Suffering for Righteousness

the 4th Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C. This is recording of the Sunday evening sermon for March 1, 1987. The theme is Suffering for Righteousness. Scripture references 1 Peter the 3rd chapter, verses 13 through 16. In you this evening to look at those words that the Apostle Peter has given to us as we read in the 3rd chapter of the 1st Epistle of Peter, beginning at the 8th verse, finally all of you live in harmony with one another, the sympathetic lovers, brothers, the compassionate and humble and do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing. Because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing, whosoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech. He must turn from evil and do good. He must persecute peace and pursue it for the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil. Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right you are blessed, do not fear what they fear, do not be frightened, but in your heart set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have, but do this with gentle respect, keeping it clear conscience so that those who speak maliciously against your good behaviour in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. Let's pray together. Lord our God does we bow before you. We would ask this evening that your word would instruct us in the things of righteousness and godliness of truth and of love. And as we bow before you it is with the conviction that you desire to bless us as we wait upon you, that your word might ever speak to us of the truth that you would teach us, that it would guide us in the things of our Savior. Our Heavenly Father we pray you bless us now in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Last Sunday evening we began to examine this passage of Scripture and to see how the Lord had given to us and to this people a commitment. And we saw the commitment that the Christian husband makes to the non-Christian wife and the Christian wife to the non-Christian husband. And we saw the nature of those painful relationships and obedience set out for us by Peter and we recognised the things that he had called us to and the way in which we go forward. Now this evening we come back to that passage of Scripture and we broaden it, seeing what it is in its general context and what is the specific principle by which their possible Peter would cause us to direct our life. And the principle is this. It is that we should be involved together in the whole question of the Christian calling. What is our vocation? Heart and lifestyle brought together in the sense that you and I are called to be the Christians that God would have us be. And the apostle begins by saying finally brethren and then gives us that catalogue of imperatives to accomplish knowing that you are there unto called. He starts with the basic assumption that our Christian calling is something that is engraven upon us. The Christian life begins with the summons that the Lord Jesus gives to us and that movement from life to death as we embrace Jesus Christ and Lord and Savior is a movement that calls our hearts into subjection to Him and then moves our minds as we gather knowledge about Him so that we are able to give a reason for the hope that is within us and then brings the whole pattern of our behaviour under the picture that Christ gives to us. So that there is first of all a commitment of life to the Lord Jesus Christ then there is a commitment of mind that is constantly pursuing truth so that the truth sets us free and we be enabled to read to the world that which is true of us that we be able to give a reason for the hope that we have. The intellectual understanding of what we have done and then that which is the guide to our behaviour, the way in which we deal with Christians and non-Christians, the conduct of the Christian life in the face of being reviled and of being persecuted. And when those things come together, the Christian is called to pursue blessing. The passage teaches us that one of the aims of our life is that we should be blessed by God. We live to know His blessing. We live to know His company and His touch upon us. So that apart from that there is no good reason for us to want to live but because He has planted the seed of life in us. There is a desire to live for Him. And it teaches us also that the aim of our life is to be able to acquire that blessing and the passage teaches us that we put ourselves where God may properly bless us. That as it is the aim of our life to know the blessing of God so it becomes the very desire of our life to go and to be where God is and where He is pouring out His blessing and where we know as individuals He has touched us and equipped us and prepared us. And then we begin to understand what is the very nature of blessing itself which is His presence and His grace with us. That by way of introduction to the passage then tells us, how is it that we are blessed? How is it that we know the presence of God and the apostle gives to us a list of things that we will deal with in successive weeks? But I want this evening to see the first thing that he tells us and he says that the blessing of God is to be found in living with a good and clear conscience. Cultivate for yourself, he says, a good conscience so that we can live properly for God and live with ourselves. I want this evening very simply and briefly to look at what the apostle tells us about the conscience because it's an area that is key if we are going to know the blessing of God. Things we need to understand about it, what it does and doesn't do and how it affects our life. What is the conscience? The Greek word is synodesis and it means a joint knowledge. The conscience is the monitor that every one of us has. It is given by God to register whether we do right or whether we do wrong. It matters