v. 11 The statement in v. 10 is almost an inclusio, which is a rhetorical device that was used in ancient literature, even in some more modern literature you will find it, in which you have a statement of the author's theme at the very outset and another like it at the very conclusion of the argument indicating that everything in between has to do with, and was offered with and in substantiation of this particular statement. You will find very similar, even identical, wording and a few phrases in those two places. This is the great theme of 1 Peter. The God of all grace will sustain you and lead you to glory.

Peter has all this while been speaking about faith in the teeth of the persecutions which these particular Christians were suffering at the time he wrote the letter. He had urged them from the beginning to the end, with some major asides along the way, to stand firm in the face of those persecutions, no matter what cost to themselves. And then he had given them reasons for doing so.

He had first said that these persecutions were in the highest and ultimate sense sent from God himself to test and to purify their faith and therefore, they had some wonderful things to expect from them for their own faith and for their own souls. What is more, those who persecuted them will someday have to give an account to God himself for the evil they sought to do to his people. Or, in other words, God will himself in due time see to his people's vindication. They have nothing to worry about in the long run, however difficult the present may be.

Then Peter argued, they needn't in a sense see these persecutions primarily in a negative way because what they offered these believers was an opportunity to share in their Savior's suffering, to identify with him, to love him in the most practical and important way by their imitation of him who suffered for them, and also by their demonstration of loyalty to him by standing firmly with him in spite of the cost to themselves. All of that, Peter had said, would be to their immense joy and satisfaction and honor when Jesus Christ was revealed.

And most recently, from the sixth verse of chapter five and following, Peter assured them that in the midst of their trials God still cared for them. He had a tender interest in their welfare and they were by no means forgotten in heaven. And finally, that the Devil too had a role in these persecutions, and that it was every Christian's duty to resist his evil work every way that they could. For them that meant refusing to budge under the pressure he brought against them, maintaining their loyalty to Christ in word and in deed.

In these final two verses of the argument Peter then sums up the whole by offering this final encouragement to the saints. You may suffer some while longer -- though however long, it will be a "little while" compared to your eternal glory! -- but the God of all grace will restore you and make you and keep you strong! You are not obliged to face these trials in your own strength. God will help you and see to your perseverance and see to your eventual triumph! Soli Deo, Gloria!

The God of all grace will do this is how Peter puts it. And that's our subject this morning, brothers and sisters. And what is that? Grace? It's a common word in the Bible. It's a very important word in the Bible. I suspect it's the most important word in the Bible -- save the name of God himself -- but it's a religious word, and it's a word that we use very frequently and we get used to and, like other such words, such as "glory" and "faith" and "holy" and even, "God", we can use it often and think about it very little. We grew up learning that grace means "unmerited favor." And it means that to be sure. It also very definitely includes the idea of love because in the Bible it's frequently virtually a synonym for love. Also, for mercy. All of these things are included in the idea of grace. But it's much more than that. It's not merely an affection that resides in God's heart, it is the energy, it is the powerful hand of Almighty God that works in the lives of men, moves in those hearts and lifts them up out of sin and death and eventually places them in a manner they hardly understand in the heavenly places in Christ.

Most of the time, God forgive us, we're somewhat bored with God's grace. We're so used to these ideas and these words and the whole notion of our sin and God's forgiveness of our sins by his grace that we're no longer moved by them. It's our worst problem in life, yours and mine, this hardness and dullness and coldness of heart that plagues us in regard to the most wonderful and sacred things. But I tell you if at any moment you could see yourself in hell where you belong suffering the punishments of that place and that condition on account of your insufferable devotion to yourself and all the sins you have committed against God and man, or, if for just a moment, you could see yourself in heaven, with that broad smile upon your face with the tears of joy running down your cheeks, looking with amazement at all those surpassingly beautiful and glorious things in this place where you had no right to be, or if at any time you could have been carried back to that day and that time and be there at the cross and see the Lord Christ shedding his blood and giving up his life for you and crying out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", or if at any time you could physically feel, as some of you had had some experience of feeling, the absolutely delicious feeling of the love of God and the peace that passes all understanding and the joy of everlasting salvation, suddenly spreading out in your mind and your heart, I say, you wouldn't think these things small things and you wouldn't think them common things and you wouldn't find them boring. But you, with every other Christian who had in any way felt these things, would with all the power you could ever place in words sing something like:

"Lord, can it be that I should gain a interest in the Savior's love? Died he for me who caused his pain? 'Tis mercy all, immense and free, for, Oh, my God, it found out me!" Or like John Newton's similar expression: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me."

