To Encourage You

1 Peter 1:22 “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart”

We’ve all heard the phrase “first things first.”  When it comes to following Christ, that phrase is of critical importance.  You see, so much of religion around the world involves doing things to earn favor with God.  This can range from things like various religious ceremonies, dietary laws, and modes of dress to  helping others, and giving money, that sort of thing. Some even think that if they kill someone in the name of God, they will earn favor with Him.  According to the Bible, all of this is a backwards approach to life with respect to our relationship with the true God. 

As Peter says in the verse above, the Christian must first be purified on the inside before anything done on the outside matters at all.  Purification of the heart and soul is the first step in following Christ and that comes only by “obedience to the truth.” That “truth” is the truth of the gospel, and the gospel message is to “believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31).  No matter what else is involved in the Christian’s life, this is the first thing.  No amount of external religious, social, or neighborly work means anything if this first thing is not indeed first.  

The Christian’s life follows from this belief. It is through this alone that a person receives Christ’s righteousness as a gracious gift. Belief in Christ involves confession of sin, and when we do this first, we are assured that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).  It is only when the heart has been cleansed by God that a person can ever truly “love one another earnestly” as stated in 1 Peter above. No good works and no religious ceremony can ever cleanse the heart, “for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).  To try to draw near to God in any other way is to put last things first, which won’t achieve such a goal any more than to put last things first will allow one to achieve any other goal.  Put another way, Jesus said “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).  Just the same, it is from the abundance of the heart that one does anything – whether it be by way of our mouth, hands, feet, money, or time. 

In the words of 1 Corinthians 13, which some have termed “the love chapter,” “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”  That’s because the first thing is always the heart when it comes to following Christ.