that relate to the will of God. It tells us whether we are obeying or disobeying, whether we are listening to right impulses to go forward or wrong impulses. I know of no better definition of the nature of the Christian conscience than that that is given to us by the writer of Proverbs in the 20th chapter on the 27th verse when he says of the conscience it is the Lamb of the Lord in the innermost century of man's being. It's as though God has lit inside of us a lamp that reflects upon our heart and upon our way and that conscience tells us that the impulses or the direction of the impulses of our life are leading us in good or bad ways. What does the conscience do? It has two functions. The conscience both condemns and confirms. It condemns us when we stand outside of the will of God and outside of his grace. The prompting inside of us that says this is not good. If you like, it's the bell that God uses to ring inside of ourselves to warn us or to assure us to warn us that we are standing apart from him or to assure us that we are walking with him. In the scripture you got instances of the conscience doing a number of those functions, condemning, listening to Joseph's brothers having taken their brother and having cast him to a pit and sent him to Egypt and whilst he was in prison they said in the 42nd chapter we are very guilty concerning our brother in that we saw the anguish of his soul when he besought us and we would not hear. God caused Joseph to cry, brothers heard his cry, but they suppressed the sound of that cry as it echoed in their ears. Our conscience is weak in the sense that we can suppress it, that we can avoid it but it is there and it condemns that which is wicked. It condemns the wrong impulse but again, Judas, after he had betrayed the Lord and was given 30 pieces of silver, was overcome by remorse for his conscience told him, this is wrong. And which of us hasn't stood at the place where our conscience has sound alarm? And we have known what is right or what is wrong, we have been condemned by that conscience and ignored it or suppressed it but we cannot deny the reality of the sound. God has given it to us why? So that it becomes a tool in our blessing whether in the way in which we think or the way in which we act or the way in which we love. The Lord has given to us the conscience to condemn us sometimes but also to confirm. The Apostle Paul standing before the chief priest and all the counsel of the hasn't even served in Acts chapter 23 verse, men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day. He had lived and his conscience had confirmed that he had lived before the Lord and it had confirmed him as one who had walked uprightly before his God. And yet the reality is that the conscience has got limits to it. We cannot live our lives solely by our conscience because it limitations, that's just, it's not infallible when it condemns us or when it affirms us, our conscience may simply be wrong, we cannot live simply by the conscience. It is not that it is a bad mechanism but sometimes we have set the conscience of the wrong place. I have a clock on my side of the bed, my wife has a clock on her side of the bed. My clock is set exactly, her clock is set 15 minutes in advance, enormous confusion results in this. And when I look at her clock, I get the wrong time, not because the clock is wrong but it's set wrong for all sorts of reasons. The clock is not at fault, the mechanism is at fault, it's just set wrongly. The conscience can be like that. The conscience is not broken and destroyed, it's not a faulty creation of God but because it is set wrongly and it doesn't always operate as it ought to. And so it is not always the reliable guide in the things in which God gives it to us for. It's a hallmark of the Creator's hand in us and we need to watch it but sometimes we set it standards incorrectly. The Scripture tells us that the conscience is weak in three areas and unless we are aware of those areas of weakness then we will find ourselves plunged into chaos and say to ourselves, why is it that internally I thought I was going along well? And I seem to have ended up apart from God and many of us have been there. We have followed the impulse of our conscience and we have arrived at a place that is far from the presence of God and we say, why is it? I thought I was following that which was God given. I thought I was listening to Him. I thought I was following my conscience. Well, the Scripture tells us that on occasion the conscience may be defiled. In Titus, the 1st chapter and the 15th verse, that is precisely what is told to us. And there comes a place in our life when we need to cleanse our consciences as well as our lives. But when we come to Christ, His blood has to cleanse us in that area or else we will never live according to His perfect will and law. For we will have carried with us those pre-Christian ideas into our life and allowed them to shape our thinking and to guide us at the place where we make moral decisions and where we believe we are following Him. Again, the Scripture tells us that our conscience may not only be defiled, it may actually be seared and in Jeremiah, on the 6th chapter and the 14th verse, we know that that may occur and to be seared means to be hardened and insensitive. So the Jeremiah was able to say that they did not know that generation to which he spoke did not know how to blush when they engaged in sinful actions. He didn't even know what it was to be content in that way. They were indifferent to the results of their activities. And at that point the Lord has to soften the spirit and to soften the conscience or else we become ignorant of the impact of our action and our lives, our reaction and our ignorance as they touch other people. Or again, says the Scripture, our conscience may be weak. In 1 Corinthians chapter 8 and verse 7, the