Weird of Salvation – September 2026

Title: Living in Light of Eternity

Sermon by Rev Jesse Gollan

Series: How to Survive in a Hostile World

Passage: 1 Peter 4:1-11

Introduction

“We do what we do based on what we believe to be true.”

A good pastor friend of mine, a really wise guy, someone who was zealous for the glory of God and for the flourishing of his people, used to say this constantly in his sermons and in his conversations.

I’m going to say it again and then pause so that you can think about the truth of that statement. We do what we do based on what we believe to be true.

Peter’s goal here is to transform our actions by reminding us of what is true. He wants us to intentionally live lives that make sense, given what is true.

I’m just going to start with verse one of chapter 4:

“Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions, but for the will of God.”

There are multiple steps in this train of thought, and we’re just going to walk our way through them to make sure that they are clear to us.

For starters, he says, “since Christ suffered in the flesh.” In other words, given that there is now a pathway to salvation, given that your eternal destiny is not the lake of fire prepared for the devil and for his demons, we should live transformed lives.

He has this phrase, “whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin.” It continues, “so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh, no longer for human passions, but for the will of God.”

What he is saying is that for the true believer, for someone who truly believes what the Bible says about reality and about eternity, their life will be transformed. They will suffer

“in the flesh.”

In other words, they will be waging war constantly against the broken, sinful, and selfish desires that are contrary to the will of God. And he spends a lot of the rest of this passage outlining for us the difference between our sinful desires and the will of God.

Leaving the Flood of Wickedness Behind.

He says in verse 3:

“For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this, they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you; but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.”

Okay, there’s a list there of five things, and I think that they are intentionally kind of building towards something.

1. Sensuality: Which means that you are just giving in to whatever desires your body throws up to you.
2. Passions: Is talking about a next level. You aren’t stumbling into sin anymore… you now consider the sin to be precious to you. You are passionate about it.
3. Drunkenness: Which is talking about addiction to sin. Addiction to gambling, addiction to pornography, addiction to alcohol. Sin is addictive. If you allow it a place in your life… it won’t stay still. It will grow and spread and put down roots and make it harder and harder for you to fight it. Maybe you feel like you are already addicted to a particular sin in your life. Well, you can either start fighting it today, or you can allow it to continue to grow in your life. There is no middle ground. There is no holding pattern. You are either putting sin to death in your life, or it is becoming more and more powerful in your life.
   The time has passed for being enslaved to sin. If you are in Christ, then slavery is not your identity anymore.
4. Orgies and Drinking Parties: It talks about these together-type-of-sins. You have progressed from giving in to a sin, to being passionate about a sin, to being addicted to a sin… and now your shame is gone. Now you are participating in sin openly with other people… you are encouraging them to sin, and you are encouraged to sin by them. Sinning is now out in the open in your life.

   Just by the way, I think that when people consume pornography, there’s a sense in which they are participating in an orgy. It’s almost worse than an orgy, because it’s fake and dehumanizing and everything else…

5. Lawless Idolatry: And it finishes with lawless idolatry, the worship of things that are not God. At this point, you aren’t even thinking about the Lord. Your mind is consumed by the worship of sin. I’ve seen this happen to people. Literally this pattern – including people who grew up in churches.

And that pattern what the people of the world do, and it says in verse 4 that they are surprised when we do not join them in the same flood of evil-doing, and they will speak against us.

The Lord Jesus is saying that if you are a Christian, you will suffer because you do not join the people of the world in their flood of debauchery, their flood of wickedness. Wickedness is ruling over every part of their lives.

You will suffer, people will speak against you, and you will stand out. You might be disadvantaged at work, or your family may not like that you no longer join them in wickedness.

But according to the scriptures, the time that has passed suffices for doing what the people of the world do.

If you are a Christian, that life is behind you. Suffering in the flesh, being willing to suffer because you are fighting the hold of sin in your life, is one of the things that is meant to encourage you that your faith is real, that it is genuine, that it is not just words.

Real faith results in a transformed life. You will do what you do based on what you believe, deep down, to be true.

And if you are truly saved, you will not be content with evil in your life. There’s a comfort later on in this passage for people who are still struggling with evil. But, we’ll wait to speak to it when we get there.

