First Peter, 1 Peter 2:11-12 Abstain From Fleshly Lusts

Okay, well actually today we start, it's hard to see it when you look through 1 Peter, all of a sudden we get down to verse 11 in chapter two, and all of a sudden we go off onto a different topic. And this topic has been labeled, this is McCulloch's labeled God's plan of submission. And there's kind of, I'm gonna use his division. We're going to cover today the root of submission.

And first of all, who can tell me what scriptural submission is? Can somebody tell me what that is? It doesn't have to be a precise definition, but just kind of off the top of your head. What's spiritual submission? What's that all about? OK. OK. It's a military term. rank under or to abide under. And God has an incredible, in fact actually this is one of the best places in scripture to look for that plan.

In fact I'm doing my son's wedding. appreciate your prayers and november twentieth of this year my youngest son ryan is getting married and he asked me to do the wedding i've never i've actually never done a way before somehow i i snuck through holly hills for twenty two years and never did a wedding i don't know how it happened but my i'd like to it for into it i snuck through all those years and there is a way so my son's asked me in the miles well no No, actually I would have recommended miles. I think I said he did one. Oh, yeah, my actually miles He's got the he's way ahead of me now miles jump past me, so I'm I'm in the rearview mirror So anyway, so we're gonna talk about submission I could go on off for you know golf track here, okay, so anyway real submission We talked about submission to the government submission in the workplace Submission of our Savior, which is incredible submission in the family and then there's a summary in eight through twelve so if you know it's and here's the thing you know when i know when miles did it when we get down to the roles in a marriage also in submission shows up and all the ladies go well this is a trial lord not okay i'm i'm all i'm making too much of it but anyway but but you look at god's plan is one of submission one of ranking under so is that you know we're going to learn about that today we're But it's interesting, he's going to start with a place, a very familiar place that we learned a lot about in Romans.

So we're going to learn about the root of submission.

So, Vonnie, could you read these verses for me?

"Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, They may, because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation."

OK. Lots of interesting things in here. And it winds up with the day of visitation, which is interesting. So okay, let's get into it here. So we start off, actually this is a very familiar, beloved is such a wonderful word. It shows up in first John a lot, other places.

It's actually a very special tender word for it's, I would say beloved to you, any one of you here in the room, beloved, you're my brothers and sisters in the Lord, beloved, divinely. We're acknowledging the fact that God has divinely loved us. We're acknowledging that among one another, divinely loved one. And it's a distinctive word use of God's divine love.

And it shows up again a little bit later on in 1 Peter. Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trials or ordeals among you, which come upon you for your testing. And so it goes on from there. So it shows up here. So it's a very tender term. So he starts off with a very tender term. And we've kind of seen this structure before, but it was from Paul. Now we're going to see it from Peter. I urge you. So can someone tell me of another verse that has I urge you off the top of your head? You get extra points for this, you know. Romans 12. What's that? Romans 12, 1 and 2. Romans 12, 1 and 2. Excellent. You get a star. Thanks, Ahmad. Perfect. Yeah. I urge you, brethren, by the mercy of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice.

And we're going to see it's the same word. It's this word in the Greek that talks about this urging and its present tense. And it's in this thing called a middle voice. So it's a very personalized term. And you're involved in this term. It's parakleo, if I pronounce it right. And this tender term talks about the idea to call to one side. Actually, it's a derivative. There's another word that talks about the ministry of the Holy Spirit. A very similar word, and I actually didn't go through and do a comparison, but anyway, a very similar word, to call to one side, to exhort, and even to beg.

So Peter here is, as Paul has done too, he's going to beg these people, exhort them, to act in a certain way. He feels so strongly that they need to understand this. He wants them to act, conduct their lives in a certain way. Someone has said, actually Constable said this, he was quoting some others when I copied this down.

It's not a command And it's not exactly pleading. It's somewhere between commanding and pleading. So there's emotion in here. I urge you. I plead with you. And according to the gospel, it's one of the most tender expressions in the Bible. So Peter is really exercised by this.

