begun with power and firmness, with a wise policy as well as an ardent zeal, and who showed themselves able to cope with adversaries and the assailing forces of the world. It was this company of men that surrounded Jesus Christ during His earthly ministry. It was such men who saw in Christ the Man without sin, the undefiled Lamb of God, who took away the sin of the world, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. It was the purpose of God to give us that special guarantee to the supernatural holiness of Christ which was contained in the testimony of such men, who had known Him, and lived with Him, and yet felt this assurance about Him, to show us that the belief in the mystery about Him had gone through the most trying of all ordeals: familiarity with Him. J. B. Mozley, Sermons Parochial and Occasional, p. 278. References: 1 Peter 2:24.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. iii., p. 202; Homiletic Magazine, vol. xii., p. 301; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix., No. 1143; G. Calthrop, Pulpit Recollections, p. 133; Archbishop Maclagan, Church of England Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 205. 1 Peter 2:25.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. v., p. 222. 1 Peter 3:1, 1 Peter 3:2.— R. Tuck, Christian World Pulpit, vol. v., p. 180. 1 Peter 3:3, 1 Peter 3:4.— H. W. Beecher, Ibid., vol. xxiii., p. 372; G. Calthrop, Words to my Friends, p. 346. 1 Peter 3:4.—Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 264; Homiletic Magazine, vol. xv., p. 168. 1 Peter 3:6.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii., No. 1633. 1 Peter 3:7 Our Social Relationships. I. Marriage is a relationship of mutual sympathy. That comprehensive word "sympathy" is to be understood here in its largest sense. Those who enter into this binding fellowship ought to be one in the completest measure possible of their entire nature; for the supreme end of marriage is not simply the continuance of the human race, but the culture and development of all the noblest faculties of the intellect and the spirit. II. It is a relationship of mutual sacredness. The Roman Catholic Church includes matrimony among the sacraments, though in this, as in so many other matters, it goes beyond the direct warrant of God's word. Yet there is no question that it is regarded as one of the most solemn acts of human life. "Until death us do part" is the solemn vow, and it must remain unbroken to the end. All revelation and the distinct words of Christ imply the sacredness of this bond, and it will be a sign of coming downfall in any country when the inviolability of this relationship is disregarded. III. The relationship is one of mutual honour. Christ ruled the Church, yet served it; then it is possible to rule and to serve at the same time. If it be for womanhood to submit, it is for manhood to serve; and perhaps that is a task difficult to both, but that might become much more pleasant and full of joy if the endeavour were mutual. IV. The relationship is one of mutual responsibility. W. Braden, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 353. 1 Peter 3:7I. One specialty to be observed in this phrase is this: it treats prayer not as a duty to be enforced, but as a habit to be taken for granted. The Apostle seems to consider prayer as inseparable from spiritual life, just as the air we breathe is inseparable from material life; and therefore, instead of advocating prayer, he presupposes it. He does not enforce prayer as a duty, but he urges the avoidance of everything that can obstruct it. II. Since prayer is an exercise of the spirit, of the heart, as well as of the lips, it follows that whatever clogs that heart with a consciousness of alienation from God, and whatever charges and loads that ethereal spirit with elements earthly, material, and gross, must press down that spirit, must encumber that heart with the great hindrance of its heavenward aspirations. If we have been allowing ourselves in anything irreconcilable with the principles of Christ, it is impossible, impossible with the stain of that misconduct still upon it, that the spirit of a man should naturally and cheerfully and spontaneously seek to consort and hold communion with that Spirit which is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. III. This, then, is the main notion to fix upon our minds, namely, that in any temptation, however trivial, to depart from the dictates of conscience, we should remember that yielding to that inclination hinders prayer, discourages all heavenward aspirations, shuts out what would raise us above the gross atmosphere of the world, obstructs the breath of spiritual life, and so puts spiritual life in jeopardy. W. H. Brookfield, Sermons, p. 87. References: 1 Peter 3:7.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xx., No. 1192; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 271. 1 Peter 3:8I. This is one of those texts which are too apt to confuse persons who do not read their Bibles carefully enough. They cannot see what the latter part of these verses has to do with the former. St. Peter writes that we Christians are to inherit a blessing, and hence people would say, speaking commonly, that he means the blessing of future salvation. But then St. Peter goes on to quote Ps. 34, "He that will love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile," and then, in order to make this harmonise with their view of the former verse, they say that this must be taken spiritually! Now, what people mean when they talk like this, I do not know. That which brings a blessing here is the same thing that will make us blessed there; that which belonged to the old Jews belongs also to us Christians, and if we avoid evil and seek after peace in this life, then shall we inherit a blessing in this and in any possible life or lives to come. II. And why? Because then only are we living the one and everlasting life, the life that alone brings with it a blessing or good days, and the only life that is worth living or loving. Very necessary is it to bear this in mind just now. People are too apt to say that the Old Testament saints got their reward in this life. But where do they find that? If they read the Old Testament carefully, they will find that the Old Testament saints were men whom God trained by long suffering, like Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Job, and all the Old Testament prophets. They were not even made perfect; for in the Epistle to the Hebrews it says that they died in faith, not having received their reward. If, then, God rewarded in this life, their reward must have been spiritual. III. God's world is good; the evil is not in nature, it is not in the world around us, but it is in our own foolish hearts. We shall find the world an unpleasant place, as the Jews did, if we break God's laws, for they must punish us; but if we obey His laws, we shall find the world a pleasant place, and His laws a comfort to us. This is God's promise, for He made all things for good, and His word cannot alter. C. Kingsley, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 229. Reference: 1 Peter 3:10.— H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty, vol. ii., p. 44. 