The press was inundated with stories about the controversy surrounding the queen of the entertainment industry, Oprah Winfrey, a couple of weeks ago to go follow that news item. It was kind of interesting. If you get Oprah to endorse your book, you are set. I mean that's it. There was a situation where Oprah had endorsed this book called A Million Little Pieces, about a very detailed, vivid story about someone who had been in drug addiction, alcohol addiction, various vices against human beings and how there was radical redemption and transformation. It was wonderful until the facts came out that the facts didn't line up with the story that a lot of it was falsified and James Fry was shown to be fake in what he told. Well, that would have been difficult enough, but Oprah first came out and said this. She said the underlying message of redemption still rings true for me. In other words, she was saying it doesn't really matter that the story doesn't correspond to reality. Well, there was this massive reaction of people against that because of course it does matter. Truth is important. And Oprah, whom I actually regard as a very fine woman in many respects, quickly recoiled and said, you know, I am going to distance myself from this man because it does matter what happens, whether it corresponds with reality or not. That's true in anything. We always need to be truthful, but when you're dealing with sensitive situations, people involved, entrapped in sinful, addictive lifestyles, when you're talking about something like redemption, it's obviously critical that the word that you listen to is true. And that's what Peter says in his passage this morning. He's writing to people that are going through immense suffering, terrible difficulties, their difficulties, their sufferings might not be your sufferings. In fact, probably aren't because there's were primarily dealing with persecution for their faith and we don't deal with that like they did back in that world most of us. But what he says is, is absolutely vital, the word that you listen to. Not the word of human beings that is like a flower of the field. It's here today gone tomorrow. It's beautiful. It has glory, but it's fleeting like that. What we need to hold onto, when you're in sinking sand, you need something strong to pull you up, something you can count on, something that will endure that is alive, that is transforming ability. And that's the word of God. And he quotes from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah in using that passage. Now what we said the last couple of weeks is, Peter's saying, as you're going through difficulties, what you need to stand strong in the midst of those difficulties is grace. Since the purpose statement for his whole book, chapter 5, verse 12, this is the true grace of God, stand firm in it. So everything Peter's talking about is getting to the central point of the strength, the unique strength of grace in a person's life to persevere through life's difficulties. Last week we said, when you're in the midst of difficulties, don't be surprised if temptations arise because suffering is fertile ground for temptation. Now we can all nod our heads at these things when we're looking at them from a vantage point of 20,000 feet. We have the luxury because we will apply things in convenient ways, right? We will avoid applying a truth like this to areas where it hurts us. So when Peter said last week, grace is never a permission slip to yield to temptation, you must persevere in a life of holiness, holiness and grace, our sisters, they go together. This week he zooms in and says, here's where you need to check your temperature spiritually. Here's where you ask the question, how am I doing? You zoom in on the issue of holiness in a very pointed, practical and painful area, the area of our relationships. Peter is basically saying, don't be surprised when you're going through tough things if you find that there's tension in your relationships. You have the feeling that Murphy's Law has visited you firsthand, everything is going bad and it's affecting all your relationships. Peter says that is exactly what you should expect. And so we need to apply this principle of standing firm in grace and pursuing holiness within the context of our relationships. This is tough for all of us, for some of us with red hair in this congregation who tend to have more of an explosive personality. These things are more difficult, okay? What Peter is saying is, even if you've got explosive personality, something more explosive, the gospel, when it penetrates into your heart, brings about radical transformation, possibilities, skies the limit in your relationships, when the gospel explodes. So that's what we want to look at this morning. First of all, when the gospel explodes in our hearts, what does it do to our relationships? And secondly, how do we apply it? How can we more and more daily realize that kind of renewal in our relationships? So first of all, what happens to our relationships from the gospel explodes in us. On verse 22, for the second time, Peter brings up the issue of, excuse me, in verse 23, brings up the issue of being born again. And he says in verse 22, that having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth, in essence, verse 23, we have been born again. And what Peter is getting at by saying obedience to the truth is saying that you believe in the truth that he is setting out. The gospel, the good news, that we are sinful, broken people, that we have no hope apart from the ministry and work of Jesus Christ in our life. By obeying that, by relying and depending upon that, we enjoy new life. We are literally born again. It's a second time, Peter's used that expression. And I recognize that for some people, the expression about being born again, carries a lot of baggage