AP

1 Peter 2:1-3  Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.  Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.

That we are saved by grace alone through faith alone is a liberating and comforting truth of Scripture that was rediscovered in the Protestant Reformation of the 16^th Century.  When we take hold of it for ourselves we are born again by the Holy Spirit, and this new life we have in Christ is ours forever.  Our full salvation is a free gift from God and all we can do is accept it with humble, thankful hearts.  Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.  I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life FOR the sheep” (John 10:10b-11).

Nothing can take away from these amazing truths that our loving God has revealed to us in his Word.  But the Apostle Peter reminds us that once we have ‘tasted that the Lord is good’, if this is in fact the case for us personally, it will automatically follow that “like newborn[again] babies” we will instinctively “crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it [we] may grow up in [our] salvation”!  And a natural aspect of this ‘growing up’ [to spiritual maturity]  will include ‘ridding ourselves’ of  “all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.”

In short, our ‘new birth’ is something God, by his grace alone, does FOR us – but the way we become aware of this amazing gift of justification is by recognising IN us the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts and minds.  As the apostle Paul says, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23a), so there is no place for ‘malice and deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind’ in a ‘born again’ believer.

The root of our salvation is ‘justification [being brought, once-for-all, into a new relationship with a Holy God] by grace-through-faith alone’; but the consequntial, and noticeable, fruit of our salvation is ‘sanctification [being made holy] by the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit’ within us.  As Jesus spells out in John 15: lack of fruit on a branch of a vine indicates a lack of that branch being rooted in the vine – and he is the ‘vine’ and we are the branches.  It seems that Peter’s recalling of Jesus’ saying this led to his exhortation to his readers who were becoming discouraged by opposition and were running the risk of falling back into their old sinful habits.

The Scriptures make it clear that we are not saved by ‘faith and works’, but we are saved by faith that works!

– Bruce Christian