Sermon: Fighting Through Your Suffering
Speaker: Pastor Val Watkins
Duration: 34:54
Size: 15.9 MB
New Life In The Same Old Place
“Fighting Through Your Suffering”
1 Peter 4:1-6
I. Your Top Ten
C.S. Lewis wrote, We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, “Blessed are they that mourn.”
II. The Passage: “Arm Yourselves” (4:1-6)
This is a military term Peter is using here.
In the suffering you are currently experiencing. In the suffering that is to come, are you ready to fight?
A. Fighting to Respond Like Jesus (4:1-2)
Peter is telling us that because Jesus, the Son of God, God in human flesh suffered as we suffer, we have a perfect example to follow.
Peter is reminding them that the one who is willing to suffer for Christ and/or suffer like Christ, demonstrates that he or she has put away the old life and is committed to the new.
C.S. Lewis – God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
B. Fighting to Flee “Human Passions” (4:3-5)
But do you see that the contrast from verse 2 is still here, the contrast between “human passions” or human desires and God’s will, or what God desires.
Instead of fighting to respond like Jesus, they were being tempted to give up and give in, to go back to their old lifestyle.
A past, present, and future perspective on our sinful responses should convince us that such a choice is always the wrong choice.
C. Fighting to Have Hope (4:6)
Some of them wrongly assumed that death would keep the deceased from partaking in Jesus’ return and ultimate victory.
When a follower of Jesus dies, we should not mourn like those without hope. We will mourn, but we should also rejoice.
When we suffer, we need to fight to respond like Jesus; which means we need to fight to flee “human passions” and very often, that means fighting to have hope in the face of fear.
III. The Rest of Your Time
And because of this incredible truth, in light of these incredible truths, we have to ask, from this point out what will you do with “the rest of your time“.
So what will it take for us to fight through our suffering?
Suffering is inevitable, but how you respond and what you choose to do is up to you.
Only faith in Jesus can free us to fight through our sufferings, so that God is honored, even in the worst of times.
Next Week
“What To Do At The End Of The World”
1 Peter 4:7-11