Peter’s Lost Legacy Pt. 1 – Our Inheritance of Radical Joy in Jesus

I’d like you to pause a moment to contemplate a snapshot of vibrant life in the early church.  Far more excellent than a picture frozen in time, it is alive, moving, radiating with the uppermost pleasures of life above the sun.  It’s the red carpet rolled out to us inviting us to euphoric joy found in Jesus Christ.  Pause before this following verse as you might in awe of seeing the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls for the first time.  Drink in the sublime magnitude of passionate lovers of Jesus and their rapturous joy in Him. 

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory…

1 Peter 1:8 ESV

We’re about to submerge into the tropical reefs of a letter we call 1 Peter to discover its multicolored wonders, pleasures and promises swimmingly alive in its depths.  This love and inexpressible joy for Jesus they had was not hypothetical, some hoped for ideal.  This was happening in real time when Peter wrote this letter.  Peter was simply acknowledging their common practice.  These people were not Bible scholars or seminarians, just real flesh and blood, average folks.  They were people you might see in the supermarket or out walking their dog in your neighborhood.  They had tapped into Jesus in a way that today’s church should marvel over.  It should awaken holy curiosity within us.  How did they do this? 

The good news for us is Peter is going to tell us how.  We need to rediscover Peter’s secret sauce to delight our spiritual taste buds to feast on our soul satisfying Jesus.  Peter’s secret sauce is the antidote to boredom with Jesus.  It’s revolutionary!  Are you ready to be revitalized? 

Honesty check here.  Would you say this characterizes your day to day experience with Jesus?  I will tip my hand a bit here at the onset as a preview of what’s to come and say that this joy gushed out of the wellspring of the prophetic writings of what we call the Old Testament.  You know, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jonah, Malachi.  Those guys.  Their encounter of loving adoration and jubilant celebration of Jesus—and from the Old Testament no less!—should inspire us to seek after the same.  When you engage with the Old Testament, do you have this white hot, passionate, fiery excitement for Jesus?  Or are you bored?  Perhaps you’re intimidated to explore that part of the Bible because you’re not a pastor or Bible scholar.  Neither were they.  Most of them were just average folks.

The churches in Peter’s day had something we’re missing.  Unlike us, they were wholly devoted to seeing, loving and rejoicing in Jesus from the pages of the Old Testament.  We, on the other hand, cling for dear life to the New Testament and Psalms like a wooden plank in a shipwreck.  Many pastors avoid the Old Testament for they fear their people will get bored or dismiss it as irrelevant for daily living.  That’s not how it was with these churches!  Do you cling to the New Testament and Psalms because that’s where it feels relevant and life giving in your relationship with God?  This estrangement from the Old Testament would have been foreign to the church in Peter’s day.  Well, that’s just because the New Testament wasn’t written yet.  Hmm.  Is that why?  I will ask again, not to shame you but to awaken a fresh hunger in you, does your engagement of the Old Testament usher you into this same passionate, inexpressible rejoicing in Jesus Christ?  When’s the last time you read Isaiah and your discovery of Jesus there inflamed your love for Him with “with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory”?

There’s a principle of Bible study called full mention.  What this means is that for any important biblical topic, there’s a set of passages that summarize it in a comprehensive way.  For example, the Bible abounds with the love of God, but if you want to find its full mention, you’d go to 1 Corinthians 13, “the love chapter.”  For many years I’d considered 2 Corinthians 3 (and into chapter 4) God’s full mention of how to study the Bible.  However, as the Lord has unfolded 1 Peter to my heart, I’m convinced that God’s full mention of Bible study is right here.  In other words, if you want to understand the fullest expression of engaging with Scripture in the most profitable way that God intended, the best explanation in all of the Bible is right here.  1 Peter chapters 1 and 2 is God’s full mention of how we’re to study our Bibles.  And its net result is loving and rejoicing in the Lord Jesus Christ!

When you gather together with the saints, what aspects of that gathering ignite this loving of Jesus and rejoicing in Him with joy inexpressible and full of glory?  Is it the time of corporate singing, where the poetry or hymnody of song embodies our thoughts and feelings for the Lord?  Singing is a permanent fixture of the modern church.  It’s wonderful!  I love it!  I’m so at home praising Jesus with the saints lifting their hearts and voices to Him.  But what’s curious about this Jesus-centered joy inexpressible and full of glory is that Peter doesn’t mention singing.  Nada.  Zip.  Of course, singing had its place.  Paul refers to it in Ephesians and Colossians.  We see a number of New Testament letters that many scholars believe had grafted in the popular hymns of the day.  Peter, though, rivets our attention not to singing but an entirely different venue. 

Are the heights of experiencing Jesus attained by praying for revival?  I love revival!  I’ve been a careful student of Church history and well acquainted with many thrilling revivals of the past.  I believe it’s for today and we’re seeing it today.  I love hearing testimonies of God’s heavenly presence manifesting here on earth.  But as we get into Peter’s letter, he’s not talking about persistent, desperate prayers to lay hold of God’s presence.  They already had it!  These churches Peter wrote to were living in continuous revival!  So as we peek under the hood and check out the engine that drove this fiery, white hot love for Jesus Christ, it wasn’t these commonplace approaches of today’s church.  I’m not opposed to them.  I think they’re good.  But it’s not what Peter emphasized.  There’s an even more excellent way.  