The Gospel and the Coming Judgment

Verse 6 is really interesting and important, let me read it and then explain:

“For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.”

Peter is answering the question: Are Christians wasting their lives? Christians reject all these sinful pleasures, and they don’t participate in the flood of wickedness.

They suffer because they are rejecting that flood of wickedness, so are they fools? And Peter says no. Those who die in the Lord Jesus are alive in the spirit.

Their life is not snuffed out, and therefore, their life is not wasted. They will be rewarded for the way that they lived their life.

But if we go back to verse 5, which is talking about the people of the world who are participating in this flood of wickedness, it says, “But they will give an account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.” The “living and the dead” there is a way of saying that if Jesus comes back, no one is going to escape the judgment.

Anyone who is living will be judged, and anyone who has died before the return of Jesus will be judged; there is no escape.

Peter’s point here is that he’s trying to remind us of what is true: there is a great judgment coming. It says elsewhere in the scriptures that all those who participate in Satan’s rebellion against the Creator God will be thrown into the lake of fire, which is not prepared for humans, but is prepared for the devil and for the demons.

In other words, humans will share in the ~same~ punishment of the devil. We will be in the same place: the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, and fire and other horrors.

The place prepared by God for his enemies is the fate of everyone who has sinned against Him. There is a price that must be paid for rebelling against the ruler of the universe. His honour and his glory demands it.

It will either be paid by you in the lake of fire for the trillions upon trillions of decades, the endless trillions of days that consist of eternity, or it has been paid by the Lord Jesus on your behalf when he died on the cross.

The End is at Hand: Be Ready

Verse 7 continues the same idea:

“The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers.”

We know from the previous chapter that when he talks about the sake of our prayers, he’s talking about the fact that God listens to those who are forgiven through Christ, but he turns his ear away from those who are in rebellion against him.

I just have to briefly deal with that phrase: “The end of all things is at hand.” God does not lie; the end of all things is indeed at hand, but you need to understand what God is saying.

There are four major events in the history of this age:

1. The world was created.
2. Humans rebelled against God.
3. Jesus came, died, and paid the price. This was in order that all who placed their faith and trust in him might be forgiven and restored to peaceful, joyful, family-type relationship with him.
4. The return of Jesus. This is the last major event of this age, when the great judgment will occur, the end of this age will come, and the beginning of the next age will be inaugurated.

Peter’s point is that the Lord Jesus can return at any moment.

I have heard people say to me before, “I’m just going to continue in the flood of wickedness for a couple more years, and then after a couple of years I will repent and come to God.” For starters, that’s a foolish plan anyway; sin gets a tighter and tighter grip on people, like we looked at earlier in this passage. Your giving in to your sensuality will develop into passions which will develop into addictions which will develop into open sin which will develop into lawless idolatry.

Of course, anyone that turns to him will be forgiven, but our hearts grow harder and colder the longer we walk in rebellion against God.

But Peter’s application is different; Peter is saying that the Lord Jesus can return at any moment, and you need to be ready. It is not worth risking eternity to squeeze in just a couple of more sins. ENOUGH! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF GOD’S PATIENCE!
He is patient… he is kind, he is generous… he is forgiving… but that is not all.
He is also just, and angry towards sin and sinners, and he has proven throughout the Scriptures that there is an end to his patience towards people who know the truth but resist him.
He wiped out all of humanity except for one family in the flood.
He wiped out the original inhabitants of Canaan because of their extreme wickedness.

He caused the Israelites to become slaves in foreign lands, and the northern tribes disappeared into history.
After Jesus was rejected by the people of Israel and killed, the Lord caused not only for the whole country to be absolutely torn to shreds by the Romans, but allowed there to be a decree making it totally illegal for any Jewish person to live in what was formerly Israel by the Romans.

And God promises even more extreme eternal punishment for anyone who remains in rebellion against him until the time of the great judgment. All of those punishments are just earthly things… but the eternal punishment is far worse.
His patience will not last forever. Eventually Christ will return, and then the eternal judgment.

And so he says, be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers. Being self-controlled and sober-minded means that you are living in accordance with the truth; you are doing what you do based on what you believe to be true.

And I just have to point out here that Peter has multiple times now used prayer as one of the greatest gifts from God for the saved person. The ability to come before the ruler of the very universe and bring our requests to him is unfathomably amazing.

