Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why You Don't Fit In | New Testament | 1 Peter 1

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Do you ever feel like you don't fit in? The answer might lie in 1 Peter 1. In today's episode, Patrick describes the tension of being obedient in the midst of the culture around you. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 1 Peter 1

Welcome to 10-minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. Today we begin our journey through 1st Peter, and then we'll move on to 2nd Peter. Now, these are just two letters that were written, obviously, by a guy named Peter. A quick reminder of who Peter was. Peter was one of Jesus' earliest followers. Back then, he went by the name Simon, and he was just a poor fisherman.

Not the kind of guy you'd expect to drop everything and follow a rabbi and become one of the greatest Bible scholars, teachers, and leaders, and church history. But Jesus saw the potential in Simon. And if you know Simon's story, he was famous for just being passionate. The problem was that his passion often outstripped his intellect and often outstripped his faith. There's a great story where Jesus is walking on the water. And who's the disciple to get out of the boat and try to walk on the water to Jesus? What's Peter? And at first it goes great. But then he starts sinking is he was passionate, but sometimes his passion outstripped. His faith. It's not just that. On the night before Jesus was crucified, he went to go pray to his father in the Garden of Gassimony, and he invited a few of his followers to come with him. And he said, please, pray with me, pray for me, because what I'm about to go through is quite literally hell on earth. And Peter, like the other disciples, fell asleep. But then this mob comes to arrest Jesus. And again, we see Peter's passion. He takes out his sword. He attacks one of the servants of the high priest and chops off his ear. And what does Jesus say to him? Good job.

Peter love the passion here? No, he says, no more of this. That's not how his kingdom's going to come. It will not come by violence. It will not come by attacking our enemies. Jesus showed Peter on the cross that his kingdom only comes by laying down your life. And that was a message Peter would eventually have to take to heart. You see, Jesus changed Simon's name to Petros. That's the Greek word for rock. It's where we get the name Peter. And he said, on this rock, I will build my church. Again, how does Jesus build his church? Well, he does it counterintuitively. He does it paradoxically.

He does it by calling his followers to be subversive by submitting, to be subversive by laying down their life. And Peter took that to heart. In the book of Acts, he's one of the bold disciples out there proclaiming the good news of Jesus' kingdom. And he's thrown into prison. He's beaten. He's treated terribly.

And eventually, there's a huge wave of persecution in Jerusalem that causes Peter to flee. Now, we don't quite know what happened after that with Peter entirely, but eventually Peter moved to Rome, to the capital of the Roman Empire. And he was there at a time when the Roman Emperor Nero, who was kind of this mad emperor who did all kinds of crazy things. Well, this emperor, Nero, he wanted to do a new building project. And there was something in his way. There were all these homes that were owned by poor people who lived inside of his community. And rather than trying to find them new housing, Nero took a time.

torch and burned down an entire district of Rome. Now, the Romans weren't too happy about this, and Nero knew that would be the case. So what did he do? Well, he found a scapegoat. He blamed the Christians. He said the Christians were the ones who did this. And this led to one of the largest waves of persecution of Christians in the ancient Roman Empire. And Peter was caught up in that wave of persecution. He was crucified by Nero's regime in 62 AD. But he made one request. He said, I'm not worthy to die the way my Savior died, so at least crucify me upside down. That's what happened. Peter laid down to his life to announce the good news of the kingdom, and he knew that in doing this, that is precisely how God's kingdom comes.

You see, Peter, he got that he was in exile. I love this quote by S.D. Grade. I might be saying his name wrong, but he said, we live in strange times, or the times we live in make strangers out of folks like me. I'm not sure. And I think that's probably how Peter felt. I live in strange times or maybe I feel like a stranger because I don't really belong here. I'm an exile in Rome. I think Peter would have resonated with that. And when he writes his letters, he wants the people who he's writing to to see themselves as exiles as well.

This is how he opens up his letter. First Peter, one, Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to God's election. He's saying, hey, you are the chosen ones of God. He's called you out. He's rescued you. But then he adds another name. He's like, hey, you're called and chosen. And then he says this, exiles scattered throughout the province of Pontus, Galicia,

Cappadocia, Asia, and Bethinia. Now, if you were receiving this letter in one of those regions, these are all kind of modern-day Turkey, but it would have been part of the Roman Empire. You would have scratched your head. Wait a second. I'm an exile. I've lived in Rome my whole life. I'm not in exile from anywhere.

