Text: 1 Peter 1:22–25
Date: December 31, 2021
Event: New Year’s Eve, Set 3
1 Peter 1:22–25 (EHV)
Since you have purified your souls by obeying the truth, resulting in sincere brotherly love, love one another constantly from a pure heart. 23For you have been born again, not from perishable seed but from imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. 24For:
All flesh is like grass,
and all its glory is like a flower of the field.
The grass withers,
and the flower falls,
25but the word of the Lord endures forever.
And this is the word that was preached to you.
New Year’s Resolution: Love One Another Constantly
What are your goals for 2022? Do you want things to be very different from the year that is drawing to a close? Would you like to continue positive momentum you started this year? Whether you want to make big changes or you want things to be relatively close to the same, this evening gives us an opportunity to look both forward and backward, to reflect on what has happened and plan for what is to come.
In his New Testament letters, the apostle Peter is similarly reflective and forward-looking. Although for him it was not brought on by something as relatively simple as the change to a new year. For Peter, he’s writing to Christians in a large region to encourage and focus them on the future by reminding them of what they’ve been taught. He knows that his life is quickly drawing to a close. Before he dies, he wants to do everything in his power to remind his audience of what is truly important so that they don’t lose sight of that when he’s gone. You and I also get to benefit from that encouragement and focus by making it a part of our focus this evening. Peter reminds us of what God has done for us in the past and what he will do for us in the future. This focus on God’s love and care allows us to make plans for what is coming in the year ahead.
Peter reminds us that we have purified our souls by obeying the the truth. While purification sounds like a good thing, it’s also a reminder that there was something wrong. You only need purification if something was corrupted and ruined.
And we know all too well that we were corrupted and ruined. We did not, have not, and will not meet God’s expectations of perfection. We have been lazy and greedy; we’ve treated those around us in shabby, thoughtless ways; we’ve let lust dance in our mind and even dictate our actions; we’ve allowed our selfish desires to override other’s needs and even God’s will. Sin has fouled us from the inside out. On our own, there is nothing pure in us.
So God brings the purification we need. He has set before us Jesus as the solution to sin. Jesus’ life and death bring the release from sin, the complete scrubbing of the corruption that we brought on ourselves. We have not earned it or deserved it, but he gives it to us. We are pure because of Jesus for us. So when Peter says we are purified by obeying the truth, that is related to what we often call a gospel imperative, an appeal to believe the good news. But we know that faith can only come about if God gives it. We can rightly understand “obeying the truth” as Peter saying, “You’ve trusted the truth with the faith God has given.” Your purity comes not from you, but from God. Peter makes that clearer as he changes the picture describing this change: For you have been born again, not from perishable seed but from imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.
We needed to be born again because our original birth didn’t work out so well. That birth resulted in the stillbirth of sin—we were born spiritually dead in our trespasses. But a new birth from God changes us from death to life. We didn’t choose or dictate our first birth. Likewise, being born again is not something we did or we made happen or that we chose to do. This rebirth is something done for us by God. We were born again when God created faith, trust in his promises in our hearts.
To accomplish our rebirth, God used his Word, the Word of God that we have in the Scriptures, the Word of God that pairs itself with the earthly elements of water, bread, and wine in the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. This Word is a changing power from God. It takes us from clinging to ourselves and wallowing in our sin to trusting in him for everything we need for time and eternity.
That Word never goes away, regardless of how dire the circumstance around us might look. Peter quotes the famous words from Isaiah to show us the endurance of God’s Word even in this fallen, sinful world: “All flesh is like grass, and all its glory is like a flower of the field. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures forever.”
God’s Word endures in good times and in difficult times, when time seems to be dragging on or going by too quickly to comprehend. It stands as the immovable rock and center of our lives. In that Word, God assures us of his love for us, his complete forgiveness for us, and what the result of that love and forgiveness will be: eternal life with him forever. As Peter looks on to his impending death, he recognizes that this is going to be a gigantic change for a lot of people. But even losing the apostles, even changes in spiritual leadership in the church does not change the message. No family death, no pandemic, no great loss of finances, no personal health tragedy can ever remove the truth of what the Word tells us. No matter what lies ahead in the bumpy life ahead, this eternal, enduring Word is in fact the same word that was preached to you. It is what you’ve known and will continue to trust.
That love of God and confidence for eternity that it produces brings a calm even to an unstable-feeling existence. Even in a time of transition like a new year, we go forward knowing that our God and what he’s promised has not, does not, and will not change. The same Word that Peter and the others apostles preached is the very Word of God preached to us. We cling to the same promises in the same Savior with the same certainty as they did. And in all of this perhaps the famous words that the writer to the Hebrews was inspired to record for us ring in our mind, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). Even if our whole life here seems like shifting quick sand, the Word does not change and our Savior does not change.
This stability and confidence and peace that God gives to us produces a visible change and action in our lives. Peter said that as a result of the purification of our souls we will love one another constantly from a pure heart. It’s been a refrain for us in recent weeks, but it’s a thought that bears reacting especially in the brink of a new year. We want the love of God to reflect itself in how we speak to others, how we behave toward each other, and even the thoughts we carry in our hearts about others.
Tonight let’s jointly set a new year’s resolution: let’s resolve to love one another constantly in the year ahead. All of us can look back over 2021 and see places where we have failed to do this, where we’ve served ourselves not others, where we haven’t loved as we have been loved. And we can also see in Jesus’ life and death for us that the sin has been removed. We are forgiven! And that loving forgiveness then empowers us to be more forgiving toward others, more God-like in our love for all other people.
But unlike so many new year’s resolutions that we get excited to set and then perhaps lose drive to keep in place by January 5th, this resolution doesn’t depend on our strength and willpower. This is a change that God works in us through his Word. So while a resolution of more love for one another may be the outward, observable result, the deeper resolution is that this year we want to be even more enveloped with God’s Word. In worship, Bible Class, home devotions, God wraps us in the warm blanket of his love and allows us to share that love with others.
Let this coming year be a year where you spend even more time with the God loves you. Let this coming year be a year where you spend even more effort to put that Word into practice in all areas of your life. Let this coming year be a year where you find more comfort in the eternal love of your God who was born to take your place, who died to pay your debt, and who rose to prove your victory. Let your new year’s resolution be that you love one another constantly because your Savior has loved you eternally. Happy New Year! Amen.
