The Purchase that Changes Everything

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This morning, we’re going to go to God’s Word and take a look at the passage we’ve been, the book we’ve been looking through the last several weeks, which is 1 Peter. We’re going to go to 1 Peter chapter 1 this morning. If you have your Bible, go ahead and take it out with me.

If you don’t have a Bible, hopefully you have something there in front of you, whether it’s another device or a computer or something where you can pull up a copy of God’s Word. Blue Letter Bible is a great resource. Bible Gateway, YouVersion, there are several things you could Google real quick and find where you can get a copy of God’s Word right in front of you.

We’re going to be in 1 Peter chapter 1. And over the last several weeks, we’ve been in this chapter. And starting last week, we started talking about the theme of holiness.

I started sharing the theme of holiness with you. especially as it applies to the way God has called believers to live wholly in this world. And as I was reading this week’s passage, it reminded me of a story, as so many of these do, something that illustrates what it’s talking about.

And I was thinking about my first car, not my first car that I ever owned, but my first car that I ever went out and bought. My first car that I ever owned was one I bought secondhand from my grandmother. And everybody at high school said it was a granny car, but it fit my personality somehow.

The first car I ever went and went and picked out and bought, I actually drove from the city out here to Seminole and bought it here. But it was an old Oldsmobile, kind of a dark red color, old Oldsmobile. They said it was a granny car too.

But you know what? It’s what I could afford, and it worked for me for several years. I didn’t get rid of that car until after Benjamin came along, because I realized I needed something a little bigger.

I needed something a little more reliable. And so I sold that car for $200, loved that car, tore my heart out to let that car go. But I sold that Oldsmobile for $200 and put it towards some parts I needed for the Ford Explorer that I had.

So I sold that car to a man that lived there in my hometown. And he’s not somebody that I knew. He’s somebody we had mutual friends.

And so he came and bought the car from me for $200. And I would see it around town. The man happened to work at McDonald’s.

And so I’d be up in that general area. I’d see my car. I’d see my car, which was now his car, parked there in the parking lot.

And I’d think, man, he sure has let that car get dirty. I’d drive by and say, he put a big ding in the door of my car. No, that’s not my car.

I can’t believe he put that sticker on that car. And I’d see it, it’d just be pitted out inside. And I’d think, man, can’t believe he’s doing that to my car.

And I really would have loved to have said something to him about trashing my car. It And I’m not a confrontational person, but there was something deep down in my soul that wanted to say something to him after a while when I saw that car and saw the condition it was in. But I had to remind myself that that made no sense at all.

It was really an irrational desire to go say something to him because that was not my car anymore. For me to go tell him how to do anything with that car would have been a ridiculous overstep on my part because it wasn’t my car anymore. It was his car.

He had purchased that car. He had bought it. It belonged to him.

And because of that purchase, everything was different. Because of that purchase price that was paid, I no longer had a claim to that car. I no longer owned that car.

It was his to do with as he saw fit. And the Bible in the passage that we’re about to read today describes something similar in our lives. The Bible describes how there was a purchase that has taken place in the life of a Christian that has also changed everything as a result.

It’s changed ownership. It’s changed the direction of everything. And so again, turn with me if you haven’t already from 1 Peter chapter 1, and we’re going to look at verses 17 through 21 this morning.

1 Peter chapter 1 verse 17. It says, and if you call on the Father, who without partiality judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear, knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things like silver or gold from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. He indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who through him believe in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory so that your faith and hope are in God.

And one of the major points of this passage, one of the first things that we need to understand right out of the gate is the fact that believers don’t belong to themselves. We don’t belong to ourselves. This morning, if you call yourself a Christian, and I realize we live in a country where 70, 80% of the people call themselves Christian and have no idea really what that means.

They know they’re not Muslim. They maybe went to church with grandma, and so they assume Christian. But I’m talking about if you say that you are a born-again believer, if you trust in Jesus Christ as your Savior, and you say there was that moment of conversion where I trusted in Christ as my Savior, and I was born again by faith in Him.

