Word of Salvation – Vol. 43 No. 27 – July 1998

 

Pure Spiritual Milk

 

Sermon by Rev. R. Meischke on 1Peter 2:1-3

Scripture Readings: Psalm 34; 1Peter 1

Suggested Hymns: BoW 180; 498; 34; 470

 

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Tasting the Goodness of the Lord

There is one thing I really like about this letter from Peter.  It’s true that he spends a lot of time encouraging us to change our lives and get rid of things that are wrong.  But he also backs all of that up with the encouragement that the foundation for this change is the confidence of our new life in Jesus.

We are reminded of how good it is to be alive in Jesus Christ and then we are stirred up to let that hope have an impact on how we live.

If you’ve got Jesus, if you know in your heart that your sins and evil are totally washed away by his blood; if you know with confidence that your eternity with God is set in concrete, thanks to Jesus, then the challenge is to allow your life to be affected and changed by this hope and joy which you have.

And the three verses of our text are no exception.  He says, get rid of all these evil attitudes and crave only the stuff that will make you grow in your salvation.  And the reason for the challenge is the fact that you have already tasted that the Lord is good.

The foundation, the thing that holds up and supports all the changes that we need to make in our lives is the fact that we, who believe in Jesus, have already experienced the goodness of God.

Now, you might feel like asking, “How have I tasted that the Lord is good?”  “How have I experienced this ‘goodness’?”  Not all of us have been smacked in the face with a conversion experience.  We can’t pick up a piece of this thing called ‘eternal life’ and look at it and measure it and feel it.

I guess it’s like asking, “How do you know that you were born?”  We don’t remember what it felt like.  We can’t compare testimonies about our birth experiences.  We just don’t know.

Unless, of course, we ask our parents, and then they might tell us what happened when we were born.  They’ll say something like, “Your mother cried a lot and you cried a lot and your father just walked around with a silly grin on his face.”  It’s one of those experiences that we’ve all had and that none of us remember.  The best we can do is to believe what our parents tell us, and join that with the fact that we know we are alive.

For us, to experience or taste that the Lord is good is to know for certain, not that we have been born, but that we have been born again.  It is to know without a doubt that we have eternal salvation and a perfect relationship with God.

And the only way that you can have this certainty is by believing that when Jesus died, you died with him, so that every single thing that is wrong in your life was punished and paid for completely at that time.  It is believing with the heart that the blood of Jesus Christ was the price that paid for everything, every last bit of guilt that separated us from God.  And it also means knowing that when Jesus rose from the dead, you rose with him into this new life that you now stand in.

Tasting the goodness of the Lord is knowing that his death is my death, and that his life is my life, a life that doesn’t end.  We can’t testify or show photographs to prove that we walked that rocky ground with a timber beam across our backs.  We can’t testify that we felt the steel nails being driven through our flesh and bones.  We can’t testify that we saw the stone rolled away.

But we do have the testimony of our God who says not only that it all happened, but also that if we believe in Jesus, then we can know that we were there, that it has been done.

Putting Aside the Bad Food

That’s the foundation.  That’s the ground that we build our lives on.  That’s the ‘therefore’ that comes before the challenge.  That’s the hope that reminds us that we are alive, that we do have a reason for cleaning out our lives and getting rid of the things that hold back our growth.

It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to realise that if you eat poisonous or rotten food, then you will probably get sick, and maybe even die.  So we try not to do that.

We don’t feed ‘ratsak’ or turps or furry yoghurt to our children, and most of us know what can happen if we get involved in drugs or too much alcohol.

But, we tend to rationalise these things.  Even though some foods might make us sick, or might be generally unhealthy.  Even when we know that eating, drinking, taking, shooting or smoking some things might even be risking our lives, we still take the risks.

And we do the same with our spiritual lives.  Even though these things that Peter is talking about are known threats to our well-being and our relationships with each other, we still take the risks.  They might make us sick, but they won’t kill us.

If you look at the list of things that Peter tells us to get rid of, you’ll notice that all of them have something to do with our relationships with each other.  Malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander are all things which damage our relationships and seriously threaten our growth as Christians.

Malice is an attitude which is designed to hurt other people.  If you have malice, then your intentions are bad and destructive.  Its only purpose is to hurt and destroy and tear down.  We get malicious because we want to hurt somebody.

We use deceit when we want to mislead somebody else for our own benefit.  Maybe it is to make me look good, or to make you look bad.

But, however I use it, either to cover up the truth or to invent a lie, it is hurtful and damaging.  And we know it.

Hypocrisy is what happens when I want you to think that I am better than I really am, or that I am a whole lot better than you, even when I know I’m not.  It happens when I convince myself that I don’t need Jesus as much as you do.

Envy is when I’m dirty on you because you have something that I want.  Or, maybe when you are something that I’m not.  Envy doesn’t only wish that I might get something, but also that you might lose it.

And slander is simply putting your malice and your deceit and your hypocrisy and your envy into words to literally destroy the value and the reputation of somebody else.

The problem is that, as much as some of these things might feel good at the time, they are not good for us.  They damage our relationships with each other and they get in the way of our growing up in Jesus.

And we know this sort of stuff from experience.  We know what it’s like when people start fighting or arguing, even within the Church.  We have seen bitterness and envy.  We have heard, and sometimes even encouraged, malicious gossip.  We know what it’s like to hear the truth being ignored or played with.  We have seen the hurt and felt the pain.  In chapter 1, Peter pointed out that his readers had been born again through the living and enduring Word of God.  And that new birth is the reason for getting rid of all those things that don’t fit in this new life.