Grace is not a tame thing though we tame it; it is a mighty thing. It is even, in some ways, a dark and a difficult and a dangerous and a worrying thing. Because it is the power in the world that separates human beings from one another in the most fundamental way. It places you on the other side of a great chasm, sometimes from people you love deeply and dearly. Our Savior said it would. It would divide families and people and nations from one another. It's a terribly powerful thing -- this grace. It creates new life in the hearts of the dead. It sustains and protects God's people day by day and year by year when they have brought against them all the cunning, all the power of the evil one seeking their destruction. There is a mighty battle in this world and the Devil is on one side and the grace of God is on the other side.

Not a Christian in this room has the barest idea nor does he nearly often enough think of how much divine grace he needs, or she consumes in any given 24-hour period. As the great Puritan William Jenkyn once put it, "There are as many miracles wrought as a saint is preserved minutes." [Commentary on Jude, 1680] We only get a glimpse from time to time of the power, of the love and mercy that alone is able to rescue a human being from sin and judgment. And we ordinarily see it when we see it in somebody else's life, not when we see it in our own because we are so accustomed to the way we live.

Take, for example, a favorite illustration of mine. It is one of the host of glorious accounts of the presence of the work of divine grace that have accumulated throughout the world as the years of the gospel have passed. There was a man in Japan, Tokichi Ichi, who was hanged for murder in 1918. He had been sent to prison more than twenty times in his life before he was finally executed. Apparently the Japanese criminal justice system had the same problem ours does in dealing definitively with human sin and with crime. He was famous in the criminal community for the ferocity of his cruelty. When punished in prison for acts of violence, such as attacking a guard, even when tortured, it was a matter of principle with him that he would never apologize, never acknowledge that anything that he had done was wrong. And, of course, as a Japanese in the early years of the 20^th century he knew nothing about and cared nothing about Christianity.

But just before he was sentenced to death for this last murder, Tokichi was sent a Bible by two women missionaries. After a follow-up visit by one of those women missionaries, Tokichi began to read the story of Jesus' trial and execution. He came to the sentence, just one sentence, "And Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'" And God's grace, his mighty power with love and mercy in it and behind it, reached down to that man in that Tokyo jail cell and changed him. "I stopped: I was stabbed to the heart, as if by a five-inch nail. What did the verse reveal to me? Shall I call it the love of the heart of Christ? Shall I call it His compassion? I do not know what to call it. I only know that with an unspeakably grateful heart I believed."

When sentenced to death, Tokichi, now a completely new man in Christ, new in ways that baffled everyone who knew of him, he accepted his sentence as he wrote "the fair, impartial judgment of God." And near the end, he was directed by these missionaries to the words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 6:8-10 where the Apostle paradoxically describes the Christian as "sorrowful yet always rejoicing", "poor, yet making many rich." And of those words he wrote shortly before his death. 

"People will say that I must have a very sorrowful heart because I am daily awaiting the execution of the death sentence. This is not the case. I feel neither sorrow nor distress nor any pain. Locked up in a prison cell six feet by nine in size I am infinitely happier than I was in the days of my sinning when I did not know God. Day and night...I am talking with Jesus Christ.

"As poor, yet making many rich." This certainly does not apply to the evil life I led before I repented. But perhaps in the future, someone in the world may hear that the most desperate villain that every lived repented of his sins and was saved by the power of Christ, and so may come to repent also. Then it may be that though I am poor myself, I shall be able to make many rich."

