1 Peter 3:18 ReCAST United

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan.

Good morning, Recast, and thanks for tuning in to our YouTube channel. This technology has served us so well, but it's also, and I wanna be clear about this, Recast, this has been less than what the New Testament defines as church.

And I don't wanna bash anybody else, but I've just heard said out in the community and out at large, you know, we just keep doing church, we're just doing it digitally right now. We're really not, because let me be clear.

What the New Testament indicates is that we are a gathering people. We're a people who gather together physically. We are a relational people. We are a look into the eyes of others kind of people. We are a read the body language and really know and be able to identify by the way that someone else's posture is that they're down, we're that kind of people.

And yes, despite the funny things that I've said about not being a hugger myself, we are a put your arms around each other and bring it in for a hug kind of people. And Zoom is not good for that. It certainly doesn't work very well as a preacher when the camera gives me nothing more than the little red light I see right there letting me know that it's recording.

I don't get feedback, I don't know when to press into a point longer because I see blank stares or I don't know when to get you to raise your hand and say an engagement because I recognize that people are losing engagement in the, I can't see that in the video.

And so we know that we want to be back together and I believe that that's the case for everybody that's listening and you are looking forward to and longing for the gathering of God's people. So we anticipate our first gathering in over 12 weeks on Saturday.

June 13th, we will be having a service at seven o 'clock p .m. outdoors, Lord willing and weather permitting. We will meet inside under very strict guidelines. Otherwise, if it's raining, Sunday, June 14th at nine a .m. and then another service at 11 a .m., you need to sign up for those services.

Please, please, please do that. And there will be a link for signups on the website and that will be emailed out. If you've given us your email information in the past, we will send you a link to sign up.

And signups are for the express purpose, hear me carefully, it's not to keep track of you, they are for the express purpose of keeping our numbers spread throughout those three services evenly. And so we wanna make sure that we don't go over 100 people as much as possible in each of those three services.

So we're trying to spread people out among those three services. Note, recognizing that we're a church, on a given Sunday, pressing 300 people. And so three services, I think that there's gonna be plenty of people who are not quite eager to come back to keep that number right around 100 in each of those services.

So, but sign up for those. And we ask that you are thoughtful in the process of signing up, considering that what we're asking is that everyone continue to come to the service that you sign up for initially.

So if you sign up for that Saturday night service, we ask that you continue during the course of these different kind of services to keep coming on Saturday. If you sign up for the nine o 'clock, keep coming at nine o 'clock.

Or the 11 o 'clock, keep coming to that one. And that way we keep the cross, the potential for cross-contamination down to a minimum. And so, this morning we're doing something different, we're looking at a single verse.

And I don't do that, this is something that I rarely do. I'm in the habit of preaching larger chunks of Scripture walking us through books of the Bible, chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph,.

Verse by verse.

And I feel good about preaching on one single verse this morning, primarily because I've studied this context. I actually preach through the book of 1 Peter. And I'm gonna give you a little bit of the background as we go through so that you're not just, and the reason I'm even giving this a little bit of warning is because the primary place that we encounter a single verse is a little quip or a little meme online that I would say probably about 50 of the time is taken out of context.

It's just ripped out and given to us on a poster or on a coffee mug or on some kind of a meme and completely used out of context to try to encourage us in some way, shape, or form that maybe the original author didn't intend for it to be used.

And so, the reason I'm saying that is I've studied this verse and I know where it fits into 1 Peter. And you can go back and hear any of the sermons that I preached on 1 Peter. I don't know how many of you know that all of those are available on our website, but you can go to recastchurch .com, click the teaching tab, scroll down in the archives to the winter of 2015.

You can see all of those are organized by dates and you can get back to the winter of 2015 when I preached a series on the entire book of 1 Peter. But this verse grabbed me this week. 1 Peter 3, 8 grabbed my heart this week.

It's what I believe God wants to say to us in a time of division as a nation and even a time where there's potential divisions in our church and in churches because as we come back from COVID, there are so many various opinions.

And some of those opinions, of course, have even been washed out a little bit by all the other things that are going on in our nation. You see, the text that we're looking at speaks to our hearts as followers of Jesus and informs us how we are called to be his people, his people of faith, loving and moving in this world.