1 Peter 3:11 The character of the man to whom these words are addressed is a very singular one. "He that will love life," or, more accurately, "He that wishes to love life, let him seek peace, and ensue it." Does not every one "love life"? What "life" is it of which St. Peter is speaking, the present life or the life to come? Certainly the present life. It may not exclude the life to come, for it is life generally, but specially the present life. But all life is one. This life is only one chapter in your immortality. I. Is it a duty to "love life"? Unquestionably. "Life" is a talent committed to us. It is a great gift of God; it is an opportunity of service; it is a thing to be consecrated; it is the germ of heaven. I have no sympathy with those who depreciate this present life, and run down this world as if it were all nothing or all bad. Heaven may be, as much as you like, an attractive, but this world should never be a repulsive, thing. It is a beautiful world! And it may be a very happy world. God is everywhere; the elements of good are always near us, and always within our reach, if only we could see them and use them. We are responsible for having a happy life. And even if we are afflicted and unhappy, remember it is the only stage of a Christian's being in which he can glorify God by patience and submission. II. "Peace," then, is the climax of the conditions of a "life" that can be "loved." We must examine "peace." "Peace" is an empire with three provinces, and the provinces cannot really be divided, for there is one King of all; all belong to Him, and He is "peace"; He is "the God of peace." First, there is the "peace" which a man has with God as soon as he is reconciled to God by an act of faith in the blood of Jesus Christ, and his sins are all forgiven. Then there is the "peace" which every forgiven man carries in his own bosom: "peace" with his conscience. And then there is the "peace" with man, with all our fellow-creatures. And these grow the one out of the other; and they must come, and can only come, in that order. If you are not comfortable and on good terms with other people, it is mainly because you are not quite comfortable with yourself; and if you are not quite comfortable with yourself, it is because you are not right, and you know that you are not right, with God. "Peace" with God makes "peace" with the soul; and "peace" with the soul makes "peace" with the whole world: so the three provinces are one. III. How, then, is this difficult quest of "peace"— more difficult as education and refinement make the feelings more sensitive, and the subjects of thought grow larger and deeper, and the divergence of mind becomes wider and wider, as it will do more and more every day— how, how is it to be carried out? (1) First, recognise it as an act of Omnipotence, an attribute of God only. "He maketh men to be of one mind in a house." You will fail if you do not at once bring in the great power of God to a work which is far too high for you. (2) Then travel to it by the right and only road; adjust your own relations to God. Be at peace yourselves. This done, you will be able to understand and remember at what pains, how patiently, how persistently, how stoopingly, and at what a cost, God made your "peace." And then you can go and copy "God's peace"— that great Peacemaker with us all. Lay yourself out to see, and show, and learn, and copy the excellency in every one. Go about with a veil to throw over follies and mistakes, and a microscopic glance to see what is good in everybody and everything. Let it be your characteristic: a man of charity, a healer of breaches, one who has something kind and good to say of everybody, a lover of all men, and a suitor of "peace." J. Vaughan, Sermons, 12th series, p. 37. References: 1 Peter 3:12.— J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity, Part I., p. 166. 1 Peter 3:14, 1 Peter 3:15.—Ibid., p. 176. 1 Peter 3:15I. It is the simplest of truisms that God can receive no increase of holiness, least of all from those who must beg Him to forgive their sins; but to sanctify Him, or to hallow His name, is to acknowledge Him, not merely in word, but habitually and practically— in thought, in feeling, in aim, in conduct— as being what He is: the one supreme object of obedience, reverence, and devotion. They sanctify Him who give Him His due, who treat His claims as real and absolute, who look away from all other powers, from all imagined resources or grounds of confidence, to Him as the origin and centre of their existence, the One most high, most holy, and most lovable, and, at the same time, most awful in His purity, with a reverential awe which leaves no room for lower fear, because it involves an adoring and loving trust. II. See how the precept can be obeyed, and the consequent blessing secured, under three different forms of trial, taken as examples of the rest. (1) St. Peter was thinking immediately of apprehended suffering. Why not simply take the Lord at His own word, and put aside faithless anxiety about the morrow? If we fret ourselves, we shall be moved to do evil; if we place ourselves confidingly in the hands of our mighty and loving Saviour, we sanctify Him in our hearts as Lord. (2) Remember, further, that the drama of spiritual life and death can be performed on a humble stage, under conditions devoid of any impressive brilliancy. "The eyes of the Lord," open alike for scrutiny and for sympathy, are in every place, are scanning impartially every career. (3) When we are depressed and anxious as to the prospects of the Church and of the faith, we should be able to fulfil the duty of relying absolutely on Christ. It is treason to be fearful for the kingdom of the risen One; our business is simply to hold our post, be faithful in our day, and leave results to Him. W. Bright, Morality in Doctrine, p. 302. References: 1 Peter 3:15.—Expositor, 1st series, vol. vii., p. 208; R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons, 3rd series, p. 277: W. J. Knox-Little, Church of England Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 32; J. W. Burgon, Ibid., vol. v., p. 236. 1 Peter 3:16 The Conscience of a Christian. The more consistent a Christian is with his Lord's example, or, which is really the same thing practically, the loftier his ideal of duty, the more he must expect to be treated as Christ was treated. Nominal Christians and the world keep an easy truce of mutual toleration, which the interests of society keep them from grossly infringing. On the one hand, the nominal Christian finds his profession sit easily upon him. Principles which are not pressed to their consequences offend no one. On the other hand, the purely worldly man makes the easy pursuit or easy enjoyment of things immediately agreeable to his ruling principle. He accepts the condition of not shocking the prejudices of others, though he may not share them, and so finds easy room for the nominal Christian in his system. I. But when St. Peter wrote, things were very different. There was then no possibility of blending principles which were inconsistent in a neutral solution of indifference. The world and the Church were sharply defined and contrasted. They were mutually repulsive, mutually exclusive of one another. II. True Christians must excite prejudice. They break that comfortable truce with the worldling which the nominal Christian is content to accept, and keeps without acknowledging by a tacit understanding. They must have reverses; they go too far for their friends in God's service, and their friends break from them. They intrude their principles where they are unwelcome, and others around them are offended in them, even as the Pharisees and Sadducees were offended in Christ. Against this power of prejudice, deepening often into ill-nature and malice, the power of a Christian's conscience, informed by faith and enlightened by the Holy Spirit, is his great safeguard. Let us see how it operates. (1) By making him feel directly the presence of God, the conscience of the Christian becomes an organ of the Holy Spirit. (2) A good conscience sets a man free from all unworthy motives. (3) As a consequence of this, a directness of aim and simplicity of character distinguishes the man. H. Hayman, Rugby Sermons, p. 165. 