Listen along as we continue our time through 1 Peter.

Notes//Quotes:

1 Peter 1:13-26 - Chris F Reading
Title: Exilic Exercise

“The tidings were mostly sad and ominous: of gathering darkness, the wars of Men, and the flight of the Elves…And I warn you that peril is now both before you and behind you, and upon either side…. ‘But where shall I find courage?’ asked Frodo. ‘That is what I chiefly need.’ ‘Courage is found in unlikely places,’ said Gildor. ‘Be of good hope!”
— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship Of The Rings

“So roll up your sleeves, put your mind in gear, be totally ready to receive the gift that’s coming when Jesus arrives. Don’t lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. You didn’t know any better then; you do now. As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness.” (1 Peter 13-16, MSG)

“If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that is distinctively Christian… is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. “Father” is the Christian name for God.”
— J. I. Packer, Knowing God

“Christianity is completely and entirely and utterly hope — a looking forward and a forward direction; hope is not just an appendix. So Christianity inevitably means a new setting forth and transformation of the present…[The hoping person] can never come to terms with the inescapability of death or with the evil that continually breeds evil. For him the resurrection of Christ is not merely consolation in suffering; it is also the sign of God’s protest against suffering. That is why whenever faith develops into hope it does not make people serene and placid; it makes them restless. It does not make them patient; it makes them impatient. Instead of being reconciled to existing reality they begin to suffer from it and to resist it.”
— Jürgen Moltmann, Experiences of God