1st Peter

I want to thank you for being with me in this journey through the first letter of Peter. 

The overall themes in this letter are easy to see: humility, discipline, strength, and endurance. These things are brought up in today’s passage. It takes humility so that we may be one day exalted. It also takes humility to cast all of our anxieties onto the Lord because we have to acknowledge that we can’t solve our problems without His help.

What makes a good leader? Today’s passage from 1 Peter addresses church leaders, but I think it can be easily applied to today because it talks about the qualities of a good leader: being responsible of the people you overlook, but not asserting your authority too much.

Why does a God who is supposed to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving allow human beings to suffer? This question gets brought up by Christians and non-believers alike. There aren’t any easy answers, to be honest. Humans were born with a tendency to sin ever since the original sin of Adam and Eve.

One of my favorite movies growing up was Disney’s Mulan. One of the more well-loved parts of the movie was the training montage in the military camp that Mulan joins under the guise of a man named Ping. Shang shoots an arrow to the top of a tall pole and holds two weights: one representing discipline, the other representing strength. Every soldier in the camp had to try to climb to the arrow while carrying those two weights.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite shows to watch was Veggietales. One of the stories from the Veggietales series was inspired by the story of Daniel’s friends Shadrach, Meschach, and Abendego, who called Rack, Shack, and Benny in this kid-friendly retelling. The three boys worked in a chocolate bunny factory and were promoted to factory managers when they decided not to eat as many bunnies as their co-workers.

We’ve all rolled our eyes at that passage from Ephesians about wives being subject to their husbands. We live in an age where women don’t have to depend on a man to get what they need and we can dress however we want to. So why on Earth is Peter asking wives to accept the authority of their husbands and to not adorn themselves by dressing nicely?

Today’s passage is going to make you feel uncomfortable. I’m not gonna lie. I had some trouble getting my head around the fact that Peter wasn’t preaching civil disobedience and told slaves to be obedient to their masters.

The name Peter, as many of us know, comes from the Greek word “petros,” meaning “rock.” I used to joke that the name had a double meaning, referring to Peter being the foundation of the Church and referring to Peter’s rock-thick head.

My absolute favorite fairy tale is and always will be Beauty and the Beast. The Disney version that came out in 1991 is still my favorite Disney movie. I love that the Beast had to win Belle’s love by saving her life and being her friend. Eventually, he loved her enough to let her go. It wasn’t until Belle came back and told him how she loved him that the Beast turned into a prince.

It doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun. We’re all grown ups here, and yet he asks us to act like obedient children. However, he gives us a reason as to why we need to be living holy lives.We don’t discipline ourselves just because a government or some other kind of authority figure says so. We don’t do it for any sense of personal gain. We don’t even do it just because it makes us feel good. We do it for the greater glory of God. We do it because we are saved by Christ.

The word “inheritance” means that you get something that belongs to an older generation, usually at the death of a family member. My mother, for example, inherited some property after my grandfather passed away. The inheritance that Peter describes in today’s passage, however, is a little bit different.