Do I Make Myself Suffer

Welcome to the New Life Ministries podcast. How does a person figure out what God wants them to do? So often we look for signs by interpreting the things that happen to us. Have you ever had a day go badly and asked, is God punishing me for something? In today’s service, we are encouraged to build our confidence in the choices we make in following Jesus, a confidence that comes by trusting Jesus and his victory.

Let’s join Curtis. Well, good morning. Today we’re going to look at 1 Peter chapter 3, page 1830.

If you have a New Living Translation giant print Bible. At the recent pastor’s gathering I was part of a couple weeks ago, we learned about the Nike swoosh. Do you know the Nike swoosh? It’s on the side of every Nike shoe.

You know what? You need to know it for me to keep going. It looks like a big check mark and it was right there on the screen that the screen has decided to. No, it’s all right.

It’s all right. By the time she gets it up, I will have finished my little story. Anyway, the Nike swoosh.

In 1971, Carolyn Davidson first drew the logo for Nike shoes. There, that’s it. Phil Knight, who was the co-founder of Nike, didn’t like it at first.

He said, though, it was the least awful of all his design options. And he thought, well, it’ll grow on him. And they had to get the shoes in production, so they went with it.

Now it has become a tremendously successful logo. So the inspiration for the swoosh, which is what it’s called, is taken from the wing of the Greek goddess Nike. The Greek goddess Nike is spelled N-I-K-E, or Nike.

So that’s their brand name. But the Greek goddess Nike, it’s a female goddess in Greek and Roman culture, athletic woman, big wings. She’s the goddess of victory.

And so she brings victory in war, she brings victory in sport. And so they took her wing and made it into the swoosh. So at our pastor’s gathering, we talked about the swoosh, and we noted how it felt like a step down and then away, like a rebound or a bouncing back.

And one of our guys said, you know, in life we talk about taking one step forward and two steps back. He goes, maybe the swoosh is more like how it is. It’s down and away to something new, or one’s down and two forward.

And of course, that rebounding, that fall and pick yourself up again, is what our teacher wanted us to ponder. So victory is, you know, the goddess of victory. Victory is partly in our ability to come back from difficulty, to come back from hardship or failure.

It’s the idea that a crash doesn’t stop you, because if a crash stops you, you will not be victorious. So he said that research shows that recovery and resilience is normal for humans. Resilience, that ability to recover from a difficult experience, to spring back after being bent, that’s the normal human way.

And that surprised me, because when we look at media, we tend to see the message that if a person encounters something hard, if some bad thing happens to them, their life kind of stops there. And if they do recover, it’s almost a miraculous unheard of victory. And it’s not true.

It’s normal for humans to rebound and recover. We are normally resilient, and that helps us. That’s part of being victorious.

So sometimes we behave like the situation we are in will always be this way. And therefore, we give up hope. And without hope, we don’t engage in the activity of recovery, or we don’t work on being resilient.

We give ourselves over to the pit. And I want to challenge us today by considering the words that Peter gives the folks who are suffering in chapter 3 of 1 Peter, that they can have hope in life because of Jesus. You with me? Yeah.

Let me offer a prayer, and then we’ll look at 1 Peter 3. Father, Father, in this morning, would you speak to us through your word, and would you draw us to see the thing you really want us to see? Would you help us to hear from you that we would that we would grow as disciples, that we would grow in how we live life, that we would also have new advice, new perspectives as we help people? So please help us today. Amen. So 1 Peter 3, verse 12.

Now, who will want to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you suffer for doing what is right, God will reward you for it. So don’t be worried or be afraid of their threats. Instead, you must worship Christ as Lord of your life.

And if someone asks you about your hope as a believer, always be ready to explain it. But do this in a gentle and respectful way. Keep your conscience clear.

Then if people speak against you, they will be ashamed when they see what a good life you live because you belong to Christ. Remember, it is better to suffer for doing good, if that is what God wants, than to suffer for doing wrong. Christ suffered for our sins once for all time.

He never sinned, but he died for sinners to bring you safely home to God. He suffered physical death, but he was raised to life in the Spirit. So he went and preached to the spirits in prison, those who disobeyed God long ago when God waited patiently while Noah was building his boat.

Only eight people were saved from drowning in that terrible flood. And that water is a picture of baptism, which now saves you, not by removing dirt from your body, but as a response to God from a clean conscience. It is effective because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Now Christ has gone to heaven. He is seated in the place of honor next to God, and all the angels and authorities and powers accept his authority. We’ll stop there.

So who will want to harm you if you are eager to do good? So in recent weeks, I’ve been talking about different ways we might experience suffering for our faith from other people. I want to talk today about how we do it to ourselves. How do you figure out if the difficult experience or the hardship you’re going through is what God wants you to be going through, or if you’ve brought it on yourself, and if you’ve brought it on yourself to make changes to get yourself out? So one thing we sometimes do is we interpret the events that happen to us and try to figure out if God is trying to tell us something, or if he wants us to do something.