Corinthians church didn't feel it was wrong to eat food that was offered to idols and needed to be strengthened by the word of God because their conscience had accumulated that which was the value system of the world and had been fashioned by it and it didn't see anything wrong in being able to replace God. And there are times when our consciences have absorbed so much of the nature of this world that they have become weak and they've touched at the things of the world and are no good guide to us and says, God, it is at that place that the people of God have to come back and seek Him to deal with their conscience. Oh, there are different ways. We apply the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ to cleanse us from our sins, to cleanse our consciences, to claim the forgiveness and the remaking of our grace in our lives. We use the word of God so that it begins to shape the way in which we think and we walk no longer after that which is fashioned by the world. But rather live according to that word that regulates the way in which we think. Or else we simply absorb the world into our midst and there is no distinctive witness and there's no blessing. You see, all this is linked by the apostle Peter at this point to the very nature of blessing and he is saying to his church, or I give you this, not that you should become mere moral people, not that you should live lives that were upright alone, back there you should know the blessing of God. But you might know his intimacy and his grace and his care, that he should be very close to you and that he should touch you. And this is the mechanism, one of those mechanisms by which we are brought into subjection. You see, there are three imperatives in this passage as we read them. First of all, the apostle says, cultivate a life of God consciousness. Finally, my brethren, be of one mind. What is it? Let the mind of Christ be in you. Be aware in all your life that God is present and that as you make decisions and live for him, be aware of the reality of his presence and sanctify him in your soul. And then hold yourself ready to answer the world about us because it will ask questions and it will not understand any ignorance, it will persecute. They are ready to speak out of what you know for Jesus Christ and now he says, now have a good conscience. And the way in which we see that conscious worked out is the way in which it affects our relationship with the Lord and with the people of the Lord and the people of the world. For there are four things that we see are tied to our consciences that so often we don't seem able to work out. And the first of them is the fact that without our conscience being renewed and strong, then our hope, the very idea of what we are in Christ and where we are going with him becomes affected. For that is a part of the Christian calling that is eroded when we have a conscience that is not renewed. We cease to believe internally and we begin to live a lie. If we deny our conscience, then we talk the truth of the faith, but the hope that we have fit by this diminishes. We may not change very much about the things that we talk about but our inner confidence in the reality of the power of Christ is eroded. And nobody knows it except us to say the right things but the bad conscience eats away at the reality of what he is doing in us and what he can do in us. We begin to live in the lie and we begin to live the lie itself. And if we allow that to continue, then internally we begin to doubt because we say how is it that I can live with the lie so easily and still claim the redeeming power of Jesus Christ to be a reality. And we are torn apart and we begin to understand that we no longer walk with him. The soul suffers an eclipse and the son of our life disappears and there is no warmth or radiance or joy about the presence of the Savior in us. And our hope diminishes and we of all people become the weakest of Christians. It is at that point that we come back saying the very integrity of our worship, of our life, of our Christian commitment depends upon a good conscience or else we will be torn apart. And our souls rent a sunder in this manner but he is able to come. He is able to take, to cleanse, to renew and to set right. But there is a second element that our consciences and living with a good conscience catch us at the place where our witness to the world is most imperative. We may call it evangelism or outreach or anything else but ultimately the inconsistencies that tear us apart between our talking and our doing will impact what we say to those who are not Christians. They will look at us and they will say there is a discrepancy between who you say you are and who in reality we see. And such will cloud our spiritual lives and beyond that it also affects the weaker brethren. For they will say is there any good thing in Christianity? If they see us living with poor consciences, inconsistent at that point the weaker brother is cast down and hurt and ruined. For they see there the overtaking and the destruction of ourselves and our consciences unless they are clear before the Lord. Unless they stand before him will cause us to be so ineffective that none will ever read Jesus Christ in us. They will simply see us as those who have no good at all and we become people who are phony. And the world sees that and there is no commendation of Christ, no proclamation by life or word that ever will reach those who have seen us apart from him. The Apostle Paul was able to turn around and say to those who he ministered to, I am an example to you all. Some people have turned around and they have said oh this man is so arrogant, he sets himself up as the example, the man who has made it not at all. That isn't the Apostle. He is saying I struggle the same as the rest of you but I struggle with that good conscience that I might not make shipwreck of my