1 Peter 3:18 Christ Suffering for Sins. I. Observe that St. Peter says, "Christ suffered for sins"— not merely suffered, but suffered for us— that is, clearly for our sins, for the sins of mankind. These were, in some way, the cause of His sufferings. If the sins had not been, His sufferings had not been. However strange the connection may seem, a connection undoubtedly there is between the sins which have been committed from the time of Adam until now and the death of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross under Pontius Pilate. Perhaps the connection between the sins of mankind and the sufferings of Christ is made more striking by the word "once." Christ hath once suffered for sins. Sins may be committed often, nay, are being committed continually, but Christ died once and for all; that one event stands by itself; it is unique in the world's history; it can never be repeated; it need never be repeated. II. A wonderful efficacy is attributed to Christ's sufferings. We are accounted righteous for the merits of Christ, and not for any merits of our own. Teacher and Example was Christ; but He was something more than this. Our sense of need and infirmity teaches us that, in order to be the Physician of souls, in order to supply a cure for the great universal disease of humanity, Christ must be something different from, and entirely beyond, a Teacher and Example. We want to hear of something concerning pardon of sins, something concerning reconciliation, something concerning being brought back to God. And this the Apostles preached in the name of their Lord; peace through the blood of His cross was their message, a propitiation for sin, a ransom from slavery, salvation for the lost, life for the dead— this was what they had to announce as the Gospel for mankind. Harvey Goodwin, Parish Sermons, vol. v., p. 305. References: 1 Peter 3:18.—Homilist, 2nd series, vol. ii., p. 416; F. Wagstaff, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiv., p. 179; Preacher's Monthly, vol. vii., p. 369; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. v., p. 29. 1 Peter 3:18-20.—Ibid., vol. vii., p. 114. 1 Peter 3:19 The Spirits in Prison. I. There is one article of the Creed which, strange as it may seem, for some centuries has practically fallen into the background, and lost its hold on the thoughts and affections of mankind. We repeat the words which tell us that Christ descended into hell, but they do not move us. Our thoughts about them are indistinct and dim. They bring no strength or comfort to us. To the taught they probably suggest the dark and monstrous belief that, in order to complete the work of a penalty vicariously borne, the agony of the garden and the passion of the cross were followed by the endurance for a few brief hours of the torments of the lost. We may be quite sure that if the descent into hell had brought no other thoughts to men's minds than those which we commonly attach to it, it would never have gained a place in the creed of Christendom, or seized, as it did for centuries, on men's thought and feeling. To those who so received it it spoke of a victory over death which was the completion of the sacrifice of the cross. It told them that He who came to seek and to save the souls He loved on earth had continued that Divine work while the body was lying in the rock-hewn grave. He had passed into the unseen world as a mighty King, the herald of His own conquests; and death and hell had trembled at His coming, and the bands of the prisoners were broken, and the gates of the prison-house were thrown open. There the banner of the King was unfurled, and the cross set up, that there also, even there, the souls of those who were capable of life might turn to it and live. There had He gathered round Him the souls of those righteous ones, from Abel onwards, who had had the faith which from the beginning of the world has justified, and had confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. There He had delivered from the passionate yearning of unsatisfied desire, and had taken them to rest till the Resurrection in the paradise of God, where He had promised to be with one whose lawless life had melted at the last hour into some touch of tenderness, and awe, and pity. II. Whatever doubt might linger round these words is removed by the reiterated assertion of the same truth a few verses further on. That which was preached to them that were dead is nothing less than a gospel— the good news of the redeeming love of Christ. And it was published to them, not to exempt them from all penalty, but that they, having been judged in all that belonged to the relations of their human life with a true and righteous judgment, should yet, in all that affected their relation to God, "live in the Spirit." Death came upon them, and they accepted their punishment as awarded by the loving and righteous Judge, and so ceased from the sin to which they had before been slaves; and thus it became to them the gate of life. E. H. Plumptre, The Spirits in Prison, p. 1. Reference: 1 Peter 3:19.— H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year, p. 84. 1 Peter 3:20 The Two Baptisms. I. The salvation of Noah by water. You are familiar with the narrative in Genesis. Peter does not recapitulate the facts, but alludes to them as well known. Eight souls were saved in the Ark and by water. God will have a seed to serve Him while sun and moon endure. For this purpose He chose Noah and his family as vessels to retain and transmit the knowledge of His name. If Divine power had not then interfered, the last remnant of righteousness would soon have been submerged under the ever-rising tide of sin. It concerned the plans and the honour of God that this should be prevented, and therefore Noah was saved— saved by water! The Lord saved Noah as He is wont to save His own in all times: by destroying the enemies who were prepared to devour him. Noah was saved by baptism— a baptism that washed away the filth of the world, and left him standing free. II. The salvation of Christians by baptism is like the saving of Noah by the waters of the Flood. We draw near now to behold a greater sight. We contemplate now the redemption wrought by Christ and enjoyed by His people. We are saved by baptism; and this salvation is like the deliverance wrought of old for Noah by means of the Flood. (1) It is altogether a narrow and inadequate view that thinks of hell as the danger, and heaven as the deliverance. The danger is sin, and the deliverance is pardon. Your soul, surrounded by its own sins, is like Noah in the midst of the old world. If they are not destroyed by a flood, they will destroy you. (2) The deliverance. It, too, is like Noah's. We are saved by a flood. We are saved by baptism. What is meant by baptism? "The answer of a good conscience toward God." It is the cleansing of the conscience from its guilt, so that when God makes inquisition for blood He finds no spot or wrinkle there, so that the conscience, when put to the question, answers, "Peace!" to the challenge of the Judge. It is by being in Christ that we may get our sins purged away, and yet be ourselves saved. W. Arnot, Roots and Fruits, p. 197. 