v.7 "The end of all things is near" -- how are we to understand that when so many centuries have passed? It is a complex subject, which Peter himself addresses directly in his second letter (3:3-9). The NT makes clear in a number of places that there are things that must take place first before the Lord will come again. Jesus prepares his disciples for a long delay. But there is also frequent mention of the nearness of the end and of Christ's return. We will say here that one purpose of that witness is to remind Christians to live in view of the coming end of history, which, for all anyone knows, is near; even as it actually is near when viewed in the larger perspective of time, as Peter will say in 2 Peter 3.

v.8 "covers a multitude of sins" The statement here is a very close approximation to the text of Proverbs 10:12 indicating that its meaning here also is that love will cause a person to overlook, to pass over, to make nothing of the sins that others commit, even the sins that others commit against us.

v.9 The command is general and we should not limit it in any way. But, it is likely that Peter has primarily in view the case of traveling Christians and Christian leaders and preachers. There was a great deal of coming and going in the early church and, of course, there was not in that world the network of decent hotels and motels that we enjoy today. The Lord spoke positively of hospitality to strangers and it is mentioned as an important virtue by several NT authors. It is also frequently mentioned in the materials of early Christianity, especially in connection with the movement of Christian workers throughout the church.

v.10 "faithfully administering..." the NIV has made a verb out of a noun. It reads literally, "as good stewards of God's manifold grace."

It is always a good exercise to stop and think about a passage that we read in Holy Scripture and ask ourselves why the biblical author said what he said. In this particular case, all the more. After all, if you had just this many words, this short paragraph of five verses with which to describe the Christian life, what would you have said? If you had to reduce Christian living to just a few things, what things would you have chosen? Biblical writers often give us short summaries of Christian living and they do not always say the same thing, though it is interesting and important to see how often they do say nearly the same thing. We noticed that last Lord's Day morning, in connection with Peter's negative description of the Christian life -- what it is not; what Christian's don't do -- how much what he says in 4:3 is virtually identical to two passages in Paul.

But here Peter gives us the positive: what Christians do or should do; what makes up a true and authentic Christian life. In the middle ages they spoke of the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, hope, and temperance. Well, there is some of that here to be sure. Or they spoke of the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and love; and those three virtues certainly make their appearance here. But, still, Peter's own description -- when he had to describe the Christian life in a very few words -- is highly interesting and important. What did the great apostle want Christians to be? How did he want us to live above all? What mattered most to this man who was taught the Christian life by the Lord Christ himself -- both by the Lord's teaching and his example, which Peter had been privileged to observe for three years -- and by the Holy Spirit himself who oversaw the writing of Peter's canonical letter?

Well, Peter says that Christians should be sober-minded and self-controlled, that is, people who see life, their own and that of the world around them, in view of the coming judgment. That will lead them to prayer and the life of prayer. They must, in particular, love the brothers and demonstrate that love in practical ways -- overlooking one another's sins (a very difficult thing, we know -- something that takes grace in great quantities to do faithfully and constantly) and cheerfully offering hospitality (that too is difficult. Have you heard the Italian proverb: "a guest is like a fish; after three days he stinks!"). Further, Christians should live attempting to make the maximum use of the gifts God has given them in the service of the Lord, relying on the Lord's grace and help to make their service fruitful in the lives of others. In all things they are to seek the glory of God and Jesus Christ their Savior. There, in a nutshell, is Peter's description of a faithful Christian life. How do we match up? Well, let's look again.

If we look closer at this description of the Christian life certain general characteristics of true Christian living emerge. And these, taken together, reveal not only the real burden of Peter's description but also the great challenge of it.

First, Peter says that the Christian life is an other-centered life. He says that, of course, when he urges us to love one another. But, as well when he chooses hospitality -- the use of our homes for the sake of others -- as a particular instance of Christian charity. And, then, this is the burden also of his remarks about the use of our gifts. It is "to serve others" he says that we have been given these gifts. There is no surprise here, of course. Christ is our pattern and there never was a more "other-centered" life in all the world than that he lived when he was in the world. He came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. He came that others might have life and have it abundantly. God is love. Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. It is no surprise that the Christian life is to be dominated by love, lived for love and by love.

It surprises no one familiar with the Bible to be reminded of the centrality of love in the Christian life. But let's let the Scripture speak for itself. Among other such teaching, the night of his betrayal, the Lord Jesus told his disciples: "A new commandment I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." [John 13:34-35]

And so with Paul. He writes to the Corinthians, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not love...I am nothing;" to the Colossians, "Above all these things put on love which binds [all the other virtues] in perfect unity;" to the Romans, "Let no debt remain unpaid, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law;" and to the Ephesians, "walk in love, as Christ also has loved you."

And so with John, who writes, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. He that does not love does not know God, for God is love." [1 John 4:7-8] And so with the rest of Holy Scripture, from beginning to end.

And now comes Peter, "Above all love each other deeply" and "give hospitality" and "use your God-given gifts for others."