and not all of it's good. You might think of that as a certain kind of Christian or as a born again Christian, and they tend to be the kind of people you want to distance yourself from. Peter is saying, there's only one brand of Christian. Regardless of your denominational background, regardless of your religious upbringing, you're either born again and therefore a Christian or you're not. And the difference between being born again and not born again, Peter is saying is by obeying the truth, by relying, depending on the truth of the gospel about Jesus Christ in the Bible. And when we are born again, he says in verse 22 that we are born for a purpose. Did you notice that? 4, and that's a purposeful introduction. They're for a sincere, brotherly love. This is now your purpose in life. You say, I thought my purpose was to love God, to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, absolutely. But have you noticed that the Bible is always holding that together with loving one another? I mean, Jesus summarized the Bible the same way the Old Testament summarized the Bible. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbors yourself. Any apostle John would go so far as to turning on his head and say, basically, you don't really get this, the loving of God part unless you get this, loving one another. This is the litmus test about whether there's authenticity here. And that bears out, I think, when you're looking at verse 2, we'll get to in more detail in a minute where he talks about hypocrisy, which is playacting. You're really playing at loving God if you're at the same time being malicious and deceitful and angry and not pursuing peace with God's people. So our purpose is that we are to be intentional about loving one another. We are to be lovers of one another. The Bible speaks a good bit, Peter will talk a little bit later about our responsibility if you're a Christian, about your responsibility to the world. But what he's getting at here, what Peter's zooming in on here is the responsibility that Christians, that believers, those who have been born into this new existence, the responsibility they have toward one another. We are to passionately love one another. The translation here earnestly is a very powerful pregnant word. It's strenuous love. It's stretching love. It's back breaking, relentless love that he's talking about here, which means it's not convenient love. It's not love for people that love you back. It's love that means sacrifice. It's love that hurts. It's stretching love. And relentless at the same time. Let me ask you a question. Where are you stretching right now to love someone? Where are you breaking your back? Where are you moving out of your comfort to love another person? To love someone in the body of Christ? Do you have radar for people that are hurting? Do you think about people that have hurt you as being objects that the Lord is calling you to love? We usually avoid people that have hurt us. They've burned us. I'm not about to love them back until they apologize. The Bible was saying the gospel was saying, no, it's absolutely counter to that. We pursue soul stretching, back breaking love to all people in the body of Christ. And so what he's getting at here is that this is a radically different kind of love. Now think back for a second. What we were talking about last week, the words that come right before here, he's saying, look, standing in grace is not a permission slip to live however you'd like to live. We are called to be what? Holy, just as he is holy. And remember what holy means? It means totally different, radically set apart, distinct. And so you might say, well, look, this is a tough kind of love. Everybody struggles with this. I struggle with it. That's just part of being human. And the answer to that is yes, absolutely, but you're not simply human. You're a new kind of human. You're a Christian. And Christians now are called to a particular kind of distinctness, radical difference in their life. It's how they love one another. Do you think about Christianity first that way? I mean, this is really the litmus test. If you want to take a spiritual temperature of your own heart, how you're doing. And this is the gut check. How you doing spiritually? Look at the relationships of your life. Look first, maybe in concentric circles, think first, the closest people in your life. Think of your spouse, if you're married, your children, or your parents. Think of good friends. And then move outward to acquaintances. People you work with, think a little bit further out of people that have burned you bad. Do you, in a soul-stretching way, love them with the ill-deserved love of the gospel? Because that's what the gospel does. When it invades our heart, it explodes. And it liberates us to love people that are frankly unlovable. It's that love as the guy is saying in a tremendous song that is deeper, wider, stronger, higher than anything. It is holy love that we pursue in loving one another. So think about the radical possibilities in your own life for this love. Where do you need it? Don't avoid. Don't engage in that, yeah, but think about those relationships, that person. That makes you squirm a little bit and try to apply the words that follow. Because these things can sound ideal in the abstract. But let's get down and dirty and apply them now. Keeping in mind a relationship or two in your own life where there's tension, where you're tempted to not love in a holy and distinct way. And let's ask the question, how do we really get the gospel to explode in my heart in that relationship? And it all has to do with what comes right in the middle of this passage, what is very beautifully displayed by quoting from the book of Isaiah about the Word of God. In other words, if you want to get the gospel deep into your heart, you've got