Please turn with me in your Bibles to 1 Peter chapter 1. 1 Peter chapter 1. We'll begin reading at verse 13 and go through chapter 2 verse 3. 1 Peter chapter 1 beginning at verse 13. This is the Word of God. Therefore, prepare your minds for action. Be self-controlled. Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as He who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do. For it is written, Be holy because I am holy. Since you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear. For you know that it is not with perishable things, such as silver or gold, that you were redeemed from the empty way of life, handed down to you from your forefathers but with the precious blood of Christ a lamb without blemish or defect he was chosen before the creation of the world but he was revealed in these last times for your sake through him you believe in God who raised him from the dead and glorified him and so your faith and hope are in God Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. For all men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers, and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever. And this is the word that was preached to you. Therefore, rid yourselves of malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk so that by it you may grow up in your salvation now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. So far the reading in the Word of God. Let us pray. Lord, we come before you this morning thankful for your Word. We thank you for the truths that lie therein. We thank you for the fact that your word never fails. The grass may wither and the flowers fade, but the word of God lasts forever. Please be with your servant, Lord. May my words be accompanied by the Holy Spirit. And may I proclaim the truth and may your people receive it. This we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, as a young exhorter, I'm attempting to do something that may not be very wise to do, since my opportunities to exhort are far and few between. But I'm attempting to do a series on 1 Peter. And if you remember last month, we went through 1 Peter 1, verses 1 through 12. And there we saw that we have a new birth. And that new birth is characterized by a living hope, an eternal inheritance. And a seasoned joy. And this week, we still consider that new birth that Peter mentions in chapter 1, verse 3. But he focuses on a different attribute of it. The fact that this new birth is imperishable. That it will not fade away. 1 Peter is such an encouraging book. It tells us about our faith. It tells us about the foundation of our faith. And here in this section, we see that this is imperishable. It will not fade away. And what a comfort that is. Because we live in a perishable world. We live in a world where cars break down. We live in a world where pets die. And parents have to take them off to the pound for that final walk. We live in a world where loved ones die. Mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and even children. But what we see in this section of 1 Peter is this new birth we have will never die. It is imperishable. And we are told why it is imperishable. First, we see that it is purchased with an imperishable redemption in verses 18 through 21. And secondly, we see that it is planted by an imperishable seed in verses 23 through 25. And finally, we see that it produces an imperishable faith in verses 13 through 17. Now, if you noticed, I'm dealing with the first part of the section we read last. And that's very intentional. Because in the first part of Peter, what we considered last month, you see the foundation of our faith. And then in verses 13 through 17, you see that faith acted out. And in verses 18 through 25, once again, Peter reminds us of that foundation. He gives us bookends. He doesn't want us to just look at faith by itself, as it is. Because apart from the foundation of faith, faith is pointless. So he shows us in verses 1-12 where our faith comes from, and he reminds us once again in verses 18-25 where our faith comes from. So I wanted to start by looking at the foundation of our faith. But because it's only when we understand this foundation of redemption and the seed of faith that we may look to how our faith is imperishable. So first we view how our new birth is purchased with an imperishable redemption. And we see this in verses 18 through 21. In verse 18, Peter tells us what it's not. We read, for you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers. Now he does this intentionally. He uses this analogy a number of times. In verse 7 of chapter 1, if you remember, he mentioned this, that we are not to look to perishable things, but we are to look to the imperishable, Not the way of kings, not the way of gold and silver, but the imperishable. And so in verse 18, he sets it up by saying, this is not what I'm talking about. And then in verse 19, he says, what it is. But with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. the precious blood of Christ. Puts it so simply, but so truly. And again, I would encourage you to come this evening to the Lord's table because it is there where we see visibly the precious blood of Christ. And then we also see a reference to the Lamb here. This is a clear Old Testament reference. The lamb without blemish or defect. Because in the Old Testament, they chose the choicest lamb. The best lamb. The lamb without blemish or defect to offer