And that is true already in this world and this life. How much more in the world to come where one who chooses to disobey God finds what the true issue of that disobedience really is. As Bunyan so solemnly reminds us, one hour in hell will burn out all the pleasure that the disobedient ever got from their sin in this world.

So, no wonder that "obedience" is an important word for Peter. He has already used it twice before we get to 1:22 -- once in v.2, where he says that it is the end that God has in view -- that we may be obedient to Jesus Christ; and again in v. 14, where he describes faithful Christians as obedient children of their Father in heaven. He then classifies unbelievers as disobedient in 3:1 (the NIV speaks of those who do not "believe" the Word, but what Peter wrote literally is those who "disobey" the Word). The same idea appears again in 4:17 where unbelievers are defined, as Paul defined them in 2 Thes. 1:8, as those who "do not obey the gospel of God."

Peter wants us to see the Christian life, from beginning to end, as a matter of obedience to God and to his Word, to Christ and to his Gospel. He wants us to see the difference between Christians and non-Christians in terms of this obedience or disobedience.

And somehow that is a problem for us. We are, by dint of our sinful nature, the dregs of our rebellion against God, our selfish pride, disinclined to love and to delight in the thought of our being obedient, of our being subject to another, even God; perhaps especially God! We like faith better than obedience as a way of thinking about our Christian lives. And perhaps that is why the Scripture does not let us imagine that faith and obedience are, after all, two completely different things. There is true faith in any real obedience to God and there must be obedience in any true faith in God. Even the gospel of salvation by grace comes to us as a command to obey.

So, I want to speak briefly on behalf of this obedience this morning, to help you to see it in another light, a brighter light.

I want you to think more enthusiastically about the fact that the Christian life, by Peter's testimony and that of the whole Scripture, is a life of obedience to God and Christ.

Peter himself here commends obedience in a variety of interesting and important ways.

"Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth..." Peter is speaking of the moral transformation that the gospel brings, that Christ brings -- the forgiveness of our sins -- but also the purification of our hearts and lives. And the path to that he says is obedience, our obedience to the truth as God has revealed it to us in Christ the Savior.

What I want you to consider is how wonderful this purity is. We don't think much of this in our culture today, which, you may notice, almost never speaks of purity any more, or commends purity. It is far more interested, our culture is, in the purity of the water or the air than the purity of human beings! But our culture's disinterest cannot change the fact that purity is something for which all human beings crave. The desire to be clean inside, to be right in one's relations, to feel that one is good is a craving so powerful in human hearts, that people will do almost anything to satisfy this desire. It is the desperation to cover up dissatisfaction with oneself -- what the Bible would call a sense of impurity -- which accounts for so much of the addiction, the drunkenness and the drug use in our day.

In so many people, their sense of impurity is experienced as shame. It may not be, in our culture, very often experienced in terms of guilt before a holy God, but shame remains a very powerful force in human hearts, even when it is now largely understood in terms of a sense that one has been exposed before other human beings, that other people have seen us act foolishly or badly or irresponsibly, and, as a result, think poorly of us. We feel impure in their eyes, our impurity has been exposed. Even when shame has more to do with feelings of inferiority before others than with a sense of guilt before God, it is a powerful demonstration of how we crave purity. All of us, all human beings, in one way or another, at one time or another, are like those folk on TV being led away to or from the courtroom who cover their faces with their hands or turn from the cameras or hold their coats over their heads. We are impure and we hate the thought of it, we hate that others know.

The opposite of guilt is innocence, and the opposite of shame is honor and acceptance. And all of that is extended to us in the Gospel. Our guilt is taken away through the sacrifice of Christ and we are adopted as the sons and daughters of the living God himself. Just as when our bodies are dirty, it is a wonderful thing to take a bath or shower and be clean again, so much more for the soul. It too gets dirty and craves to be clean again. And Peter says to these Christians that the gospel that they obeyed has made them pure. In our culture that may not sound like much, but it takes little observation to tell that that is the most wonderful thing in the world, and one of the things that human beings, made in God's image as they are, crave most of all -- to be clean and, because of one's purity, to be accepted and honored and regarded in oneself. And that is what the gospel brings to those who obey it.

We serve a God, Jude says, who can and will present us before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy! Wonderful! Wonderful beyond words. And if you will stop and think about that, and ponder it, you will realize how that is the truest fulfillment of everything you are and desire as a human being.

And how does it happen? By Christ becoming our impurity and our shame in our place. Crucifixion remember was a way not only of executing a criminal but of exposing him to the maximum experience of shame and degradation -- the exposure of his impurity before the world. Every vestige of a person's standing in human society was stripped from him, every last vestige of any goodness or dignity or honor or acceptance. The condemned was flogged as a prelude to the crucifixion itself. He was forced to carry the crossbeam -- a further sign of his helplessness, which added insult to injury. Once nailed up, usually naked, he was jeered and ridiculed by passers-by. The body contortions brought on by the agony and the excretions he could not control completed the total humiliation.

