Living For God's Glory

Christ suffered once for sins. The righteous for the unrighteous.

A simple passage, again, to memorize for the sake of the clarity of the gospel. Chapter 1, verse 19, we've been bought by the precious blood of Christ. The suffering of Christ, his death on the cross, his shedding his blood for us is central to what God has done for us. Here, Christ has suffered in the flesh. He experienced a true, absolute, full human nature. That's what we're celebrating at Christmas. God became man, God incarnate. He had a full human nature so that he could suffer the full human death. One of the most excruciating deaths. All this for us. He being the righteous one, never sinned. Always right in line with the will of God as God himself who took on flesh. This is the gospel. If you're not a believer at this point, this is the truth that you need to hear most clearly. No one can please God in his own strength. We're all unrighteous. We are all sinners. We've all rebelled against God. No one can outdo their bad deeds with their good deeds. That's why God came himself to take on our nature. Christ, in his human nature, died in the place of sinners. died in the place of all who believe in him to forgive them. He takes the wrath of God upon himself so that God is just. He will punish every sin. And Christ gives us his own righteousness so that all who believe in him can be forgiven. This morning, that is the basis of the gospel. I'll be talking to the Christians in the room because there's a great application for what that means for us now. The most beautiful thing you can hear is the only hope you have is Christ who suffered in your place. And the invitation of God is to believe in him, to simply see the sin you have and that you can't wash it away. But Christ in his blood, he can forgive you by his sacrifice. Believer, there's a new application for us As Christ suffered, it's continued to be applied in different ways. Hear what Peter says, since Christ suffered in the flesh, we therefore arm ourselves, you are to arm yourselves with the same way of thinking. Christian, it's a thinking faith. There's a command to think here. There's a command earlier, be sober-minded. Consider the ways in which we think. If we only come in and check out our minds at the door and want an emotional experience of some sort, we're not seeking to live as a true human in the sight of God. We're not seeking to truly be engaged by God in every way. I pray there is an incredible experience, especially that cutting of the heart of the Holy Spirit. But we don't check our minds out. We're required to think. and rethink and recalculate. Because here's the reality, we all walk in with some really bad ideas. We all have borrowed, mostly even tacitly, unintentionally, really bad ideas. And when we come to God's word, he helps us think his thoughts after him. We're called to a new way of thinking. Praise God, he gives us better thoughts. He gives us better ideas. We need to be aware that there's a lot of ideas that we bring to God's word, and we gotta be careful not to syncretize. We need to be careful not to bring them in and, well, hide them away. God changes all our ways. There's a new way of thinking. Based on everything that follows, that might get complicated. Let me make it simple. Sin, bad, Jesus, good. All right, a lot of folks are exhausted. You've been hosting people all week. If that's what you walk away with today, that's fine. Sin bad, Jesus good. If that's the only thing you ever walk away with, that's not gonna be good for you. But it can't be that simple. Human passion's bad, God's will good. Jesus has come to make God's will known to us. Notice it's not just the way we think, it's arming ourselves with a new way of thinking. That's militant. Elect exiles, we're not in a playground, we're on a battlefield. There's a real battle, there's real consequence. It requires real training, real intentional, thoughtful action. This is something to take seriously. Christ suffered so that we can arm ourselves with a new way of thinking, thinking the same way as Christ regarding sin. For whoever, verse one, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin. Now that's challenging to think about. Christ suffered in the flesh, he put an end to sin for all who believe him. In the sense of he takes away the penalty of sin, he takes away the power of sin. One day he will take away the presence of sin. But here, this can't just mean suffering in general. As in just anybody who suffers ceases from sin. That can't be what it means. As he continues to relate our suffering to Christ's suffering, this must be suffering by faith. This must be connected to suffering with Christ, participating with his suffering. It's a suffering that's tied to walking faithfully with Christ. There's a union with Christ, I believe, that must be understood within this statement because it can't just be suffering, period, in our human nature. No, it's suffering here and now at this time with Christ and for Christ, by faith in Christ.

For whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin.

Now that should give us all some pause to ask, am I in that whoever section? Ceased from sin. I wanna bring in some other texts to help us kind of think about that declaration, because that's a big declaration. 1 John gives us two boundaries for us to think about this. 1 John 1, beginning of verse 8, he says anyone who says they're without sin is a liar, so we know there's no sinless elect exile. But he also says anyone who continues to practice sin cannot belong to God. So we see some boundaries for what this statement must mean. Ceasing from sin can't mean you're sinless all of a sudden, but it means we're not practicing sin. As we think about that, I think a helpful way of saying it is you're finished with sin. Because after you've suffered with Christ, as you've united with Christ, as you've seen what sin is in light of the cross, you see it's destructive, it's deceptive, it's dangerous. I believe if we look at what's going to happen next, he's going to tell us how to stop doing the things that are no longer fit for a follower of Christ. And he's going to pull us towards the things that are true and should be part of the Christian life. I believe we see this commitment as we come to faith. It's not just receiving forgiveness. It's a commitment to see the sin Christ died for is something I've got to stop practicing. It's deadly. The way of Christ is good. I want to follow him. See, the new way of Christ It calls us to holiness. It calls us away from danger. A Christian disciple denies himself. What are you denying yourself of? The deadly, dangerous sins that Christ died for. You're carrying a cross. You're participating in the suffering. You're following Christ. You're seeking to know His way to follow. There's something important here. There is no unique way of following Jesus Christ. God gifts us all, we'll see that in a little while. There's different ways in which we serve based upon what God's gifts are, they're varied. But there's one holy standard, God. There's one Holy Spirit that's driving us and changing us and transforming us to be like that one holy God. We're all supposed to seek to live in the same holy way. We have been made alive with Christ. That was chapter one, verse three. Now we're to live in that way. Look at verse two. So as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh. Again, as humans, in our human existence now as elect exiles, as we're still on this earth waiting for a renewed body with new lives, for the rest of the time we're to live in a different way. And there's a key contrast. no longer for human passions, but for the will of God. That's the key contrast. Believer, you do have two options. There's two ways to live. We try to make it somehow like closer together as if we can mix and mingle here, but there's two ways to live. According to our human passions, what feels right, what we desire by nature, what's right in our own eyes, or what God says is right. There's a strong contrast here between the human passions and our own desires. Now, what's truly amazing is God not only changes what we think, the head, God even changes the way we desire, the heart. And that fascinates me because here, We can have control over our desires. We can redirect our desires. That's significant because we usually think based upon our desires. We usually choose based upon our desires. We usually feel out of control with our emotions or our desires. Here, we can actually change how we love because God loved us. I think that's really hard to do. Because here's what the desires come from within. Those are our desires. We identify with them. We produced them. Those passions, which are taking God's good gifts and corrupting them, they're taking what God has given to us and we twist and we pervert. They're ours. This is why sin becomes our master? That's why it's so easy to fall into a slavery of sin because it's our actual deceptive desires that are leading us away. They feel like they're who we truly are. But in God's grace, he changes our hearts. He directs our hearts back to him. He leads us back into his love by first loving us. He leads us to better loves. This takes effort. Your heart doesn't just change accidentally. It is changed in a moment by God's grace, but then there's great effort to take every thought captive, every desire under inspection. It takes help from others, and most of all, help from God. What Peter's putting before us here, believer, we can be done with the deadly, destructive patterns that Christ had to die for, and we can live a new way God's will. The world shouts, you do you. Jesus says, I've got something better. Don't be true to yourself. Learn how to live up to what God has called. Verse three, the old way to reject. We've seen there's a new way, no longer the passions, but for the will of God, according to the way Christ has shown us what sin is and what it does in his own way. Now there's a clarity of what not to do. And notice again, time is important. The old way to reject, verse three,

for the time that has passed suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do. living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatries.

