Tawa Baptist

Responsibility

Scripture: Proverbs 6:1-11

Video Link: https://youtu.be/-TP-QDgpdto

Structure:

  • Introduction
  • Guard your authority
  • Take responsibility for yourself
  • Conclusion

Introduction:

Good morning everyone.

In a moment I’m going to list some words and as I do, listen carefully and see if you can pick up the common thread: Kiwi, Kākāpō, Morepork, Fantail, Tui and Black Robin. What is the common thread with these? [Wait]

That’s right, they are all native birds of New Zealand. 

Today we continue our series in the Old Testament book of Proverbs. Proverbs offers practical wisdom for living. It gives handy life hacks for people starting out in the world. 

Often when we read Proverbs it seems like a random collection of unrelated sayings. And sometimes that’s because it is. Other times though it’s possible to find a common thread.

A couple of weeks’ ago we heard about the importance of guarding your heart. This morning we look at Proverbs chapter 6. If we were to read the whole chapter, we would notice one of the common threads tying Proverbs 6 together is responsibility.  

Most of Proverbs 6 deals with our responsibility to God and our neighbour, but the first 11 verses (the focus of our message today) is primarily concerned with personal responsibility. That is, our responsibility to and for ourselves. From Proverbs 6, verse 1, we read…

My son, if you have put up security for your neighbour, if you have shaken hands in pledge for a stranger, 2 you have been trapped by what you said, ensnared by the words of your mouth. 3 So do this, my son, to free yourself, since you have fallen into your neighbour’s hands: Go—to the point of exhaustion—and give your neighbour no rest! 4 Allow no sleep to your eyes, no slumber to your eyelids. 5 Free yourself, like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the snare of the fowler. 6 Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! 7 It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, 8 yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. 9 How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? 10 A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest—11 and poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man.

May the Spirit of Jesus illuminate God’s word for us.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the common threads with this reading is the idea of responsibility, in particular personal responsibility. For responsibility to be life giving though, it must always go together with authority.

Being responsible means you are the one who will be held accountable for the outcome. While authority means having the resources and decision making control you need to get the job done and achieve the outcome.  

Responsibility plus authority equals freedom.

Conversely, responsibility minus authority equals captivity.

To make someone responsible for something but then take away their authority to act, is unfair. It puts that’s person in a difficult position.

Responsibility without authority is like saying, you must cook a meal to feed your family but I’m tying your hands behind your back first. Or, you must build a house to provide shelter but I’m taking away your land and your tools.

In order to maintain our freedom, we must keep responsibility and authority together; we must guard our authority and not give it away thoughtlessly.

Guard your authority:

In verses 1-5 of Proverbs 6, the teacher gives a real life example of what separating responsibility from authority looks like; putting up security for your neighbour.

This scenario imagines someone, you might not know all that well, asking you to act as guarantor for a loan. Maybe they need some cash for a business venture. They come to you and say, “I’ve got a proposition for you. Act as guarantor on my loan so I can buy this field. I’ll flip it for a quick profit and give you a cut.”

Whatever the reason, they want to borrow money from someone else and they ask you to pledge your tractor or your house or something of value you possess as collateral against the loan.

If you agree to do this, then you are making yourself responsible for their debt and you are giving away your authority. You cannot control whether or not this strange neighbour will repay their debt. Maybe they will and you will be okay, but if they don’t you will lose your tractor and your house and your financial freedom.  In any case, you will lose sleep while you wait to find out.    

Agreeing to help someone in this way might seem like a smart thing to do, but it is foolish because it ties your hands. It puts you in their power.

You may have noticed the word hands is used multiple times in these verses. Quite often in the Bible hands is a poetic way of talking about power. To be in someone else’s hands is to be in their power, to be captive, not free.

If you (in the heat of the moment) rashly say you will cover someone else’s debt, then do everything in your power to get out of the arrangement as soon as possible. Take a lesson from the gazelle and the bird caught in a trap. Free yourself before it is too late. Better to humiliate yourself temporarily than to become a slave permanently. Better still not to get yourself in that position in the first place.