That's the grace of God, and that's the change that it creates in human beings, and that's the grace that's in our hearts too if we're Christians. That's the work that God has done in us too if we are his children. And that's the grace that will bring you, Peter says, at last to the heavenly country, to that place where you could never, never have got by yourselves. That's what grace is and what it does and it's so powerful that it could take a cruel murderer and turn him into a humble lover of other human beings. A man who refused to admit that anything that he did was wrong and turn him into a man who was perfectly willing to admit that he deserved to be executed for his crimes.

That's the greatest change, the greatest transformation that ever occurs in the human experience, ever occurs in the world of men. You can get from poverty to riches by accident, you can get from poverty to riches by putting a dollar in the lottery machine and buying a lottery card, you can get from poverty to riches by having a wealthy relative, but you can get from badness to goodness in only one way. Angels themselves, powerful as they are, are not strong enough to make a bad heart good. And what is more, nobody else in all the universe has enough love to want to make bad hearts good. When those hearts reside in human beings as disagreeable as you and I are in our lives.

We often, I think, tend to underestimate the power and working of divine grace because, after all, we remain quite sinful people in this life and it doesn't seem to us that the difference is as great as all that. It is true, you'll never see the real difference, the full difference, until you can see a man who is made perfect in heaven there with the glory of God upon his life and compare him with a man who is now in hell, all the restraints of God removed and the full effects of his sinfulness now being experienced in his life.

But that's the difference that grace makes. It's the difference between heaven and hell, between life and death, between darkness and light, between evil and good. But already the difference exists. It does, and it can be observed in the deepest commitments of people's lives. Nothing else makes a man or a woman want to be truly holy before God but the power of divine grace. Nothing else makes a man or a woman truly to love God who by nature hates God and fears God except divine grace. Nothing else can make a man or a woman honestly admit the truth about his or her own badness except divine grace. And nothing else can make Jesus Christ the fulfillment of every one of his or her dreams but divine grace. And all you have to do is look around yourself and study human beings and realize that that is true.

Divine grace is so regularly misunderstood, it's so often bastardized and denatured in our culture. I've been reminded of this in various ways in recent weeks. To so many people grace is not this living power of love and mercy transforming human beings, it's just leniency -- God not caring to make an issue about what's wrong in your life. I've had the grace of God thrown up to me several times in recent weeks by those who are living sinful and unrepentant lives. We don't understand the grace of God, so they say, because we continue to make an issue about the way they live or rather, about the way they refuse to live. But divine grace is not leniency, it's never leniency in the Bible. It is a mighty power in a human life that transforms, it as we read in the Bible, according to the image of Jesus Christ.

And someone who has been changed like that is a person who now hungers and thirsts after righteousness precisely because souls touched by this divine grace instinctively know how great a gift has been given to them, how undeserving they have been of it, and how marvelous must have been the kindness of God to give it to them. People who feel that and know that are the last people in the world who can content themselves with a life they know is displeasing to God. The God of all grace --

Were the whole realm of nature mine;
That were a present far too small.
Love so amazing (or grace so amazing), so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all!

Nor is grace simply an undifferentiated affection in the heart of God, a love he feels for everyone that as often fails as succeeds to secure its object. Grace is not God's tender hope or kindly wish that a person might be saved and live at last in heaven. Not the grace taught in Holy Scripture, not the grace we see at work in the world, not the grace of which Paul spoke when he wrote "whom God loves he calls, and whom he calls he justifies, and whom he justifies he glorifies." That grace is a mighty thing that reaches down from heaven. It finds out a man or a woman. It changes his or her heart and makes of that man who did not want anything to do with God now the most willing soldier and servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. Sometimes the man himself can hardly explain what has happened to him so sudden the change, so unsuspecting, so completely against the grain of his former life.