1 Peter 3:21A Good Conscience. These words are very wide words, too wide to please most people. They preach a very free grace, too free to please most people. Man preaches his own notions of God's forgiveness, his notions of what he thinks God ought to do; but when God proclaims His own forgiveness, and tells men what He has actually done, and bids His Apostle declare boldly that baptism doth now save us, then man is frightened at the vastness of God's generosity, and thinks God's grace too free, His forgiveness too complete. I. What hinders a little child, from the very moment that it can think or speak, from entering into God's salvation? I know one hindrance at least, and that is when the parents' harshness or neglect tempts the child to fancy that God the Father is such a father to him as his parents are, and that to be a child of God is to look up to his heavenly Father with dread and suspicion as to a hard taskmaster whose anger has to be turned away, and not with that perfect love, and trust, and respect, and self-sacrifice with which the Lord Jesus fulfilled His Father's will and proclaimed His Father's glory. II. The catechism of our Church does not begin by telling children they are sinners; they will find that out soon enough for themselves from their own wayward and self-willed hearts. It begins by teaching the child the name of God. It is so careful of God's honour, so careful that the child should learn from the first to look up to God with love and trust, that it dare not tell the child that God can destroy and punish before it has told him that God is a Father and a Maker, the Father of spirits, who has made him and all the world. It dare not tell him that mankind is fallen before it has told him that all the world is redeemed. It tells him of the name of God, and tells him that God is with him, and he with God, and bids him believe that and be saved from his birth-hour to endless ages. It does not tell him to pray that he may become God's child, but to pray because he is God's child already. It tells him that he is safe and saved, even as David, and Isaiah, and all holy men who ever lived have been, as long as he trusts in God, and clings to God, and obeys God; and that only when he forsakes God and follows his own selfishness and pride can any thing or being in earth or hell harm him. C. Kingsley, Sermons for the Times, p. 29. References: 1 Peter 3:22.— J. Keble, Sermons from Ascension to Trinity, p. 1; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii., No. 1928. 1 Peter 4:1-3.— H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxv., p. 51; A. Rowland, Ibid., vol. xxxvi., p. 225; F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. i., p. 333. 1 Peter 4:3.—Homilist, 3rd series, vol. ix., p. 24. 1 Peter 4:4.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. vii., p. 82. 1 Peter 4:4, 1 Peter 4:5.— E. Cooper, Practical Sermons, vol. iii., p. 160. 1 Peter 4:6.— F. W. Farrar. Christian World Pulpit, vol. xii., p. 353. 1 Peter 4:7 Christ's Absence and Return. All the practical exhortations of this passage are founded upon the truth that "the end of all things is at hand." Yet, strange to say, there is hardly any passage of Scripture which has given rise to more frequent cavils than this simple assurance. I. Some persons are fond of asserting that the Apostles were mistaken in this belief; that when they wrote the end of all things was not at hand. But the answer is, that the Apostles warned the men of their own age, and through them the men of every age, that by remembering the uncertainty of the world's duration they should assign to temporal things their true value and see that the true safety of a Christian consists in a life of prayer, and love, and active duty. II. But there are some who object altogether to the hope of heavenly reward as a motive of action. Christ Himself, however, encouraged His disciples by such promises. St. Paul was stirred up by them to ever-increasing diligence and greater eagerness in pressing towards the mark. If we are not to lower our conception of goodness by practising it for the sake of future happiness, neither are we required to "Wind ourselves too high For sinful man beneath the sky," and to exclude from the heart every feeling except a cold and naked sense of duty. G. E. L. Cotton, Expository Sermons on the Epistles, vol. ii., p. 40. References: 1 Peter 4:7.— W. W. How, Church of England Pulpit, vol. x., p. 517; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty, vol. i., p. 260. 1 Peter 4:8 It is quite evident that the sins spoken of here are not our own sins, but the sins of other persons, and that the intention is to say that as hatred brings causes of quarrel to the surface, so love puts the faults of other people down out of sight. I. Love shall cover multitudes of sins— from. God and from man. Love by silence and by veiling hides from man, and by prayer and by converting hides from God. And yet, in all ages of the Church, men have built from my text the fallacy that a man's charities are, in some way, a set-off against his sins. Love covers sins. Love learnt her office where she learnt everything: upon the bosom of Jesus Christ. It is a good and pleasant exercise to substitute for the word "charity," wherever you find it in the Bible, the word "Christ." And see how accurately and how exquisitely true the sentence runs respecting all that charity is and charity does when charity is Christ. And this is Christ's blessed work: He covers the multitude of sins. II. Your mission as a Christian is to be a coverer of sins. If you know of anything to any one's detriment, hold it as a sacred deposit, to be used religiously. Never think that you can make yourself great by making another less. Let it be your characteristic, the point by which you are known in society, that, like your Master, you always cover everybody's sins. It will be true religion. J. Vaughan, Sermons, 1865. References: 1 Peter 4:8.— G. Dawson, The Authentic Gospel, p. 86; J. Keble, Sermons from Ascension to Trinity, p. 93; F. VV. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xii., p. 353; E. H. Plumptre, Ibid., vol. xix., p. 392. 1 Peter 4:9, 1 Peter 4:10.— H. D. B. Rawnsley, Ibid., vol. xxxii., p. 93. 1 Peter 4:10 Combination. I. Religion is, in one sense, a hidden thing— "a life hid with Christ in God." Acts rather than words are the invigorating exponents of emotion. And doubtless it is the consciousness of this law of our being which in great measure accounts for that delicate reserve which makes it repugnant to all minds of the finest temper to speak much of their religious experiences. In secrecy lies the secret of their strength. And further there is another motive, and that, too, a noble one, which makes many Christians, especially among the young, chary of giving utterance to their religious convictions. They distrust their genuineness, or at least their abiding power. To many it seems much more easy to obey Christ's teaching when He warns them against ostentatious and therefore hypocritical devotion, than when He utters the no less needful exhortation, "Let your light so shine before men," etc. II. And yet this last exhortation must not be forgotten, or received only with a lukewarm willingness to obey it. "As every man hath received the gift." What gift? The gifts of the Holy Spirit are infinitely various, but the greatest of all is the gift of Himself, the gift of loving God, of caring for the things of heaven, of having even a definite desire to be on the side of Christ, and not on that of His enemies. This is indeed a gift, and, like all gifts of God, it brings with it a responsibility. It is something which demands not only to be appropriated, but also to be traded with and devoted to the relief of others. If any one has, through God's grace, been brought to hate sin and to see its ruinous, soul-destroying character; let him not shut up this holy conviction in his own heart, but let him be glad to find opportunities for imparting it to others. By so doing, he will greatly confirm his own sense of its importance, and he will have done much to confirm the faith and courage of his brethren. For there is no cordial so cheering to the Christian soldier as the discovery that he is not alone, but that, while he has been striving to serve his Master in secret, others also, unknown to him, have been engaged in the same struggle. H. M. Butler, Harrow Sermons, 2nd series, p. 46. Christian Stewardship. In the kingdom of grace, as in the kingdom of nature, God turns everything to account. He gave it a beginning by His own direct and almighty power; and He could just as easily, by the same power, carry it on to its final completion. But this is not His manner of doing. He expects it, by virtue of that principle of life which He has communicated to it, to carry itself on now, not independently of Him, but in reliance upon Him and receiving from Him, just as nature is dependent on Him for the continuance of its vital and vitalising force. But still, in so far as instrumentality is concerned, the