Now, it is important to note that the teacher is not advocating stinginess or meanness toward people in need. Elsewhere, in the law of Moses, God encourages those who can afford it to lend money to the poor and to help those in need.

But lending money to the poor (who may or may not be able to pay you back) is different from mortgaging your land for them. Because when you lend (or give) money to someone, you limit your liability and you guard your authority. You maintain your freedom to be generous in other words.

Acting as guarantor for other people’s debt is not only personally irresponsible, it’s also socially irresponsible. It places a strain on community relationships that the neighbourhood is not strong enough to bear.

As one commentator puts it, the principle of wisdom here is: take responsibility for what is yours and do not take responsibility for what is not. [1]

So how might this apply in our context today?

How many of you here have received a phone call or an email or a text message from a scammer, trying to get access to your bank account details. [Wait] It’s disturbing really. Proverbs 6 is a warning to be alert and not allow yourself to be scammed.

Some people will play on your emotions to get money out of you. They will appeal to your fear, or your ego or your greed. Whatever strategy the scammer uses they are trying to put you in their power by getting you to hand over your authority while making you responsible.     

Keeping responsibility and authority together has a broader application though than not acting as a guarantor and avoiding scammers. Money is not our only resource. For most of us these days, time is a more valuable thing.     

When we over commit ourselves and try to do too much with the limited time and energy available to us, we effectively give away our authority and make ourselves responsible for more than we can handle. We become slaves to an over busy schedule; trapped on a treadmill of never ending activity.   

I imagine most people here don’t need to be told to work harder. More likely you need to become more discerning about what you commit yourself to. That can be difficult. Our need to feel useful, to find meaning, purpose and a sense of belonging often drive us to take on more than we can handle.

One of our church values, here at Tawa Baptist, is freedom to be involved.

‘Freedom to be involved’ means we don’t put pressure on people to do lots of church stuff. We let people become involved in church life at their own pace.

We don’t guilt people into doing things and we don’t load people up with so many church responsibilities that they lose authority (or control) over their lives.

We try to encourage people to maintain a healthy balance, allowing time for family, time for church and time for engagement with the wider world. Hopefully too, time for fun and rest.

The risk with freedom to be involved is that some people might think they have a license to kick back and cruise. To be slack and to take without giving anything back. But that is not a responsible use of freedom.   

Freedom to be involved is about contributing in a way that is life giving for you and the community. We want people to be involved in church life from a place of personal authority and responsibility, because you want to and you can. 

It’s like Jesus said in Matthew 11: “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

The wisdom of Jesus does not separate responsibility and authority. The wisdom of Jesus calls us to do what is in our power to do and to trust God for the rest.

Take responsibility for yourself:

Responsibility plus authority equals freedom. If the first five verses of Proverbs 6 talk about the importance of guarding your authority (keeping some control over your life), then the next six verses underline the importance of taking responsibility for yourself. Verses 6-8 tell us to learn from the ant… 

6 Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! 7 It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, 8 yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.

A sluggard is a lazy person, someone who does not take responsibility for themselves. They have authority over themselves but they don’t exercise it in a positive or constructive way.

Ants keep authority and responsibility together. Ants have their own authority. They are not slaves at the mercy of a dictator. Ants have autonomy over themselves, no one tells them what to do. And how do they use their authority? How do they use their freedom? Wisely and responsibly.

Ants work hard, carrying loads much bigger than themselves. But they also work smart. They make hay while the sun shines. They go with the grain of the seasons, putting themselves to work when the environment is most conducive to a good outcome, during the summer harvest, when conditions are right and food is plentiful.

Another wise thing about ants is that they work together. Working on your own (especially doing heavy physical labour) can be quite tough. But when you work as part of a team, there is a certain buoyancy or energy that carries you. Somehow the work doesn’t seem so overwhelming.

But wait, there’s more. Ants are good for the environment too. Ants turn and aerate the soil, allowing water and oxygen to reach plant roots. Ants also help with seed dispersal. In the very act of taking responsibility for themselves, ants make a positive contribution to the environment.

It’s similar with us human beings. Personal responsibility forms the building blocks of social responsibility. As we work to earn a living, taking care of ourselves and our family, we contribute positively to society.    