And he wants to convey to these believers he's talking to, who are undergoing persecution, about their actions. And we're going to see as we come down through this, he actually asked them to do something which we all find very difficult, to act contrary to the way we're treated, right? If we're treated badly, it's very difficult to come back and not, you know, we still have fallen natures to not respond in kind, but that's not the way our Savior did, and that's not the way we're to be either. So he's going to ask us to respond that way.

Whoops. What was the last one? Okay, so let's go on. I had another chart here. A little more thoughts on, so here's a verse that I think really kind of nails down the difference between parakaleo and not being in command. This is from Philemon. Therefore, though I have enough confidence in Christ to order you to do what is proper, yet for love's sake I would rather appeal, that's our word, pericleo, urge you to do that. He said I could order you but yet I love you so much and care for you so much I want to appeal to you. I want to get down, we're brothers in the Lord, sisters in the Lord, I want to appeal to you on that basis. We're both have the same relationship to the Savior.

Then here's another place where it's used in Ephesians 4.1 And this is in the interlinear, I encourage you or urge you to walk worthy of the calling which you were called by.

Okay, so both verses urging, the idea of urging or encouraging is something we're to be doing, engaged in doing. That's what Peter's about here. At present tense, indicative active, so you're involved in doing it, it's a fact. And typically, present tense has the idea of this continuous action. So it's not something we just do one time.

So you go to your brother. You encourage him one time. You say, OK, you've had your sister. You've got it. That's not one time I'm going to encourage you. I'm being a little bit silly here. But anyway, it's something that you do as a matter of your life. And you want to do that, because you love your brothers and sisters, hopefully. Sometimes they're hard to love. So now, here we go. Beloved, I urge you.

Now he's gonna give a description. He's gonna tell them, and this, boy, this fits to us, you think, in our world today even more so. He's gonna say, this is the description of the kind of person you are. As alien, as is the idea, it's a simile. So it's a, were as alien and strangers. So the word alien is the idea that we're not a citizen, right?

We know from like Philippians 3.20 that our citizenship is in heaven. So we're not, even though I think of Ahmad here, he's trying to become a citizen of this country. Well, he's already a citizen of heaven. So he's got that covered, and that's the most important one. being a citizen, but we're not citizens of this country or this world. We're citizens of heaven.

So we, we are aliens in this world. Okay. We're also, it says we're strangers. And this is the idea of settling down alongside a pagan. So we're aliens and strangers. So that describes our position. And a couple of comments here from Weest. We've set up our home alongside the unsaved and settled down among them. So we're among, we're aliens and strangers to them. As an alien, one is a stranger to them in that he is different from them. So we're different. We're different from this world. We have different values. We see things differently. We act differently, hopefully.

And then often thing we often say, we are in the world, right? We live in this world, but we're not of the world. And then that passage in James just talks about, not exactly a parallel verse, but just talks about the fact that we were to keep ourselves unstained from the world. We're not to let the world affect us.

And that's a huge challenge, right? A huge, huge challenge in this world. It's very hard not to let the world rub off on you. But we're not to do that. Okay, so that's what Peter's all about. So he says, beloved, I urge you, I plead with you, I beg you. This is not your home, you're an alien, a stranger. And this is what he's gonna ask them to do.

To abstain from fleshly lust. So, interesting words here, right? Interesting words. So what does it all mean, to abstain from fleshly lust? So the Greek word, apeko, is to hold from, so where to hold from or better, it's in the middle voice, is to hold oneself from. Where to say, I don't wanna go there, I wanna hold myself from that, okay?

So we see that, so this sets up, the last part of the verse we're gonna see, sets up the situation of a struggle or a battle or a war, right? and you're the believer, we're the center of that battle, right? And our battle is with, as we learned, as we spent two years or more in Romans, the battle is with our flesh and our sin nature, right? That's where the battleground is, right? Look how much time we spent talking about that battleground in Romans.

But it's interesting, Peter's going to come along, totally different writer, and he's going to express this battle in a different set of words. He's not going to be a Paul, which will dissect it 10 different ways, right? I mean, Paul just hits it so many different ways. He's just going to flat out say, abstain from fleshly lust. Don't do that. Don't go there.

