Good weekend to you my “Walking with Jesus” friends,
From the time we have been children, through all our schooling years, we’ve been trained to look forward to and enjoy weekends, haven’t we! Of course, your employment journey probably caused you to work on weekends from time to time, but still, there’s something deep in all of us that rises up on the weekend in rejoicing! Is that true for you?
We’ve been walking a journey in the first century with the apostle Peter, one of the special disciples who was part of that inner circle of three disciples who had a very special relationship with Jesus. We’ve been watching Peter write the first of his two letters. They are addressed to Christians all across the Roman empire who are suffering great persecution simply because they are believed to be Christians and therefore radical because of their belief in a man who claimed to be the Son of God!
That man performed many miracles, proving His God powers, and He willingly went to the cross paying the sin debt price to God for humanity, and then He rose from the dead and was seen by many people over a period of 40 days, and finally Jesus ascended, in full view of many people, into the sky and back to heaven! As you can see, that’s radical, my friends! No other faith system in the world claims such a Savior!!
So, Peter, led by the Holy Spirit, is writing words of God’s truth and encouragement to suffering Christians in the first century, but these words are timeless, inspired Scripture, and thus they apply to us in 2023 as much as they did 2000 years ago! We left Peter yesterday in mid-stream of a powerful paragraph in which Peter was calling us to remember how Jesus responded to the mockery, persecution, humiliation, torture and even execution by those in Jerusalem who should have welcomed Jesus! Peter had been an eyewitness to it all. Peter was linking his memories to the graphic prophecy of this found in Isaiah 53, written over 600 years before Jesus was born! Today let’s consider Peter’s closing statement in this remarkable paragraph of HOPE for anyone suffering persecution anywhere in the world.
1 Peter 2:24,25 “Jesus bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by His wounds you have been healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Good Shepherd, the Overseer of your souls.” Yes, Jesus took upon Himself all the sin guilt of humanity, and then Jesus received from God all the wrath that holy justice pours out in punishment of sin, because all sin is rebellion against God and rejection of God. That wrath was yes, the horrificness of crucifixion, but it was much, much more. It was God separating Himself from Jesus, for sin cannot be in the presence of God. That’s why Jesus cried out from the cross “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46) Jesus experienced what people who have rejected God will experience at the final judgment when they will be sent away from God’s presence into eternal separation from God! (Matt. 25:41,46) Nothing is more hopeless!
But in that experience of Jesus taking upon Himself the wrath of God for our sin, Jesus earned our redemption, our freedom from sin condemnation and sin bondage! That’s why Peter wrote “…so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by His wounds you have been healed.” The people to whom Peter was writing felt that most of the persecution they were experiencing was because of deeply rooted evil in the hearts of people and even in governments! That evil rejects God and therefore persecutes people who want to honor God with their lives!
Perhaps you have experienced some of that? But Peter wants us to understand that through the power of Jesus we can live free from the bondage of that evil in our lives, and we can live God honoring lives, and furthermore, do you see the next phrase?
We can experience the healing power of God healing the wounds we’ve suffered in our persecution! That healing for us is seen in the miraculous healing Jesus experienced as He rose from the dead and all those terrible wounds inflicted on Him were healed. Oh, some scars remained, like the scars in His hand from the nails, but those scars were trophies of His victorious defeat of Satan, sin and death! (John 20)
Peter wants us to understand that Jesus Christ, the miracle working healer, wants to heal our life emotional wounds, especially those suffered through persecution because we are followers of Jesus. And the resurrected Jesus wants us to understand that the scars left after our healing can actually be great sources of joy and encouragement for us AND evidence to others of the healing power of Jesus in our life!
Do you remember how Thomas responded when he saw the nail scars in the hands of Jesus? (John 20:26-29) In fact Jesus made this powerful statement to amazed Thomas: “Because you have seen Me you have believed. Blessed are those who do not see Me but believe!” Jesus was talking about you and me, my friends! Have you thanked Jesus lately for the wounds He has healed you from and are there some fresh wounds that may need the healing touch of the resurrected Jesus in your life? Do you trust Jesus to understand HOW you suffered those wounds, and are you confident that if you invite Jesus to heal you, He will?
Finally, did you notice Peter’s closing statement: “For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Good Shepherd, the Overseer of your souls.” (1 Peter 2:25) We’ve all had times in our lives when we were like sheep wandering without a shepherd, do you remember your spiritual wandering times? Oh, you can call it rebellion or drifting or running away or lost in the darkness. It doesn’t matter what term you use; we all know what it feels like to walk away from God. But Peter wants us to understand that God will NEVER walk away from us, and Jesus is always ready to be your Good Shepherd who loves you and cares for you as Psalm 23 says. And also, God is always watching over you, and especially over the health and eternal destiny of your soul! (Ps. 14:2,3; Ps. 33:18)
Now friends, I urge us to pause here and thank God for these great truths, and then look closely to see if they are really true IN your life? Are these truths guiding your emotions, your thinking, your choices when you are feeling persecuted?
And to end our time together this weekend, I’ve chosen an old song sung and played in a manner that perhaps helps us find ourselves with a group of folks living in difficult times but reminiscing together about the old story about the healing power of Jesus!
Today’s Scripture is 1 Peter 2:24, 25.
Choose below to read or listen.
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Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
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Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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