to the Lord. And this reminds us that Christ was not merely a teacher, as is so often portrayed in the church today. But Christ was the lamb of God. And we see this throughout the New Testament. In John 1.29 we read, The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And this is the same Lamb that was foretold in the Old Testament. In Isaiah 53.7 we read, He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth. So Peter sets up a very clear distinction between the perishable things of this world that we are not to have our hope and faith in and the imperishable Lamb of God who came to take away the sins of the world. And then he also reflects on when this is, when this imperishable redemption, where it came from, or I should say when it came from, when we read the phrase, he was chosen before the creation of the world. God knew from all time that this was his method of salvation for his people. Christ was not a clever chess move that God made when Satan beat him to a pawn. Christ was the chosen way before the world was. Because Christ is God. He's not merely a man. He was when the world was not. In John 1.1, we read those familiar words, in the beginning was the Word, Referring to Jesus Christ. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And so we see that even from the foundations of the world, Christ was chosen to be the Redeemer of His people. And then Peter looks at the other end of it, that He was revealed in last times. And we get a description of that revelation in verse 21. Who this Christ was. He is the Christ who was raised and the Christ who is glorified. And those are the two foundations of this redemption that we really look to. Because Christ took on death for us. He took on our sin. He was the Lamb without defect, who was sacrificed. And yet He was raised. He conquered death. He conquered sin. He conquered the devil. For God raised him. And that is our hope, that we will be raised in Christ, in this imperishable Redeemer. And then secondly, Peter says, that God glorified him. And again, that is our hope in this imperishable Redeemer that we too will be raised and that we too shall be glorified. And it is that Christ we put our faith in. This Redeemer. This imperishable Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. And then in verses 23-25, Peter turns to how this imperishable Redeemer is revealed through our second point the imperishable seed now I already mentioned John 1.1 and we see an implicit close connection between Christ and the word because the word is that seed that leads us to Christ the word is how we are told about Christ the word is an imperishable seed. And we even see that in the parable of the seeds, if you remember that. In Matthew 13, 1-9, the seed is Scripture. Some hear and believe, and some have deaf ears. And we know this is in different ways through either the birds or the rocks or the thorns. But what makes the seed imperishable is that it is accompanied by the Holy Spirit. It is a living word that the Holy Spirit maintains. And those are the very words Peter uses for it. He says this is a living and enduring word. What amazing words for us to hear. Because that gives the certainty that the word will never fail. Because we can't say the same things. We can't say the same thing about things which are written by the hands of man. no matter how good they be, we can't say with certainty that the Heidelberg Catechism will be around forever. Because as good as it is and as faithful a summary of the Word of God as it is, it's not the infallible, inerrant Word of God. And as good as our Psalter hymnal is, we can't say with all confidence that the Psalter hymnal will remain forever. Well, at least not the hymns. But that's another point altogether. But we do have that certainty with the Scripture. The Scripture will endure forever because the Holy Spirit accompanies it. We think often of preachers as faithful men, but really what they do is they proclaim a word that endures forever and it is the word that is the focus and that's why Peter quotes Isaiah 40 verses 6 and 8 and I'll read from Isaiah what he paraphrases a voice says cry out and I said what shall I cry all men are like grass and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall. But the Word of God stands forever. And here I stand before you today as a man exhorting, teaching the Word of God. And if the Lord tarries long, one day I will pass from this earth. And many faithful men have come before me. And Lord willing, many will come after me. John Calvin is dead. Jonathan Edwards is dead. Charles Spurgeon is dead. But the Word they proclaimed, the Scripture that they brought forth Sunday to Sunday will endure forever. What a reassurance that is to us. In the midst of a world that assails the Scripture constantly, from schools, scholarly schools that say, well, you fools, you can't really believe that the Bible is true anymore. We've disproven that with science and testing in grammatical study or in a more popular culture sense in the Da Vinci Code. The Da Vinci Code will pass. It's already passing. Who's talking about it now? But the Word of God endures forever. And at the same time, it's a reminder to us that the Word of God is the seed, the imperishable seed that is ordained by our Lord to profess the good news. And we must remember that when we are tempted to give in to the wisdom of man that would say, you can't get up there and