So, Peter is going to take us in a new direction for the rest of this little letter that we're looking at. He's laid this gospel foundation, but Peter wants us to understand the gospel is not just the narrative of God's work of redemption; it's meant for us 'right here, right now' to form a lifestyle, to be the way that we look at, understand, and respond to everything in our life. It's not an overstatement to say that the gospel changes everything. It really does.
Let me read these verses for you.
So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation-if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
The Christian life is really shaped by saying, "No!" and saying, "Yes!" And you better know where to say, "No!" and where to say, "Yes!" If you're going to live a consistent, gospel-shaped life, you better be good at saying, "No!" And Peter doesn't mean saying, "No!" to external evil or saying, "No!" to other people. He's talking about saying, "No!" to yourself. And the reason we have to say, "No!" to ourselves is because we're not yet grace graduates; we're not yet sin free.
There are passions inside of us that we need to resist. And he mentions five things actually: malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander. All of those things are first sins of the heart before they're ever sins of behavior. Peter does not believe that you should follow your heart. He believes that there are moments where we need to do war with our own hearts. You know that you'll have raging emotions and raging anger at places that will lead you in dangerous directions-and you've got to say, "No!" to those. And we're able to say, "No!" because the Holy Spirit now lives inside of us and empowers us to say, "No!" to us. Are you committed to saying, "No!" to you?
But we also need to say, "Yes!" to say, "Yes!" to what? To God's gift of constantly giving us all the spiritual nutrients that we need in order to grow in our relationship with Him. The word picture Peter uses is a newborn infant, that ravenous hunger of that crying infant, that he will not relent until he gets the milk that he's hungry for. That's where we should say, "Yes, yes, yes, yes! I want everything that helps me to understand the depth of the life changing wisdom of God's Word, I want to be a student of God's Word. I want to be biblically literate; I want to be theologically knowledgeable, I want, I want, I want, I hunger for that. And I hunger for anything that will help me to understand God's truth and how it is all the spiritual nutrition that I need."
Now, what's the motivation for that? Well, I like what Peter says here. I think it's the bottom line, "...if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good." The motivation is that God is good? How could it be that anything in this book would be anything less than good because the God who ordained and guided this Book is perfectly good all the time and in every way. God is good!
And so, everything God calls me to is good. And I think that bottom line also sets up everything Peter is going to say for the rest of this book. All the hard calls that we will hear in 1 Peter are based on the fact that God is good.
I want to ask you, are you good at saying "No!"? Are you committed to saying, "No!" to you? Or do you just go wherever your feelings lead you, wherever your passions lead you? And is there a 'yes' inside of you that makes you ravenously hungry for nutrients of God's Word that will continue to grow you in your faith and in your love and service for the Lord?