Verse two, live for the rest of your time seeking God's will. The time that has passed suffices. It is no longer timely to pursue these sinful practices. It is out of season, believer. The time has passed. We need to recognize how important time is, how precious it is, especially that Christ has redeemed it. One of my children made an observation recently that old people want to be young and young people want to be old. My response was, reality is old people cannot be young, but young people, Lord willing, will grow older. There's really not a lot of option there. So I told her, enjoy being young. Quit trying to be old. We always wish it the other way. We have a hard time appreciating where we are in the moment, and here in this moment, believer, if you're in elect exile, time has passed for these sinful practices. There's a new way to live today. Believer, as the word of God is planted in your heart, every moment is precious as a way of glorifying God. We are to do good with our time. We are to do God's will. There's a warning, especially as we have so many young folks. Be afraid of wasting your life. It is so easy to waste your life. It is so easy to just get into a pattern of doing something that doesn't matter because there's so many different ways of numbing ourselves in weird, mindless entertainment. Realize God has given you great purpose. God has given you his will. In order to do this, we have to learn how to say no in order to say yes to the right things. We have to learn how to say no so we make sure to say yes to the right things. Living in sensuality. This is simply if it feels good, do it. Obey those base desires that the world's telling you is what makes you the true noble savage. That inner heart, the culture's pressing in and making you be somebody who you're not supposed to be. Those inner sensual desires, that's who you truly are. Well, that's the old way he's saying is no longer in season. According to your passions, that's the same words above that he said is against God's will. Again, that's the lust, the twistedness, The taking of God's good gifts that had a good purpose and using them for our new purposes, which means we're gonna mess them up. Drunkenness, the idea here is a foolish person in drink. The fool is at the heart of the word there. Foolish drinking. Orgies, outrageous, self-indulging sexual practice. Drinking parties or carousing, the vanity fair in Pilgrim's Progress. And then finally, lawless idolatry. Worship everything but God. Now, this is not an exhaustive list of sins. There's a whole other list of sins about the self-righteous person who seeks to be a hypocrite and pretend they're better than they are. This is a list of the licentious. So we realize there's different kinds of sins, there's even different categories of sins, and this isn't exhaustive. But a simple glance at the list all together is really helpful for our age because this list is all about self-satisfying, self-worshipping the self-seeking person. This person is indulging. All these particular activities are the indulgent. This is what our cultural icons teach us to do. Really, we see here many ways of being intoxicated by overindulging. By indulging outside of God's will, outside of God's way. Alcohol is listed explicitly once, assumed again. Sexual sin explicitly once, assumed twice. The primary gifts God has given us is food as we feast and glorify in his name. And sexual union with a marital spouse. It's significant, the more important the gift, the more likely it is we're gonna mess it up. The goodness of the gift, we see the goodness but we take it and we wanna flip it around and use it for our own personal selfish ends. What sex is supposed to be in God's design is a way of enjoying the covenant union of marriage But what our culture has done is despise marriage and try to glorify sex in every other way. That's out of season for the Christian. Now, you might look at this and say, orgies, well, that's gross, that's way out there, that's, of course not. A preacher once challenged a group of young folks. We do realize we have a brothel in our pocket with the phone. The kinds of things you can look at is the equivalent of an orgy. Our sophistication has only made these things more easy to grasp if we want them. Again, the key here is a self-satisfying consumption, foolish consumption, an intoxicating consumption, filling ourselves with God's good gifts without giving him glory or without seeking what his will is. At the end of the day, it's all idolatry. At the end of the day, it's really just worshiping ourselves. Here's the reality, we are designed to worship. We will worship. We are worshiping something, sometime, or all the time. The key is are we worshiping God with all he's given us according to his will? This is why it's so important we understand God has given us his will. Because those desires are ours. And the helpful thing God has given us is his word. The real way to analyze and understand your desires and your passions to see how we're taking something good and messing it up is to allow God's word to function as it's supposed to, as a mirror. To shine light in our sin, on our sin, by the goodness of his good word. We look at God's word and we ask God, first show me your goodness so that I can see my sin, so that I can know your forgiveness, so that I can know how to be more obedient. It's not some grand mystery to figure out what God's goodness is. He's made it very clear. The trouble is our heart, our deceptive, sinful heart likes to twist what God says and make room for our sin. This is not an exhaustive list, but I think it speaks to our age that is self-indulgent. I ask you, Christian, what current sins are you seeking to repent of? What kind of practices do you see you need to stop in order to align yourself outside of the human passions that have directed you, but towards God's will? We're supposed to be finished with sin because we've suffered with Christ. We're supposed to say we're going to stop these sin patterns. Christians, the pressing question, what needs to change today? To better know God according to his will. There is an old way to stop. Verses four to six present our third point, new way in the world, our new way in the world. As we've come to think a new way, to live a new way in God's will, setting aside all those old practices, Peter gives us some pastoral care in the midst of thinking through how those old friends are gonna treat us. Our new way in the world. With respect to this, they, that is the world, those who practice these things,