The ant is a model of setting a goal, making an appropriate commitment in community with others and sticking with it. The ant teaches us to avoid those responsibilities that are not ours so we can be free for those responsibilities that are ours.

Verses 9-11 paint a picture of what not taking responsibility for yourself looks like. The outcome of shirking our responsibility is poverty.

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest—11 and poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man.

Notice how scarcity sneaks up and mugs a person. No one really sets out to be poor. Poverty ambushes people, it takes the sluggard by surprise. The point here is that being irresponsible is a lifestyle or a pattern. It’s a bad habit that eventually leads to disaster.

Now, in reading these verses, we need to be very careful. While being slack and not taking responsibility for yourself generally does result in poverty, it does not automatically follow that everyone who is poor is lazy or irresponsible. People can fall on hard times for a whole raft of reasons.

Sometimes people fall into the pit of poverty because they lack discipline and drift aimlessly through life. Other times though people find themselves in the pit of poverty because they have been pushed. There are often systemic reasons why people find themselves trapped in poverty.

You are probably aware of the saying, ‘Give a person a fish and they eat for a day. Teach them to fish and they eat for a lifetime’. That saying is well intentioned but a little naive. It assumes the world is fair, when it is not.

It’s not enough to teach a person to fish. Many of the world’s poor would fish responsibly if they could, but the authority to fish has been taken from them. We address systemic inequalities, we give people authority, by ensuring people have the right fishing equipment and fair access to the fishing pond.

To avoid poverty, we need to keep authority and responsibility together.

Thinking of systemic injustice, which takes away people’s authority and discourages personal responsibility, the ant has more to teach us. In the context of Proverbs 6 at least, the ant gathers its food in season, which is often quite different from the way we gather food.

We live is a consumer oriented culture, one in which we don’t necessarily know what we want but we feel we don’t have it and so we always want more. We are always consuming but never really satisfied.

As a consequence, our society gathers perpetually, with little or no regard for the demand and supply of resources or the needs of others. Affluent ‘out of season’ consumption can drive the price up and make life more difficult for the global poor.    

So how does the advice of Proverbs, to not be lazy but rather store up provisions in season, fit with the teaching of Jesus? After all, didn’t Jesus warn against storing up riches on earth? Didn’t the Lord tell us not to worry about tomorrow because God knows what we need is able to provide?

Yes, Jesus did teach those things.

We need to keep in mind that the wisdom of Proverbs is not complete; it is not whole. Jesus completes the wisdom of Proverbs. He fulfils it. The wisdom of Proverbs is generally intuitive, it’s common sense. Whereas the wisdom of Jesus is often counter intuitive. It’s paradoxical.

Proverbs tells us how to identify and avoid pitfalls in life. Proverbs says, ‘This is what a pit looks like. Stay away from it’. But Jesus does more than that. Jesus looks for pits in order to lift people out of them. Jesus came to redeem and restore and make whole.   

Proverbs builds a fence to protect people. Jesus builds a gate in the fence to connect people and show them the way.   

Jesus brings some much needed perspective to the wisdom of Proverbs. Proverbs is very focused on this life and how to survive in an imperfect world, so much so that it puts us at risk of losing sight of the next life.

Part of Jesus’ message is to remind people that this life is not all there is. What we do in this life has consequences for the next life. The life to come is by far the bigger part. Wisdom dictates that our behaviour in this world needs to be informed by the life to come.

When Jesus said, don’t worry about the food you eat or what tomorrow might bring, he was not encouraging people to be lazy or irresponsible. He was encouraging the work of faith. He was setting people free from unhelpful fear and anxiety. He was broadening people’s horizons, helping the human mind to imagine a different reality, an eternal reality.        

That does not mean we fold our hands and give up our jobs. We still need to work but we do so by the light of eternity, rather than the fear of not having enough. 

The apostle Paul brings the teaching of Jesus and the wisdom of Proverbs together nicely when he says in his letter to the Thessalonians… 

11 make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, 12 so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody. 

