In verses 3-6 we are given a magnificent account of the salvation that God in his grace and mercy bestows on his people. We have already read, in v. 2, that this salvation is brought to pass by the purifying work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and lives of those who are being saved and leads to their life of obedience to Christ and to the forgiveness of their sins.

Here in vv. 3-6, that purification by the Holy Spirit is identified as the new birth, what Paul calls the "new creation," a grand new beginning of life that the Holy Spirit brings to pass when he calls a sinner out of darkness into light, when he breaks a soul's bondage to sin and death, illuminates the mind with the truth and turns the will to God and Christ. The result of all of that is a life of hope -- a life that is pointed to a magnificent future, grand beyond our power to describe, that lies on the other side of death and the resurrection and which Christ has made certain and sure for us by his own resurrection. What is more, this new life in Christ, which the Spirit has led us into, is a life that God himself oversees, protects, and nurtures to ensure that we who have come to life in Christ will remain in that life until we are safely in the presence of God in heaven.

It is a brief, but splendid description of salvation, like a number of others that you can read in the New Testament. Peter doesn't mention everything, of course, but he mentions a lot and implies still more. This salvation is a great transformation worked at the deepest level of the human heart, a transformation so radical that it can be likened to being born all over again. It is a deliverance from the despair of this world, from the death that is over this world on account of sin and God's holy wrath against sin. And it is a new life that is certain of fulfillment and success and the fullness of joy because God himself takes charge to protect us in our salvation and lead us from this world to the next. You could go on at great length to talk about salvation, but that pretty well sums up the main points, doesn't it?

But, then we have that jolt in v. 6: "In this you greatly rejoice..." Well, there is nothing surprising about that. Who would not rejoice over deliverance and eternal life and the protection of God himself. But, there is more. "In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials."

Now, it is not too much to say that, at least to a Christian novice, or to one investigating the Christian faith, v. 6 comes as something of a surprise, even a disappointment.

The Holy Spirit -- the same Spirit who created the world -- has come into our lives and transformed them. We have a living hope of eternal life through Jesus Christ. In this world, as we wait for and walk toward the next world, we have the promise of God's own personal protection, help, and strength. All of this has come to us because of God's mercy, his love, his compassion. In other words, Christianity proclaims a salvation that results from the combination of divine compassion and divine power. God is willing and God, of course, is able to give us everything we need for life and happiness and eternal joy. That much is clear.

But, if so, why then does any Christian have to "suffer grief in all kinds of trials"? Where is the mercy of God now? Where is his power to protect his people now? Experienced readers of the Bible may not be surprised at this, but it is worth remembering how un-obvious this is, how contrary to natural expectation. This is, after all, something the Bible admits very often. We have any number of saints in the Bible itself wondering aloud how come their lives are so painful and so difficult in many ways, if God has truly loved them as he says he has, has really given them so complete a transformation of nature and character as the gospel says he has, and if God is truly present to protect and care for them as he promises to be? Over and again the Bible takes up the question: why does the life of God's children have so much in it that, at first glance, would seem to suggest that God is not caring for them or protecting them, that they have not been given a completely new life and new existence to live in this world?

It is the strength of such language in verses like 1 Pet. 1:3-6 that still confuses Christians today. So many of them argue that the Christian life ought to be a life of triumphant success and perpetual happiness, precisely because the Bible describes our salvation in such unqualified terms: it is deliverance, a new life, a new heart, a new creation; old things have passed away, behold all things have become new; faith is the victory that overcomes the world, we are being transformed from glory into glory, and so on. It does not seem to them that one can do justice to such language and still expect to see Christians suffering trials, tramping wearily through the desert of this world, gasping for some air from that world to come which has been promised them but, frankly, often seems to them as far away as ever.

But, the fact is, this is Christianity and this is Christian experience: both the tremendous transformation and deliverance and the griefs and the trials. It is never anything else but those two things together.