work is its own, not His. God did not give us the faculty for nothing. He gave it for use; He gave it that it might come out in its appropriate life, thereby always becoming more faculty, while it continues to yield more fruit. I. Look at the nature of the thing spoken of: ministry; service. We are apt to look upon service as a menial thing. That may be our idea, but there is nothing more glorified in the Bible. Service, mutual helpfulness growing out of mutual dependence, is the law of the universe. So it is in grace. The spiritual sphere knows no other law. It is held together by it. Let us set this down as an unquestionable fact. Service is the law of our life, by which we rise out of sense to spirit; we touch angels; we perpetuate Christ; we repeat His example and keep His memory fresh in the world. II. Observe the range of the duty. It is universal. "As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same." This makes the matter very simple. It puts an end to all casuistry and all excuses. And, indeed, it could not be other than universal, since it is the law of rational life. It is not merely the law of spiritually renewed life. It is the recognised law in that case. But whether recognised or not, it is still the law. It holds angels— "Are they not all ministering spirits?"— and they honour the law; but it equally holds men and devils who break the law. III. The rule of duty: "As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same." It is idle to say you can do nothing, for if you are a Christian, you have received something. This rule applies to the form and to the measure of the gift, both to its kind and to its degree. IV. Look, lastly, at what comes out of all this— this picture, if I may so say, of the family of Christ. (1) There is universal responsibility. It takes in all. The great is not above it, and the weakest is not beneath it. (2) There is universal utility. Every one is employed, young and old, rich and poor. Every one is a minister according to his gift. (3) A totality of progress. This diversity of gifts secures that every part of the work shall be done; for it is just love in its innumerable forms addressing itself to the world's innumerable needs. A. L. Simpson, Sermons, p. 16. 1 Peter 4:10 The Christian Stewardship. I. The manifold grace of God— the term is a remarkable one; it is that word by which the Greeks expressed infinite variety of hue or of design, the shiftings and glistenings of richly mingled colours or the dappled patterns of skilful embroidery. And by it a lesson is conveyed to us of no inconsiderable importance. We have not, I think, been good stewards of this manifold grace. We have been ever apt to look on the grace of God in one or at most in some few of its aspects only. We have forgotten its manifoldness, its many-shifting hues, its exquisite and inexhaustible richness of tint and pattern. In other words, we have assumed for the Gospel of Christ too exclusively theological a character. This has been the fault of the Church for ages. By setting forth the Gospel in its manifold points of human interest, we might have had much more hold on men's hearts, and brought in a richer harvest of souls to Christ. II. Every one of us is more or less put in trust with this manifold grace, in one or other of its departments. And when we review the wonderful process of love by which it has been won for us, is it not a very solemn question for us all, for every one in his own case, "Am I a good steward of this manifold grace?" (1) Wealth is a stewardship. As a man's worldly means increase, so his charities ought to increase. (2) Talent is a stewardship. (3) Influence is a stewardship. If we use our stewardships as our own, His property committed to us as if it were not His, we cannot walk in the track of His gracious purposes, nor at last enter into His joy. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. v., p. 15. References: 1 Peter 4:10.— H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxii., p. 60; Preacher's Monthly, vol. vii., p. 287; J. Edmunds, Sixty Sermons, p. 228. 1 Peter 4:11 God's Scholars. Consider:— I. Our labours of the understanding. May I say, "If any man read, let him read as if his book were God's work," or as if he were God's scholar? We cannot make a Christian use of other books, if the book of God Himself be not familiar to us. Nor, again, can we possibly turn common things into our spiritual food. We shall not easily be led to think of the highest things by the study of books on worldly matters, if even, when the occasion directly calls for it, our thoughts are still slow to travel heavenward. And therefore, if we would learn to read everything as God's scholars, we must at least read the Bible as such, I mean with a sincere desire to practise it. II. Our labours of charity, or our acts of kindness to our neighbours. "If any man minister, let him do it as of the ability which God giveth." If we give but a cup of cold water to one of the humblest of our brethren, let it be done for Christ's sake. Perhaps the need of our remembering this is greater than we are apt to imagine. There is something so delightful in kindness, so natural in the wish to please and to relieve, so exceedingly sweet in the consciousness of having done good to others and in receiving the return of others' grateful love, that I am afraid our charity is very often unsanctified. There is no real goodness, there is even no safety from condemnation, unless we glorify God through Jesus Christ. All our thoughts and all our actions are unworthy of God's acceptance; they can be accepted by Him only in His beloved Son, He in our place and we in His, that as He took upon Him the infirmities of our nature, we might be clothed with the perfections of His; and as He died because we were sinners, so we might be loved and receive eternal life because He is righteous. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. ii., p. 193. Reference: 1 Peter 4:12, 1 Peter 4:13.— H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvi., p. 291. 1 Peter 4:13 Consider:— I. What Christ could not, as a perfectly pure and holy Being, have suffered for sins. (1) One element of suffering for sin, and that a most bitter one, of which Christ could have no direct experience, is conscious guilt. Wide as is the range of its sympathies with the sinful, there is a line beyond which a nature which is itself sinless can never pass. Into that dismal region overshadowed by the gloom of guilt, and where rage the furies of an avenging conscience, He who "was in all points tempted" like as we are, yet without sin, could never follow us. (2) Another element of suffering for sin of which a perfectly holy nature could have no experience is a personal sense of Divine wrath. Betwixt the experience of a guilty soul writhing under the frown of God and His there is an impassable gulf. (3) Nor, finally, though Christ tasted death for every man, could He ever experience personally that which constitutes to the sinner the very bitterness of death: the fear of what comes after death. II. What kind of suffering for sin may be conceived of as noble and worthy, and so not impossible to a pure and holy nature. I notice (1) that which a pure and holy nature must feel from the mere contiguity of evil; (2) the reflected or borrowed shame and pain which noble natures feel for the sins of those with whom they are closely connected. (3) Christ suffered for sin, not only as bearing relatively its guilt, but also as its Victim. J. Caird, Sermons, p. 167. Reference: 1 Peter 4:13.— W. Boyd-Carpenter, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 97. 