Here is the Christian life, above all, Peter says -- the giving of love to others, the living for the love of others. What is the cause of unhappiness in this world, the cause of the unhappiness of those who are not Christians and the cause of unhappiness for those who are. It is an insufficient measure of love. We were made for love. We were made to find our happiness and fulfillment in love. The happiest, the most serene, and the most complete people are invariably those who love the most. And the wonderful thing about love, the proof that it comes from God and is divine in its character, is that no one ever gets enough of it. The more we love, the more our capacity to love grows, each time we climb a height of love, we can see from the summit another still higher and more distant, so that we are always drawn onward, and will be until we are drunk up in the love of God.

Henry Scougal, in his great work, The Life of God in the Soul of Man, the book that was instrumental in the conversion of George Whitefield, makes the wonderful observation that if he had his choice of anything in all the world to make him really happy, he should choose to have his heart full of the greatest love, affection, and kindness toward all men in the world. For if you really loved someone, you would partake yourself in all of their happiness -- inward gifts, outward blessings -- and, for that reason, you would have to be the happiest person in the world, because everything that made anyone else happy would make you happy too! Such is the purity and the goodness of love; such is why no one has ever been harmed by love or diminished by it.

Now it is one thing to nod our heads in agreement with Peter here. But, we must take the Apostle's teaching home to our hearts. Are we living for love, are we taking pains to be sure that we are actually loving others, covering their sins, giving them hospitality, using what God has given us for their blessing and happiness? Are we doing that. Today, tomorrow, the next day? Is this the great object of our lives? Are we measuring our obedience, are we measuring our own happiness by this means? These are the questions Peter is forcing upon our consciences. They are not hard questions to answer as questions of fact, however hard it may be to face those facts. What have we done for others? How much? When last? Does the love of others have the character of an "above all else" in our lives? We must give answer, repent, and renew our commitment to loving others as the supreme act of Christian living.

Second, from what Peter says here, we find that the Christian life is faith-centered. By that I mean that it is lived, it can only be lived in an active dependence upon and looking to the Lord, present with us, but unseen, unheard, and untouched. This emphasis also surfaces several times in these few verses. Peter begins by noting the importance of prayer in the Christian life -- and the importance, therefore, of having a state of mind and heart that knows its need for God's help. But then notice the emphasis in v. 11, where we are urged to make use of our God-given gifts -- faith alone knows that our gifts are from God, of course -- in the strength God provides. We are not to live naturally, as if by our own efforts we could be and do what a Christian ought to be and do; as if the Christian life lay in our own power to live. Faith is, as many have said, the power of God at the disposal of man. And that is how the Christian life alone can be lived by sinners, such as ourselves, sinners still so selfish that even when they, by the grace of God, come to know God's great love for them, and have come to see love as absolutely the true purpose of their lives and really do want to practice love in every way, they still cannot manage to escape the grip of their self-centeredness.

Make me a captive Lord,
And then I shall be free.

Force me to render up my sword,
And I shall conqueror be.

I sink in life's alarms
When by myself I stand;

Imprison me within Thine arms,
And strong shall be my hand.

George Matheson

Here too is a great divide. There are many who will nod their approval to the ethics of the Christian life, many who profess to admire love and the life of love for others, but who have no interest in that life of daily dependence upon God, of looking to God, of trusting in the presence of God and the power of God, by which alone, the Scripture says, the life of love can truly be lived. They like the fruit of the gospel, but not the root from which it springs [Ryle, Practical Religion, 123-124]. Multitudes will praise love who have no interest in being told that the practice of love absolutely requires the soul's constant attendance upon the strength the Lord supplies to those who trust in him, that the love of others requires constant renewal in the believer's knowledge that our love for others must grow out of God's love for us when we were his enemies.

In any Christian home this surely should be the constant lesson. Love for others should be taught and commanded -- love for brothers and sisters, love for friends and neighbors -- but how often it will be proved true that no mere human effort is sufficient to produce such a love. The Lord must help, he must inspire, he must strengthen the will, he must convict us of our selfishness and make us hate it, he must cause us to feel that nothing would satisfy us more, fulfill us more, make us more truly happy than just to love others, perhaps especially to love others who are not very lovely in his name. And then what opportunities to teach our children how high and how difficult the Christian life is, how impossible for us in ourselves, and so how necessary that we not only know what God commands and why we must obey, but also that we pray and look to him each day for the help we need to obey those commands.

Lots of people praise love who never cover anybody's sins. Lots of people praise love who do not in any practical way use what they have been given for the sake of others. The problem is that they lack faith, and lacking faith, an active, working, praying faith, they lack the power to love. And love takes a great deal of power, power that selfish sinners cannot supply, but which they can get from God who gives to all who trust him liberally and without reproach.