If you belong to Jesus Christ, if you are a believer, if you are a Christian, according to that biblical definition of the term, then you do not belong to yourself today. I don’t belong to myself. You don’t belong to yourself.

And the reason we don’t belong to ourselves is because we have been purchased. We’ve been bought. We’ve been paid for.

Now, he spells this out very clearly in verses 18 and 19 when he says, you were not redeemed with corruptible things. He doesn’t say we were not redeemed. The fact that we were redeemed or bought back or purchased, that’s assumed right there.

He’s not saying we were not redeemed. He said we were redeemed, but we weren’t redeemed with corruptible things like gold and silver from our aimless conduct. He said we were bought back from something else from this old way, this aimless conduct learned from our fathers, received by tradition from our fathers, meaning specifically talking to those who were following the way of the Pharisees, these laws and traditions that they thought were going to get them closer to God, but they end up just running in circles.

He said, you were redeemed from that self-righteousness and from that sin. You were purchased, but not with corruptible things like silver and gold. Instead, you were bought with the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.

Now, they were familiar, living as they did in the Greco-Roman world, they were familiar with the idea of people being bought and sold. For us, that’s something that goes on. We know it exists.

We know there’s still slavery in the world. We know there’s human trafficking. We know that human trafficking goes on in our own state, but it’s kept hush-hush.

It’s not something that most of us see. In their world, it wouldn’t have been particularly shocking the idea of somebody being bought because they did it right out in the open. They had these slave markets.

And if you had any means at all, any money at all, you owned slaves. It was just what they did. And so this idea of being bought and paid for, of a person being owned by another person, is something they would have been familiar with.

And when these people were bought and sold, they were bought and sold to serve a particular master. They were bought and sold with this purpose of serving a particular master. Now, don’t get too hung up on the idea of slavery here, though, and think, well, if that’s what Christianity is, count me out.

You know what? Christianity, despite the fact that some biblical texts were misinterpreted and misapplied by people to support slavery, it was actually the influence of Christians that contributed significantly to the end of slavery in the Roman Empire, in the British Empire, and in America. So Christianity is not promoting slavery here.

And it’s not the idea here. Service to God looks nothing like the idea of slavery that we have in our minds, especially in America with the brutal history of slavery here. Don’t get too hung up on that idea of slavery.

What I’m telling you is they would have understood the idea that you can go, because they saw it in their own town. They would be familiar with the idea that you could go into town and you could see somebody up on the block being auctioned off and being purchased by the highest bidder. And suddenly they belong to that person that bought them.

And now it’s that person that bought them who calls the shots in their lives. As believers, we’ve been purchased by a new master. We don’t serve our old master.

That master, we could say is sin. We could say it’s self. We don’t serve that old master anymore.

We’ve been purchased by a new master. And we weren’t just purchased with mere gold and silver. And that sounds like such an odd statement.

You weren’t purchased with corruptible things like gold and silver. You weren’t purchased with trivial little trinkets like gold and silver. To us, gold and silver are pretty valuable.

Here’s the thing. They pale in comparison to what we’ve been bought with. They pale in comparison to the price that our master paid for us.

We were not purchased with mere gold and silver, things that corrupt, things that can eventually corrode over time, things that will pass away, things that one day will be worthless. We were purchased, it says in verse 19, with the precious blood of Christ. On this verse, Peter’s presenting Jesus as this ultimate sinless sacrifice, this idea of a lamb without blemish and without spot, a perfect sacrifice that would accomplish what it set out to do. It would be effective as a payment for our sin.

The blood of Jesus that he shed when he died on the cross was the only payment that would be effective to purchase us back from sin. It’s the most precious sacrifice ever offered in the universe because it wasn’t just a lamb. It wasn’t just an animal. It was God the Son in human flesh who shed his blood and died.

God went to the ultimate lengths to purchase you and me. We were not bought with plain old silver and gold. God bought us with the blood of his Son.