1 Peter 4:14 The Ennobling Power of the Gospel. I. Externally these kings and priests, these bearers on their heads of the Spirit of glory and of God, are invested with no dignities. Strangers and scattered, pained by ever-varying temptations, many of them slaves in the households of the heathen, all liable to be reproached for the name of Christ— such was their actual condition of humiliation and obligation; such, for many of them, was their actual present poverty and meanness of estate. They had been transformed, transfigured. From beings merely of the world around them, from the huge commonalty of character and condition, certainly from no assemblage of genius and culture, they had been refined into the family likeness of the children of God, by faith in Jesus. They had that upon them which, as we well know, made them an awful yet blessed power on the earth: the Spirit of glory and of God. II. It was the nature of the message of Jesus to give to these peasants and slaves of Asia Minor the title, the aspirations, the courage, the wisdom, of citizens and heirs of heaven. It emancipated them into a Divine freedom. It raised them to a supernatural nobility. It taught them such things as facts about the soul and its future, about eternity, about God, as made them feel a totally new wonder and significance in themselves, their duty and their destiny; and so it led them to act, to live and die, with a purpose and in a manner that answered in some measure to that deep significance. Nothing but the Scripture revelation of redemption in Jesus Christ, with eternal glory, has proved itself to be the bearer of all the fruits of the Spirit. Other things can produce strength without meekness, kindness without holiness, aspirations without repentance, refinement without love. The Gospel is formed to produce them all, as the direct result from its simplest elements, and this not only because it is the message from the throne, but because, being such, it remembers, and provides for, and addresses the whole of man: his misery and his greatness; his greatness and his misery. H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All, p. 191. References: 1 Peter 4:17.— J. G. Rogers, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxvi., p. 84. 1 Peter 4:18.— J. Natt, Posthumous Sermons, p. 229; Preacher's Monthly, vol. vii., p. 85. 1 Peter 5:5 Who was so fit to communicate this command to man as the once self-confident, arrogant Peter? We can fancy, as he wrote the words, how his mind would go back, with blushing memories, to many a passage in his earlier history; and as he thought of the painful processes through which, by the grace of God, he had unlearned the impetuosity, the egotism, and the pride of his youth, he would say it with all the earnestness and the force of one who had felt the power and the subjugation of a besetting sin, "Be clothed with humility." I. "Humility," to be "humility" indeed, cannot see itself. It hides itself in Christ; it lets nothing be seen but Christ. The best "humility" is Christ; it makes itself humility by losing itself in the humility of Jesus. Now, if it be asked, "Of what material is this clothing of humility made?" I should take you for the answer to that marvellous scene when, upon the margin of heaven, Jesus denuded and emptied Himself of the prerogatives of Deity, and put off His glory, and put on shame and weakness, that He might be a Brother to the people whom He came to save. I would bid you collect from all the humilities of the Redeemer's history the real fabric of the "humility" that you are to copy and to follow. II. I am persuaded that the first way to grow humble is to be sure that you are loved. The education of almost any child will teach you that if you treat that child harshly, you will make his little heart stubborn and proud; but if he feels that you love him, he will gradually take a gentler tone. So it is with the education through which we are all passing to the life to come. The first thing God does with His child is to make the child feel that He loves him. He shows him that he is forgiven. He gives him many tokens of His remembrance; He heaps tendernesses upon him, like the angels' food, that was to "humble them in the wilderness." There is nothing which will stoop a man into the dust like the gentle pressure of the feeling, "I am loved." No heart will resist it. The forgiven David; the woman at Jesus's feet; Peter under the look; John in the bosom; the gaoler, first rushing to suicide, and then casting himself at the feet of the Apostles when he heard a kind word— "Do thyself no harm; we are all here"— all witness to that one universal law love, makes humility. III. There is a false "humility," than which none can be more unlike Christ's or destructive to the character. It is of three kinds. There is "humility" of external things in a mortification of the body— a thing which nature likes to do, and which men generally admire, and call saintly. But it is a cloke, not a robe; a look, a posture, a ceremony. There is a great deal of self-applause, self-righteousness, conscious goodness. Self is denied on one side to break out, gratifying itself on the other side. The body is more vile, but the spirit is full of self-consequence. There is another counterfeit which Satan makes and calls "humility" (for there is never a work of God's but Satan is ready to counterfeit it); it is what St. Paul calls, in his epistle to the Colossians, "a voluntary humility," people thinking themselves unworthy to come to God. They put in other matters that God hath not required, and therefore "worship angels." And there are those who do not know it, but who, like Peter, are, under an appearance of "humility," indulging contemptuous pride. "Thou shalt never wash my feet." "I am not good enough to be saved. I am not worthy to come to the Lord's Supper. I cannot believe God loves me." What is that but the worst form of pride, giving God the lie and setting up worthiness as a condition to receive the free gift of God? True humility is to cast yourself so low that you just take, as a poor, helpless sinner, without a question, all that God is, and all that God gives, and all that God undertakes for you, as all your life, and all your peace, and all your salvation. For remember that this is the grace to which God has promised everything else. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 12th series, p. 13. Clothed with Humility. I. Humility— what is it? It is a gracious gift of the Holy Ghost. So far as it has respect to God, it is that docility which is willing to learn what God teaches; that conscious penury which is willing to accept whatever God proffers; that submissiveness which is willing to do what God desires, and to endure whatever God deems needful. And, so far as it has respect to man, it is that self-oblivion which is not indignant at being overlooked; that modesty which is not aware of its own importance; that considerateness which, in reproving sin and in trying to rescue the sinner, recognises a brother or sister in the same condemnation: and in this development it is near of kin to that charity which envieth not, which vaunteth not herself, which is not puffed up, doth not behave herself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil. II. Humility is the conscious penury which is willing to accept whatever God offers. And there are two things which in the Gospel He more particularly offers: righteousness and strength. Perhaps, if those who have never got the full comfort of the Gospel would look narrowly into it, they might find that the hindrance is a want of humility. By the door of the Gospel a God of love invites you to come into His peaceful presence; but though a wide door, it is wonderfully low, so low that no one can enter who does not stoop. III. Finally, humility is that submissive and acquiescent mood of mind which is willing to do, to undergo, and to become whatever may be God's good pleasure. If a haughty spirit cometh before destruction, God giveth grace to the humble. Affable, contented, obliging, grateful humility grows in favour with God and with the people around, and never lacks the materials of a continual feast. J. Hamilton, Works, vol. vi., p. 389. 