They're surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you.

There's a wonderful clarity that Peter tells you what's happening, probably, if you're in elect exile at this time. As you stop participating in the sin that you once gathered with these friends with over, They're gonna malign you. As you once joined with them in the debauchery, now you stop, they're gonna speak evil of you. Now, he's speaking to what's most likely a new church of new believers, folks who were raised as pagans and became Christians and stopped a lot of foolish practices. We can appreciate the radical change that happened with many of those lives, and I praise God for the radical change that happened among many of you. because of God's grace. But what kinds of practices do we just adopt again, maybe not even fully embracing the practice as something that's clear, sinful, but the role of recreation and entertainment in our culture? That is our idols in America, our recreation and entertainment. What kinds of ways do we gather with folks that if we stopped participating in the jokes or the gossip or the slander that they would malign us because we're not participating with their sin anymore? When you stop joining in the evil practices, they're gonna treat you with evil. That's the reality of what Peter's telling us. Believers elect to exiles know that they will give an account. That's the comfort he gives. The reality is they're gonna malign you, but verse five, but they will give account to him, the almighty just judge, who is ready to judge the living and the dead. If we're walking with Christ, there's a great comfort that he is a just judge. If we know he has forgiven us because Christ paid the penalty in full, we rejoice in Christ We rejoice in God's judgment because if we are maligned for doing good, if we bless those who curse us, we know that there will be a judgment. Vengeance belongs to the Lord. Verse six,

for this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.

We need to pause here and remember this is a thinking faith. For this is why is referring to the two purposes at the bottom. The gospel was preached so that though judged in the flesh, they might live in the spirit. And he's not saying we're going to go and preach to the dead. Do not go to the graveyard today and think you're going to fulfill this passage. I believe the idea is the gospel was preached to those who are now dead while they were living. This is the beauty of the gospel. Everyone's supposed to hear it. Everyone is supposed to hear it because it's the only way to live. But those who are now dead, they heard the gospel that they might, though judged in the flesh the way people are, that is, they've died in the flesh, they might live in the spirit the way God does. And this is so parallel to what we saw about Jesus in 318. I believe that spirit is the Holy Spirit. They died. like humans do, but they were made alive by the Spirit if they believed. Christian, as we think about this world, we need to be careful of wanting the world to embrace us and give us some kind of certificate for good deeds. Because the gospel is offensive when truly preached and taught to those who reject him. We should not be We should not expect celebration of the world for being faithful. We should long for God's celebration for our faithfulness. We need to seek to be faithful to him. If they hated Jesus who suffered for us, we shouldn't expect different treatment. There's a forewarning of what to expect and a promise that there is a judgment and even hope in the midst of that judgment. Fourth point, verses seven to 11, the new way within the church. Notice how time continues to be a significant stamp. Live for the rest of the time in the will of God. The time has passed to participate in the sinful practices. The end of all things is at hand. Here we are. Verse seven,

the end of all things and therefore be self-controlled and superminded for the sake of your prayers. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling, as each has received a gift, use it to serve one another. As God's good stewards of God's varied grace, whoever speaks as one who speaks oracles of God, whoever serves as one who serves with the strength that God supplies, in order that in everything, God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion, Forever and ever, amen.