OK, so what's lust? Lust at its core, epiphemia, is basically a desire. And actually, they're good desires, right? You love your wife, you love your children, you love the Lord. They are good desires. But many times, lust is used in a negative sense, right?

And that's what the case is here. So fleshly lust, It's connected, it has another word with two aspects. Flesh can be just my skin, right? That's my flesh. Or, more typically, it's a fallen nature from Adam, right? We see that. And sometimes it's translated carnal.

So he says, I want you to abstain from this desire of the flesh, this desire of the sin nature. I want you to hold yourself back from that. Don't get involved in that. And he really doesn't tell you how to do that, right? He doesn't say, he's just going to tell you, don't do that. Don't go there.

Different than Paul, right? Paul would say, OK, now I want to start in and tell you how we're going to, Mike? That sounds like just saying no. OK. All right. Well, actually, that's sort of his, you know, Peter's not going to tell you how to do it necessarily. He's going to say it's a bad thing. First of all, you're not part of this. Why would you want to get involved with these guys, these guys down here? You're not a citizen with them. You're a citizen of heaven. It says, don't do that. I want you to abstain from this desire of the flesh. I want you not to get involved in that. It doesn't tell you how to do it.

So OK, I listened to Merriman a little bit, which is really fantastic. and he went to the he spent twenty minutes i'm not going to spend twenty minutes on this idea he went through all the different kinds of lust i don't want to go there anyway we have lust from our ego we have lust from for power we have lust from material goods sexual lust pleasure lust and the list goes on right all these things in this case these are negative ones there's no positives here And now the key point about this is, as we see, these lusts are not passive, right? Because the verse doesn't say that, right? So we're now going to look at the last part of the verse which says, you know those, I'm telling you to abstain from fleshly lust? These lusts are not passive. These lusts are active. And so we're going to kind of go back to familiar ground here very shortly. The struggle that we have with our sin nature.

Okay, it says that, from fleshly lust, which, so which is just kind of restating of fleshly lust wage war against our soul. So this is a way, so you think about, how did Paul describe this struggle? And I'm going to compare that in just a second here. How did Paul describe this struggle? Peter describes this struggle as fleshly lust waging war against our soul. That's how he's going to describe this struggle. And the war here is just the idea of war.

Actually, what's interesting is it's the idea of an encamped army. It doesn't sound, I don't know. And that kind of fits, right? We don't have an issue that comes and goes. That issue is there 24-7. We have a fallen nature that's still with us that's there 24-7. And this is a formidable foe, right?

And so the word war speaks to the idea of carrying on an active military campaign. And then a couple of places, a couple of verses that use this idea of war or waging war. In James, it says, and this is just to the point, right? What is the source of your quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures or, and actually that's the word lust, that wage war against your members. And then we saw this verse in Romans, you know, fair time ago, but I see a different law in the members of my body. Here we are again waging war against the law of my mind, making me a prisoner of the law of sin, which is in my members. So Paul saw the struggle and he called it a war. James called it a war. And Peter's calling it a war. So we have this war. And they all, what's interesting, look at the continuity of scripture. Amazing. We got this war going on. Different writers of the New Testament express it differently.

But Peter's chosen to say, abstain from it. Don't get close to it. Stay away from it. Okay. So, I couldn't leave it here. I could go on and go on to the next verse, right? But I couldn't. So I'm going to present one chart. So the question is, how are we to counter the battle with our soul? And this is actually familiar territory. I'm going to use a chart from Brother Howe, which I really love. I've used it over the years.

So hopefully this will, I'll try to explain a little bit differently and we'll look at, so how do we, if you're a young believer and you say, you got this war going on, what are you gonna do about it? So let me just stop back up for a second. So what's the typical response? How am I gonna win this war? so i give me a typical response i'll pick up miles miles of what what what what have you heard while she was i mean i thought it was a sad but as i once heard it said you know we've we've got to wake up in the morning and kill sin and then we've got to get up the next day and kill it again and the next day and kill it again and that's the typical mindset is that you've got to you've got to fight to overcome, and it's going to be a constant struggle from now until the day you die.