I think probably every Christian often forgets how amazingly amazing the invitation to prayer is. Somehow, God, who is outside of time, pays specific attention to every prayer of every believer.

It doesn’t mean that he will say yes to you; God is not a genie or a computer program. But he will listen to you, and he might say yes. And importantly, crucially, he wants you to come to him.

Quick Application!

There is nothing wrong with telegram prayers (give examples). There is nothing wrong with praying together with other believers at growth group and at church.

But if you think about your life as a Christian, and realise that sometimes multiple days go by without you seriously coming before the Lord in prayer… it’s like you are going on a cruise ship and never leaving your cabin. The food is great, smell is oceany… you are genuinely on the cruise ship – but you are voluntarily giving up on so much.
What is more… God commands us to pray to him, so you aren’t just giving up on an unbelievable gift… you are rebelling against God.

If you struggle to pray, I have some great resources that I can recommend to you after the sermon.

The Will of God: Love and Serve

We now come to verse 8, where Peter kind of provides the opposite picture to the flood of wickedness that he’s described in the earlier verses. The will of God for us is not to participate in the flood of wickedness, but to love Him and love our neighbour.

Let me read, starting in verse 8, as it speaks for itself:

“Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”

Okay, the first thing that we have to notice there from verse 8 is that love covers a multitude of sins. God is recognizing right here—where he’s saying that we need to take sin really seriously—that still, there will be sin amongst believers.

Believers will have private sins, and they will have sins where they wrong other believers in the church. We are rejecting it, we are fighting it, and we are no longer ruled by it, but sin is and will be an ever-present struggle in the life of every human being until the Lord Jesus returns. God knows that you will sin against other believers, and that they will sin against you… so he tells you – it is his will for you to love them because that will make it possible for you to forgive them. =

So take comfort, because God knows that you continue to struggle with sin. Struggling with sin does not mean that you are not a believer, and does not mean that you are not loved.

Indeed, God would not tell believers to love Christians who sin against them unless he also loves those sinner-Christians. He tells us to love them… and to love you… because he loves all of his children, even though we will never be fully free of sin until the return of Christ.

Surrendering yourself to sin, declaring that sin is your master and not the Lord, means that you do not have true saving faith. True saving faith results in a life where we take up arms against sin in our life… and we do battle, and when we fall down, we get back up. It means that we are not content with sin, and we are making war against it.

And we don’t just run away from sin, but we run towards what God says is good.

To the Glory of God

I just want to point out the last words of our passage: “Do all these good things in order that in everything, God may be glorified through Jesus Christ; to him belong glory and dominion forever and ever, Amen.”

By loving our neighbour—and in particular, here it’s talking about our Christian brothers and sisters, by sacrificing for them—God is glorified. We are loving our neighbour, and we’re loving God.

And why do we care about that? We care about that for many reasons, but I want to highlight two of them:

1. God is objectively worth honouring. Just look around at the world at the beauty that he has created for us to enjoy. He declared that the world was good, and it is good. Think about the fact that God invented the sense of smell, which he didn’t have to, but he did for our delight.
2. He is specifically good to every believer in the Lord Jesus. That pulls us into the second major reason why we should care about the glory of God: He isn’t just creative, he isn’t just powerful, he isn’t just generally good.

If you are a believer, then the Lord Jesus has come down to earth and been incarnated into humanity. And by the way, he remains a human; after his resurrection, fully God, fully man—so still God, but also now fully man for all eternity.

And then he suffered and died on a cross—not only human suffering, but the wrath of God, the Father turning his face away from him. And he did all of that for you, specifically, if you are a believer.

That is a second reason to care about the glory of God. And he did it not only so that you can avoid the lake of fire prepared for the demons, and for the devil, and for all who persist in their rebellion against God, but he did it in order that your life might be transformed to truly reflect the glory of God.

You are created in his image, and God desires for his goodness, his character to be reflected in the way that you live. Jesus didn’t just die for the sake of your eternity.

Jesus also died so that right now, even before the return of Christ or before your death, you can begin to more and more live as you were designed to live as a human woman or a human man. Those are only two of the reasons why we should care about the glory of God.

Let’s pray together.