The Brethren (1st Peter 1:22)

Introduction

Okay, how are we going to do tonight? I have no idea. But we are going to start with a brief story. My mom went to Indiana last weekend to attend a family reunion. And after she did that, she went to worship on the Lord’s Day with the Charlestown Road Church of Christ in New Albany, Indiana. Now that’s the remnant of the group that it’s a rather large remnant now, about 300 plus people, but that’s the group I grew up with. And of course, my mom and dad were there and know all those people. And I held a meeting for them last year, I think. So she’s worshiping there, and they have a new second preacher. The regular guy is Roger Schaus, who’s a wonderful guy, good preacher.

And they’ve asked this young man, Jason Harden, who has a young family, to come worship with them. And my mom started talking to Jason and says, hey, we were on a cruise together with your dad. He was the leader of the cruise when they went to the Holy Land. Oh, they were talking about that, and he was much younger then. Well, Jason’s wife is Shelley, whose former name was Cummins. Now, I’ve known the Cummins family since 1983. And so my mom said, Yeah, Tony knows Shelly. And he goes, Jason goes, oh yeah. Oh yeah. Shelly loves Tony. I’m going to go get Shelly and bring her to you so you can talk to her. So let me tell you the story about Shelly and her family.

So there was this young preacher back in 1983. And her dad, Richard, would often say, hey, Tony, let’s go to breakfast at Waffle House in Plainfield, Indiana. And then when I first started preaching full time after that, at Biltmore Gardens in Indianapolis, he would call me up just a few miles down the road. Hey, let’s meet at Waffle House. And when we did that, he would sometimes bring his small children. Most often it was the youngest one, Brooke, but Shelley and Brian were the little bit older children. And some wonderful memories of that family. In fact, I’ll never forget. I’m sitting there, we’re going to breakfast, and there’s Richard driving, and Brooke sitting between us. He was, you know, maybe three years old. And I’m sitting in the passenger seat.

And she looked up to me and she said, What do you do? And Richard quickly times into it and said, Well, honey, you know, he’s he’s the young preacher working with Johnny Edwards. You know, he preaches. And she thought about that for a second, and she looked up at me and says, Don’t you have a job?

I’ll never forget to that. That’s that was a great story from Little Brooke. But so Shelly and her family, I mean, I’m friends with Shelly and Brooke and talk to Brown on the phone a couple years ago, the older boy. I’ve been friends with the Cummins family all through the years. Though I’ve not spent a lot of time around them, and it’s just funny to me, though we are very distant friends through Facebook, and they live in another part of the world, hardly ever see him. She still has this love for me because of that relationship that was started 30 something years ago. Now I know what you’re thinking. She may not feel the same way if she had been listening to you preach for eight years.

Amen. There he goes. And again, in line with Daniel’s amen last week, both of you need to work with Wayland. Now, and you know, we can just, I can just go on and on with that, blah, about, yeah, but we have to put up with you all the time, and she doesn’t, thus, but that’s how we’re going with this lesson. One of the reasons, and I was talking to my mom about this, one of the reasons why she still feels that way about me. Yeah, she has been around me. But I’m fairly certain because of what I know of Richard and Loretta, their parents. That the only discussion, or the majority of the discussion that’s taken place throughout the years in their home about Tony Mach has been positive.

And I want to make this observation.

And as they get older to appreciate the faith and value the brethren the way they ought to value them. There’s certainly a time for being real about the things people do and how they’re done, the things are done, or how they are said poorly, in your perfect judgment and mine. But all of that had better be tempered with a lot of positive things. Or else our children are going to think negatively about all this. And the Lord’s people.

Don’t just happen. You don’t hear enough sermons about it. Or get enough instruction in Bible class. I’ve heard it so many times. I’ve gone over the passages so many times, so that you therefore automatically have good attitudes about the brethren. I know that because I have seen plenty of upset through the years where I’ve seen horrible attitudes displayed from people who have heard those kinds of lessons over and over. You will not have the right attitudes toward the Lord’s people just because we sing a few good songs tonight about it. Or we’ve heard so much about loving the brethren that it’ll just be easy to do. And excellently accomplished on every occasion. So I want to spend a few minutes tonight talking to you about the brethren.

And I chose this title for just that reason. Sort of tongue in cheek. Because sometimes when that phrase is spoken, the brethren. It’s not said in an endearing way at all. It’s said with a tone of negativity. Because we’ve dealt with what we perceive to be some bad apples in the bunch. And I’ll get to that in a minute. Some disappointing apples at the very least. And so there’s a law. Hey, let’s all compose a list of all the brethren that we’ve known throughout the earth years who are bad apples. Let’s have a bad apple this night. And make a list. And so we can talk about the brethren. That ought to tell us something right there. Now, I said I was going to mention this tonight.