In one sense, this text shows us five marks of a life of faith. They are imperatives, they are commands, but Peter, wrapping up a section in the way that Christians are to interact in a bunch of relational contexts, that's what he's doing, and he's basically helping us to understand in the context of this entire passage in 1 Peter, how do wives and husbands interact?

How do we relate to the world around us now that we have a relationship with Jesus Christ? How do we respond to authorities now that we're Christians? And now, here at the conclusion of all of this section about relationships, he summarizes all of that by how we are to relate to one another in the body of Christ.

And I think this is such a vital message for us, where our nation is today, where we are recast today as we consider and contemplate with joy coming back together. It matters a ton how we treat each other in the body of Christ.

Our Lord and Savior said it this way in John 13, 35, the Apostle John recording the words of Christ himself pertaining to what Peter is going on about in our text. By this, all people will know that you are my disciples.

What is this? If you have love for one another. Jesus saying, you will know, the world will know that you are a disciple of Jesus by the love that you have for other disciples of Jesus Christ. And Peter is saying the same thing here in our verse, echoing the words of our Lord and Savior.

So let's open our Bibles, if you're not already there, to 1 Peter 3, verse eight. And I'll give you a second because it'll probably take you longer to turn over there or to navigate in your device over to that than it would for me to read it.

But 1 Peter 3, eight, the very precious and holy word of God to us recast. I'm gonna read it twice for emphasis because it's such a short passage. And then we're gonna have some prayer and we're gonna head over into a time of worshiping the Lord by singing.

1 Peter 3, verse eight. Finally, all of you have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart,.

And a humble mind.

Again, 1 Peter 3, verse eight. Finally, all of you have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart,.

And a humble mind. Let's pray.

Father, I thank you for the calling that you have placed on your people. The way that you use us to demonstrate to the world around us what love is supposed to be. And Father, I pray that you would be increasing that.

We are not equal to the task, but Christ in us and your Holy Spirit is equal to that task. So Father, I pray that even as we gather back together again next week and as we listen to this message this week, that you would use this word, use this very passage to produce within us a renewed commitment to your body, a renewed commitment to the things that you desire to do in our midst.

And Father, that you would speak through me with accuracy, that nothing that I say would be inaccurate, but it would all be true to the text that you have placed before us this morning, that it would be clear, that you would allow no distractions to get in the way of this clear communication, and that by your Spirit you would press this word correctly into the lives of people with clarity, and then that you would give me zeal.

Father, this is your word. How could I speak about it without inflection in my voice? How could I speak about this in a monotone way when it is your precious and holy word? So Father, give me a zeal that is consistent with this glorious and beautiful text that is calling us all to a higher living in your Spirit.

Pray that you would preserve the unity of your church here at Recast, here in Matawan, here in the state of Michigan, in the United States. Globally, Father, that you would be preserving your church in unity.

Protect us from the evil ones planned to divide during this very divisive time as a nation.

In Jesus' name.

Pause, you may pause or 10. Are we gonna get rid of the plants now?

All right.

We can just kind of move them back, I guess. Keep them kind of in the background, but. Was it okay that that fell over?

Was that actually, did it add?

Okay, it added to it.

Yeah.

Yeah, you caught it.

That was good.

It would have gone worse.

Oh look, it's shedding, it must be fall.

Okay.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And then you've got the. Yeah, and that one goes out on the doors there. But they hang like some kind of little splay thing right here. Go ahead and get me recording and then you can take care of that.

Oh, is it? Okay, I'll just jump back in. Do I need, I don't need to clap again, do I?

All right.

All right.

Well, I really appreciate Dave, who leads us every week. And actually, those were all pre-recorded songs because Dave had surgery this past week. So you could be praying for Dave Bundin and his recovery.

I would really appreciate that. But so grateful for him and the team and for David Schrock, who has been editing our videos, but also has been a worship intern, was a worship intern and has been helping us with worship here for a while now.

So very grateful for them. And get comfortable. Keep your Bibles open to 1 Peter 3, verse 8. Again, 1 Peter 3, 8. And if you lost your place there, jump back in. Very short text, but good to see the words.