1 Peter 5:5I. The humble man must be a spiritual man— a believer in Christ Jesus. Other men may be modest, may be retiring, may be unselfish; but the Christian alone can be humble. They want the great source, the central point, of humility. They know perchance that they are weak, erring, inconsistent; but only the Christian knows that he is a sinner. No man knows this in the inner depths of his heart until God's Holy Spirit has wrought there— has opened his eyes to see that in him which Christ came to save him from, and has brought him in abasement to the foot of Christ's cross. Nothing can lead a man to humility except God's blessed Spirit, breaking up the hard and fallow ground within, showing a man what he himself is and what Christ is. Two truths of which the natural man is ignorant: (1) What he himself is. The humble man must know himself. The self-examination we need is a habit, becoming at length, like other habits, a second nature. (2) And what Christ is. In true humility, faith is absolutely necessary. II. "God giveth grace to the humble." There is no difficulty now in seeing that this is so. For it is the humble who are ever seeking that grace. The proud have no sense of their need of it; but it is the daily bread of the humble. Prayer for it is to them not an irksome duty, not a prescribed form to be got through, but the work of the heart, the struggle of the whole man for more strength to walk in God's ways. It is to the humble, then, that the promises are made, "Seek, and ye shall find"; "Ask, and ye shall have"; "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. ii., p, 30. 1 Peter 5:5I. Who are the proud? One has the pride of birth. A long line of honoured ancestry has preceded him; he boasts of the blood of heroes and of princes. Fair indeed is his portion, and truly noble, if he be like the servants of God of old, perfect in his generation, not disgracing his descent by meanness of spirit, but rather striving, in the highest sense, to be the best of his line. But this is not pride of birth in the offensive sense. It is the pride of birth to stand aloof in thought from the poor and lowly-born, to deny in practice the universal brotherhood of mankind, to depreciate God's gifts and God's people. This pride of birth God resisteth. II. Another is proud of his wealth. Here also it is none the less true that God by His promises resisteth the proud. The mere pride of the possession of this world's means— how does it make discord in all the course of God's government and God's redemption of the world. There is the day of God's final victory, when the rich man also dieth, when all his revenues cannot keep his spirit here on earth, nor all the splendour of his tomb preserve the spirit's cherished tenement from decay. III. Another is proud of his power. But here too God fights against pride. The pride of another is his talent, of another still his character. "God resisteth the proud." As long as the heart dwells in a fair habitation of its own, it has no place in God's spiritual temple; self-satisfaction is an insuperable barrier to the reception of the Gospel of Christ. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. ii., p. 15. References: 1 Peter 5:5.— C. Kingsley, Town and Country Sermons, p. 323; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. ii., p. 10; F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. ii., p. 171; J. Edmunds, Sixty Sermons, p. 268. 1 Peter 5:5-6 Humility and its Greatness. I. Let us examine the source and ground of humility. This is drawn from the knowledge of God. Hence, where the knowledge of God is absent, the exercise of humility becomes impossible. It is in His presence and before the light of His majesty that the lesson is to be learned, not in the rude conflicts of the world, nor in the eager strifes of man with man, not in the heat of human passion, interest, or ambition; but in worship and devotion, the uplifting of the heart God ward, and the flashing of the light of God into the darkened human intellect. Humility begins with the knowledge of God, and advances to the knowledge of ourselves. II. Consider the practical outgoing of humility. (1) It produces an absorbing and unmeasured admiration. For the worse we think of ourselves, the more adoring must be our sense of the sovereign love and grace, the infinitely perfect and effectual righteousness, of the God who has redeemed us. The greatness of God first abases pride, and then the knowledge of ourselves magnifies the greatness of God. (2) From praise and trust combined there will arise also implicit obedience. For admiration and trust exalt to the highest degree the glory of the Being admired and trusted. If obedience be hard, trust in God makes it easy, for trust goes out and up in prayer, and prayer, rising like a messenger, comes down again like an angel from the Divine presence laden with blessings, and bearing the gifts of grace and peace. III. These three sentiments of adoration, trust, and obedience necessarily affect our relation towards our fellow-men. Let us picture to ourselves a man who is thus humbled, and say if he is not a strong man, and noble and honourable in his strength. The strength is all of God; the gift is of God; the knowledge is of God; the character in its appropriate relations is the character of God. E. Garbett, Experiences of the Inner Life, p. 223.Reference: 1 Peter 5:6.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix., No. 1733 1 Peter 5:6 Christian Work and Christian Rest. I. Half, and more than half, of the practical faults in the world arise from looking upon life in a false view, and expecting from it what God does not mean us to find in it. It may be that many persons, when reading attentively our Lord's life and studying His language, are greatly surprised at the absolute unworldliness of both of them. He to whom all things future are as present suited both His life and His words to what He knew would be ever the chief error of mankind. He knew that social and civil activities were sufficiently natural to man to need no encouragement. He knew that knowledge would be pursued, and arts and sciences cultivated. But He knew that the kingdom of God and His righteousness would not be sought after. He knew that men would look carefully enough on the things of this life, but would care for little beyond it. II. For ourselves then, and for our children, life is before us as a trial-time of uncertain length, but short at the longest, in which we may fit ourselves, if we will, for the eternal life beyond it. This is life to each of us, and this is our proper business; all the rest that we do or can do, however splendid, however useful, is, or should be, done only subordinately. It is not true that our great business or object in the world is to do all the good we can in it; our great business and object is to do God's will, and so to be changed through His Spirit into His image that we may be fit to live with Him for ever. This, then, is Christ's daily lesson to us: not to be idle and slothful in our work, and to sanctify it by doing it as to Him, and not as to men; not to be idle as those who have mere bodily faculties, who live only to eat, to drink, to sleep; not to be too busily and carefully engaged in our own labour, and still less for its own sake, as those who live only for themselves and for this world, and to whom God, and Christ, and eternal life have never been made known. Let us work earnestly, for so did Christ; but let us work also as doing God's will, and for the improvement of our own souls, or else our work will not be such as He will acknowledge at His coming. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. ii., p. 173. 