Well as we launch into 1 Peter 3, I want to take a moment to talk about the goodness of God and His commands. I think there are places in 1 Peter 3 where many of you who are watching or listening will struggle with what God is asking you to do. And so I think it's important to frame this next portion of 1 Peter, 1 Peter 3. It's important that you remind yourself that God is perfectly good in every way, all of the time! And if you embrace that, if you remind yourself of that, then the logical conclusion is that what He asks of us is good for us. It's impossible for God to ever command you to do something that's evil or harmful because that's not actually in His nature. He's perfectly holy, He's perfectly good, and so He will never ask of us anything that is not good.
In fact, it's important that we remind ourselves that His commands themselves are a grace to us. I hate the contrast that we often set up between God's law and God's grace. God's law is actually an expression of His grace. You say, "What do you mean by that?" Well first of all, His law 'rescues us from us' because it puts boundaries around us that we wouldn't know we needed apart from God's law. It's sort of like a child; a child is born into a world where there are all kinds of danger. And if a parent didn't set boundaries for that child, the child would hurt himself. So, God our Father sets boundaries for us because He loves us.
There's another thing about 'His commands are grace;' He always meets us with enabling grace. All of God's commands are accompanied by His enabling grace; He doesn't command us and just walk away. But He enables us with both a desire and to do what He's called for us to do.
And then I love the fact that God's commands give all of us wisdom tracks to run on in our daily lives. There's so much that we know that we should do and so much that we know that we shouldn't do that it lifts the burden of, "What do I do now?" in so many situations of life. It's such a sweet thing that we're not left to figure it out on our own, but God lovingly guides and directs us.
There's one other thing, and it is that if you're God's child, your life has been welcomed to have a higher purpose than personal happiness and fulfillment-your definition of comfort and pleasure. In fact, I am deeply persuaded if your highest goal in life is your comfort and your pleasure, you will probably not experience those in the way that you wish because you'll always find something to complain about; you'll always find something that is unpleasurable; you'll always encounter something that's uncomfortable. That's not a way of living a peaceful, content, and joyful life. And so throughout scripture, and surely in 1 Peter, we have these phrases "for the Lord's sake, in the Lord, as unto the Lord." Those are reminders that I am now welcomed into an agenda that's vastly bigger than the agenda I would have set for myself. We get to participate in God's glorious plan for humanity, and what an honor, what a blessing that is! A good God couldn't possibly ask you to do anything that wasn't good for you. A good God wants his children to thrive, thus His commands!