Exactly. Right. Exactly. Which, in their minds, makes sense, because, well, it's a battle. It's a war. I guess I've got to fight. Right. And it's going to take a lot of effort and strength to do that. Amen. But anyway, now you can give us that. OK. Now I'm going to give you the scriptural approach.

I'm going to go back to Paul. We're going to go back to Paul, because Paul's the guy and he gets down to the nitty-gritty. I mean, he's so detailed that some people, you know, they throw their hands up and say, Paul, you're too complicated. In fact, actually, his own disciples said, you're hard to understand, Paul. It's hard to listen to you, because you're too nuts and bolts. You're too detailed sometimes. OK, so here we go. So I borrowed a picture from our brother Hal. And his attempt here is to show that man is body, soul, and spirit. So I blanked out a part I don't want to talk about yet. So, okay, no laughing aloud.

Okay, so within our body, scripture talks about the activity, the core of us is our mind, our heart, and we believe with our heart, right? Our mind and heart, where it's at, what we think, what we think about our savior, what we believe about our savior causes us to be born again, right?

So all the action is happening within our mind. So our brother Hal here has depicted the flesh here. It's hanging out there. And here are these desires or lusts. And they're impacting our soul. And the tough part I have here is that I would like to, maybe Miles will do a study, I'll put him on him for the future, maybe 10 years down the road or five, I don't know, anytime soon. I'd like to see a good study on the soul. Because actually people, I've seen this quoted many times, the soul is this and this and that, they go through that. but they don't really give a lot of backup for that. So the soul is really, that's us, our mentality, our senses, our conscience, our emotion, our will. So we have these fleshly desires coming from our sin nature, and they're impacting in our mind, in our heart, in us, 24-7.

In fact, actually, I read someplace that how many thoughts do we have per second? And it's actually more than one. We have, and maybe you can relate to that, man, sometimes you get so confused, you don't know what you're doing. You get multiple thoughts hitting you, and you say, which one am I gonna act on of those thoughts? We got a lot going on up there, right? So here comes all these fleshly desires. So what are we gonna do about this?

Well, fortunately, okay, so here's a pictorial picture of Romans 6, in a sense. So what our brother has done here, he said, OK, we come to faith in the Lord Jesus. We're born again. And we have his very life. We have the Holy Spirit residing in us. And we can choose. And we've been separated from our sin nature. This is Romans 6 kind of stuff. We're going to read a couple of verses here. We've been separated from the flesh or the sin nature. This all sounds awful familiar.

And we have a choice. We have a faith choice, I'll call it, or an abide choice. We can hang out with the flesh, or we can hang out with the spirit, the Lord Jesus. So we can be in one of those two places. We can't be in between. I'm going to be in between, right? No, you don't get to choose it. You're either one or the other.

Well, the desire of God, the desire of scripture, the desire of The Godhead is that we spend time with our Savior and we hang out and then our desires are the proper kind of desires, the proper kind of lust. And they're impacting our soul and we're walking with the Lord. So that's that struggle. So what Peter's done is he's described this part on the left hand side about the flesh constantly impacting.

So our solution to the problem is, and actually one of the many verses here in Galatians 5.17, just out of states of fact for the flesh sets it's desires against the spirit and the spirit sets it's desires against the flesh and it says so we're not and it goes on from that. So here's the battle between the flesh and the spirit. So there's a battle going on. So I wanted to just look at, I couldn't get by so I have somebody turn to Romans chapter six and read 11 and 12 which are very germane to what we're talking about here. This is Paul's discussion about how to win this battle, if you will.

So whoever, Miles, do you want to? Yeah, thank you. Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies, so that you obey its lusts." Okay, well you notice that all these verses have the word lust shows up in there.

So I wanted to show that Paul addresses this, right? He addresses that. So we're to count upon the fact that we're, remember death is separation, that we're separated that we're separated from our sin nature. We have a switch there, in Hal's picture. Some people have objected to the switch, and I'm not going to go through that. I think, to me, it helped me a lot. The fact that I can choose, hey, thank you, Lord, I can do that.

Do you think it's just believing? Well, it's in the mind. What happens in your mind? There's no, you know, you don't have a, I don't, I do, whoop. You know, I don't switch like this. That might be kind of cool, right? You go like this. Well, then people can see which switch you have on, right?