1 Peter 5:7 The Sympathy of the Divine Care-bearer. Nothing can be more beautifully true to the real meaning and intention of this passage than this translation. It conveys exactly what St. Peter means it to convey. Its rhythm is perfect. But we must be upon our guard that we do not run into a confusion of thought from the repetition of the word "care." "Care" can never be to God what it is to us. To a Being infinite in power, love, and leisure, "care" can never attach in its inferior "and baser sense. The very reason why we should "cast" our "care" is that God cannot be made unhappy or weary by it. The fact is that, in the original of this verse, the word "care" is not repeated. It is quite a different expression which is applied to God from the one which is used concerning us. We may write it, "Casting all your anxiety upon God, for to God all that concerns you is dear." Nevertheless our version is admirable, and infinitely better than any other. It exactly carries the thought and the comfort which God meant it to do, "Casting all your care upon Him, for He careth for you." I. "Care" is a word which is used both in a good and bad sense in the Bible. "Care chokes the word." Yet we are to "have care one to another." Quite literally, the word used for "care," in the beginning of my text, is the same which Christ employs when He says, "Take no thought for the morrow": and it is, "Do not split your mind; do not have a divided heart." "Cast all your corroding thought upon Him, for He careth for you." It is a delightful thing to do— to "cast care." It leaves life so light! But never think it is an easy thing. Here again the word God uses, both in the Greek and in the English, is very discriminating, for to throw, to hurl, to "cast," is not easy. It involves a great effort. Every one who has tried it has found it so. It is a very rare thing, and a very difficult thing, to do what we have to do, and then have no "care" about it. No words can say how blessed a thing it is when it is done. But it is no light thing to do. We do not lay these things; we "cast" them. II. You must begin with the fundamental truth that Christ is both "the Sin-bearer" and "the Care-bearer" of His people. I do not mean that these two things are really different. Sin is the heaviest of all "cares." Nobody who has ever felt its burden will question that. But, strange as it may appear, it is often more difficult to "cast" our "cares" than it is our sins, else why are so many Christians so burdened with daily life and depressed with so many anxieties? Why is it that men who are sure of their salvation yet are not sure of their constant provision? The fact is that in some respects it is a higher religion to trust God and leave all with God about temporal things than it is about spiritual things. We may easily deceive ourselves about our spiritual faith, and think we trust when we do not, because the subject is far away out of sight; but temporal things are visible, and real, and close; and we can scarcely make a mistake whether we trust God about them or not. They are daily tests of faith. And many fail here who think that their spiritual faith is strong. Yet could that be the case? Can we really believe in a God of grace when we do not rest in a God of providence? III. But now the important question is, What shall we do that we may "cast"? How shall we fulfil this kind and hard command? (1) Realise, and take a large estimate of, the God of your life and of your providence. See His hand in everything. Feel His eye always upon you, and believe in His fondness for you. Never think of this world as being ruled by general, universal laws. It is. But think of what is as true, and much better for us to think of, though we may not be able to see the reconciliation between the two: that there is a particular and special providence in every little thing, and that God overrules everything for His own; that you are a centre round which the universe of providence circles. (2) When you say your prayers, pray about the small things— the things which are upon your mind at the moment. Pray about the things, whatever they be, concerning which at that time you are most interested. Do not pray vague prayers, the prayers that will suit everybody, but your own personal prayer, just as much about your worldly trial as about your heavenly one. (3) Live in the day: in the day's duties; in the day's trials; the day's strength; the day's joys. Live inside the day. "The morning and the evening"; "the evening and the morning"; and tomorrow heaven! J. Vaughan, Sermons, 13th series, p. 197. References: 1 Peter 5:7.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii., No. 428; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 6; E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation, p. 297; W. C. E. Newbolt, Counsels of Faith and Practice, p. 149; W. J. Knox-Little, Church of England Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 17; W. Arnot, Good Words, vol. iii., pp. 122, 124; E. White, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 40; H. VV. Beecher, Ibid., vol. xxx., p. 177; Preacher's Monthly, vol. iv., p. 343; J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity, Part II., p. 474. 1 Peter 5:8.— E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation, vol. ii., p. 375; J. Vaughan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xviii., p. 36; F. W. Farrar, In the Days of thy Youth, p. 297. 1 Peter 5:8 Companionship in Temptation. I. St. Peter evidently thought that the conviction of companionship in temptation was meant by God to be a source of strength. We are hourly and daily assailed by sore temptations. Let us then remember that our case is not an isolated one. Other persons, our fellow-Christians, are being tempted in like manner, not, indeed, all by precisely the same temptations— for the tempter understands character and knows how to adapt and adjust his snares— but still in the like manner, by the engine best fitted to break down each individual's attempts at defiance. II. Regard a man as suffering in the same way that you suffer yourself as labouring under the same illness, disabled by the same accident, wounded in the same battle. How the heart opens to him! What an entirely different interest he inspires! He is no more a man merely, nor an acquaintance merely, but a brother. Suffering creates families. It is the great adopter. And does not the analogy hold in spiritual suffering? Some biographies which tell us of religious struggles that have been very terrible move us to a certain awe. We recognise the sufferer as greater than ourselves, because he has suffered more. And that which we do instinctively feel of the very greatest spiritual wrestlers, we ought to feel in due degree of all those among whom we live. What a sacredness will they thus acquire in our eyes! Our temptations are their temptations, and a tempted soul cannot be uninteresting. Christ died for it. Christ's death gives once for all a solemnity to all human lives. III. The thought that others are being tempted like ourselves leads us (1) to render justice to them and (2) to be ourselves upon our guard. The recollection that we are not alone in temptation, but that others are yielding to it and causing unhappiness by yielding to it, may well warn us of the great power, the widely extended domain, of the common enemy. H. M. Butler, Harrow Sermons, p. 320. References: 1 Peter 5:8, 1 Peter 5:9.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii., No. 419; F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. i., p. 299. 1 Peter 5:9.— W. Arnot, Good Words, vol. iii., pp. 125, 127; A. P. Stanley, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xviii., p. 292; J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity, Part I., p. 74. 1 Peter 5:10.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. ix., p. 65; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi., No. 262; vol. xxix., No. 1721; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 193; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty, vol. ii., p. 26. 1 Peter 5:14.— W. Peacock, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxii., p. 153.