You have felt this just a little from time to time in your life -- that terrible exposure, that shame, that degradation, when you have failed in some way in the presence of others, when others have rejected you for what you have said or done, when you have seen them looking down at you. Nothing like what Jesus experienced for you, but you still remember it, and how it galls you.

This is what the author of Hebrews was referring to when he said that Jesus "endured the cross, despising the shame." All so that you could be clean, and once clean, could be honored and accepted. For what really matters is not what man thinks of you but what God thinks of you and not man's acceptance but God's. If you have God's you will, at the last, have man's acceptance and honor entirely! And then, if Christ makes you pure, someday you will open your eyes on a world washed clean and breath air so fresh that it will almost hurt.

And all of this comes from obedience. What a good thing obedience must be to bring such happiness, such fulfillment, the satisfaction of such deep longings.

Love, is, of course, what God commands. Love for him and love for the brethren. A deep and sincere love. By obedience to the truth and the gospel, these folk have entered into a community of love and into a life of love. This too is what everyone wants, everyone craves -- the life of love. Nothing so fulfills a human being as loving another, nothing so satisfies as being loved in return.

In other words, the obedience of the Christian life does not lead you into some life of grinding duty, of heavy obligations to fulfill. It leads you straight where you most want to go. To a world that is beautiful. A world of love.

This is what everyone mistakes about Christian obedience. They are sure that living an obedient Christian life, keeping the commandments of God, must be a dull life, a hard life, a life without pleasure, a cheerless and weary life of dutiful obligation. And it is the farthest thing from it! God made man to be happy. Christ came to the world to tell men how to be happy. He began his greatest sermon -- which is a sermon on obedience by the way -- with the words "Happy is the man..." He has given his law to show men how to be happy, to show them how human life ought to be lived in order to come into its own, to fulfill its purest longings and its highest purposes. "The commands of God are not burdensome" the Bible reminds us, because we are always tempted to think that they are. Like foolish little children we chafe under commandments that have no other purpose than our happiness and blessing.

You remember the famous statement of Simone Weil.

"Nothing is so beautiful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good; no desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. But with fantasy it's the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied, intriguing, attractive and full of charm."

Obedience to the gospel and to the Word of God doesn't lead you to dreariness. It leads you -- it inevitably leads you -- to all that you truly desire as a human being, to the fulfillment of life, and to genuine joy. Everyone is seeking happiness; all the time and in every way. How sad, how unbearably sad, that there are so many people around us who are looking for it in all the wrong places and find instead misery and despair at worst and a pale imitation of life at best. We are looking for the world of love, and Christian obedience is the only path that will take us there.

Here is the answer to the problem with which we began. Peter is not saying that obedience is something we offer to God in our own strength. It is God's work in us. We answer the summons of God because he enables us to answer it. This is the thought of vv. 23-25. The question comes naturally at the end of v. 22: "How can this world, this life of brotherly love really flourish in this world where sinful men live?" Well, such a thing is possible because of the transformation that God, by his grace, has worked within his children. He has made them new, given them a new birth. They share this new life with one another. The means of that new birth was the Word of God. The idea is not so much the Word of God understood as the Bible or Holy Scripture, but that creative, powerful word by which God calls something into being.

He created the world by merely uttering a word. And he creates new life within us in the same way. He calls, and with that call comes his sovereign power, changing us, making us willing to answer his call and obey his summons. And, as the quotation from Isa. 40 indicates, what God creates with his powerful word, can never be undone. What men do in and of themselves must eventually pass away, but what God calls into being stands forever -- including and especially the new life that he has created within his people, the new life that issued in their obedience to God.

Do you see then what stature this gives to obedience in your life. This is what Peter has already said in v. 2 -- God chose you to obey Christ. He saved you to be happy, of course. But he saved you first and foremost to make you a man or woman who would obey, and to find your happiness and fulfillment in that obedience. What pleases him, because it is his good and true purpose in your life, is that you should be an "obedient child" as Peter has said in v. 14.

We are so foolish, you and I. We so often still chafe under the obligations of obedience. We want to shave God's laws. We imagine that life will be easier and happier if we can just break that commandment just a little, if we can lay down that obligation for just a short while. We are like little children who think that it is unfair for our parents so sternly to forbid us to grab that pan heating on the stove.

We need to be reminded over and over again that obedience is the path to the life that is worthy to be called life. The whole grand story of salvation, from election to the cross to the new birth, is all to bring us to that life of obedience in which we will give glory to God by demonstrating the wisdom and the goodness of his laws and his will.