That are used there.

And I struggled this week to bring an introduction to this message that isn't trite or overly simplistic. And in that process of trying to think through this, the only thing I can say, church, the only thing that I can bring to say, and I feel like some people will receive it as trite, some people will receive it as overly simplistic, but it's the most biblical thing that I can figure out to say to us during this season that we've been living in.

We live as fallen people in a fallen world. We have, probably to a person, been emotionally ravaged by COVID -19. Pressed to the limits with our children, pressed to the limits with our family, pressed to the limits of our isolation and our aloneness, pressed to the limits, for many who struggle with mental illness already, this has been a trial of their lifetime.

Some have been physically ravaged by COVID -19. I've spoken with some of you who have lost loved ones aunts, uncles, cousins, relative sisters, and we grieve and we mourn. And to add insult to injury has been the inability to even rightly remember those lives.

Some have been economically broken by COVID -19. Some have lost businesses. Some are right on the edge of not being able to make mortgage payments or student loan payments or some of those things that just have no reprieve and the bills keep coming month after month and the income doesn't.

And then a couple of weeks ago, our nation witnessed a wicked act of murder. And I will call it that, a wicked act of murder. As screens lit up all over this nation with the image of a man kneeling on the neck of another man as the minutes tick by.

And we are reeling as a nation. And my heart grieves, my heart grieves for the wickedness, the wickedness that I see around me, but it also grieves because of the wickedness that I see in me. My heart grieves that this world is not the way it's supposed to be.

Our brief text is gonna tell us the way that it's supposed to be and it's glorious. And yes, even as I get emotional about the pain and the devastation, there is hope, church. Because this world is not the way that God made it to be, but he is giving us glimpses of hope.

And that glimpse of hope is something that is glorious and beautiful. This text is a calling from the Almighty God.

Through his word.

It's a calling to correct each and every one of us, yes, to a person. And especially maybe those who say, I don't have any prejudice. Maybe even more so to somebody who says, I don't need correction. This is a word to correct you.

And further, it's a text that should remind us that the thing that God is doing to repair relationships in this fallen world is called the church. You ask, where is God in this? What is God doing in the world?

What is he doing in a world so divided? What is he doing in a world where COVID -19.

Is economically and physically and emotionally ravaging us, where racism is running on the streets and there's all kinds of devastation and people are dying? Where is God? He has always had a plan. And that plan is summarized in the word church.

We are the plan of God. A redeemed people who are learning to love, who are learning what 1 Peter 3, 8, as I explain it, is going to tell us we ought to look like church. The redeemed people of God with new hearts and a spirit alive in us.

And we are given commands for how we are to show love.

To a fallen world.

In the opening to a summary paragraph about how we are to live with each other, Peter tells the church to live out five specific realities. These amount to five callings on each and every one of us. Five commands for recast as we come back together from COVID.

Five commands for recast as we consider the racial tensions that are raging across our country as I preach this. Five commands as we seek to make sense of what God is doing in the world around us. And so here's the first command.

He says to the church, he says to you and me, he's saying to us recast as we come back together as the gathering of God's people here in this area, have unity of mind. Have unity of mind. This is a character quality in Peter's culture that was used to express a common purpose, a togetherness, a unity around a common theme.

We exhibit this as a church when we all agree that Jesus is worthy of our worship, when we together affirm the gospel. We express this visibly when we come to the communion table. Something that I've missed deeply over these months, over these weeks, week after week, after a wonderful and glorious, yes, I'll call it a habit, but a necessary habit, but a life-giving and filling habit of gathering together each week to take communion together,.

And we've missed that.

And if you have a mind that is engaged during communion, if you observe communion with a theologically informed mind, then you realize that in that act, when we gather together again, we are all demonstrating that we all think the same things, that Jesus died for our sins.

We are confessing, again, week after week,.

Our own need for a savior.

And we are all demonstrating thankfulness for his blood that was shed for us and his body that was broken for us. Unity of mind, by the way, doesn't mean that we never disagree, but in the body of believers, we should always be moving toward unity and not away from it.