preach that long. People will be bored. People will leave. You can't have Bible studies. You need rock shows that somebody comes up and basically reads a couple Bible verses at the end. We're not to be wiser than God, beloved. The Word is the imperishable seed that He has ordained to bring people to that imperishable redemption and to produce an imperishable faith within them. And therefore, we turn to our third and our final point, that imperishable faith. We see this in verses 13 through 17 and also mentioned again in verse 22. We viewed our imperishable redemption that's planted by an imperishable seed. So how then are we to live in this imperishable faith? I'd like to turn to the words of verses 13 through 17 in 1 Peter and read them again. Because those words only have import when we have meditated on what we've meditated upon. The foundation of our faith. the foundation in the redemption and the word. Therefore, prepare your minds for action. Be self-controlled. Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do. For it is written, be holy because I am holy since you call on a father who judges each man's work impartially live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear so we see that this faith does not come out of a sense of duty or obligation doing our part but rather it is in joy and thanksgiving for the redemption given and the seed given. So our faith is to be self-controlled. Setting your hope in Christ. And that theme comes up often in 1 Peter. In 4 verse 7 and 5 verse 8, this idea that we are to set our hopes in Christ. And in verse 14 we're told, do not conform. Paul expands on this thought. In Romans 12 verse 2, Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is. His good, pleasing, and perfect will. His will that is revealed by Scripture. And we are told to be holy as He who called you is holy. For it is written immediately follows. Again, all these concepts are bound together. Redemption, the Word, our faith. And we are encouraged that they will not pass away. Because we are to be looking forward to when this imperishable faith will be glorified. In 1 Peter 1.17, we read that we are strangers here in reverent fear. And he comes back to that in 1 Peter 2.11, strangers, reverent fear. Our faith is to be looking forward. We have confidence that it is imperishable even today. But we are to look forward to that day when we shall be glorified. when the Lord shall come again to judge the living and the dead. And we have been purified. So our good works, our desire to live a good life flows only from that. Because we read in verse 22 that we are to live by obeying the truth. And the question then might arise, is this contradictory to everything I've been saying? That, okay, Christ does His part, We see that through the Word. We're to put on faith. But then we also have to do this fourth thing and obey the truth. But not at all. Because obeying the truth, what is the truth? It's Jesus Christ. It's putting on Christ and believing on Him. So we see that by this faith we are called to live in this world. And we will be upheld because the Lord will not let us go. Our faith is imperishable because it comes from an imperishable redemption. And it was planted with an imperishable seed. And then in chapter 2, verses 1 through 3, I think we get a nice summary of everything we've looked at so far. Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind, like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk so that by it you may grow up in your salvation now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. We are to live in this imperishable faith, beloved. We are to show the fruits of this faith. And that's what Peter admonishes us to do. Rid yourselves of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. For how can we do other? We who have been given so much out of gratitude to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And we are to crave to be fed constantly. New birth once again comes up. We are to seek spiritual milk. And what does that come from? It comes once again from the Scripture, that seed that will grow within us. For indeed, he knows that believers have tasted, we've tasted of this redemption, we've tasted of this seed, and we've seen that the Lord is good. Therefore, they were then, this original audience hearing it, were encouraged. And we today should be encouraged. Because we believe in an imperishable Redeemer, Jesus Christ, who's been revealed to us through His imperishable seed, God's holy word, and has produced in us an imperishable faith. And this evening we will come to the table, and certainly we will taste and see that the Lord is good. Amen. Let us pray. Lord, we thank You for Your Word. We thank You for the truths therein and that we may have hope that Your Son has come and fully accomplished His task, that He has redeemed all those who would believe upon Him. And I pray, Lord, that You would be with any who are in doubt of that and that You would comfort us when we do doubt the imperishable nature of Your redemption. For we see in your imperishable seed the word that you have indeed sent your Son and that he has indeed taken our sins away. And we thank you for this gift of faith, Lord, by which we may perceive these things. May we grow in faith daily, Lord, turning to you for our hope and our strength. This we pray in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen. Thank you.