So if I’ve encountered all kinds of obstacles in my day, does it mean that I’ve sinned and God is punishing me? If I get sick, does it mean that I’ve been overworking and God wants me to take a break? If I encounter a bunch of hardship and the path seems blocked, does that mean the evil one is resisting my work and God wants me to push through and persevere? This becomes a very difficult way to figure out if God is trying to tell you something, because the Lord can use circumstance, but what you’re going through might also be the result of choices other people are making, and it might also be the result of choices you are making. So it could be you, it could be others, it could be God. Anyone could be causing the hardship that you are going through.

How do you know for certain? It is very easy to get this wrong, and then you will end up enduring something that you think is God’s will for you, when actually it’s the result of your own behavior or the behavior of somebody else. Which is why I say sometimes we can be the cause of our own suffering. So I’d like to give you a different approach to thinking about how to follow God.

It’s simpler, it’s more intentional, and it’s therefore clearer when it comes to dealing with hardship. We all have different responsibilities in life. We’re in relationships, we have to be faithful in that relationship, we have jobs, we have homes to be taken care of, we have bodies to be taken care of, we’re involved in different activities.

Take what you’ve learned about God, what you’ve learned from what Jesus has taught you, and implement that teaching in those areas of responsibilities. It’s that easy. Do what God puts in front of you, and do it as a disciple of Jesus.

So that means you have to make decisions in how you relate to people, in how you talk with people, how you do your job, how you take care of your body, how you play, how you rest. And those decisions is where you follow God, is where you follow Jesus. And then for new activities or new desires you have, or things you want to get into, make a choice of what you want to do, and do it.

Be intentional. Act in a considered way. Now, it’s good to pray and ask God to be clear if this is the right step or wrong step, and I really encourage that.

Run it by others who will also pray and give you some feedback. Learn to listen when you pray, but then settle, make a decision, and move forward. Most of following Jesus is making choices to live in line with Jesus and his goal, like you’re an active participant in this whole story.

So you don’t have to try to read signs in the circumstances that happen to you to figure out if God is wanting you to do something or stop something or whatever. Like, that’s a guessing game that’s really hard to play. Consider what God wants you to do or to behave and implement that and do that.

I think sometimes people have an insecurity about following God, and they are afraid that they will get it wrong. And because people are afraid that they will get it wrong when it comes to following Jesus, they abandon their responsibility. And it becomes then God’s responsibility to guide that person in their decisions or to make those decisions for that person.

And then they look for events in their day to decide how God is trying to guide them. And I want you instead to understand God wants you to make your choices, and there are risks in those choices, and he wants you to take those risks. The fear of getting it wrong, the fear of failure or of shame, is really a fear of judgment that I will make a mistake, and God will judge me, and then I will have failed.

Or it’s about being condemned in the eyes of people around us who don’t understand our decisions anyway. So the passage says two things about that fear, the fear of shame, the fear of judgment. We’re going to focus on verse 15.

You must worship Christ as Lord of your life, and if someone asks about your hope as a believer, always be ready to explain it. So first, the passage reminds us that Jesus is our Lord, and he’s already dealt with the issue of your judgment. So if we jump to verse 18, Christ suffered for our sins once and for all time.

He never sinned, but he died for sinners to bring you safely home to God. It’s done. Your judgment is done.

So you don’t need to be afraid of failing God or getting it wrong when if you fail God and get it wrong, you’ve already been forgiven. So forgiveness isn’t just being forgiven of the sins we did before we can become a Christian. We’re also forgiven all the mistakes and sins we commit as Christians, and it would be really arrogant to think that once we became Christians, we no longer sinned.

That idea would be expecting God to instantly change us, and instead we have to learn to make choices that implement our faith. So in our heart, we worship Christ as our Lord, or another translation says, in your heart, set apart Christ as Lord. Remember a while back, we talked about the heart, and the heart, what it means in Scripture, and the heart is not where you feel affection or you feel attraction, which is how our culture talks about heart.

Heart is that core place deep in your being where you decide what is right, what is important, who is important. It’s the place of your core values and your core commitments that drive your behavior, and it’s saying in that deep place in your being, put Christ as Lord. Let it go into that deep, settled place within you, and you can say, Jesus is my boss, and in his eyes, I am free from being condemned and free being judged.

So I am free to try things. I am free to risk. I am free to learn.