In obedience to the truth, as our sermon concluded this morning, your souls are purified unto a sincere love of the brethren. Therefore, we are to fervently love one another from the heart. And that’s been impressing me in recent years because of all the things Peter could have said that conversion to the Lord is unto, and the purification of our souls is unto, he says, unto a sincere love of the brethren. That’s not the whole package of Christianity. That’s not the whole expression goes kit and caboo. There’s a lot of other things involved. But it is unto that, and it’s a significant part of what we come into in Christ. And I can’t preach a sermon like this without going back to our patriarch study and the verse that so often gets quoted when the strife is generated between Lot’s herdsmen and Abraham’s herdsman.

Let there be no strife between us. Abraham says, or Abram at that time, for we are brothers. Among brothers is no place for strife. And I thought of all the passages in the New Testament that I might use as a text for tonight, not the entire chapter, but I didn’t want to put sprinkled verses here. Galatians chapter 5. We are called to freedom, brethren. However, there is this concern. Do not use that freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, and the example that he draws. Is the need to serve one another through love. And then he warns, as he quotes, the law of being fulfilled in a single statement, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. He then warns about biding and devouring one another. A common concern, it seems, among New Testament believers and churches of the first century.

And so he says, if you bite and devour one another, you might be consumed, one of another. And so he says, don’t walk after the flesh, but instead walk after the spirit. And some of the walking after the flesh particularly relates to attitudes and actions toward brethren, because if you’ll look at most of verse 20, after sorcery, you have enmities and strife and jealousy and outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, actions, and then envying in verse 21. Some of that could take place in our homes among our neighbors generally, but the primary application of those particular deeds of the flesh would be in relation to our brothers. And then he goes on to say, to practice the fruit of the Spirit, and certainly in all relationships, but the brotherly relationship also.

Challenging one another, envying one another. I suggest these were common difficulties for most of the early churches. This is not just a Galatians refrain. And remember, there are several churches encompassed in the message to the Galatians. It’s a region. And he says, don’t be boastful, challenging one another, envying one another. And then really, we shouldn’t stop reading there. We should go into chapter 6 about the brother overtaking the fault and bearing one another’s burdens, because that all flows out of this context. Teach us, Lord, how to love each other. I did remember one phrase because I wrote it down. Alright. Let’s develop better attitudes toward our bread. I could do that. I need to do that. We all need to do that. Let me give you some things to think about.

1. The Problem: We Had a Sinful Past

What’s the problem with the bread? And we could ask that question differently. What’s the problem with me? You see, the problem is, we had a sinful past. And we are not yet, as we come into Christ, we are not yet full grown and mature. And modeling the attitudes of Christ, where he always exalted the needs of others to the hurt of himself. That’s a pretty tall pursuit for us. Perhaps in part due to our sinful past or how far we are from the goal of imitating him. Romans 6, that passage that talks about what baptism is. You know, people were saying, shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? And he says, May it never be. And we could go through all of Romans chapter 6 and what baptism means.

But one of the things that I learned from Romans chapter 6 is that the brethren in the church at Rome, and really all the brethren everywhere struggle with still these passions and desires of the past. Romans 6 emphasizes that. Colossians 3 emphasizes that. 1 Thessalonians 4 emphasizes that. That’s why there’s so much instruction from cover to cover in the New Testament talking about not going back to a sinful lifestyle of one’s past. Now, listen. The struggles you encounter. They’re similar to every generation and every group of people who’ve ever signed on to serve the Lord. Temptations such as are common to man. 1 Corinthians chapter 10 and verse 13. But I would say this: while the avenues of sin and the exercise of passion may evolve, the basic attitudes that lead us to partake in sin have always been the same.

Common desires, common thinking. And while there are common struggles, there are unique struggles. Now, what I mean by that is what is a particular difficulty for me may not be your difficulty or the one that you struggle with the most. What I struggle with the most may not be the thing that you struggle with the most. Your struggle with a sinful past may be unique to you. There are probably others that have a similar struggle like you do, but yours may be unique. Some people will be closer to the ideal of loving the brethren. And for other people, it’s going to be more challenging. And a harder road to hoe, as we say. So, what kind of struggles do we encounter? There are behavioral struggles, that is a certain conduct from which we don’t want to deny ourselves or to refrain.