We ought, far from seeing how we might not have to obey quite so much, we ought, I say, be seeing how we can obey more, more carefully, more strictly, more completely, more cheerfully, more willingly, more comprehensively. Obedience is wonderful! It is life and happiness and fulfillment, at least when that obedience is being offered from the heart to God.

You will never, in all eternity, you will never regret having kept a commandment of God, having done his will. But you will regret someday, if you do not today, every single time you did not obey the Lord your God. Every single time! We live in a rebel culture. We have perfected the art, the science, the philosophy of disobedience. No longer do you hear our cultural elite waxing eloquent about the beauty of an obedient child, about the security and the fulfillment and the well-adjusted personhood that obedience bestows. Our culture defends the rebel. Its picture of obedience is that of mindless conformity. It glories in rebellion. And what is the result of that? Our culture is dying before our eyes. And in years to come people will shake their heads at such foolishness and perversity.

As C.S. Lewis observed, "I was not born to be free; I was born to adore and obey." The false freedoms that men claim for themselves today and revel in today, therefore, must finally forge very real bonds. (Dryden) The newspaper yesterday brought news of an Episcopalian bishop who flaunts the law of God and argues that his is the truly Christian way. How utterly ordinary. Human beings disobeying God because they cannot believe will not believe that his laws are good and right and meant for our happiness.

If you believe in God, as you must if you are a Christian, and as you do in your deepest heart if you are a human being -- can you question, can you doubt the infinite goodness and infinite wisdom of God? Can you believe that he has made bad laws, that his will is unkind or harmful? NO! In God's world, obedience to God is, must be, the path to everything that is good. This becomes especially clear when we realize that the question is not whether we will obey, but whom. God or ourselves? God or other men like ourselves, as small, as shortsighted as ourselves? We were made to obey. We will obey. The only question is, whom?

Life may be difficult in many ways in this world of sin and death. But it is always better, safer, happier when, by God's grace, we give ourselves to obedience to our Father in heaven, and give ourselves with all our hearts.

If Daniel had remained home in bed instead of obeying God and getting thrown into the lion's den, the plaster from the ceiling above probably would have fallen on him and killed him. He was safest and happiest with the lions, picking a nice soft one for a pillow!

We know our gracious God, the Father of our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ. He never commands any of his children without promising the necessary help that we might obey. He never tells us "Leave here and hide yourself" without at the same time, either expressly or by implication, saying, "and the ravens shall feed you there."

No, brothers and sisters, we cannot obey too much. Not if we love our own souls and our own happiness and our own fulfillment of life. We do not think often enough about our lives in terms of obedience. We do not ask: how may I obey the Lord in this and in that? How may I be more obedient to him and to his laws today?

The Holy Spirit is here encouraging us to consider our lives in terms of obedience, to strive to obey in every way, to be our Heavenly Father's most obedient children.

We may feel, we all feel from time to time, that we cannot obey because we don't feel enough like it, the pull of disobedience is too strong, the deceitful pleasures of sin have worked their wiles on us. We may even sometimes tell ourselves that there is no point in our obedience because without feeling and without a more genuine willingness, obedience becomes mere hypocrisy. No! No! Don't ever think that!

Here is Samuel Rutherford (In Whyte, 218-219)

"I believe that many think that obedience is lifeless and formal unless the wind be in the west, and all their sails are filled with the joys of sense. But I am not of their mind who think so. ...it is in the absence of all sense and sweetness that our duties prove themselves to be truly spiritual."

Listen, you are your Father's child. He knows your frame. He remembers that you are dust. He loves your obedience. He wants it from your heart and with cheerfulness because he wants you to get the full good and blessing of that obedience. But if you are struggling, and some particular piece of obedience is very hard for you, and yet you still give him that obedience because you know it is right and he is right to command you as he does and because you know you owe him your submission, will he not love you for that and bless you for that? And will not the one who changed your heart by uttering his all-powerful word, change your heart again to love that obedience you gave him even when you did not love it as you knew you should?

How would you feel about your child, parents, who was struggling to obey you in some way, and clearly found disobedience very attractive, a strong temptation, but who obeyed nonetheless, because he loved you or because she knew, at the last, that your way was best and that you laid down the laws you did not because you hated her but because you loved her so much? Would you not love that child still more and wrap your arms around her to thank her for her hard-won, her so expensive obedience? Do we not value obedience precisely by how much it costs?

"If you love," Jesus said, "you will keep my commandments." And because I love you, he also said, "in the keeping of my commandments, you will find a great reward."

Say it now, in your heart, to yourself and to God: "I was not born to be free; I was born to adore and to obey."