1 Peter 1:17-23 (NLT)

I have to say, I picked the perfect week to be on vacation.  The weather was phenomenal, and I got my yard furniture out of the shed and set up my grill, and we cooked out twice.  And my birthday was wonderful; Chinese food, a beautiful cake, a call from my dad.  AND Pennie gave me tickets to see Amy Grant in concert in October!  I am so excited!  The last time I heard Amy Grant in concert, I was in college in the very early 1980s.  I have been a fan ever since then.  I can’t wait for the show!

One of Amy Grant’s recordings in the early 1990s, on her Heart in Motion album was the song, “Hope Set High.”  In part the lyrics go like this:

I’ve got my hope set high, that’s why I came tonight
I need to see the truth, I need to see the light
And I can do my best and pray to the Father
But the one thing I ought to know by now
When it all comes down, when it all comes down
If there’s anything good that happens in life it’s from Jesus

I thought about that song when I was reading this passage from 1 Peter.  The writer was trying to give the readers a reason to set their hopes high, and the reason that he gave them was the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Peter began by saying that we have a God who is an impartial judge of human beings.  God judges each of us according to what we do; he has no favorites.  That kind of unbiased judgment is something we don’t see too often in our world.  Beverly Zink-Sawyer, professor emeritus at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, writes, “We live in a culture that is torn apart by judgments made on the basis of race, class, creed, and other qualities that serve to divide us from one another.  We regard those who do not look, act, or speak like us as ‘others’ to be feared and even despised.”

The end result of that kind of mindset was certainly made clear last week, when Andrew Lester shot Ralph Yarl, a 16 year-old black teenager, who came to his home by mistake when we went to pick up his younger brothers.  Instead of going to NE 115th Street in Kansas City, Ralph went to NE 115th Terrace.  He went to the door, rang the bell, and was shot in the head and arm.  Lester said that when he saw a black male that he didn’t know at his door, he was scared to death and shot him.  Ralph Yarl’s attorney stated that, “This 16 year-old unarmed boy didn’t actually pose a threat.  But far too often in America, his skin alone is his weapon.”  Lester has been arrested and charged with felony assault in the first degree and armed criminal action.  Yarl suffered permanent physical injuries from a cracked skull, loss of brain tissue and scarring.  And none of this needed to have happened.  Why should simply ringing the wrong doorbell end up with an 84-year-old man in custody and a 16 year-old boy with permanent injuries?  It was all because of incorrect judgment based on a person’s skin color.

God, however, is an impartial judge.  We will be judged for our own actions, along with all other human beings.  That may sound shocking at first.  After all, isn’t our faith in Christ supposed to be sufficient to keep us from facing judgment?  What about being saved by faith alone and not by works?  Well, that is true.  But it is also true that faith should result in works.  Jesus clearly defines the boundaries of how we will be judged in Matthew 25, when he talks about the sheep being separated from the goats based on their actions:  did people feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, give clothing to those who needed it, visit those in prison and those who were sick?  And James reminds us that faith without works is dead.  We will be judged according to our actions; but always a factor is the grace of God through Jesus Christ.

Peter next stated that God paid a ransom for us.  It wasn’t a ransom paid with gold or silver, in other words, not paid with money.  Instead, this ransom was paid with the precious blood of Jesus, who was the sinless, spotless Lamb of God.  The concept of paying for sin with the blood of a sacrificial lamb is foreign to 21st century Americans.  We don’t practice animal sacrifice, nor is it a common practice in our country.  But it was a common practice in the ancient world, and in the Judaism of Jesus’s day.  In order to make sense of what Jesus did through his death on the cross, Peter wrote in language and imagery that his readers would understand quite well.  Just as the blood of a lamb or other animal would pay the price for the sins of those who offered the sacrifice, so the blood of Jesus pays the price for the sins of those who believe in him. 

Then Peter said that we have come to trust in God through Christ.  This trust is possible because Jesus was raised from the dead and given great glory by God.  On account of this, we can place our faith and hope confidently in God.  What more could God do to prove himself than to raise Jesus from the dead?  There could be no greater testimony that God has power over everything, even over death, and that those who believe in Jesus have the hope of life beyond our life on this earth. 

There are a lot of skeptics out there – and maybe some in here, too.  We have trusted in the past, and gotten burned for it, whether it was trust placed in a parent or spouse or other person who betrayed us.  We have trusted in knowledge, only to see new discoveries and new evidence that changes what we can know about something.  We have trusted in our own abilities and found that sometimes trying our best doesn’t matter.  And there are those who cannot believe in anything that cannot be proven or seen.  But Peter makes the bold claim that we can put our trust in God based on the fact – the fact – of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead.

One result of our trust in God is our ability to live in love with our brothers and sisters.  And Peter urged his readers to love each other intensely with all their hearts.  It is risky to love like that, isn’t it?  We don’t want to take a chance on being hurt.  But Christians should be able to live in love because we all have found forgiveness and grace from God.  We know that we aren’t perfect, but we are forgiven, and that God will not pull the rug out from under our feet.  And we can risk loving God, and each other, because God has proven himself to be trustworthy.  God has given us what we most need and what we can never provide for ourselves:  grace and salvation.  And God will never take that away from us. 

Finally, Peter said that those who follow Christ have been born again.  Our new life comes from the eternal living word of God, and it will last forever.  That is the Good News that has been preached to them and to us.  That eternal life has already begun; it is not something that starts at the moment of our death.  We are living our eternal lives now.  And our lives will last forever.  That’s a long time!  How might it affect the way we live if we are conscious of the fact that we are already living our eternal lives?  How might it influence the decisions we make about how we use our time and our resources?  How might it affect the way we treat other people?  the way we treat ourselves? 

I’ve got my hope set high.  I have hope of eternal life – life that lasts forever – because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  And my hope is based on the trust I have in God to keep his promises and his covenant.  That is a sure and certain hope that I can count on.