That's what Peter means when he says that God is the one "who called" these Christians. In the Bible that "calling" is not simply an invitation which may or may not be heard. It's a divine summons which the soul no more can refuse or ignore than it can resist the power of God. It's the "call" that reached Paul on the road to Damascus. God didn't ask Paul whether he'd like to believe in him or not. He told Paul that he was now a Christian. This was what he was going to do about it. And for the rest of his life that was what Paul was a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's the "call" that reached Justin Martyr and drew him to Jesus Christ whom he'd never heard of before when he had that conversation with that Christian man on a long ago beach. It's the "call" that summoned Augustine in that courtyard in a villa in Milan. It’s the "call" that summoned Martin Luther to new life in Christ in the Erfurt tower. The "call" that found out John Calvin when he was just a student in Paris. The "call" that drew John Bunyan out of the city of destruction and lifted Charles Wesley out of his despair when he was sitting in that church balcony in London listening to Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Galatians being read. It was the "call" that summoned Charles Spurgeon to new life in Christ on that snowing Sunday morning amongst that tiny congregation of Primitive Methodist. It was the "call" that ended in a moment C. S. Lewis' dallying about God and Christ on his bus ride to the zoo. It was the "call" that brought Charles Colson to Jesus Christ when he was sitting in the front seat of his car. And it’s the same "call" that has summoned untold multitudes of other saints out of whatever spiritual indifference or positive and open rebellion against God they were living in and would have cheerfully lived in the rest of their lives until they finally found themselves in hell.

It was a "call" that summoned them with a command that they were powerless to disobey, with a creative effect in their hearts that made them want to obey when they had never wanted to before.

There's a southern aphorism that goes: "When you find a turtle on a fence post, you know it did not get there by itself." And when you find a human being born in sin and the love of himself and the craven fear of God and a spirit of rebellion against God now loving God and delighting in that very holiness he once feared and found so offensive, you know he simply didn't get there by himself. He didn't simply change his mind or turn over a new leaf. There has been a total change of that man's nature. He could no more effect that himself than he could give himself life in the first place. But God's voice -- his call -- could effect that change and does. Just as it called the world into being in the first place. God says, "Let there be faith in Christ! Let there be a turning away from sin and a hunger and thirst for righteousness! Let there be the love of God!" And God speaks and it is so. That's divine grace -- that mighty power, that new creation, that transformation of a man and a woman.

Peter has already talked about it in chapter 2 drawing us out of darkness into God's marvelous light. Peter is absolutely right to say that once a man or woman has felt the force and the power and effect of that divine love and that divine power and work in the heart he has nothing more to fear from the troubles and trials and tribulations of life. If God be for us, who can be against us? Who possibly can be against us?

One of the books that came recently from Mr. Tait's library was a set of The Lives of the Puritans, a three-volume set of short biographies of significant English Puritans of the 16^th and 17^th centuries by Benjamin Brook, who, I was interested to learn, was born in 1776, the year of our Declaration of Independence. I was browsing in the second volume the other day and came across the account of the conversion of a Richard Rothwell, who was born in 1563. He became a Puritan, a follower of that school only later in his life. He was a brilliant man, a very precocious student as a young man and so he went to Cambridge University and then, as was the case with almost all men of real academic brilliance and bent in those days, he was ordained to the priesthood of the Anglican church even though he knew absolutely nothing and cared even less about the grace of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ -- which was probably true of most Anglican priests in those days. Indeed, in the early years of his ministry there wasn't a thing that remotely resembled Christian discipleship, or a love of God or a desire to be holy for God's sake. In fact, the guy was a thief and a bully. On one occasion he was caught red handed killing a deer on somebody else's property and when the owner caught him at it and sought to apprehend him and, in particular to keep him from taking the dead animal off his property, Rothwell beat him up and then tied him to a tree hanging him from his thumbs so just the tips of his feet still touched the ground and there the fellow remained through the day and all through the next night before somebody finally found him the following morning. Not a man who was an attractive personality much less a man who had any evidence whatever of a spiritual interest or a Christian faith.