to build tracks. It's like a train. The gospel is like a train carrying very powerful explosives, healing explosives. But you've got to get them down deep and you do that by laying tracks deep into your heart. And those tracks are the Word of God. So we need to let God's Word speak to you. We need to let God's Word expose you. And finally, we need to let God's Word nourish you. That's what we need. First of all, let God's Word speak to you. It's basically just opening the door of your soul and really letting God's Word speak to you. I was visiting with someone this week about my, it actually wasn't about my son. We were just talking about, you know, reading the Bible, having a which might call quiet times and like that. And I really appreciated this woman's honesty, very seasoned believer in the Lord. And she said, you know, my problem is I don't really like reading the Bible. I mean, I like reading a few things here and there, but it's hard work. And if I'm, you know, if I don't feel like it, then it's so easy just to push it aside. That's human nature, isn't it? Don't you feel that way? More often than you'd like to admit. See, what we need is to realize right up front, especially when we're enduring difficulties. When the pressure of life is pressing in, we are tempted to throw God's Word aside. Or even when we do read it, isn't it? Don't you have that experience where you're reading it, but it's you're not really reading it. Your eyes are moving over the page, but nothing's really sinking in. Keep in your mind that metaphor of building these train tracks and realize that building train tracks are not easy, especially through difficult terrain. But you just methodically plod through laying that train track in essence, opening your heart that the Holy Spirit will speak through His Word as He's pleased to do so. And think of it this way. If that word of God is powerful enough to cause you to be born again, to take you from being a dead person spiritually, to a brand new person. Whole new creation, not just resuscitate you, but make you a whole new person. That's what He says, that we are born again through the living and enduring Word of God. If that word is that powerful, don't you think it's powerful enough to speak to our hearts, to transform us in the most difficult of areas? Because the truth is we're always listening to some Word, some line of thinking. There's always something that is influencing the way that we react. So when you're going through a difficult situation and someone that really kind of bugs you, enters into your sphere, you have a way of thinking about them. And it might be a word of bitterness, that person, that person, I can't ever treat them with the kind of love that I'm supposed to and I shouldn't because they don't deserve it. Maybe it's a word of deceit. You know, you fear someone and you think I could never be honest with this person, thoroughly honest because if I did, they would clobber me. I mean, they would let me have it. And so you begin to build a pattern and habits of deceit. And that's what He talks about in chapter 2, verse 1, where there's all malice and deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander all these kinds of things. It existed like poisons and toxins. And we listen to those. We let those toxic words influence us. And what He's saying is, by contrast here, all of those are human words. They're earthy. And they're like the flowers of the field. Even when they look good and got the glory of the flower of the field, you know, like blue bonds looks so good, they're gone. They don't endure. They don't persevere. They don't have any real glory. See, the word of God has the living enduring permanence. It has the glory of the ages. God's wisdom, God's line of thinking, God's word that we can depend upon. What word are you depending on? That's the question. So when you're reading through the Bible and you're thinking about relationships in your life, try to think about what words you're really reading, what words you're really listening to and let God's word speak to you and challenge you. Alright, so let God's word speak to you. Secondly, let God's word expose you out. This is not the fun part. Okay. This is the tough part because God's word, as you know, has these, has this x-ray capability. God's word absolutely has the power to show up the deep issues of our heart, to show up the things like malice, deceit. You know, you might read through that the first time you go, I'm not malicious. I'm a deceitful, I'm an honest person. I'm not hypocritical. I hate hypocritical people. I don't envy people. I'm content with what I have. Really? Really? I want you to think about that this week. Keep in mind just that short list of evil vices and think about how many times you stretch the truth and ask yourself, why did you feel like you needed to do that? Shouldn't you just be totally honest with that person? Where were you secretly, invious of another person? Or where was bitterness rearing its ugly head? We need to let God's word expose us. See it as God pinning us down and calling us to do like a snake and shed layers of skin. And like a snake, we don't have the luxury of simply when you become a Christian and you are quote born again having the layers of the skin shed at that point because they grow back. And they're constantly there. And by God's grace, using his word as an x-ray device, we see what we need to put away. And that's the wording he uses in the first one of chapter two, to put away shed those things. I remember when I was a little boy used to love wrestling with my father and we'd get down on the floor, you know, we'd really go at it. And I was under the great delusion that I actually had an opportunity to be him. And he would humor me for a while and then he would ultimately pin me down. And he wouldn't