Transcript
We've been examining these five directives from 1 Peter that really do capture what it looks like to live in light of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in your everyday life between the "already" and the "not yet". The first directive was know your place. The second was rest in God's care.
The Third Directive: Be Sober-Minded and Watchful
The third is take life seriously. Listen to these words. 8Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. I think there's evidence that we have bought the pleasure-centered materialism of the world around us that causes us to take life less than seriously.
If you've attached your identity to your job, you're going to make bad choices and you're not going to take life seriously in the way that this passage talks about. If you're all too connected to pleasure and you have to have a certain amount of pleasure in life all the time, you will end up not taking life seriously. If you've spent yourself into unbelievable debt, you're not taking life seriously. You're exposing yourself to things that tempt you morally, you're not taking life seriously.
The picture here is of the devil as a roaring lion. I had the opportunity of experiencing this word picture firsthand. I was in South Africa on a game safari where we tracked lions on the hunt with infrared lights at night. It was an amazing experience as they were running through the bush of South Africa chasing this herd of kudu deer. They separated out several of the weak deer. And we were in open four-wheel drive vehicles, were flying through the bush country at night.
Finally, they pounced on these deer and it was the most gruesome, bloody, violent scene I've ever seen. If you think that you've seen animal kills on television, trust me, you've seen sanitized kills. This was gruesome and awful. About eight feet from where I was sitting in this open vehicle was this huge lion, nine foot long from head to tail, huge, big paws; and he was just ripping the flesh of this deer.
A Lion Beside Our Vehicle
He looked down and realized that there was a lion in front of him that was much smaller, who was eating a bigger deer and he wanted that deer; and so, he began to walk alongside our vehicle. He turned and looked at us, his mane dripping with blood, looked at us with the eyes of Satan. I'm terrified. At that moment, I said to my guide sitting next to me with a rifle, "Are we okay," and he said we were. I wondered if my pants were wet. They were. It was a terrifying scene.
The next morning, I'm sitting on a rock next to the lodge where we stayed up on a hill and I hear what is distant thunder, and I said to a steward who walked up, "Looks like there's a storm front coming through." And he basically said, "You newbies who are first time on these hunts all think the same thing." He said, "That's actually the lions roaring after the kill. They roll around the ground with full stomachs and just roar in delight."
It's a very interesting picture of this metaphor, this word picture in the Bible because on the hunt, the lions are utterly silent. It's amazing how little noise they make as they're running through the bush. It's after the kill that they roar. That means that we believe in the presence of a stealthy, seductive, silent, murderous enemy, and you don't want to hear his roar because once you hear the roar, you've already been bitten. That's the warning of this passage. We live in a world where there is real, personal evil that is still prowling around and we're called by the gospel to take life just that seriously.