This unity, by the way, does not mean uniformity. We are not called to be little robots or clones of one another, but as we grow more and more into Christ-centeredness, we become more tightly knit in our hope, more tightly knit in our love, in our forgiveness and in our purpose, so that in a sense, as Christ is a center and we revolve around him, he's like the nucleus and we're like the electrons rotating around him, the closer we get to Christ, the closer we get to one another.

The more we understand how much he has forgiven us, the more that's gonna rub off on others around us. The more that we understand the way that he loved, as a model and as an example, and his putting his love in our hearts, the closer we get to him, the more we will express and radiate that love out to others.

Yes, draw close to Christ, and the closer to Christ, the closer unity of mind you will have.

With others around you.

The church is not a place of selfish interests when we think about unity of mind. It is a place for harmonious living. We are being called here to consider what we all have in common and major on that, and it is this dance together, swirling perpetually closer.

To our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,.

That kind of unity of mind. The second command that Peter gives to the church and is giving to us, recast, is have sympathy. Now, sympathy is a very specific word that needs a little bit of definition, and I've mentioned often in the sense of our core value of authenticity that we wanna be a place where nobody mourns alone and nobody celebrates alone, and I've said this often, and I don't mean it tongue-in-cheek.

It's a legitimate thing. It's one thing to suffer alone, but I actually, in my life of experience, it's more lonely to celebrate alone. Sometimes when I'm mourning, sometimes when I'm sorrowful,.

I just kinda wanna be alone.

I wanna go for a walk in the woods. I wanna go for a bike ride. I just wanna be alone, right? Alone to try to work through that on my own, but man, celebrating alone, that's a bummer. We don't want that for people.

You get that raise, you get that promotion, man, call somebody up. Let's get a cake, let's celebrate, and man, I look forward to being able to do things like that again when we get back together, but sympathy requires, by the way, sympathy is a feeling word.

It's not straight up a doing word. We enter the pain of others together with them. It is a horrible thing when someone comes to merely observe another's mourning without allowing themselves to be moved in their spirit to the suffering of another.

Yeah, how often? Ask yourself, how often have you been near somebody mourning without seeking to understand their pain or their suffering, and so before we would bring a solution, before we would bring an answer, before we would bring some kind of answer to the suffering or the problem, we ought to learn, like Job's friends, at least got this right.

In the book of Job, Job lost everything, and he had three friends who came and joined him, and the first thing they did was good. They sat in the dust and ashes for a few weeks with him, a few days, rather, with him, and in that sense, they got that right, and we ought to as well.

There is a time and a place to sit with somebody in their suffering, but I need to be clear about this. This is a calling to feel with one another, but also to do what we can to help. Sympathy is not only, sympathy is meant to lead to compassion, which we're gonna see that word tenderheartedness is another word for compassion.

We're gonna see that coupled here, so you got sympathy, the feeling, and then you got the compassion that always, in Scripture, leads to action. So you need those two things together, and Scripture uses those words intentionally, sympathy and compassion.

Sympathy, the feeling that leads to, and compassion, the feeling that leads to active solutions. Job's friends didn't get it wrong by seeking to answer him. They just had the wrong answer. It was not wrong for them to try to bring the truth in.

They just didn't bring the truth. So a lot of people get down on Job's friends because they spoke. No, they should've just sat there and cried with him. Well, that's not it. And what I'm trying to get to is we do not want our sympathy to roll over into empathy.

Now, when I say that, I define empathy very narrowly and quite specifically as it ought to be because there is a distinction between sympathy.

And empathy.

They are two different words. Empathy immobilizes ourselves in grief with others. It puts yourself so wholly into the shoes of the other person that it actually eschews, it pushes out any bringing the truth.

Empathy is a word that is never used in Scripture. It's not found in the Bible. And it is actually a word that has only been around in the English language for about a century and was brought in through philosophy, and particularly German philosophers were the first to use the word empathy.

It is an attempt, hear me carefully, I believe firmly that the word empathy is an attempt to improve on the biblical concept of sympathy and a compassion that leads to action. I like the way that Douglas Wilson illustrated this and if you've got more questions about this, I'd love to put you on to a documentary that Douglas Wilson does about the differences between sympathy and empathy that I find powerful and I found quite accurate.