There are affection struggles, that is, things that I want and desire that are inordinate and wrong, and I’ve got to rein those in, and that’s a particular difficulty. And then there’s attitude struggles. Not viewing things the way we ought to, not viewing our circumstances in the right way. Perhaps that leads to excessive complaining, not viewing relationships, marriage, the brethren in the right way. And so the problem that we may experience could be any and all of these things. And so that’s what we’re dealing with as Christians.

Struggles in any of those areas. I want to say this before I move on. Don’t allow any of these struggles to derail your conviction and your faith and your confidence in the Lord. We can recover from the struggles, no matter what they are, how severe they’ve been, we can recover from those. I write these things, John says that you may not sin, but if any man sins, we have an advocate with the Father. It’s all not signed, sealed, and delivered over, but we’re going to have to fight so that we are not practicing sin, that we are not setting ourselves up to wall a course that is sinful and we’re not deterring from it. We’re not changing from that. Now, this leads me to point number two.

2. Disappointment With Your Brethren Is Inevitable

If point number one is going on, and I think most of us were signing on saying, I’ve had some struggles, then point number two is true. Disappointment where your brethren are concerned is inevitable. Because the Lord’s people are not without their flaws. Now we should know that from our study of the patriarchs, right? And of most of the biblical characters who were extraordinary people of faith, but who did not perform perfectly all the time. Warning.

Where their struggle or spiritual downturn might affect your faith and your confidence in these things. If I somehow lose it spiritually, that is not an indication that these things are not true and should not be lived and followed. I am not the standard. The elders are not the standard. And so don’t allow a brother’s or sister’s misdeeds to derail your faith and goodness. Once strong disciples have walked away. And if you’ve been serving the Lord for any length of time, you’ve seen it. There have been people who walked away in the eight years that I’ve been here that I never would have suspected would leave the Lord so soon.

3. All of Us Are Dependent Upon Jesus

All of us are dependent upon Jesus. Every last one of us. Whatever we do for the Lord’s cause, it is only because of him and for him that we’re able to do it. We serve by the strength that God supplies. I know we talked about the first part of that verse. If any man speak, let him speak, as it were, the utterances or oracles of God. But I really like the latter part of that verse, too. We serve by the strength that God supplies. Anything that we are capable of doing as God has endowed each one of us, Romans chapter 12 and verse 6, employ your gift or your abilities accordingly. And anything that we’re able to do, however well we’re able to do it, is only because of him.

And it is for him and for his glory. To him be the glory of the church. Not me. And I’ll tell you what happens. Too often in too many places. The glory of men interferes with the progress of the gospel. This is not about my glory among you. Or your glory.

4. Still the Finest People on the Planet

And our ultimate glorification because of him. And we are all, no matter what’s here of service that we render, we are all completely dependent upon the Lord because we are those flawed disciples who sometimes still make terrible decisions and display poor attitudes. Toward our brothers, toward our spouses, toward our circumstances. And so let’s never forget our place in this great cause. And that leads me to this. So, I can’t paint a rosy picture of the brethren in every respect because all of us are flawed disciples, and all of us have at least occasional struggles. Some will struggle so far as to leave the Lord. So then how are we to regard the brethren? I’ll tell you, they’re still the finest people on the planet. And the reason why is because these are the people who have signed on to submit to the reign of the king.

And that makes them very unique in our world. There are a lot of kind people in the world who display a lot of goodness and mirror a lot of the qualities of Christ. But we are people who are dedicated to submit our lives in every respect to the will of God, and that makes us unique.

And if we wanted to concentrate on the negatives, we could probably do that for hours on end. Because I’ll tell you about the brethren. I know a lot of them. I’m not just talking about you, the members of Decker Prairie. I know a lot of saints, and I wish I could keep up with them all. I just wish I could remember their names. I don’t know how many brethren that I’ve known or met in my life, but it’s thousands. And you know what I’ve noticed about every last one of them? They’re all different than me. Some of them are somewhat like me, but they’re a little different than me. All of them. And just because they’re different than you, they may do things that you wouldn’t do.

Imagine that. And we can get better out of shape about things that aren’t even sinful. You still like it. Let’s talk about all things we didn’t like. It doesn’t measure up to my way of doing. These are my standards. You can do that until the cows come home. That’s not what love does. Thus the verse. What’s that say? 1 Corinthians 13. And again, that’s what we might quote at weddings, but the primary application in 1 Corinthians 13 is the relationship of brothers because there were problems in Corinth and they were divided. And he’s talking about the exercise of miraculous spiritual gifts. They were divided over that. And I spoke in tongues, so I’m better than you, kind of thing. And so he says, look, love bears, believes, and hopes all things.