And then this, one day Brook writes: "It pleased God to send his grace to this man and to put an end to this behavior and this is how it happened. He was playing bowls one Saturday afternoon with the most profane men in the town who were the men to which Rothwell regularly gravitated and an old Mr. Midgley, who was the vicar of that town, another Anglican priest, happened to come by and see what was going on. Mr. Midgley felt he couldn't just pass by without saying something so he pulled Rothwell to the side and he read him the riot act. He said how disappointed he was that a Christian minister should be spending his Saturday, not only not preparing for his responsibilities on Sunday, but spending it having a good time in profanity with men who had no interest whatsoever in the gospel of Christ. He might very well have sought to win those men to Christ, but to encourage them in the way of life in which they were following was not the life and not the work of a Christian minister. Well, what do you suppose would have happened if you'd said something like that to somebody like that today? He'd probably respond just exactly like Rothwell did -- he was infuriated, he was offended! He told Midgley to mind his own business and turned his back and walked away. It wasn't until the game was over and he was walking away that Midgley's rebuke sort of rose unbidden, unwanted, but irresistibly in his mind and he couldn't get it out of his mind. He didn't want to be thinking about this, he had no interest in thinking about this. He hated the man for bringing it up but he could not get this rebuke out of his mind. To make a long story short, the next morning he was found in Midgley's church, instead of his own, Midgley preaching the sermon, and under the spiritual instruction of that good old man. He became a Christian himself.

Well, as invariably was the case with men like that in those days, his new convictions revolutionized his life and his ministry and brought him almost immediately into trouble. Not only with the church authorities, but with his own parishioners who were quite happy to have had the ministry they used to get from Mr. Rothwell but did not like the ministry they were getting from him now. In fact, on one occasion an attempt was made on his life by his own parishioners -- something I can cheerfully say, to my knowledge, has never happened here. He persevered and the Lord helped him and made him a singularly effective gospel minister.

That's just one account of the grace of God. but see what it did. It wasn't anything in Rothwell. God reached down, decided it was time in that man's life. God reached down into that life; he transformed that man root and branch before the man even know what was happening to him. And then set him out on a course that was going to prove very difficult and yet with the same power with which the life began. It was sustained and preserved and protected. This is Peter's point precisely. Divine grace will not necessarily prevent suffering, Peter says, but it will prevent any lasting harm from that suffering and it will certainly make for a believer's eventual triumph. Peter himself suffered a martyr's death not many years after he wrote this letter but because of God's grace, because of that powerful work that had been done in him, because of the faith that had been sustained through many years of difficulties in this world, Peter's death like his Savior's before him became rather the beginning of his life.

I say there is no greater thing that any human being has ever said or can say, there's nothing more important to be able to say than that he knows and is known by the God of all grace. That's the only really absolutely important thing that can be said or cannot be said about a human being -- that I have or that I do not have God's grace. And that's why you must have that grace, my friends, that grace and nothing else, God's favor and God's love and God's mercy all wrapped up and brought into heart and life by God's power. You cannot earn it. You cannot find it if you go searching for it. You cannot figure it out. You can only plead with God that he might give it to you and not stop pleading until you are sure that he has. And come to the Lord Jesus Christ in the confidence that he gives you when he says, "He who comes to me I will never drive away." And then not stop until you are sure that you have come and that he has given his grace to you. And once you have it, and once the God of all grace is yours, Peter says, it goes without saying, that none of the power of earth or hell can do you any harm after that.

Here's Charles Spurgeon who knew a great deal about that grace since when he was fifteen years of age and met him there in that little church on that snowy Sunday morning:

"Ah, the bridge of grace will bear your weight, brother. Thousands of big sinners have gone across that bridge, yea, tens of thousands have gone over it. I can hear their trampings now as they traverse the great arches of the bridge of salvation. They come by their thousands, by their myriads; e're since the day when Christ first entered into his glory, they come and yet never a stone has sprung in that mighty bridge. Some have been the chief of sinners and some have come at the very last of their days, but the arch has never yielded beneath their weight. I will go with them trusting to the same support; it will bear me over as it has borne them." [Cited in Murray, Forgotten Spurgeon, 164]

God's grace did not fail Peter. It did not fail these Christians to whom Peter wrote. And it will not fail you either. Not this grace, not this God.

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