But he likens grief of a friend to them being stuck in quicksand. So a loss of a child, a loss of a loved one, a loss of a parent, a loss of a job, and you're stuck in the mire and you're sinking.

And it's a kind of feeling,.

Like sometimes when you're in that place of suffering, it feels like you are not going to make it out and your faith is going with you. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where you feel so at pain and so frustrated, even with God, that there comes a point where you can become so stuck in your circumstances.

That you begin to lose hope,.

You begin to lose touch with God. Well, what empathy does in that situation with the quicksand, you encounter a friend, you're coming through the jungle, you went, like I did earlier, and you encounter a person who's stuck in the quicksand and empathy jumps in.

Empathy says, I'm gonna come all in with you. And we might think that that's a great thing, but what happens when you jump into the quicksand with the other person? When you don't keep any objectivity,.

You go down with them.

But sympathy comes alongside and says, oh, my friend's in trouble, and grabs a branch, holds on firmly to the truth, holds on firmly to God, and then jumps in. So yes, you do enter the feelings with the person, but you keep a handle on reality.

You keep a handle on truth. You keep a handle on God, so that you have something to actually help the person. Sympathy doesn't lose grip on truth, while empathy encourages a complete abandonment of objectivity for the sake of subjectively entering the pain of others.

And I think that as I've been talking about this, you might very well see how our culture has bought wholesale into empathy. You can't speak truth into a scenario like our current climate. You must only feel with each other.

What is more common in our culture is the empathy, is an empathy that says that bringing the truth is violent in situations where someone is grieving. There is a time, certainly, hear me carefully, there is a time, like Job's friends, to come in and sit quietly and mourn and grieve and put the dust and the ashes on your head, too, and let them see your tears with them.

But there is never a time to abandon God and truth for the sake of feeling with someone else. That is to bring no help at all. A church is called to have sympathy, to come alongside, while maintaining a grip on the truth that genuinely helps.

The third, and what some see as central because it's the center of the five commands, is to have brotherly love. Recast, come back together and have brotherly love with one another. Brotherly love is a core around which all of these other qualities revolve.

All of these could be called an expression of brotherly love. A mark of the Christian life is genuine heart engagement with others that seeks their welfare. That's kind of a definition of love, is a always actively seeking out the benefit and the blessing of others.

Wanting good and working for the good of others is the way of a follower of Jesus Christ. And we often don't know what to do with the brotherly at the front of brotherly love when we read this, so we skip over and just define the word love and move on and place the emphasis there on the word love.

So what distinguishes, think about it, what distinguishes a brotherly love? Why put that word in here, Peter?

Well, I believe this word is used here.

To emphasize the familial nature of our relationship within the body of Christ. We are family.

We've been missing our family.

I've been missing my family. I've been missing those that love me and I love them and we work together, we hold each other accountable, we are in relationship to Christ, we're swirling around him and we have this unity of mind and we're growing together.

It's familial.

And I don't know how many of you have brothers, but I grew up, when I was 12 years old, my mother remarried and I instantly received three younger stepbrothers, and so I have a little bit of experience with some notion of brothers from the time I was 12 to the time that I moved out when I was 18 and headed off to college.

But I know that to a little bit, and so if you filter the word brother through personal experience, if I filter it through my own personal experiences, then I think it must mean something like perpetual competition or something like that, like a loving, perpetual competition.

And I wanna distance ourselves from that understanding because we live in a fallen world where competition is a part of familial relationships and that's not what God is getting at. He's getting at a more pure sense of brotherliness, a more pure familial sense.

But through the regeneration and through the new birth with Christ, we have been brought into the family of God. You don't get to choose your family. I don't know if you noticed that, but you didn't get to choose who your mom is or who your siblings are or who your dad is.

And despite what we may think, we don't really get to choose our spiritual family either. Sure, maybe when you first attended Recast, you recognized a couple of people or maybe even somebody invited you here, maybe you knew me before you came here, but you didn't know who you were getting into when you came here.