I think it's a great illustration. Of course, faith, I mean, that's a very simple picture. It is a very simple picture. And faith or belief is much more complex in reality. Exactly. convincing or conviction that has to be involved before you're just going to flip the switch. Right. But it is a great illustration. Actually, over the years, I can remember, Bonnie and I have used this and it's helped our family immensely. For the last 20 years, I mean, just an incredible amount.

In fact, actually, Bonnie, she liked it so well, she re-do her own version of this picture. if you didn't you forgot which is that the bible says she took it is also the ladies look at this will course if you haven't been in roman six you look at that you cut it off body are you sure if you look at the fact that they don't have to do it that's another story anyway it was great yet go ahead You often hear, or you often read what Paul's teaching.

He says, you can either walk in the spirit or you can walk in the flesh. You cannot do both. But that switch I think is accurate. You can walk in the spirit or you walk in the flesh. Amen. No, I love the picture. I love the picture. But anyway, people, all pictures, this isn't scripture. That picture is not scripture.

Scripture, God's word, or God breathed, that's taking his word and trying to put it, and that's a good, in my mind, that's accurate to the scriptures. And again, in Romans 8, he says, the mind set on the flesh desires what is in the flesh, but the mind set on the spirit desires what is in the spirit.

Yeah, Amon, go ahead. So when Paul says in Corinthian that I will worship God with my mind and also with my soul, how similar or different it is? Good, good. Well, the mind of the heart, that's where it's constantly, that's where we believe, that's where the action is, right? It's all going on inside there.

I was thinking about this, and we'll save this for 10 years down the road, but it is complicated. A lot of those words are used in the mind, heart, soul, and even spirit are sometimes used interchangeably. to refer to as a very similar thing. Maybe the simplest way at this point in my thinking I can boil it down is everything on that list are all things that are going to remain with you when you depart this body and go to be with the Lord.

All of that, you don't have the body. No, no, it's gone. You don't even have your brain. That's true. But you do have your mind. So you have your mentality, your senses. Because the world says that the brain is where all the thinking happens. I disagree, because when that stays in the ground, you still have all your memory. Yeah, well, just as an aside, we were listening to this great guy, this physicist, talking about the mind and the brain. And the world thinks, oh, it's just your brain.

It's just chemicals going around. It's not true. No, it's not. Anyway, so maybe that's one way to do it. You can maybe see the essential you. Exactly. Because that is everything that's going to come with you, and you are no less you when you go to be with Christ than you were when you were in your body. Right. You will get a new body, but still. Amen. Amen. Okay. All right.

And then the other verses here, each of the other verses both have the word lust in them. And for the sake of time, I'm not going to, but look them up. They're both good. They both have the word He shows the struggle between the lust and what God has done about it. So look at those verses. So now in the few time, we have about 10 minutes to go here. Let's look at the last verse. And so, so actually if you think the first verse, he talked about what's going on on the inside, right?

Your mind, here's how I want you to be thinking. Here's how I want you to be acting. But now he's going to say, I want that to come out and what people see. that with a little bit with a rubber meets the road right so you'd have it inside you have this understanding inside you're trusting you're walking with the lord i want that to be shown out so first talk about the inner the inner battle now we're gonna see how should that come out how should the world see that so now he starts off once again he's not paul peters not paul he says he just says right off the bat you know keep keep your behavior excellent among the gentiles Thanks a lot, Peter.

As I said, there's all these statements in here that are impossible to keep. OK. So this first begins this discussion about your outward persona, how you're perceived. And isn't that really so important? Because we've seen this happen over and over again. And I'll just speak personally.

I have a struggle with my sister right now. She's hurting. She really is hurting. So she perceives I don't Care about she knows I care about I show I love her, but she keeps saying that you don't understand you don't understand me You don't understand me, and I probably don't So anyway, we all have these struggles with with that's my sister's case so So how do we?

So what what's Peter's advice here? Hmm? So what's the main thing we want the world or the unbeliever to see about us is kind of the idea here is. He says keep your behavior excellent and present tense continuous action and here's a key part. Boy this is just so this is a hard part too.