There is much to be said, the Bible says much in explanation of that fact, of these two sides of salvation -- the light and the dark, the happy and the sad, the invigorating and the wearying, the inspiring and the confusing and discouraging -- Peter will give one explanation in the very next verse, v. 7.

But, this morning, I am interested in the juxtaposition of these two realities, their being set side by side in every Christian's experience: the glorious transformation of life and hope in Christ and the enduring of trials and grief so long as any believer in Christ remains in this world. The day will come when the transformation and the triumph of hope will be complete and all that will remain is joy and prosperity in the fullness of human life in the presence of God, but until then, the grand things of salvation are experienced in a context of troubles, light and shadow dwell together. They do for all of you, they always have for every Christian. It is as if God comes to transform every one of his chosen ones and says to each one what he told Ananias to tell Paul, after he had changed that man, root and branch, in a moment, and gave him a new life on the Damascus road: "Tell him, tell that most fortunate and happy man, how much he must suffer for my name!"

As you listen to me at this moment, you are thinking of how this is true in your own case and how you would describe and demonstrate the truth of it if you were asked to do so. What trials you have suffered or are now causing you grief even as you are sure that God has given you an inheritance that can never fade away and even as you live your life in the knowledge of God's constant care and even as you look to a glorious future which you know is kept in heaven for you.

But, I thought to give shape and substance and color to this salvation in two parts, to this portrait of our Christian life in light and shadow, I would tell one person's story. I came across this story again just recently, because of a gift my wife brought home from Great Britain a few weeks ago. There with the Covenant High School students she had the opportunity to take an afternoon when the group was in Cambridge to go visit Mr. Ian Tait, a retired English pastor who is known to a number here, having filled this pulpit on several occasions in the past. Mr. Bond and my daughter, Vangie, went with Florence to see him. Mr. Tait is a bibliophile of the first rank and has a very impressive collection of old Puritan works. And so it wasn't so surprising that he should have given them all gifts of books. But the gift he gave to Florence was very special, a first edition of The Letters of Samuel Rutherford. It was published in 1664, a smaller collection than now we have, gathered by a student and later a secretary of Rutherford's, Robert M'Ward. It was printed in Rotterdam, because, of course, the British monarch had wanted Rutherford dead and had already burned other books by him.

Books of the class of Rutherford's Letters are very rare. There are only a few books in all the world that compare to this one: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Augustine's Confessions, chief among them. Spurgeon said that he considered Rutherford's Letters the nearest thing to inspiration which can be found in all the writings of mere men. Richard Baxter, no mean author of great spiritual books himself, told a friend, "[Excepting] the Bible, such a book as Mr. Rutherford's Letters the world never saw the like." [In Macleod, Scottish Theology, 75.] The original edition of the Letters bore the title "Joshua Redivivus," or "Joshua Alive Again." Joshua, remember, was one of the spies sent to bring back a report of the Promised Land, and he brought back a good report. And that is what M'Ward thought you and all others would find in his master's letters, a very good report of the Promised Land for those who were still living in the wilderness.

You don't read very far in the Letters before you come across Rutherford's letters to Lady Kenmure, Jane Campbell, wife of the Viscount of Kenmure, and in that there hangs a tale. Lady Kenmure was a devout Christian, a woman in whom the Spirit of God worked to an usual degree. She was a woman of faith and of love. We know the quality of her heart and the fruitfulness of her Christian service in part from things that Rutherford says about her and from the esteem in which that great man held this woman. He dedicated his great work, The Trial and Triumph of Faith to her. She had been given the new birth, had become a new woman in Jesus Christ, her life had been transformed by the hope of eternal life in the world of joy. But, as Peter said, she had her trials.

She was a Christian who suffered typical trials. That is, her griefs and her trials were the kind we find often mentioned in the Bible and frequently referred to in Christian history.