We don’t need to be afraid of making mistakes as we learn to follow Jesus. Who is going to condemn us or critique us when our actual judge is also our Lord who loves us and has already forgiven us? And if some people criticize us now, and there’s always going to be people who criticize us now, in the end, they don’t get to have a say at our final evaluation. So if this situation sounds like you, where you’ve been afraid to trust your decision-making in following Jesus, if you’ve been expecting God to show you his will through the circumstances of your day, it’s time to change and to ask, what do I know about Jesus and how he wants me to live, and how can I apply that to my responsibilities in my day? For how I do my job, or the work that I have, or my responsibilities, for the people I care for, for the way I run my body, you must worship Christ as Lord of your life.

And if someone asks you about your hope as a believer, always be ready to explain it. I read that sentence and I thought, okay, what keeps me going? Like, where is my hope that keeps me tracking when life is really hard? And I thought, well, part of it is I know too much. I’ve experienced too much to walk away from Christ.

And the other part of my answer would be, I don’t like the version of who I am when I don’t follow Jesus as Lord. So that keeps me on the track. But the passage actually gives us another answer, and it’s the idea of being vindicated because Christ is the victor.

Christ has the victory. The passage tells us that Christ, we are vindicated in life because Christ is the victor. He is actually the God of victory.

You will be vindicated. You know what vindicated means? Like, when you decide to eat healthier, and so you eat less sugar and eat less saturated fats, and you don’t like it because fat and sugar taste good, and then six months later you meet with your doctor, your doctor says, your heart is in much better condition, and all of that resisting of sugar and fat, you were vindicated. It got you a good answer.

When Christ is revealed, you will be vindicated. You’ll be cleared of accusation and blame that others might throw your way, and it will be shown that your decision to follow Jesus was right. And that should give you hope.

And that hope will encourage you to try to make the decisions to follow Jesus. It’s the hope that gives you the rebound. So Peter gives us a few lines to make his point that Christ is victorious.

Verse 19, so he went, Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison, those who disobeyed God long ago when God waited patiently while Noah was building his boat. This is a tremendously difficult passage to understand, and Martin Luther said he could not figure it out. Yeah, and it’s because we are removed from stories that floated in their culture naturally.

So it would be like 2,000 years from now, somebody listening to a sermon that I’m saying, and I refer to Frodo destroying the ring of power. Now we would understand Curtis is talking about the movie or the book, Lord of the Rings, but 2,000 years from now, they might look back and go, Frodo, who, what? What is going on? So if we jump back 2,000 years, one of the stories that was part of their culture was the book of Enoch. And you can find the book of Enoch online today.

It’s not very big. Enoch expands the story of Genesis 6, which is right before Noah built the ark and the world was destroyed by a flood. So there’s a couple of different ways to understand Genesis 6, but Enoch explains it this way, that the angels of heaven see that the women, human women, are so beautiful, they decide to leave heaven, come to earth, and mate with women.

And they produce children that are giants, heroes of a previous age. And God is mad, so God puts those angels that left heaven into prison and locks them away. That’s how Enoch explains that story.

There’s another way to read Genesis 6, which is one that I prefer and one that I’ve taught here, but this is a tremendously confusing passage with many twists, and if you’re curious, I can talk with you after the service about it. But I will say, Enoch is not a spiritually authoritative book. Like, it was not authoritative spiritually in the Jewish culture or in the Christian community, but people knew it.

It was part of their folklore. And it has some truth, or the truths that it’s pointing to exist in the Bible in other ways. Which is, again, like if I was talking about Lord of the Rings and the importance of stopping, you know, all controlling power.

Like, I could talk about it as an aspect of truth without affirming that Lord of the Rings is true. So why I think Peter is referring to the book of Enoch is for two reasons. In our passage, the word translated spirits is most often translated, most often means angels or spiritual beings.

It rarely refers to humans. And in the only being that is put in prison for rebellion to God is Satan. And then in the book of Enoch, the angels that rebelled are also put in prison.

The Bible never talks about humans being put in prison after they die. So the image Peter is giving us is that Christ even went to preach to those spirits that are imprisoned. And I don’t know if he’s offering them forgiveness, that’s not part of any story.

But he is declaring that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him, including all authority over the spirit world. And so if you follow the passage through to verse 22, Christ is seated at the place of honor next to God and all the angels and authorities and powers accept his authority. Peter’s point is, Christ has been declared victorious.

He has been vindicated against in sight of all the human world and in sight of all the spirit world. His death was not his defeat, it was the means by which he rescued creation from rebellion. Jesus is the God of victory, which means that those who belong to Christ are vindicated as well.

That’s us. So your choices, your mistakes, your choices to follow Jesus will be vindicated. There’s no accusation, there’s no blame to come your way.

And it also means the spiritual forces in the universe are not able to defeat you. So if you’re having a day where it feels like the universe itself is trying to stop you, well, whatever unseen spiritual forces there might be, those forces submit to the desire of Jesus. Jesus is victorious.

So today I’ve been trying to encourage you not to be the cause of your own suffering because you’re trying to follow Jesus by interpreting the things that happen to you in life. We are to make choices. How am I going to follow Jesus in this area of my life, this responsibility, this interest? You don’t need to be afraid of failing or afraid of getting it wrong.