Conclusion:

We need to keep authority and responsibility together. When we do that we are free. Not free to do whatever we want, but free to love God, love our neighbour and love ourselves.

May the Lord give you grace to walk in freedom and righteousness. Amen.

Questions for discussion or reflection:

What stands out for you in reading this Scripture and/or in listening to the sermon? Why do you think this stood out to you?

  • Why is it important to keep responsibility and authority together? What happens if we separate responsibility and authority?
  • Can you think of examples (either from Scripture or your own experience) when authority was separated from responsibility? What happened?
  • How might we guard our personal authority? How might we help others, in a way that respects their freedom and our own?
  • What wisdom (life skills) can we learn from observing the ant?
  • How does the advice of Proverbs 6 fit with the teaching of Jesus? How does Jesus complete (fulfil) the wisdom of Proverbs? 

[1] Paul Koptak, NIVAC Proverbs, page 199.

Tawa Baptist

AAA

Scripture: 1st Peter 4:1-6

Structure:

  • Introduction
  • Attitude
  • Abstinence
  • Accountability
  • Conclusion

Introduction:

Good morning everyone.

Some years ago, before the internet, each household with a landline phone was given a telephone book. This book was quite thick (thicker than it is today) and was divided into two sections, a white pages and a yellow pages.

Since the book was organized in alphabetical order, some tradesmen used to put three AAA’s in front of their name so they would be the first in the phone book. The three AAA’s did not stand for anything necessarily. The idea was that the triple AAA Plumbing company was going to get more business because it was easier for people to find their number.

The internet is not organized in the same way, so putting three AAA’s in front of your company’s name does not really work anymore.     

Today we continue our series in the New Testament letter of first Peter, focusing on chapter 4, verses 1-6. This is a kind of triple AAA passage, except these A’s do stand for something: Attitude, Abstinence and Accountability. From 1st Peter 4, verses 1-6, we read…   

Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because whoever suffers in the body is done with sin. 2 As a result, they do not live the rest of their earthly lives for evil human desires, but rather for the will of God. 3 For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. 4 They think it strange that you do not plunge with them into the same flood of dissipation, and they heap abuse on you. 5 But they will have to give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. 6 For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead,so that they might be judged according to human standards in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.

May the Spirit of Jesus illuminate God’s word for us.

In this reading Peter addresses the need for Christians to have the right attitude to suffering, to abstain from immoral behavior and he reminds us that everyone will be held accountable to God for the way they have behaved in this life. Let’s start with the first of Peter’s three A’s; Attitude.

Attitude:

If you are in the police force or the fire service or if you work in the emergency department of a hospital, then you know that in your line of work you are going to face some fairly confronting situations. Although you are there to help people and to do good, not everyone is going to cooperate with you or appreciate your presence. Therefore, in going to work, you prepare yourself mentally.

In the same way a police officer puts on a stab proof vest and a firefighter wears special protective clothing and a doctor or nurse puts on PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) so too they arm themselves mentally with the right kind of attitude or mindset to cope with the unpredictable nature of their work.

In verse 1 of chapter 4 Peter writes: Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because whoever suffers in the body is done with sin.

Peter’s first century readers were (generally speaking) not understood and not liked by the wider society in which they lived. Earlier in the letter Peter had described the Christian community as aliens and strangers in this world.

With this in mind believers needed to have the right mental attitude to suffering. Like a police officer or a fire-fighter, they needed to go into the day with their eyes open, not expecting it to be easy but being prepared to suffer in some way.

It’s like when a rugby player places themselves to catch the high ball. They do so knowing they are likely to get pummeled in a running tackle. Or an opening batsman in a test match knows they have to stay sharp to avoid the bouncers and body blows coming their way from the fast bowlers fresh with the new ball.

When Peter, says whoever suffers in the body is done with sin, he does not mean that believers have attained sinless perfection. Rather he means those who commit themselves to suffer, who willingly endure scorn and mockery for their faith, show they have triumphed over sin. [1] They show that their commitment to a new way of life is greater than their commitment to their old way of life. They are not perfect yet, but they are on a completely different path.