And that will be true for the most experienced believer as for the novice Christian. As Rabbi Duncan put it: "Believers live not on the first act of their faith, but on the continual act of their faith; because it is not faith they live on but Christ. We can no more live by yesterday's faith, than we can see by yesterday's light, or have our life supported by yesterday's food." [B25]

Not one of us here truly knows what each of us could become if only we lived more and more by faith, by an active dependence each hour, each day on the present grace, strength, help, and guidance of the Lord Jesus through his Holy Spirit. As one man has written,

"Give me a passionate man, a hot-headed man, and one that is headstrong and unmanageable; and with faith as a grain of mustard seed, I will, by degrees make that man as quiet as a lamb. Then give me a covetous man, an avaricious man, a miserly man; and with a little faith working like leaven in his heart, I will yet make him a perfect spendthrift for the church of Christ and for the poor. Then give me one who is mortally afraid of pain; and one who all his days is in bondage through fear of death; and let the spirit of faith once enter and take its seat in his heart and his imagination, and he shall, in a short time, despise all your crosses and flames.... Then show me a man with an unclean heart and I will undertake, by his faith in Christ, to make him whiter than snow, till he will not know himself to be the same man. ["A Latin Father" through Whyte, Bunyan Characters, iv, 109-110]

Peter never imagined that what he was asking you to do, you could do by yourself, or in your own strength, or, even, with the strength left over from the moment you first became a Christian. No, you must walk with Christ and he will help you to love all those around you. It is a very great thing, but he can help you to do it and he will!

Third, from what Peter says here we learn we learn that the Christian life is heart-centered. That is, this life Peter is describing is lived from the inside out, with the heart given to love and to God as much as the hand, the heart given to love as much as the words of one's mouth. It is a life that is the same on the inside as on the outside. Because, of course, not only is God a God who does not judge by the outward appearance but looks upon the heart, but this life of love is too demanding to be lived hypocritically, with the outward act unsupported by the inner conviction and the assent of the heart. That is why, though we hear about love and hear it being sung every day all day, we see so little real love in the world today, so little real sacrifice for others, so little real covering of sins, so little of people using what they have for the sake of others. It takes the assent, the conviction, the agreement, the devotion, the passion of the heart to do that; to live like that!

That is Peter's point, once again, several times here. You see it first in the matter of "covering sins" which, of course, practically amounts to a willingness to be offended, disadvantaged, even abused without making a return, without requiring vengeance, without demanding an accounting -- whether an apology, or punishment, or a repayment of some kind. In other words, this love must be so rooted in the heart that the natural and powerful instincts of self-protection are suppressed in the interests of Christ's love. This is the "clear-mindedness and self-control" that he referred to in v. 7. This is not a life of instincts running riot, of flaky and emotional responses to anything and everything that is happening around. This is a devout heart laying hold of one's life and setting it to work, in the strength of God, at those tasks that real godliness cares most to perform.

You have the same thing in that additional clause Peter adds to his command to offer hospitality, that clause that bears, as one commentator put it, "the sharp tang of realism": "without grumbling."

It is one thing to live up to public expectations. It is another thing to do what God commands cheerfully, no matter who sees or notes what is done. That willingness comes from the heart alone. And with such a heart, the hospitality will be extended even to someone who arrives hard on the heels of someone else, to someone who broke you favorite dish the last time he was in your home, even to someone whose company is so deadly uninteresting that it is a monumental achievement just to keep a conversation going. For a devout heart sees Christ in that guest, loving him as loving Christ, and doing good to him as a tiny installment on the debt it owes to Christ who, while we were yet sinners, died for us.

Now, there is the Christian life: a life lived for love, by faith, and from the heart. What a grand thing it is; what a high thing! What a noble purpose for one's existence! What a demanding calling! To forsake our own interests for those of others, which we can successfully do only by a constant laying hold of the present Lord Christ for help, and to do all of this as much in our hearts as with our hands and voices. It is one of our worst sins, yours and mine, that we make this titanic thing called the Christian life into something so pedestrian, so predictable, so ordinary. It is not! It is so high and so great that you and I only see glimpses of it here and there as we live our lives.

Oh no! Far too many Christians and far too many of us too much of the time find ourselves in this description of modern American life.

"Making of career of nothing -- wandering through malls, killing time, making small talk, watching television programs until we know their characters better than we know our own children -- [which not only] robs the community of our gifts and energies [but] shapes life into a yawn at the God and Savior of the world. The person who will not bestir [himself], the person who hands herself over to nothing, in effect says to God: you have made nothing of interest and redeemed no one of consequence, including me." [Plantinga, Not the Way its Supposed to Be, 188.]

No, not for us, brothers and sisters, not for us. We have few enough years to live for Christ in this world -- let us not delay to make the very most of this magnificent life we have been redeemed, called, and empowered to live -- to the glory of God, the honor of Christ, and the amazement of men.

William Cowper wrote this elegy for John Thornton, a godly layman of the 18th century who was a friend and helper of the gospel and of such ministers as John Newton, Henry Venn, and Thomas Scott. I want such a thing to be said of me and of you when our day is done.

Thou hadst an industry in doing good,
Restless as his who toils and sweats for food.
Avarice in thee was the desire of wealth
By rust imperishable, or by stealth;...

And the way to that is the way of faith, of daily looking to Christ for help and to fulfill his promises in us. As Spurgeon said, "It is our ambition to be great believers rather than great thinkers; to be child-like in faith... What the Lord has spoken he is able to make good; and none of his words shall fall to the ground." [MTP, vol. 36, 304]

[Home]