faith and he calls us again though he might be those people committed in that way. A third area that is affected by our conscience is the way in which they become the ability to see the conviction of sinners. For while we know that it is only the spirit of God who convicts and converts the world, nonetheless we recognize the importance of being his agents that he uses us in response to the sinfulness of the world so that we may act as rebuke to the sins of others. At that point we minister one to the other and we minister to the world. For there are those who rebuke us and draw us back as brothers and sisters into the way of the Lord whose words call us again to the consciences that are holy before him and renewed. And we thank God for that ministry, for those who are there to reach out and to call what is the truth and to draw us back with clear conscience and at the same time our lives then become the challenge to those in the world. And the Holy Spirit takes us and he uses us in unknown ways to convict many that he is drawing to himself and you know my friend it is not that we are perfect, it is simply that we are tools. And the world may say what you have said and what you have done and who you are has rebuke the sin in my life and yet we know that there remains sin, there remains things that are unwholesome and unhealthy, there remains the mixed and the tainted motive and yet because we struggle then the Lord can use us and we can be his tool and we do not have to feel that we are the hypocrite. But the Lord will take the vessel dedicated and set apart and can and will use it in his church and in his world and he will use it to be the means whereby his spirit will touch the lives of other people and convict them and draw them back into the way of holiness. Convince them of the power of the spirit to forgive and to renew and draw them into his presence and into his grace. We do that as people who have seen what it is to be touched in that way. Then there is a fourth and a final area that we deal with. For the Apostle links them in this passage in a unique way when he says that it is only with good conscience that we dare ever to suffer for Jesus Christ. When we suffer for what is right and what is good, then we enter into the sufferings of Jesus Christ and the Apostle links us at that point to all who has suffered for right. Previous to this in these verses he has pointed out the whole catalogue of heroes of faith who have suffered for their faith in the Savior and their conviction of the living Lord, their God is in their midst and that they have been his agents of blessing in the world. And it is at the point where our consciences are renewed that we begin to be able to understand that we are linked to the suffering of Jesus Christ. The world will lift up its hands against us and it will persecute and it will tear down and will seek to destroy the men and women of Christ that we are and have to become. And how we respond to the tearing down, how we respond to the assassination of character and motive and life becomes the outworking of our good conscience. For at that point we begin to see that when we are cut down we do not respond in a way that immediately would slander and attack and would hurt. There is a West Indian tree that exudes a great perfume and never a greater perfume than when it is cut down. And when those that come and cut the trunk of that tree and cut it down then they find that the perfume that is emitted from that tree taints and stains every part of the tool that they use to dismember and to kill and to destroy it. And that's simply what happens to those who suffer in good conscience for Jesus Christ. It's not that we don't suffer, it's not that we aren't cut down, it is simply rather that in response to being cut down the perfume of the fragrance of Christ. Touches the very implements that kill us, that hurt us, that scars. Because we are secure in him, because we are sent, our minds and our hearts and our wills upon this Lord, so that what comes out of us is grounded in good conscience then all the slaying and persecuting of the world. We'll simply produce the perfume of his grace, of his goodness and of his glory, the maintaining of good conscience is essential to the well-being of the Christian as well as to the glory of God and the building of his church. Says Paul, many ignoring the voice of conscience have made shipwreck of their faith. Our calling is that we be triumphant, sailing on yet with the Lord and daring above all things to see our conscience renewed, restored to its splendour and to its guide. So that it may be a part of God's message to our souls, guiding us in the right and diverting us from the wrong, so that you and I together may pursue the place and point of blessing. For that is its purpose, not that in and of itself it is God's richest gift, it is the mechanism, one of those mechanisms whereby God seeks to bring you and me and us as a people to the place of your bless us. And that is his purpose, to pour out his spirit in blessing and sustenance, in growth, in grace, in encouragement and in nurture, that we be knit together his people, to his praise and to his glory and to his honour alone. Let's pray, gracious Heavenly Father, as we come before you, we pray that you will renew our consciences, for we have confessed before you that many times we have suppressed that voice with cries. We have committed ourselves not to its guide, but to its suppression, transform our fellowship that we may suffer for well-doing and learn what it is to dare to stand with our Savior, conscience unsolid by this world. How far do you know how hard it is for us? For we are a weak people, teachers, bless us, lead us, forgive us. And in that forgiveness renew us that we might be blessed indeed with everything that you would pour in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.