Notice he doesn't say boy give them all that doctrine, why don't you nail them to the wall, just give them that doctrine and you'll win that brother, you'll win that person the Lord. He doesn't say that. He says keep your behavior excellent. He says oh no, not my behavior, that's the hardest thing I have in life, keep my behavior. And think about what he tells the wife with the unbelieving husband, does he say Read your husband scripture every day until he comes to faith? No. He says, don't open your mouth. I mean, my goodness. You don't want him without a word. So your behavior, this is the bottom line.

This is why we teach every week. This is why Miles stays up late nights. How can we ever get a behavior to make this happen it seems like an impossible task and that we're just going down this can never happen scripture says it can so let's carry on here behavior is this idea of manner of life and he says excellent this is this is even more mind-blowing it's the idea of beautiful harmonious balanced proportional so you have this excellent beautiful behavior And the more he says, the harder you think, I can't do any of this. We are to habitually exhibit a beautiful life in front of unbelievers. And to borrow our brother Bob's thing here, it has to be.

So you know, at this point, And that's my comment. McCullough didn't have that. It has to be Christ's life. It cannot be your life. You know, when he starts putting all those, you know, excellent, beautiful, you think, wait a minute, that can't be me. Because, you know, I, on my best day, on my best day, maybe I'm, but even then, I'm still not. It has to be his life. That's, it has to be his life that people see.

Anyway, okay. Just on that thought. Sure, go ahead. How else could they glorify God? It says your good deeds, but as they observe them, they're going to glorify God. Well, then it has to be... Exactly, exactly. It has to be. It has to be His life lived out. So we have to be, back to our little picture, our very simplistic picture, you have to be walking in the Spirit. You have to be in tune, in fellowship with the Lord. Then His life can be lived out through you. So our responsibility, so you think, well, so Roger and all this, what's my responsibility? What should I be focused on? What do I have my little switch? What's the driver of that switch? Is it some bunch of knowledge? Is it some, it's faith, it's trust in the Lord Jesus. It's faith is what drives our life. It drives us for salvation. It drives us for our Christian life. Our faith in what God has said.

That's what allows us to have his life lived out through us. okay so that so here's a part is a part we're gonna get down here so here's a part where these people this is this is a tough part right so that the things in which they slander you as evil doers so he he kind of points out that what happens is and we kind of see that we're not you know we're pretty fortunate in you know Canada the US we're not we're not beating you know Unless you're unless you're well-known if you're well-known maybe you'll get some pushback, but if you're an ordinary Joe Whatever you're not gonna be if you're a believer.

They're gonna I'm not paying too much attention to you. I'm just gonna let you go. I have my life, you have your life. We don't care. But there are, so Paul, not Paul, Peter's talking about people that speak against you. They speak evil against you. Backbiting, defamation, evildoers. So the word is, injurious, evil, behaving in a bad way. So this is, Macaulay had a couple of statements here and I think he's referring to what Peter's time period. Believers were frequently slandered and called everything from pests to habitual criminals.

And we're going to see a little bit of that toward the end. We're going to see some of that. He's going to address some of that. But right now, in our world right now, we're not being slandered or speaking evil of too often, maybe occasionally, but usually not the case. And so as Miles pointed out, so the last part is kind of the key part to this.

So when they see your beautiful behavior, when they see Christ in you, what should happen is this, that they because of your good deeds, as they observe them, they observe Christ's life, glorify God in the day of visitation. That's a mouthful, right? So even though they speak against you, and this is the part, from a human perspective, like I said before, I think we started out, if somebody is, quote, speaking bad against you, saying, it's hard to be, have a nice day, you know, Do you really mean that? Can't we be at peace? It's hard. It's very hard to come back. And that's why it has to be Christ's life. It can't be our life. Because we're going to come back with some, maybe we'll do good, maybe we'll come off good. Some days we'll be bad, not bad. But anyway, it'll be our efforts, not his efforts.