Now in saying that Christians should be mentally prepared to suffer, we need to be careful not to misunderstand Peter’s intention. The suffering in view here is as representatives of Christ. While God does have ways of redeeming any kind of suffering, it does not automatically follow that all suffering is good. Sometimes suffering can cause us to walk in the way of righteousness and other times it actually makes us more vulnerable to sin.

For example, if you grew up with alcoholic parents and suffered as a child because of it, that suffering might motivate you to avoid the same mistakes that your parents made. But it might also make you more susceptible to following in their footsteps.

Or if you suffer from loneliness, then it could have the effect of softening your heart and making you more open, more kind, more available to those who don’t fit in easily. Then again it could drive you to drink or adultery.

Suffering, in the form of depression, can reduce your capacity to enjoy bodily pleasures (like eating and drinking and sex). But by the same token it can also rob you of hope and take away your ability to praise God. Losing all lust for life is not a good thing.

Suffering can take you down any number of paths. Suffering is not intrinsically virtuous. So we don’t want to go looking for suffering. There is enough suffering in this life without adding to it. The suffering of illness. The suffering of old age. The suffering of wars and pandemics and economic hardship. The list goes on. Better to try and enjoy life within God’s boundaries.

In any case, the kind of suffering Peter has in mind in these verses is not the random suffering anyone might experience in life. Rather it is suffering as a consequence of doing God’s will. Verse 2 of chapter 4 makes it clear that our attitude or mind set needs to be oriented towards God’s will, even if that means some discomfort for us in this life.

We won’t always get a hard time from non-Christians for being faithful to God. In fact, we may get respect. But Peter’s readers lived in a culture that earned them dishonor and disrespect for living a Christian lifestyle. Because the way of Jesus is foreign to the ways of the world, it is inevitable that Jesus’ followers will suffer through their association with Christ.    

Jesus certainly had a mindset, an attitude and an orientation of being obedient to his heavenly Father, even if that meant suffering. Jesus consciously and intentionally embraced his God given calling.

In Luke 9, we read that Jesus set his face like flint toward Jerusalem. Jesus knew it was God’s will for him to go to Jerusalem where he would suffer and die. Did he want to suffer like this? No, not really. But he set out resolutely – he steeled his mind, he armed himself with the right kind of mental attitude, to face the coming trial.

We see Jesus’ attitude to suffering for the will of God most clearly in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he prepared himself for the pain of the cross. In Luke 22:44 we read: And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

Jesus armed himself with the right attitude through anguished prayer.

Now, while it is true that we need to be mentally prepared to suffer for doing God’s will, wisdom requires us to maintain a healthy balance in our attitude. No one can function at high alert all the time. No one can sustain Gethsemane level intensity for very long.

When a police officer or fire-fighter or ED worker finishes their shift, they need to take time off to relax and decompress. They need to find something else to think about so the job does not swallow them whole.

While we can never really switch off from being a Christian (because it’s a 24-7 gig) we still need to make sacred time and space to enjoy life in a healthy way. We need to stop sometimes and recognize the good news. If we go into every day thinking: ‘Here we go again, another round of suffering for Jesus’, then we run the risk of developing a siege mentality and always expecting the worst.

So there is a balance to find here in our attitude, between being ready to suffer for righteousness and ready to celebrate the good things.

Okay, so having the right attitude is Peter’s first A. The second A stands for abstinence.

Abstinence:

Getting baptized and becoming a Christian means abstaining from certain behaviours that do not characterize Christ. To abstain means to not do something.

A couple of months ago there was a short series on TV3 called Match Fit. Match Fit featured a number of ex-All Blacks, who Graham Henry & Buck Shelford brought out of retirement to play in a one off game against a Barbarians side.                     

Most of these players were out of shape. The programme showed some of the things they did to get ready to play at Eden Park. A big part of the preparation was having the right mental fitness, the right attitude. They had to get their head sorted at the same time they worked on their bodies.

Getting match fit also required the players to make a radical change to their lifestyle. They had to re-establish healthy routines of eating, training and resting. This meant a certain amount of abstinence. No more eating pies and chips and lollies.

