1 Peter

Have you ever had the experience of showing kindness to somebody, only for them to repay it to you by being nasty, unkind, or cruel? I guess many of us have known that experience. As we've been working our way through this letter of 1 Peter, thinking about what it's like to live as Christians on our way home to heaven, one truth that Peter's brought us back to again and again is that on our journey to heaven we frequently are still called upon to suffer.

Well, I am English, and we English love our sport. But we're not terribly good at it. In fact, that's my story. At school, I was particularly not good at sport. But for those of you who are not English — a good number of us here from a number of nations much better at sport than we are — let me just share with you what it's like to support England in sport.

Well, what difference does it make in practice being a Christian? For the past few weeks, we've been talking about how being a Christian is like being a foreigner. We are away from home — our true home is with the Lord Jesus — but here we live in a world where His rule is not recognised. So we're like foreigners in a foreign country. We won't fit in, and that means we need to live distinctively.

Well, let me ask you a question: what is it that you are hoping for? What do you look forward to? What is the light at the end of the tunnel that keeps you going when life is tough?

Some people would say, perhaps, that they have no hope. They've lost all hope. It just feels that darkness is closing in. Some people—some of us—go through seasons of life when it feels like that. It's a tough place to be.