A Look Back

Through Silvanus, whom I know to be a faithful brother, I have written to you briefly, in order to encourage you and testify that this is the true grace of God. Stand fast in it.  1 Peter 5: 12

I took a moment to look back over what God has shown me through the book of 1 Peter the last four weeks and I am even more impressed by Peter’s brevity as he summarizes his message in this verse. I have no idea how I would bring it all together to share with someone, so let’s go with his esteemed thoughts!

First, he wrote in order to encourage. So many of these messages were encouraging to me! I was amazed and excited to learn that having a living hope means to have an active, powerful and efficacious joyful expectation of eternal salvation. I’m still in awe of how God knew all that would happen through the course of history, all the ways we would mess up the gift of His creation and sacrifice, and He did it anyways. And in the midst of struggling with so many changes in my physical body, I was encouraged that it’s not the external but the inner person of the heart that I need to be concerned with when I ask, “Am I pretty?”

Then he wrote to testify that this is the true grace of God. While so often we see being holy as a work of trying to do good, so much of it is really relationship and learning to lean back into the loving arms of God. But grace is a gift and is not forced upon us. We must choose to accept it and like a bird whose cage doors have been opened, fly free! Whatever we do, don’t choose the poop! But what grace all boils down to is that He chose us. As I was learning about this verse in a commentary by David Guzik, I was challenged by his observation that it is important to not only understand what grace is, but also to understand that grace represents our standing before God. Nothing we could do could earn the righteousness required to stand before a perfect, holy God. Only through His gift of righteousness to us, that we receive by GRACE because of His Son’s sacrifice on our behalf to pay for our sins, can we come to Him freely and call Him Abba, Father.

Here's the Thing: As I was writing this I was reminded of TV shows that do retrospective episodes near the end of a season. To be honest, they always annoyed me, because I wanted something fresh and new. I hope this doesn’t annoy anyone reading it in the same way because it was such a great exercise for me. I was so blessed by looking over all that God had taught me in these last four weeks and correlating it to how Peter summarized his teaching.

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