For example, she suffered the natural shocks of life in a world of death. One of Rutherford's most poignant letters to her concerned the death of her infant daughter. He comforted her, concerning her child,

"She is only sent on before, like unto a star, which, going out of our sight, doth not die and vanish, but still shineth in another hemisphere. What she wanted of time she hath gotten of eternity, and you have now some plenishing [furnishing for your house] up in heaven. Build your nest upon no tree here, for God hath sold the whole forest to death." [iv]

And, like every Christian, she suffered the exquisite trial of her own continuing sinfulness, the shame, the weariness, the disgust, the long battles, the sense of discouragement, anger with oneself, that a holy heart is filled up with because it continues to sin. Rutherford wrote to her about that as well.

"I find you complaining of yourself, and it becometh a sinner so to do. I am not against you in that. The more sense, the more life. The more sense of sin, the less sin." [cvi]

"I thought it had been an easy thing to be a Christian, and that to seek God had been at the next door; but, oh, the windings, the turnings, the ups and downs He hath led me through." [civ]

"Never believe that your tender-hearted Savior will mix your cup with one drachm-weight of poison. Drink, then, with the patience of the saints: wrestle, fight, go forward, watch, fear, believe, pray, and then you have all the infallible symptoms of one of the elect of Christ within you." [iii]

But, then, Lady Kenmure also suffered the trial of bearing with a world that despised the things of God and her own faith and yet a world from which she could not escape. Indeed, in her case, that world came right into her own home and her own bed in the form of her husband. This was, without a doubt, the heaviest cross she had to carry, at least for some years of her life. Her health was not good all her days, but that was nothing compared to her marriage. She was Abigail married to Nabal, all over again.

How a woman of the quality of Jane Campbell came to marry a man like John Gordon remains a mystery. We do not know the story. But he was no match for her. He was a man of little worth, a sorry character, a coward, a "yes-man", selfish to the core. And she was too clever and too high-minded a woman not to have discovered very soon the fatal mistake she had made in marrying him. No wonder Rutherford's letters to her are often headed, "To Lady Kenmure, under illness and depression of mind." [Whyte, Rutherford, 29-30.]

Kenmure was irreligious and profane, a man who cared for this world and nothing else while all the while keeping up the pretense of church-going and religion. He spent his days, like the man in the Gospel, tearing down barns and building bigger ones. He was a nobleman, -- King Charles I, seeking to curry the favor of the Scottish nobility, had made him a Viscount -- so he had a seat in the Scottish parliament in those days of religious turmoil and reformation in Scotland. He went to Edinburgh to sit in Parliament in 1633, but soon realized that the Parliament was set to take actions the King would disapprove of and so, wanting to preserve the King's favor in hopes of further reward and advancement for himself but not wanting to face the disapproval of the reformation party, he feigned an illness and left for home.

Alexander Whyte wonders out loud about what that was like for a principled Christian woman and ardent defender of the Reformation like Lady Jane.

"Think of having to nurse your humbug of a husband through a shammed illness. Think of having to take a hand in sending in a sham doctor's certificate because your husband was too much of a time-server to go to Edinburgh to give his vote for a persecuted church. Think of having to wear the title and decoration your husband had purchased for you at the cost of his truth and honour and manhood." [31]

And so it was that Rutherford wrote such things to this good woman in such terrible grief and shame.

"Therefore, madam, herein have comfort, that he who seeth perfectly through all your evils, and who knoweth the frame and constitution of your nature, and what is most healthful for your soul, holdeth every cup of affliction to your head with his own gracious hand." [iii]

"Your ladyship goeth on laughing and putting on a good countenance before the world, and yet you carry heaviness about with you. You do well, madam, not to make them witnesses of your grief who cannot be curers of it." [xx]

"Madam, tire not, weary not, for...when you are got up thither and have cast your eyes to view the golden city and the fair and never-withering Tree of Life that beareth twelve manner of fruits every month, you shall then say, 'Four-and-twenty hours' abode in this place is worth threescore and ten years' sorrow upon earth." [xix]

It is all there, the new birth, the eternal hope, the care and constant support and protection of Almighty God, though in the midst of grief and trial, just as Peter said.