Craving the Pure Food

Instead, just like new-born babies, we should crave pure spiritual milk so that we might grow up in our salvation in the same way that a child grows up if he is fed properly.

When it comes to food, a new-born baby only wants milk from its mother’s breast.  Mum doesn’t need to advertise or wear attractive clothes.  She doesn’t need to be in a particular place or with a particular group of people.  All the baby cares about is getting the food that only Mum can provide.

There’s no logic or debate or marketing or peer group pressure.  All the baby knows is: “The stuff I need and want most in this whole world comes from Mum and only from Mum.”  I could easily expand on this illustration and talk about the intricate details of breast feeding and the bonding that happens between mother and child and all of that.  But I don’t need to.

All we need to understand from Peter’s illustration is that for a new-born baby, there is only one source for everything good.  A baby doesn’t even think of trying anything that doesn’t come from inside Mum.  It’s only when we start getting older that things that Mum doesn’t provide look attractive, like junk food and mud pies and cigarette butts and Coca-Cola and cockroaches.

We can be the same.  We know that God is the source of everything good.  We know that what God wants for us is always what’s best for us.  And yet, so easily, we slip into enjoying stuff that just doesn’t fit.  There are times when we allow our lives and our relationships to be damaged by these very things that Peter is warning us about.  It’s almost as if we sometimes forget the taste of God’s goodness to us.

Pure spiritual milk is the very thing that brings us to and keeps us in a perfect relationship with God and with each other.  It is, as Peter says, the stuff that causes us to grow up in our salvation.  It is our food.  It is our nourishment.  It is everything we need.  It is everything we could ever hope for.  It is our life.

But, the strange thing is that we often struggle with how to define it.  What is this milk?  What’s in it?  What does it really taste like?  And we can start disagreeing.  I might say it’s cream, you might say it’s a white fluid, someone else might say it’s calcium and lactose and fat.

There is a lot more to this milk than just the colour or just the taste or just the smell or just the chemical makeup of it.  The milk is everything that God has provided to give us our new lives and to make us grow as Christians, as his special babies.

In the same way the word ‘milk’ sums up a whole lot of different and individual things in one package.  All of this spiritual milk from God can be summed up in the person who is Jesus.

The love that God decided to show to us, he gave to us in Jesus.  The forgiveness that we need was bought by the blood of Jesus.  The hope that we have for eternity has been given to us by Jesus when he came out of his grave alive.

The Word of God which gives us all our knowledge and understanding and feeding and encouragement and comfort and strength is designed to show us Jesus.  And he’s said that himself.  It all points to him.  The Holy Spirit is God’s gift to us through Jesus, just so that we might know Jesus even better than we do now.  And feel his presence with us all the time.

The fellowship that we have as Christians.  The worship that we share together.  The smile that says, “It’s great to be alive!”  The hug that we give to each other when we’re happy or when we’re crying.  The tears of shared grief and shared laughter.  The certainty of knowing that I stand in the middle of my brothers and my sisters is all because of, and in, and through Jesus Christ.

The pure spiritual milk that is always there for us is our Lord Jesus Christ.  The pure spiritual milk that gives us all that we will ever need for now and for all time can only be found in Jesus Christ.

Growing in Salvation on the Goodness of God

So it is in him alone that we can grow in our salvation.  Because he is the goodness of God to us.

There are times when we get really frustrated with our Christian lives.  There are times when we are not very happy with our prayer lives and our Bible reading and our willingness to join in worship and other Church activities.

There are times when we do find it really difficult to get rid of things in our lives that we know are wrong, like the ones that Peter mentioned in our text.  There are times when we get depressed and feel guilty because we’re just not doing our Christianity the way we should.  There are times when we don’t feel inside like we’re growing and improving and getting more mature and all that.  There are times when we just don’t feel like very good Christians at all.

And when we feel like that, we start looking for ways to get out of it.  We look for ways that we can start growing.  For 2,000 years, Christians have been struggling with the problem of “how do I become a better Christian?  How can I grow?”  The problem is that we often try to fix our lives on our own, by going to Church more and being nice to more people and not lying as much.  We all have our little things which we do when we want to become better Christians.

The hunger is there.  Our craving for something that will help is very real.  And yet we often get so frustrated because the things we keep trying just don’t seem to work.  And we end up feeling like hypocrites and seeing the hypocrisy in everybody else.

This hunger that we have must be focussed on Jesus Christ alone.  He alone is the answer to our every need.  He alone is the solution to our every problem.  He alone is the food that satisfies us perfectly.  Everything else is like trying to eat gravel.  Sure, you can feel it going down, but it doesn’t do you any good.

But, the value of Jesus won’t mean a thing to us unless we have already tasted that he is good.  The more we realise that our forgiveness in Jesus is more than just a statement of academic knowledge, and that it is also a contentment and confidence deep inside; the more we realise that being born again is not just words, but a whole new life beyond our wildest dreams; the more we see that Jesus really has given us hope beyond hope; then the more we will be able to trust him and lean on him and believe him when he says, “I am the bread of life.  He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.”

It is to trust that what he’s done for me is better than what I could do for myself.  It is to be confident that his care for me right now is constant and good.  It is to know that he is with me all the time.  It is to know with confidence that the good to come which he has promised to me will not only happen, but that it will actually be good.

If you have tasted the goodness of our God in Jesus Christ, then I challenge you to satisfy your hunger through him alone, and know that he is the pure spiritual milk that makes our new lives grow.

Amen.