When we go back, we've seen this contrast, God's will and human passions. Well, if you wanna know what God's will is, it's seven to 11. We can see God's will is don't do certain things, but now it's what to do. That's helpful. We don't just stop practices, we need new practices. We need a new way. God gives us his will. If you want to know what the will of God is, seven and 11 are a good starting place. This is the will of God, he's telling you what to do, because he's a good God. There's two primary ways we see at the very beginning. Be self-controlled and sober-minded. Self-control is one of those instructions about scripture for the church. It's fruit of the spirit. It's part of that knowing what to say no to and knowing what to say yes to. It's not me determining how to have my own control over my own life. No, it's how do I trust what God has said and know how to discipline my schedule, because where we spend our time is how we're growing up into something. How do I discipline my time, my desires, my thoughts? What are my patterns? If we're not intentional about it, we're gonna waste away. To be self-controlled means we're analyzing and we're seeking to know God more faithfully. We're letting others speak truth in our lives. Suburban mind, this is a seriousness. This is the opposite of foolishness. Everything about these two, I picture somebody that I call who is ballast. Ballast is that bottom part of the boat we don't see. It's under the water. It keeps the boat stable. When waves come crashing and rushing in, the boat's able to stay stable because the ballast is strong. The boat has a stability. By knowing God's will and seeking to live God's will, you've got a ballast. When storms rage, we can hear Jesus' own words there. When you're built up on the rock and the waves come crashing in, you're able to have a firm standing. The reason seriousness and super-minded and self-control are so important for the Christian in that ballast, they're not ways from outside that normally throw us off. They're simple desires from within. It's an inside job that's usually bothering us. We must have the seriousness and the super-mindedness and the self-control to identify the sin that was within that so often sabotages our love. Our culture is so over-romanticized that supposedly the most authentic you is a spontaneous you. I believe the serious self-control life is one that is wonderfully predictable. If you're a young believer, grow up to be wonderfully predictable. Your children will grow up in a home knowing exactly what to expect from their parents. The church will know exactly what to expect from you. It's a great grace to be wonderfully predictable when you've set your pattern according to Christ. The most authentic you is the version that Christ has saved you to become, which means you're denying those impulses that burst forth. Notice verse seven, the end. For the sake of your prayers. This is at least the third time we've seen it in Peter. a connection between our living and our prayers. The first was husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, honoring them so that our prayers aren't hindered. The next came from the quote from Psalm 34 that followed soon after. Our prayer life is how we find the strength and energy and the grace to know God's will and to follow God's will. Elect to exile, how is your prayer life? Are we learning to regularly depend upon God? Are we regularly asking, what is your will? Are we regularly asking, let me see you more clearly and know you more fully from your words that I would see my sins or repent more so I might see you more? If we're seeking to live in the passions, we're not going to seek God's will. There's a way in which I think just subjectively, by default, if we're seeking to live only by our own passions, we're not praying because we don't pray for that. We just are self-sufficient to know God's will, to know our own will. Earlier, the previous text, there was a way in which Christ and his suffering and resurrection and ascension, it gives us that good conscience in prayer to come before God. There's a way in which if we're living in sin, We're hesitant to go to the God who we know is good and that we've not been living with. That's one of the ways in which our prayer life could be affected by sin is we're afraid to go or we just don't go. The other is actually more terrifying. It may be that God stops listening to us so intently because we refuse to follow him. One of the most dangerous things is when we start praying and we say, this is my will, and God, you're supposed to do what I want you to do, and then we get upset with God not doing it. That's called compounding sin. We think God's supposed to satisfy the desires of our heart rather than shaping our heart. That leads to a compounding, dangerous sin. The next commands all take us in a slightly different direction. Those are plurals. We're all supposed to be self-controlled. We're all supposed to be sober-minded for the sake of our prayers together and for one another. Now, we have an above all. Notice these next have a similar phrase that we really have to know as a church, the one and others. There's a way in which we're relating to each other, the one and others who all belong to Christ as elect exiles together. There's a way in which we're relating to one another uniquely. love one another, show hospitality to one another, serve one another. Those are the three that are listed here. Our new way in the church have to be marked by these particular three practices. It begins with love one another, and this is not new. We've seen this throughout 1 Peter. We saw it in chapter one, verse 22. We saw it in chapter three, verse eight. This is not some random acts of kindness, love. This isn't just when I feel like it, I'm gonna go and participate in something, love. This is from Jesus' own command, a new commandment I give you, Jesus says.