But the Lord does not leave himself without a witness. The story has an ending that must be told, an ending that answers for us the great question: which is the lasting part of salvation -- the transformation, the new life, the hope of splendor to come, or the trials?

A year after quitting his duties at Parliament in Edinburgh, Kenmure fell ill. And in that illness, he was overcome with the fear of death and of the judgment of God, and Christ met him and met him in a most wonderful and dramatic manner. Indeed, the record of his dying days and of the tremendous change that the Spirit of God made in that man, of his new birth to a new life so shortly before he left this world, is one of the classics of Reformed spiritual literature. It is entitled, The Last and Heavenly Speeches of Viscount Kenmure. It is the account of a man beginning his life all over again almost at the very moment he must give up his life in this world.

There was first a terrible period of conviction of sin and of the wrath of God against him on account of his sins. "I've been too late coming to God," he said. And to the very end, even after the joy of God's forgiveness had flooded his soul, he was mourning his sins and repenting of them before others.

On one occasion he said to a nobleman friend who had come to see him on his sickbed, "I ever found you faithful and kind to me in my life; therefore I must now give you a charge, which you shall deliver to all noblemen you are acquainted with; go through them, and show them from me, that I have found the weight of the wrath of God for not giving testimony for the Lord, when I had occasion once in my life at the last parliament. For this fault how fierce have I found the wrath of the Lord! ...I have been grieved at the remembrance of it. Tell them that they will be as I am now: encourage my friends that stood for the Lord; tell them that failed, if they would wish to have mercy when they are as I am now, they must repent, and crave mercy of the Lord. For all the earth I would not do as I have done." [Howie, Scots Worthies, 159]

And over and again he told those who came to see them of the love of Christ that he had found, of the forgiveness of his terrible sins, and warned those he knew were as he had been not to continue in that delusion that had so spoiled his own life. There is a man transformed; a man who was given a new birth.

And what of his hope. He spoke of that a great deal those last days and spoke with others about it, including his ministers. On one morning a bishop who had much less understanding of salvation than Kenmure did now, asked him how he was. The Viscount answered, "I thank God, as well as a saved man hastening to heaven can be." And to others he said, "I would not exchange my life with any of you all; I seem to feel the savour of the place whither I am going." And on the morning of his death he said, "This night I must sup with Jesus Christ in paradise." [All the above from Howie, 159-164.]

And what of his wife, who had put up with so much that grieved her so terribly? Well, he praised her to all who came to see him, her holiness, her goodness, her kindness to him. He craved her forgiveness for every way he had failed and wronged her. And he looked forward, he said, to the day when they would be reunited at the throne of God himself.

Trials? Oh yes! Disappointment, shame, and death? Absolutely. But, with them transformation and new life and the sure and certain hope of everlasting joy in the world to come? Oh, yes! The joy, even now, one hundred times as much, a thousand times as much as the grief. As Rutherford, the wise counselor, wrote once to Lady Kenmure, before her husband became also, for that short while, her brother in Christ and joint-heir of the grace of life:

"Those who can take the crabbed tree of the cross [he means the trials the Lord sees fit to appoint for us and take us through] handsomely upon their backs and fasten it on cannily shall find it such a burden as...wings are to a bird or...sails to a ship." [lxix]

Such is salvation and its two sides and the one side, the happy side, that is far more the true salvation and the lasting part of salvation than the other. Pray and believe that you may know it to be so and feel it to be so and delight that it is so in days to come. As Rutherford wrote to Lady Jane on another occasion, when she was grieving over her trials:

"I have heard your Ladyship complain of deadness, and want of the bestirring power of the life of God. But courage! He who walked in the garden, and made a noise that made Adam hear His voice, will also at some times walk in your soul, and make you hear a more sweet word.... Ye are, at such a time, like Jacob mourning the supposed death of Joseph, when Joseph was living." [iii]