One of the things their trainer said, which stuck with me, was that when you take something bad out of your diet, replace it with something good. So don’t just abstain from eating chocolate biscuits. Don’t just go hungry. Eat a carrot or an apple instead because your body still needs fuel to function.

In verses 2-3 of chapter 4, Peter writes:      

As a result, they [meaning those who have the same attitude as Christ] do not live the rest of their earthly lives for evil human desires, but rather for the will of God. 3 For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry.

Peter is talking here about abstaining from self-indulgence and immoral behavior. He is saying, when you abstain from debauchery, drunkenness, orgies and idolatry, replace these things with the will of God. The will of God is healthy food for us. The will of God is like fruit and vegetables for our soul. It might not always be to our taste but it is good for us and it sustains us.

Now some of the words in Peter’s vice list are self-explanatory, like drunkenness, we all know what that looks like. But there are a couple of words there that you may not be familiar with like ‘carousing’ for instance. Carousing is another word for a loud drinking party. The sort that brings noise control out. Like ‘crate day’.  Debauchery refers to an over indulgence in bodily pleasures, particularly sexual pleasures. And idolatry is the worship of anything other than the one true God.

Eating and drinking and having sex with temple prostitutes was often part and parcel of the pagan religions of Peter’s day. The Romans and Greeks had made a religion out of debauchery and carousing. For them getting drunk and having orgies was not considered bad behavior. For them it went hand in hand with appeasing the gods and being a good citizen. 

In contrast to the paganism of the first century, a Christian lifestyle is not characterized by excess, but by moderation. Balance is important. It is usually better to avoid extremes because the pendulum of desire has a way of swinging back in the other direction.

In other words, it is okay to drink alcohol so long as you don’t get drunk. Of course, if you are not able to stop at one drink then you are best not to start drinking at all. It does not work to go out on a bender on Friday night and then sing worship songs in church on a Sunday as if Friday night did not happen.

Likewise, it is okay to celebrate with a party but the purpose of the party should not be to get intoxicated. The purpose should be to express thanksgiving and build healthy relationships with others.

And, for Christians, there is nothing wrong with enjoying sex, so long as it is within a loving marriage relationship.

Worship is good too, but only worship of the living God. We must not put anything else in the place of God Almighty.

The point is, we need to abstain from self-indulgent excesses and instead replace that behavior with doing God’s will. This is more sustaining to our soul and more consistent with the life Jesus lived.     

Jesus famously went without food in the wilderness for 40 days. The rest of the time though he was quite happy to enjoy people’s hospitality and go to parties. Jesus abstained from lots of things during his life. He abstained from bitterness and revenge. He abstained from hypocrisy and deceit. He abstained from sex and bad language. Jesus had perfect control over himself – both his mind and his body. And there is a certain peace and empowerment that comes with that.

How was Jesus able to do this? In John 4, after speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus’ disciples urged him to eat something. But the Lord said to them, I have food to eat that you know nothing about… My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.

There is a fulfilment and meaning in doing what God wants us to do, which satisfies and sustains our soul, in a way that nothing else can.

Jesus was able to abstain from self-indulgent excess because he had the right attitude. His mind set was to obey the will of God for him, even when that meant suffering.

The other thing that helps us to do the will of God is accountability.

Accountability:

In the Match Fit TV series, the players underwent a special body scan at the beginning of their training to measure their body fat and metabolic age. Then at the end of the series, after they had trained for a couple of months, they had a second scan to see what difference the training had made. All of them improved to some degree or other. That second scan was their accountability.

They had another measure of accountability too; a fitness test known as the Bronco. With the Bronco players run shuttles of 20, 40 and then 60 meters. This set is repeated 5 times. The goal is to do this as quickly as possible.

If you are going to be on national TV, you don’t want to make a fool of yourself. When the day of accountability comes and they measure your visceral fat you want to have better stats than when you started. Same thing with the Bronco. When the day of accountability comes you want to have a faster time.

From verse 4 of chapter 4 we read:

They [that is, the pagans] think it strange that you do not plunge with them into the same flood of dissipation, and they heap abuse on you. 5 But they will have to give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.