I’m writing this lesson, and I see Jamie’s posed. She didn’t know I was going to mention this. But I have to after we say We Are One, because we sing that at your wedding. What is one of the things you love most about your marriage or your spouse? Let me see. Could you come up with one? She said, maybe if we all spent more time thinking about the positives we have going, this life would have more love and joy and gratitude. That’s right. Sister, there is at least one positive thing about Blake. The beard, I’m not so sure is one of them. But there is some. And she’s looking hard to find them. But I think that’s a great exercise. Let’s find something positive about our mates.

And perhaps we wouldn’t view them so negatively. And the same is true of our brethren. When we start thinking in a really negative frame about a brother, perhaps one who is visible among us, I don’t know who that would be. Try to think of something positive. If you can find it. Because love is hopeful. It’s optimistic. It thinks the best. It doesn’t always put the negative slant on things. And sometimes some wrongs have to be encountered and dealt with. And love does not take into account, take into account wrongs suffering. If we accentuate every personality foyable, and boy, do we have some personalities in this group. And thereby demonstrate how much better we are in comparison. Well, we could just have a field day. Let me tell you about your brethren, how they disappoint you.

5. Your Judgments About Them Are Limited

I want to conclude with this tonight. Here’s some things to think about. Better attitudes don’t just happen. As you think about your brother in Christ, may I suggest something to you? Your judgments about them are pretty limited. We may think, boy, I’m around them all the time. I say, twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday. I wish you saw me at least that much, and you are. Wish everybody would see each other in Christ that much. At least. We would spend some time together outside of assemblies. We need that to nurture our relationships. But even if we’re with each other that much. And you’re hanging out all the time like Mike and John.

You don’t know everything about them. And there may be things in their circumstances that you know absolutely nothing about. I’m pretty sure that’s true. Some particular limitations, perhaps. Some struggles and circumstances that you don’t know a thing about, but we think we know everything. And so we make judgments about things that people should be doing or ought to be doing or things that they’re leaving undone. We don’t know all of their circumstances. And so whatever judgments you’re making about one another, understand they are only limited, they are limited by what you actually know about them. And you know, that’s that’s okay. Because in the final judgment, I’m not the one bringing the verdict. And neither are you. God’s judgments are not limited, and he’s going to take care of all that.

And if there’s something about them that’s not what it should have been, and they seem to portray something, but instead they were a hypocrite, then God’s going to take care of that. I’ll tell you what we can do. We can admonish people, and we can encourage people, and we can serve people and love them and tell them, we want you to go to heaven. Here’s how you go to heaven. Look at these passages. Look at these thoughts and principles. You apply these in your life, and boy, there’s a sermon coming here. You do these passages, you’re going to go to heaven. I got it down to four verses. Can you believe that? You will go to heaven coming up, maybe next Sunday morning. Okay. So we can encourage, admonish, challenge.

But unless they’re blatantly committing sin. Understand this there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. And I think sometimes we’re too concerned about the judgments of brethren. I tell you the judge. I talked about Shelley Cummins Harden’s judgment of me and her family’s judgment of me, and that doesn’t. That’s not going to determine my eternal destiny. And I’ll tell you the judgments about your preacher from the brethren I’ve known through the years. They’re probably all across the spectrum. And so if I worried about that all, sometimes we get also worried about what other people thinking about us, and we need to get some consideration.

But the judgments other people have of you could be way across the spectrum from good to bad. But here’s the thing. Don’t get overly caught up in that because you’ll never please everybody. Ever. But the one you had better please is the Lord. Because it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for sin. And the Hebrew writer does not sugarcoat that. You can be lost. Though you were in Christ, if you are on a sinful course and you will not forsake it. I’m not going to sugarcoat that anything. There are people who trample underfoot the Son of God and consider unclean the blood of the covenant by which they were sanctified.

Brethren have flaws, and sometimes they go back to those flaws and they stay in them, and they’re going to be lost. That’s what the Hebrew writer is telling us. But he says, goes on to say. You have need of endurance so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what is promised. He’s talked about aid and assistance that we have in living this life of faith. And then he says, let me tell you something else. We are not going to fall back. That’s not who we are. We are not of those who shrink back to destruction. But we are those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.

Conclusion

To love him and love each other. So that our faith will be to the preserving of the soul. So what about the judgment? The final judgment of our God. Are you ready to meet him? We seem to encourage your response if you need to respond tonight. Let’s see.