And because of that, we were rescued from bondage to sin. We were rescued from bondage to tradition like they were in, that they were going through all these traditions and religious rituals that they worked so hard and they thought it was going to bring them closer to God, but it never could accomplish any of that. They were rescued from that.

They were rescued from rituals. All the things, all these things that we have in our lives that demand that we serve them instead of serving God. All these things in our lives that promise freedom but deliver slavery.

All these things that want to be a cruel master over us. Sin, religion, tradition, achievement, all these things. We were rescued from bondage to those things when we were purchased at the highest price by a new master.

And that purchase, I want you to understand this morning that that purchase results in more than just a change of ownership in our lives. That purchase that was completed results in a complete change of our lives. Not just the ownership, but the whole direction of our lives is different because of that purchase that was made.

And here’s why that is. It’s because belonging to Jesus will turn our lives upside down. If we truly belong to Jesus, it’ll turn our lives upside down.

Now, there’s always been an issue from the earliest days of Christianity. There’s been an issue with people claiming to be Christians without showing any evidence whatsoever. of the change.

But hear me in this, belonging to Jesus will turn your life upside down. Peter points out in this passage that there should be a change. There should be a change.

In verse 17, he spells this out, there should be a change. Because in verse 17, let me walk you through this, maybe not in the order that is spelled out, but in a kind of logical sequence here. He says, who without partiality judges according to each one’s work.

He’s talking about God. So here, if you recognize, if we recognize that God takes sin seriously, he talks here about God showing no partiality. God doesn’t say, oh, you’re going to get away with it because Greg, I like you more.

So I’m going to give you a little more leeway and let you get away with stuff. God doesn’t show partiality, but judges according to each one’s work. So if we come to this with the understanding that God takes all sin seriously and he won’t let any of us get by with it forever.

And then if indeed we truly profess to be saved by his grace, because he says in verse 17, if you call on the father, if you call on the father. So if we know that he doesn’t let sin go, if we know that he’s not going to let us get by with sin forever, and as a result of that, we call on him and his grace, we trust in his grace to deal with our issue of sin. he says as a result then verse 17 conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear okay so he set up an if then proposition if these things are true then let this be true if you see the justice of god and you believe in his judgment of sin you believe it’s a real thing and you believe that it applies to you and if as a result you’ve you’ve repented and you’ve thrown yourself on his mercy, you’ve trusted in his grace, then as a result, conduct yourself in this way.

Now, I want to dig even further into verse 17 here because it’s so important to us understanding, to our understanding of this passage. He says, conduct yourself, as a result of all this, conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear. He said, if you recognize the judgment of God and the reality of that judgment, and you trust in God’s grace as a result, there is that should occur.

Now, do we change ourselves and clean our lives up in order to make ourselves acceptable to God? No. That’s why the judgment of God is certain, because we are sinners.

We can’t clean our lives up. That’s why grace is needed for us. That’s why grace is the thing we have to trust in, because we can’t clean our lives up.

But if His grace is present in our lives, it’s going to show up in a change of behavior, in a change of direction. Conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear. When he talks about throughout the time of your stay here, it’s going to lead to us remembering that this life is just a brief journey.

You know, we oftentimes put things off because we think we’ve got forever to accomplish them. We don’t know when God’s going to call any of us home or when God’s going to call all of us home. We don’t know.

We need to remember that this life doesn’t go on forever, and this life is not the most important thing out there. This life is the dress rehearsal for what’s real. So we need to remember that our brief journey here is in preparation for something else. We need to keep in our mind and in our focus that what happens now, this is just our stay here.

This is not all there is. So he says, throughout the time of your stay here, conduct yourselves in fear. That word fear tells us to keep the reality of God’s judgment in the proper perspective.

Because sometimes even as a believer, you can for, I don’t think as a believer, I don’t think the Bible teaches that as believers, we’re going to go on and indefinitely embrace a sinful lifestyle and just say, oh, well, God will forgive me. I think we may do that at times, but it’s not going to be the pattern of our lives. Eventually that conviction of the Holy Spirit is going to get us, is going to draw us back to him if we belong to him.

