An introduction to and call to action from 1 Peter

Of all failures, the failure to distinguish between the description of a problem and the prescription for solving it is the one that will lead to humanity’s downfall.

A lot is going on in that sentence. Let me restate it differently: telling me what’s wrong is not the same as fixing what’s wrong, and pretending it is the same will kill us all.

I wonder if either is very clear, but hopefully, you understand. We live in an age when everything is quantified, tracked, and described in exhausting detail. And some of that effort is well-spent and has led to incredible human performance and quality-of-life breakthroughs. But much of it is a smokescreen hiding a disturbing fact: we have no idea how to solve the fundamental problem of life.

Virtually all of the discourse in the halls of power, through social media, and around our TVs right now is describing the symptoms rather than administering the cure.

When someone describes acts of police brutality, gang-related violence, or racial profiling, various segments of society applaud or jeer, and then the arguments start.

When a scientist shares findings related to climate change, vaccine effectiveness, or poverty, different sides will agree or disagree, and then the debate begins.

All those words. All that airtime. All those facts and opinions.

And nothing ever changes.

It is because we have substituted talking about the problems for doing anything about them. And I am further convinced that we make the substitution because we don’t do anything about the problem because we are unwilling to admit the root cause of the problems: sin.

I am not just throwing stones at the godforsaking atheists who imagine there is no such thing as sin. I’m living in the glass house of Christianity, throwing rocks at everyone, including myself. When we fail to remember that rebellion against our Creator is a pervasive and perverse component of every human and every human system, we can talk all day long about the problem, but we will never solve it. Christians are not immune. But we are more to blame because we know the solution and still get trapped in discussing the problems.

At a certain point, talk is death, and action is life.

We need not more description of the consequences of sin, more talking about the various symptoms of our fatal illness, but an embrace of and widespread dispersal of the solution.

That’s why I love the New Testament Book of 1 Peter. Peter writes to believers living in a world that was superficially much different from the one we live in now, but it was fundamentally the same. It was a world that had many problems because it was a world full of sinners sinning. But, unlike us, he doesn’t get distracted by the symptoms or spend much time discussing the problems. Right out of the gate, he goes straight to the solution: Jesus and the new Kingdom that He is bringing about through His people, the Church, and then tells his readers how to live out that solution in their lives in various situations and ways.

That’s why, over the next couple of months, I will be walking through 1 Peter. I will be doing that through Sunday sermons and this blog’s post. The overarching theme of the study will be two words that come up repeatedly in the book: “living” and “hope.” “Living Hope.”

When we see the two words together, we usually assume that “living” functions as an adjective describing what kind of “hope” is in view. It is a passive quality in sight, a description of the type. While that is possible, I want to go in a different direction. Rather than describing, I see these two words as Peter’s prescribing a solution. “Hope” is what we are “living.” The focus is on living, doing, being, and acting out of our hope, not describing our wishes.

We are meant to live. We are meant to hope. We are meant to be living lives of hope.

The world needs Jesus’ people to live hope, not just talk about it.