So as we gaze at the beautiful life of churches thriving under the shepherds’ care of those who walked and talked with Jesus, what an inviting, desirable picture it is!  For all its wonderful progress (and it is amazing and breathtaking), the modern church sadly seems to have lost touch with what Peter had bequeathed to her.  I call it Peter’s lost legacy.  This burning passion in me aches for the church to reclaim it again.  This is the revival I earnestly pray for.  That’s where we’re going in these next blog articles, Lord willing.  My hope is that, as Peter’s letter is laid plainly before you, you’ll be fully persuaded of the rich inheritance you have now, one marked by passionate love and joy for Jesus.  If the Old Testament bores you or even repels you, give Peter another chance to warm your heart to it.  It’s a vast continent of unexplored glory to absolutely thrill and amaze you with your Lord Jesus.  It’ll wreck you (in a good way) and you’ll never be the same!  I know I have!

Over the last five years or so the Lord keeps bringing me back to 1 Peter chapters 1 and the first half of chapter 2. I’d be off studying elsewhere in the Bible and then be drawn back here.  As I’ve poured over every sentence and word, backwards and forwards, meditating deeply on them, the Lord keeps giving me more insight.  I’ve spent hundreds of hours on just these 35 verses, intensely getting into the Greek text, Greek experts, a variety of English translations, numerous commentators and sermons, and more.  Above all, I’ve continuously leaned into the Holy Spirit, whose most excellent work it is to help us understand and encounter Jesus, our bridegroom.  So now I’m totally intrigued and gripped by the Jesus I see in here.  I’m persuaded, as I’ve immersed myself in the river of these flowing jewels from Peter’s exhortation, that here lies the biggest burden he had for the church.  My heart aches when I compare what this apostolic church had in rapturous rejoicing in encountering the glory of Jesus from the Old Testament and what we as the church experience today.  There’s a disconnect between then and now.  There’s a huge gap. 

Unless you attend a church that teaches through the whole Bible, you’ll rarely hear from the Old Testament.  Christmas affords some touch points to Old Testament prophecies foretelling the birth of our Savior, Jesus.  The sermons of most evangelical churches are dominated by the Gospels and Paul’s letters.  That’s great.  We need that.  Occasionally the Psalms are preached, maybe Genesis, perhaps Isaiah, and a smattering of poster worthy verses.  But by and large, the Old Testament is neglected and even avoided.  If the Church were to hold a yard sale of the canon, Kings and Chronicles and Obadiah and Nahum might be sitting on the table with a bargain basement price tag.  Now, I know we’d never do that, but in practice we act as though we have.  Something’s missing.  What is it?  It’s Peter’s lost legacy.  So I want us to renew our minds and get a hold of Peter’s secret sauce to whet our appetites for amazing encounters with Jesus Christ from these Scriptures like these folks did.  It’s our inheritance.

In light of the last days, I earnestly believe that God would love to revive Peter’s lost legacy.  When I say Peter’s legacy, it’s really the Lord Jesus’ legacy, for it was birthed from Him.  In a lot of ways we’ve lost that fire, the cutting edge, of what Peter was bringing forth.  It’s to our own spiritual loss.  So as I share, I’m hoping that the Spirit, as we carefully examine and think hard about the text, will revive and restore and renew us in the freshness of what burned in Peter’s heart.  So our focus will be on the revelation of Jesus Christ.  What does it mean?  Time fails me to present an exhaustive study, so this will be just a brief survey.  But I will showcase the best of the best insights of what I trust the Lord has shown me in order that you might fully hope in these words and live in continuous revival as the saints once did.

Back when the United States was in its youth, the Homestead Acts were signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln.  The alluring reward of free land to possess as one’s own, a homestead, spurred a huge wave of pioneers toward the untamed frontiers of the expanding nation, especially west of the Mississippi River.  When the dust settled, more than 160 million acres of public land—nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States!—was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders.  As Christians, we have an even better and precious inheritance freely given as our possession.  We should be all the more zealous to possess it than those homesteaders.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you…

1 Peter 1:3-4 ESV

Peter is opening up the frontiers for us to inhabit the ecstasies of joy in Jesus Christ!  As we unpack Peter’s letter, we’ll see that as God’s beloved this is our inheritance.  God has thrown open the doors of kingdom welcome to us to enter into our inheritance of Christ everywhere in the word of God.  When I say ecstasies of joy, I’m not talking about excesses of out of control emotionalism.  I’m referring the God-centered, Jesus-focused, Scripture sanctioned joy befitting of the saints of all ages.  You know, like the uninhibited joy that David expressed when he danced before the ark of the covenant coming to Jerusalem.  King David’s joy expressed how much he valued and treasured God’s presence.  Let us not forget that the kingdom of God is not just righteousness and peace but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom 14:17).  So come humbly with an open heart and your mouth wide that God would fill it.  I invite you to come along with me on a journey of discovery through 1 Peter.  By God’s grace it will revolutionize the way you encounter Jesus Christ in these oft neglected portions of God’s word.  You’re going to love it!

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Rom 15:13).  This hope is an abounding hope in Jesus, the root of Jesse who has come and has arisen to rule the Gentiles—in Him will the Gentiles hope (Rom 15:12).  May the power of the Holy Spirit cause you to brim over and overflow and superabound and be inundated with hope in this Jesus whom Peter presents for your adoration and delight.  May the Spirit, who delights to lead you into all truth and glorify Jesus, dazzle you with the beauty of this amazing Person and immerse you in His inexpressible love and joy!