Jesus is your judge and he’s already forgiven you. So it’s time to set out and try living in a new way as a disciple. In your heart, put Christ as Lord.

And remember, Christ is victorious even over all the unseen beings that rebelled against God. You will be vindicated. It will be proven that following Christ was the right path.

So what catches your attention in this? What encourages you? Jesus was victorious and he is now with God and he has all authority. That’s really neat, you know. I had to reflect back on religious organizations that claim that Jesus was just a great teacher.

He was not God. And this is just one more passage in the Bible which says he was God. He was as much God as God is God.

And that’s kind of neat, isn’t it? You know, and we can trust him. But this is by no means the only passage that says that. So I’m not sure if that’s missing in some Bibles, but I think some of them have any reference to Christ being God has been deleted.

Some other religions, yeah. I don’t think Jesus could have been much of a good teacher if he was wrong about one of his main points, which was that he was God. Kind of sketchy.

It’s interesting to hear this from you specifically because I know you are more than most people that I know and respect very alert to sort of nuance of situation and kind of this feeling or that kind of like more than I am able to be. But I appreciate that you’re saying like this is actually important to sort of live into it as a responsible human, not as someone who’s trying to consult the magic eight ball. I think that I feel like I grew up around somebody whose faith was new when I was about seven.

So, you know, my mom’s faith was not an established thing, but she had grown up in a situation where love was very conditional. And so when she became a Christian, she didn’t know not to bring that with her, I think. And so she still assumes that God’s love is, I think, quite conditional.

And so she’s always trying to make sure she gets it right. And she never makes a mistake and she never gets it wrong because I think she’s very afraid that God will then reject her. And so it’s not just a little thing.

This is not a small thing. My mom lives in and people whose faith is like this pattern live in a lot of fear because basically the underlying thing is you’re afraid of getting it wrong. You’re afraid of getting it wrong and then being either rejected or abandoned or whatever bad word you want to fill in there by God.

And the alternative is, like you were saying, you’re already forgiven. You’re living right in the middle of it already, like you’re sitting in a hub of forgiveness. You’re sitting there already.

It’s not like you have to do it for every individual thing as it comes along. And the idea that God wants us to grow up into responsible, mature sons and daughters. And a responsible, mature son and daughter is not someone who’s running around tensely going, oh, oh, is this it? Is this it? Is this it? You can’t rely on that person.

You’re like, please just sit down and have a big breath. Just stop. I’d like to actually talk to you about like the principles behind wise decision making or whatever.

And I feel like God is much more like that. I appreciate the perspective that that is what God is calling us to not to this sort of magic eight ball. Like there’s one spotlight beam of God’s will and you have to make really, really sure that you stay in it.

Like, I don’t believe that. But I didn’t know that I was not allowed to live like that until after I left home because that was sort of the sense that I grew up with was that there’s always only one way to do it and you better be really, really sure. And that’s terrifying.

So I appreciate the encouragement of this. Well, it’s interesting all through the Old Testament. Like I am going through some of the history books and all these people, like it’s like God says, this is your opportunity to prove if you’re going to follow me or not.

And then they make their choices. And so it’s like, yeah, no, you have an opportunity here. What are your choices? Are you going to follow me or not? What are you going to do? Yeah.

I can only testify to my own experience. I find that God gives me prompts towards something and then he allows me to make choices towards that. And in making those choices, I have to weigh whether I believe this is what God would want.

And even if I make mistakes, that sometimes they can be painful, but God gives me guidance in how to heal those mistakes. I find that there’s seldom just one way that sometimes there is more than one choice. That is, I hesitate to use the word right, but some choices are okay, but there’s better than others.

I find that consulting others about making choices is sometimes good, but sometimes, how can I put it? Unhelpful? Their advice is less than helpful. Only God knows my heart. And I have to make choices on that basis.

No, I like that, Barry, because sometimes people interpret their own emotions to be what God is saying. And sometimes it’s also good for God to shipwreck that. You know, like, I thought this was God, I thought this was God, and it blew up in my face.

And it’s one way for God to say, yes, because that’s not me. And that’s part of that learning. Making mistakes is good.

It’s okay. But we learn. Personally, I have found that if I’m listening to God, that seldom happens.

I was just discussing with Shannon this morning, that very thing, that the number of major things that I felt God was pointing me towards, and that I was confident that this was God, that a lot of those things changed the direction of my life. One example is being here. I felt that God directed me here.

This is where you need to go. I didn’t know that this was a long-term commitment. But God was saying, you have to go look.

Yeah, I’m glad you’re here. I think this was a sermon that I really needed to hear this week, because I’ve been working towards stuff, and I was headed in a direction. I was going to see family that I haven’t seen in a long time.

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