Notice the poetry in that phrase, flood of dissipation. It creates a connection with God’s judgement through the flood of Noah’s day.  

Many of Peter’s readers used to live a pagan lifestyle, complete with orgies and wild drinking parties. But when they were baptised and became Christians they stopped all that. As a consequence, they were ridiculed and verbally abused by their ex-drinking buddies.

As I said earlier, the pagan society of the first century had made a religion out of debauchery so, in their mind, Christians were bad citizens for not appeasing the gods and going along with their rituals. In fact, the pagans used to refer to Christians as ‘atheists’ because they refused to participate in the worship of the Roman & Greek gods.

Peter is saying that those who criticize and malign Christians will have to give account to the one who judges the living and the dead. In other words, everyone who has ever lived, past, present and future will be accountable to God Almighty for the way they have conducted themselves in this life.

Some will be vindicated by God (because of their loyalty to Jesus) and others will condemn themselves by the choices they have made.         

In verse 6 of chapter 4 Peter continues the theme of accountability where he writes: For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead,so that they might be judged according to human standards in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.

This is one of those bird’s nest verses, if you remember last week’s sermon. People have got themselves into all sorts of tangles trying to unpick the meaning here.

Some think this verse is talking about Jesus preaching the gospel to the dead so they can be saved. While that idea is attractive in some ways, it is not consistent with the teaching of Jesus and it is not what Peter is getting at here.

Let me explain. The pagans of Peter’s day could dismiss the Christian faith by saying that Christian believers died in the same way as unbelievers. So if everyone succumbs to the same fate (of physical death) then what is the point of suffering and abstaining from bodily pleasure as Christians do?

Good question. What is the point? The point is, this life is not all there is. Physical death is a kind of judgment but it is not the final judgment. Those Christians who are now dead might be judged by non-Christians to have wasted their lives. But actually death is not the last word for believers. Those people who are now dead, but who put their faith in Jesus while they were still alive, will one day be acquitted at the final judgement and raised to eternal life with Christ.

This might seem like old hat to us but it was welcome news for Peter’s readers. We need to remember that the death of Christians created a problem for the church in the time of the apostles. It made some people think those who died before Jesus returned had missed out on their reward. But that is not the case at all. The dead in Christ will be raised to life also. 

Peter probably had in mind the Wisdom of Solomon when he wrote verse 6. From chapter 3 of the Wisdom of Solomon we read:

“But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. For though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immortality. Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself…” [2]

In basic terms both Peter and the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon are saying:

The wicked wrongly think the death of the righteous is a punishment and so the righteous are no better off. What the wicked do not understand is the difficulties of the present are only temporary. Believers have a future hope of eternal life. [3]

Conclusion:

Peter’s triple AAA gospel not only offers the promise of heaven. It stands for something in this life as well: Attitude, Abstinence and Accountability.

Let me leave you with a couple of questions:

Which of the three A’s is most difficult for you?

And what do you think Jesus would suggest you do about that? 

Grace and peace be yours in abundance.

Questions for discussion or reflection:

What stands out for you in reading this Scripture and/or in listening to the sermon? Why do you think this stood out to you?

  • What attitude or mind-set do you face the world with? Is this working for you? How is your attitude similar to (or different from) the attitude Peter recommends in 4:1?
  • What examples do we see in the gospels of Jesus’ attitude to suffering and obedience to God?  How might we arm ourselves with the same attitude as Christ? How might we keep a healthy balance in our mind-set?
  • Why did the pagans of the first century ‘heap abuse’ on Christians? Why do we need to abstain from the vices Peter lists in 4:3? Why is moderation helpful to aim for?
  • In what sense is God’s judgement a source of hope for Christian believers?
  • What does Peter mean in 4:6? What first century issues / questions was Peter addressing in this verse?
  • Which of the three AAA’s (Attitude, Abstinence or Accountability) is most difficult for you? Why is this do you think? What little steps of improvement can you make in this area? 

[1] Refer Thomas Schreiner’s commentary on 1st Peter, page 201.

[2] Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-6.

[3] Refer Thomas Schreiner’s commentary on First Peter, page 209.