Love one another as I have loved you.

It's sincere, it's earnest, it's sacrificial. We've all been adopted into the same family. We're all haven't received the same love. We're all seeking to grow, to enjoy, to know that love all the more and to express it to one another. We're supposed to be growing up in this sacrificial giving of ourselves to one another in this earnest love towards one another. That is God's will. What we all have been trained to think though is that we're consumers. And consumerism is a sinful mindset that must die. Consumerism really just leads us back to the sins we're supposed to be in our past with the sensuality and the passions, just the indulgence. If we only commit to other believers when we think we like it because of what we'll get out of it, are we not treating the church like a retail store? It's God's holy nation. It's God's holy temple where the will of God is supposed to be done. Consumer Christianity has been limping along for a few generations. It cannot succeed because it has no theology of suffering. It cannot succeed because it's seeking to take our will and God's will and somehow mix them together. We must come and realize God has given us himself, his love, so that we can give to others. Let's just back up for a second. How good is this? God woos us in our selfishness. We all came to Christ because of what he gives us, right? We all came to Christ as consumers. We needed forgiveness. We came to him to get that forgiveness. That's how good God is. He gives us what we need. He gives us himself. Then his will is to fill us with himself, fill us with his love so that we can give to others. God meets us where we're at, as selfish sinners, and then he transforms us to be giving saints. What a great God. What a high command. What a good will. He then tells us love covers a multitude of sins. There's a time to confront a brother, like Matthew 18 says, and another time to let love just cover that multitude of sins, and it takes a lot of wisdom to know the difference. It captures something important. Sin still happens in the church, because that's who you're loving, and that's the sin you're letting get covered from love. There's a reality that God has adopted all kinds of rascals. Some of us can be a little difficult at times. The hope is we are confronting when needed, but we're also letting love cover up multitude of sins. There's a powerful way in which Jesus has taken away our sin and his suffering. And that's a model for us in the practice of now us covering a multitude of sins with our own love for others. But by definition, Christ absorbed the wrath of God we deserve by taking away our sin. When we love others in this kind of way in forgiveness, It is absorbing activity that is difficult. I remind you of our church covenant.

We will humbly warn a brother who is in danger of falling into disobedience or error. We will speak the truth in love, be slow to take offense, and be eager to seek swift and lasting reconciliation.

That is a significant commitment regarding love covering all of our sins. Show hospitality without grumbling. If anything here, it's welcoming the stranger. I'm so thankful this comes right for Thanksgiving because how many homes opened up to folks they did not know that well. You know each other better. But because they're your fellow Christians, you're part of the same family of God. You're exiles together as elect from God. But I want to challenge us with thinking about what it means to show hospitality. There's a way in which we become too private in our culture. There was a day when you drove to somebody's house and you knocked on the door without them knowing it. Now you can't even call somebody, that seems like offensive. You're like, who's calling me? Why don't you text me? We're getting too distant. There needs to be a sense in which we're sharing each other's lives, and sharing each other's lives, according to the scriptures, usually sharing a meal together around our dinner tables. Open our homes. I'm thankful we've just experienced a lot of that with Thanksgiving and folks being invited into homes together, but this should be a normal practice in the church. Practice the pop-in. I, as your pastor, just gave you full privilege of just popping in on other members. You're welcome. I fear one of the reasons we don't do this, we don't have people over, it's the Magnolia-Joanna Gaines problem. This is for one of my daughters. Seriously, we think our homes have to look perfect for people to come over. Oh no, it's good to let people be invited into your mess. That's where they're gonna learn Christ's mess the best, right? We think we need to have our home just perfectly, everything in place, all the laundry put away, the trash again, something great being cooked on the stove. No. Young believers, new believers, they need to be invited into the mess as well. We can't think it always has to look like a Martha Stewart picture. We need to be able to see this can look messy. Key there is without grumbling, there's a great gratitude in loving others and showing hospitality. The third command, serve one another. He goes further here, he explains this one more