So now we come down to this interesting phrase, a day of visitation. so uh... so what is the day of visitation so i mean i i i start looking through and there's there's some wild thoughts on this but i liked at the end of the day i like mccauley was pretty straightforward so i just i ran with his so it comes from this word visitation this or visitation comes with this word apis kapos which sounds sort of familiar right it's a uh... is speaking of god coming and and and showering his goodness on man if you will metaphor of god who said to visit men with good so uh... so the day of visitation so if you start looking at these and we we couldn't if we have a little more time but the term is always use new testament of when god visited his mercy and grace so god so god is visiting men with his mercy and grace so so one of the questions when do we Is there a time when we as believers see that happening?

Is there a time? So, I like, McCauley kind of took that and I liked it. He took that, that can be for right now. We can see God visiting man right now. And how do we see that? And I think when a person comes to salvation, that's Outstanding. That's a day of God. Because what happened was they agreed with God and they were saved. And that's a miraculous event.

So you could say that he visited man with his salvation. So Macaulay kind of expressed it a little differently. The expression refers to a time when those who see the believers good works will be saved, visited by God's mercy and grace. So when a person comes to know the Savior, He has changed, so God's mercy and grace has come to that person. So that's kind of the day. And some would object to that. Some would say they want to make it in some future time, which kind of makes it kind of distant. So why would Peter even be talking about some distant time in the future? I like the fact that he's saying that day of visitation, we see that when a person comes to faith in our Savior. That's when we see a demonstration of his mercy and grace.

And then kind of a summary statement here salvation comes about as a result of observing the believers good works Here is evangelism by life. This concept is also means All the means for evangelism of the unbelieving husband. That's the verse I when they when they see the good works or they see Christ in and their wives that's what causes them to believe and All right, so that's actually all I have.

I actually finished. So that's a lot of cool. I mean, I think there's a lot of cool things. And this is just another look at this problem of the sin nature and man's in the struggle. And I mentioned before, this is why we teach every Sunday. Every Sunday, we want to teach that it is possible to live a life that is pleasing to God. It can happen.

But you gotta have the information. If you don't have the information, you're going to try to do what Miles said. You get up in the morning and you try that approach. And this is going to tie in well with the message in the next hour. We're going to look at the foundation for such a life, which is faith in the gospel. But you know, these two verses, this is the kind of thing that so many Christians go to read And it says, well, keep your behavior excellent. And it's just like your mother said, behave.

And it's like, well, I really am trying to, Mom, but I can't. And that's the frustration. When I talk to believers and they have this, they're very, I want to please God, I want to obey God, I want to live this kind of life. And I often bring it back to Romans 7. It's like, I know, we do want to. But the question is, how are we going to do it? Because the wretched man that I am, who will deliver me? And that's the key, which you've drawn out really well this morning. Appreciate it.

Well, it's amazing those two verses Capsulize and we've been studying Romans for two and a half years in a way they kind of capsulize This is another way of expressing the same struggle the same battle. We all have Paul spent went into detail beyond imagination and Peter just says do it I think the Lord allows these kinds of texts to be in here without having to always go through all of Romans 6, 7, and 8. Because it's what believers see this and think, yeah, that is my desire. And it's that failure that causes them to go through the Romans 7 struggle and realize, I'm going to need something else.

Go ahead, Patty. I'm reminded, too, of Galatians 2.20. Oh, good. Good. Excellent. I've been crucified with Christ. It's no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up. Amen, that's incredible verse incredible.

That's exactly right, and that's actually what in a way if you had to describe Holly Hills That's what we're about people scratch your head. What what are you guys about? That's what we're about How do you live this life that pleases God in the midst of the fact you have this? First of all you you have to realize you have this war if you don't realize there's a war You've actually lost part of the battle before you even start if you realize you have a war going on then how do I? How is it possible I can? and have any success over those in life. All right. Well, thanks, guys. It was great. Actually, it'll be Andrew next week. He said he would teach next week. Oh. What was that? It's going to be Andrew. OK. All right. So let's close in prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much, Lord. We thank you just, Lord, for your beautiful word and your beautiful life that we can't have. We have, but it's only by the fact that it's your life living through us, Lord. And we trust you for the understanding and the wisdom and the patience with ourselves and with others, Lord, that that life can be seen and lived out day by day. Pray for Myles for the next service, Lord. You guide him. In Christ's name, amen.