What do you mean that I'm in exile, Peter? Well, as Peter's letter goes on, you. He describes what it means to live as exiles. You see, exiles understand that their true citizenship is in heaven with Christ. That's not to say that the earth is bad. This earth is our home, but our ultimate citizenship is with Jesus. And one day heaven will come to earth. But until then, in this political moment, wherever you're at, you're in exile.

You don't fit in. You're out of place. And he wanted his readers to see themselves like this. You see, every new generation of Jesus followers faces an old question. question. How do we live faithfully in this present time? Cultures change, empires rise and fall, but that question always remains, how do we live faithfully as exiles in our moment? We feel it when a coworker pressures us to massage the numbers on last quarter's report, or when a friend pokes fun at our sexual ethic. We can handle the jokes, but the costs are often pretty high. Sometimes we

experience social exclusion. We miss out on business opportunities. We become the topic of gossip. We lose credibility, comfort, peace of mind, reputation, there's a cost to being in exile. Worse yet, there will be some people who see your commitment to Jesus' way of life as offensive and even dangerous. They'll call you a threat. And those people, they might shame you, they might belittle you. They might even see firing Christians as an act of godliness or justice for the bettering of society.

That's what it's like to be in exile. Remaining faithful while loving those who hurt you, which is what you. Jesus called us to do? Well, that's what Leslie Newbigin called the unbearable tension. It's the tension of living out God's future in the present. It's the tension of obeying God's call to look different than those around you and often being misunderstood by them while also simultaneously loving them. The people Peter wrote this letter to, they were caught in that tension. They were caught between the present time while they're living in the Roman Empire and the future reality that God's kingdom was coming. They were caught in that tension knowing they had to exemplify that kingdom even while being

misunderstood by their compatriots. These Christians, they refused to do what everybody else did. They refused to worship the Roman emperor and the pagan gods. And many of their friends would have judged them harshly for this. They thought that because they didn't worship the Roman emperor and all the Roman gods, they were jeopardizing the welfare of the entire society that the emperor and the gods all oversaw. So pagans would exclude Christians. It was difficult because, business deals and political decisions. These were all made at pagan temples during pagan sacrificial meals. And so if you wanted to follow Jesus, you were going to miss out on some serious opportunities. And that's what happened. Christians lost out on economic opportunities. They lost

out on social opportunities. And the pagans who were excluding the Christians, they thought that eventually the Christians would come cringing back. But that didn't work. They didn't come cringing back. And so they tried verbal assaults and said, Christians watched as their honor, their status, were torn to shreds in public life. So back to that question, every generation asks, how do we live faithfully in this present time? How do we live in unbearable tension? Over the centuries, Christians have discovered

two ways to try to relieve or smooth out that tension. One way is cultural retreat. This is people who retreat or withdraw into cloister communities where they can anonymously practice their faith apart from the influence and insults of non-Christian culture around them. They create subcultures with their own music and dress and way of speaking. They see outsiders as a hostile force threatening to pollute their community. They smooth out the tension by retreating and hiding. They don't live as exiles because they're trying not to live in the present at all.

But there's another way people try to relieve the tension, and that's cultural conformity. These are the Christians who conform to whatever the culture says, and they relegate their personal faith to the private lives. They reduce Jesus. from a cosmic king into a personal savior. They shrink Christianity into a personal religion, a matter of personal preference. Jesus saves you. They'll save. That's your kind of thing. But he just wants you to be true to yourself and nice to others. And in extremes, they'll just go along with whatever the culture says about how they should live their lives, how they should order their money, how they should order their sex lives, the whole gambit. You see, both these solutions

assume that God doesn't expect us to suffer. Both these solutions assume that tension is a bad thing. But we forget. We worship a Savior who suffered. We worship a Savior who lived in the tension. We worship a king who refused to retreat from the present and refuse to conform to it as well. How did he do that? Well, Peter's letter lays it out through hope and faith that through his own self-sacrifice, God would open up the floodgates of a new life into the present. And when Jesus walked out of his grave resurrected, that's exactly what God did. Do you know that you're in exile? I know you feel out of place, but remember, Jesus felt out of place too.

When you feel out of place, you're right there alongside him. And in a strange way, that out of placeness is precisely the way that God brings heaven to earth. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes, and you'll get an email every Wednesday that's going to help you beat that midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.