just pin me down, but he'd take his, you know, by the end of the day, he'd have a scruff on his face. And he would pin me down and then start to rub his scruff up against my face and my neck. And you know, I mean, I was just going crazy, I was squirming and dying and dying. You say, cry, uncle, say the word, say the word. The Bible does that to us, doesn't it? The Bible wasn't designed. I mean, Luther put it this way, the law was not meant to be preached or read as a manageable burden. It's not, you know, the ten steps to improve living. It's not just getting a face lift. Luther said it wasn't designed to be preached as a manageable burden, but they kill us, to level us so that we absolutely spiritually cry, uncle, we are without hope. Because then we want to do something as painful as shedding that layer of skin when it exposes us. I had a friend of mine I was sharing earlier in the week about my sermon and they thought about a little bit and sent me an email that I thought was really helpful and candid. I said, what really makes it all work for me is the part about the word exposing my heart. Without that, I'm so good at justifying my position about somebody. I want to justify my hurt feelings. Justify why I want to keep my distance and justify why I feel the way I feel about someone. Isn't that the truth? Aren't you the same way I certainly am? That's our knee jerk. We want to always justify ourselves. And that's really, I think, where we get the concept of self-righteousness. We want to say, I am right. And so when the word begins to expose you, that's painful because it gets to the core of human religion. Basically saying, I'm so good that God and others should accept me. And the gospel says, no, you're a dilapidated, broken, down building. And you need the gospel to come in and blow it up. It needs to level you so that a new out of this glorifying to the Lord can emerge. I think that part and parcel with loving one another in a soul-stretching way, being the real indicator, vital sign of alive Christians. What goes together with that is Christians who confess their sins, who are honest with others who are quit to repent. Even if someone has hurt you horribly, it's recognizing I've got to take the log out of my eye and pursue peace by confessing how I have wronged that person. And God's word exposes us to do that. And the only way that I'm comfortable to do that at the end of the day is because the word of God is not finally a hammer. I mean, it is a hammer, but that's not its final responsibility. Its final responsibility is like a father to take a little child, to take me up in his arms and throw his arms around me and love on me. And he uses the picture here actually of an infant, this final metaphor. Basically that we need to let the word of God not only speak to me and expose me, but nourish me. Look at the way he puts it. Light, verse two, like newborn infants long for the pure spiritual milk so that by it you may grow up to salvation. Now there's another place in the Bible in the book of Hebrews where essentially it's for immature Christians who are supposed to need milk. In other words, you need to move beyond milk to solid food. You know that passage? Peter's saying just the opposite here. Peter's actually saying what every Christian needs, a vital sign of an alive Christian is that you are an infant. You abide as an infant. Because what infants do? Many of you know when an infant is feeding time and you don't quite have yourself prepared to feed the baby, the child is very patient with you, right? Oh sure, mommy, just take your time. I'm fine over here. There's pandemonium, right? There's a recklessness. There's a frantic nature. They're desperate for their milk. That's what we need. When the word of God really speaks to me and exposes me, I'm broken. And I see that I am starving and I am desperate for true spiritual milk, less I die. And so life is continually going through this pattern. We've never arrived. But see the wonder of this is that while those poison toxins like malice and envy and deceit promise to bring us protection and strengthen life, what do they do now? They enslave us. They make us to be their own pawn. And we never mature and flower as an individual. That only comes as we shed those layers. As we drink the milk of the gospel and are nourished daily by that word that is permanent and enduring and alive and it gave me birth, it will continue to revitalize me. And then I see that as I love, especially at the point where I don't want to love, with soul stretching love, the Peter says, the end result is I actually experience the Lord Jesus Christ. Did you notice that? He says in verse three, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. Loving God, loving one another, they go together. You can only say you've loved God when you're loving one another with soul stretching love. And when we do that, we taste that the Lord is good having fed upon him. The gospel is the most explosive powerful force in all the world because it's not simply about some abstract force. It's about the person of Jesus Christ who laid down his life for me, showing me what true love is, regarded me as a friend, as a brother and gave himself for me. And as the word of God is laid into my heart, the gospel like a powerful engine runs forward and may it run so deep into each of us that over time the world would look at this church and see the distinctiveness, the holiness, the beauty of a group of people that have tasted and seen that the Lord is good. Father, thank you for the living and enduring word of God. Run your gospel of grace deep into our heart through the tracks of your word that we might, with other worldly, holy love, lay down our lives for one another as you have done for us and in so doing, can say indeed the Lord is good. The gospel is good.