Peter Barnes | 1 Peter 1:3-5
SERMON NOTES
A GLORIOUS INHERITANCE
1 Peter 1:3-5
– Peter: ‘You praise God first, and count your blessings in Christ.’ Peter even practised what he preached – Acts 5:40-41.
1. A Christian has been born again through Christ’s resurrection.
– 1:3. How many worldly hopes die! (Prov.11:7).
– Acts 17:18, 31-32; Rev.1:18.
– in July 1555 John Bradford was sentenced to be burnt at the stake. He consoled those who would suffer the same fate: ‘Be of good comfort, brother; for we shall have a merry supper with the Lord this night.’
2. A Christian has an everlasting inheritance.
– 1:4. Canaan was an inheritance – Deut.32:9. But the Christian has an inheritance that is:
(a) imperishable. Dan.4:34-35.
(b) undefiled. Simone Weil: ‘Nothing is so beautiful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good; no desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. But with fantasy it’s the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied, intriguing, attractive and full of charm.’
(c) unfading.
(d) personal. In verse 3 he writes of ‘us’; in verse 4 it is ‘you’.
3. A Christian is kept by the power of God through faith.
– 1:5; Psalm 34:7; 37:23-24; John 10:28-30.
Edmund Clowney: ‘Our hope is anchored in the past: Jesus rose! Our hope remains in the present: Jesus lives! Our hope is complete in the future: Jesus is coming!’