1 Peter 4:7-11
In last week’s text, we saw that there were two roles that suffering played in the life of believers. First, when we choose suffering, we are choosing to live for God’s will, and second, choosing suffering is necessary in light of judgment day. We said that Peter was going to expound on each of these in the texts that follow.
Today, we are going to look at Peter’s exposition on the first role of suffering. How do we live according to God’s will? Peter is going to give us three commands to follow if we are going to live according to God’s will.
Verse 7 connects this to last week’s text by Peter by declaring that the end of all things is near. Verse 6 had talked about being judged by human standards vs God’s standard. Peter is now saying that judgment is near. This is something that so many people fixate on today, but for the wrong reasons.
Typically, when someone speaks of God’s judgment being near, they are speaking of the return of Christ when God is going to judge the world. Looking around them, they try to interpret the signs of the times and declare that Jesus must be returning soon. That is not what Peter is speaking of here.
When Peter uses the word “near,” he is not speaking of close in time but close at hand. While Jesus may not come for another thousand years, your judgment is always near at hand. Nobody knows the time of their death; therefore, it is always near at hand. When you die, that brings about judgment day for you.
Therefore, be alert and sober-minded for prayer. I think this is a poor translation of what Peter is saying. It is not that we need to be alert and sober-minded in our prayer, but rather we need to be these things so we can pray properly. We must be alert and sober-minded to the world around us so we can properly pray to know God’s will in any situation.
We must pray for guidance to understand God’s will and the strength to carry it out. We need to pray like Jesus taught us to pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. When we are not alert or not sober-minded, we often pray for what we want.
Interestingly, prayer is not one of the three commands for living in God’s will. Prayer is a given in Peter’s mind. He is assuming that if someone is following Christ, then they are praying. They might be praying the wrong way, and here is the correct way, but he assumes the Christian is praying.
The first command is found in verse 8. Above all, maintain constant love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins. The last part of that comes from a combination, paraphrase of Proverbs 10:2 and 17:9. What does that mean, “love covers a multitude of sins”? Does it mean that if we simply love enough, then sins go away?
Love is what allows us to overlook someone’s shortcomings for the purpose of maintaining a relationship with that person. Peter is echoing Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness here. How many times are we to forgive? Relationship is what matters here because without a relationship, the next two commands become difficult, if not impossible, to keep.
The second command, found in verse 9, is to be hospitable to one another without complaining. Why did Peter have to add the second part? You can command me to be hospitable, but now you expect me to like it as well. It becomes infinitely more difficult to obey with the second part.
But God does not expect His children simply to do what He says; but He wants His children to want to do these things. God wants His children to be like Him, to think like Him, and to act like Him. To do that means we have to want to be hospitable to others.
What does this mean, or what does this look like? The idea of hospitality is to welcome strangers into your life, particularly those who are less fortunate, and to provide for their needs without expecting them to repay you in any way. In the culture that Peter is writing to, the primary means of doing this was to provide a meal to someone.
The idea of providing for the less fortunate was not foreign to the culture at large, but the way it worked was in the form of slavery. I will provide for you and your family, and in turn, you will provide this for me. According to Peter, and more importantly, Jesus, that is not true hospitality. That is a business transaction where the disadvantaged person is taken advantage of by someone else.
God provides without expectation. The greatest example of this is obviously Jesus Christ. If God had waited for humanity to deserve Jesus, or to the point that humanity could repay Him properly, Jesus would never have come, and we would still be dead in our sin. Our response should be to show hospitality to others without complaining.
The third command, found in verse 10, is to use whatever gifts you have received to serve others. Whatever the gift, we must recognize its source and its purpose. The source of all gifts is God, and the purpose is not to benefit ourselves but to benefit others.
In verse 11, Peter gives a couple of specific examples. This does not mean these are the only gifts he is speaking of here. The principle behind these specific gifts is to be applied to whatever manner of gift God has chosen to bestow upon you.
As Christians, we are to be good stewards of the varied grace of God. This goes to the parable Jesus told of the talents. The people who invested their talents received more, but the one who buried it in the ground was condemned and lost everything.
If your gift is the gift of speaking, then don’t use it to build yourself up, but speak the very words of God. People marvel at others who can command a crowd and make public speaking seem effortless. What good is that gift if it is not being used to communicate the ultimate truth of who Jesus Christ is? Paul makes similar points in his letters. He clearly wasn’t the most eloquent speaker, but what he could do was for Christ, while others who did speak eloquently were trying to attract a following.
If your gift is serving others, then do so from the strength God provides and not from your own. If you try to serve from your strength, there will be things you don’t do or can’t do. But when you rely upon the one who gave you the gift in the first place, the reward is the glorification of God.
The reason we do it all for Christ is so that He gets the glory. We don’t want people looking to us because, on our own, we will fail. It might look like we are winning, but in the end, it will all fall apart. We see this all the time. It might be years after someone has died, but the truth always comes out in the end.
The whole point of these verses is to show us what it means to live according to God’s will. God seems to care how we treat other people. There also seems to be a sense that this is how we are going to be judged. We are ultimately judged by who we say Jesus is, but the way we act towards others goes a long way to determining who we say Jesus is. It is not enough to just say we believe who Jesus is; we must also live it.
Peter, Paul, James, and even Jesus all agree on this point. How we live is important. It cannot just be the words we say. Those words must be backed up with a commitment to living as Christ calls us to live.