We don't really, at the end of the day, get to pick our spiritual families here. I mean, we can choose where to attend church, right? Like, don't get me wrong. And if you get frustrated here, we live in a culture where you could bug out and go someplace else.

But you start attending a church.

Long before you know who's there. And let me just suggest this to you that if you leave any given church, maybe you're listening to this and you don't even attend Recast or maybe you're at Recast and somebody's really rubbing you the wrong way.

You leave here, you're gonna find them somewhere else. I have found that there's about seven people and they attend churches all around the nation. I'm saying that tongue-in-cheek, but at the end of the day, all churches have their struggles, all churches have their frustration, and maybe, just maybe, God has brought you here to work through some things that you're dealing with and he's literally brought somebody here to rub off a rough edge on you, to help you to be more patient, to help you to be more loving, to help you be more long-suffering and patient and enduring.

And what you wanna do is you wanna jump up and leave because so-and-so frustrated you or the church didn't come back soon enough or somebody's taking this COVID thing too much or somebody confronted me about a mask or somebody asked me to social distance from them and I'm just, I'm tired of it.

And whatever it might be, and so you're ready to jump ship.

And let me just caution you that God brings people into our lives, he brings relationships, and he's driving for this unity in a fallen world because he wants to make us more like Jesus, more patient, more kind, more meek, more merciful towards those who maybe are abrasive to our personality.

Wherever you go, you're gonna find them. So you don't get to choose your family and the calling to brotherly love is one of familial commitment to the goodwill of your church, whatever church that is.

To express deference and an other-centeredness in our relationships,.

That's what we call to recast.

Fourth, fourth, let me go through these again real quick. Have unity of mind, have sympathy, have brotherly love, and fourth, have a tender heart. Some translations will translate that compassion,.

It just depends.

And this is a general way of looking out for the needs of others. A heart that's easily moved to move toward those who are hurting. More specific than brotherly love, tenderheartedness is having a heart that is easily moved to feel for others enough to want to meet the need and to act.

When compassion is used in scripture, the person who is said to be compassionate always moves to solve the problem. When Jesus looks out and he has compassion on the crowds, what does he do next? Consistently, if it says he had compassion, he then heals and he casts out demons and he solves problems.

He moves, it's not a pity kind of thing. It might be really good to distinguish that word from pity, right? Pity is defined as strictly an internal feeling. I can watch a commercial about the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or for people who are starving in Africa and I can be moved to pity and never move a muscle, never do anything.

Oh man, that's so bad, I feel so sorry for them,.

Move on with my day.

Or the guy holding up cardboard at the end, it's only pity, it's pity if you feel bad for him as you drive by. It's compassion if you roll the window down and offer to take him for a meal or to go grab some groceries.

There's a difference between pity and compassion. The Greek word for compassion always leads to action. If I feel pity, I'm sorry for you. If I move to tenderheartedness, I'm going to try to help. This command is a command, by the way.

There is a feeling in compassion. While I wanna be clear that you cannot force yourself to feel a certain way, you say, Don, I mean, this is unfair, that my heart would be moved to sympathy for others?

That's a command? How can I command that? How can I train my heart to respond to this command to have compassion? How can I do that? Well, I wanna be clear. You can't force that, but you can certainly do some things that will help you to be more tenderhearted and compassionate towards others.

Are you struggling, for example, to understand why many black people in America feel like they're a systematic, systemic injustice? Are you struggling to understand why people are shouting and chanting Black Lives Matter?

Why does that have to be a slogan? Why does that have to be a movement? Man, I hear so often, well, all lives matter, which is absolutely true as well, but it seems like we need to be stating.

That black lives matter.

Why not take a time to get to know someone of a different race and how that entire impact and that entire society and how this system works for them?

Why not listen to them?

Listen to their experiences.

Sit down to know and to understand it from their perspective with sympathy and compassion. I know that doing this for myself has given me a more tender heart towards the difficulties that black people routinely experience in our society that I didn't grow up with.

I was completely unaware that that's going on, but sitting down and listening to them is so much better than listening to the news where I have doubt upon doubt that everything that they say is right, but sit down with somebody who you have a relationship with or forge a relationship with somebody, and I tell you what, there's power in that.