As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's very grace.

And that's where we see there's one holy standard that God calls us to, but then there's multiple gifts that we each have that all come together to build up the body and unite the body and make the body complete. Everybody has a gift to steward. Everybody has a way of contributing to the temple, to the nation, to God's will. A person who is enjoyed by the Holy Spirit has been given a gift to use. And you don't find your gift by taking a quiz online. You find your gift by doing everything you can to serve others. I was given the advice once by a professor when I was in college. He was in his 60s and he told me,

do everything you can until you're 40 and then do what you're best at.

And I looked at him thinking, 40, I'll be dead. I'll be all used up. Now in my 40s, I'm like, man, that dude was right. Do everything you can. Serve in every way possible. The church is here to let you find ways that you shouldn't serve as well as ways you should serve, and there's grace there. Find different ways to serve. as good stewards of what God has given you. Verse 11, notice there's two specific ways of serving that he lists, and we see in other texts there's other gifts, other ways of serving, but he lays out two, and I think it's really interesting, the two that he picks. Whoever speaks, whoever serves. All right, so let's just be very clear. Verse 10, the word behind the word serve is the word we get deacon from, and the word serve in verse 11, that word serve is the word we get deacon from. He said, deacon, speaking and deaconing. That's fun. What do you see here? It's very much like Acts 6, when the apostle said that they will serve tables and we'll serve the word and prayer. Speaking is a service. There's other ways of serving. We usually consider this as a teaching ministry or a physical ministry, but both are and exalted in the Holy Temple of God because it's God's will. And I want to say there might even be behind this some idea that there's elders who are setting the pattern for speaking and there's deacons who are setting the pattern for serving. But at some level, we all are contributing to the body with the way we speak and serve. Everybody here is going to speak to others, I hope, after the service. I hope you spoke to each other before the service. I hope you're gonna use your words of the week. We're all to be speaking in a way that's reflecting the word of God. There's a unique way in which some are speaking the words of God, there's a teaching which is really just setting the pattern for how the rest of the church is supposed to talk. But we each must see there's a way we all serve The speaking is a way of proclaiming the things to build up the saints and teaching that all this service is good and all of it is needed for God's kingdom. Notice the end.

In order that in everything God may be glorified.

God's will is that he would be glorified. God's will is to invite you into the way of glory and the way of glory is by the way of suffering. Christ has suffered for us so that we can participate in his suffering, we can participate in his new life, we can know his will, we can set aside sin, and we can now pursue a better way. We're all worshiping something. Here is instruction for how to worship God, the true God who saves us, that in everything God may be glorified. and all that we do in our love and all that we do in our hospitality and our homes and all that we do in serving one another. May God be glorified. Will you pray with me? Father, we thank you for your word and that it has not left us with the foolishness that we have come up with in our own minds, the rebellion we've adopted from our culture the desires that bubble up from within that love only self and sin. Thank you that you've given us your son who gives us new life. You've given us your spirit that changes our desires, that brings us into your presence, that helps us to know your love so that we love you more. Thank you that we can be loved by one another and love one another, be served by one another, and serve one another. May we grow to know how to depend upon you, that we might become more dependable with one another. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.