But sometimes a believer can fall into a season where they say, I’m going to do this over here. I’m not going to worry about it. You know, God’s not going to zap me or anything.

Well, he may not zap you, but you’re doing something to your fellowship with God. We’ve got to remember that God is a just God. God is holy.

That’s the reason he calls us to be holy, because he’s holy. And so we keep the reality of God’s judgment in the proper perspective. It doesn’t, that word, that phrase in fear doesn’t mean that we have to be terrified of God, but it means we show him the proper respect, realizing that he’s not just our buddy who goes along with whatever we want to do.

He’s the God of this universe who is infinitely holy and will judge sin and he’ll judge it righteously. And he says, conduct yourselves. Conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear.

This word conduct yourselves really is the heart of the matter. Because if you look at it in the Greek, the word there for conduct means to turn upside down. It’s not just telling us do things a little differently.

This is saying that as a result of understanding the judgment of God and throwing ourselves on his mercy and belonging to him as a result, he is going to turn our lives upside down. And throughout the rest of our stay here, we need to keep that in the proper perspective. That word means turn your life upside down in response to the work that God’s doing.

I want to be very clear as I tried to be last week. We cannot do anything to make ourselves holy. It is entirely the work of God to declare us holy and then to help us become holy in our behavior.

It is entirely the work of God. And yet we are called to prepare ourselves and to embrace the work that God is doing. So all of this presents a very clear picture, a very clear picture of Peter saying, as he writes under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that if we belong to him, if we are believers, if we’ve been born again, we have been bought with the blood of Jesus Christ. We no longer belong to ourselves to make all the decisions and just do whatever we want to do.

We belong to him. He gets to call the shots. And if that’s true, if it has truly happened for us, then it’s going to show up in evidence of the fact that he has turned our lives upside down.

And we need to be prepared. We need to be ready. Sometimes we’ll say, God, I don’t want that change.

God, I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want to let go of the old things. If you belong to him, he is at work making you holy.

He is at work transforming you into who he wants you to be. Now, let me just tell you, who he wants you to be is better than the plan you had for yourself. So we’re called on to embrace that.

We’re called on to recognize who he is and let him call the shots. Now he’s God. He’s God.

He’s in charge. He can call the shots. He can do what he wants, whether we allow him to or not.

He doesn’t need our permission, but for the sake of our own right standing with him, for the sake of our own fellowship with him, it’s important that we embrace what he wants to do. He’s Lord, whether we say so or not. He’s Lord regardless of how we vote, but the fellowship is so much sweeter when we acknowledge him as Lord.

And all of this points us to the fact that because of his sacrifice, because of what Jesus Christ did on the cross, we are both saved and sanctified. And what I mean by that is that he didn’t die on the cross just to forgive us of our sins and leave us to continue like we were before. See, the blood, the perfect sacrifice that he shed on the cross, that Jesus as our spotless lamb shed for us, that blood was sufficient.

It was enough not only to save us, not only to get us right with God, but to sanctify us, which means to transform us into who he wants us to be. So it was enough to get us right with God, but it was also enough to make us more like Jesus. As we sang about this morning, there is power in the blood.

His blood cleanses us from our sin. It wipes our slate clean before God so that he no longer holds our sin against us. Isn’t that wonderful?

That God would look at us in our sin that he would be entirely just to destroy. He could wipe us out and punish us. He could do whatever, and he’d be totally justified in doing that.

But instead, God looks at us and sees that we’ve been covered in the blood, and he chooses to hold our sins against us no longer. He wipes our slate clean. but it also means his blood has the power to change us and we’re going to be different as a result.

Now maybe you’re a new believer this morning and you say, well I’ve still got some of those same old habits. You know, I’ve known of people that trusted Christ as their savior and just almost instantaneously everything was different. I’ve also known of people that it’s taken longer for.

I’ll tell you what, I’ve been a believer, trying to remember how long now, I want to say 29 years. I may be off on the math. I remember the date I trusted Christ as my Savior.

My math may be off. I believe it’s been 29 years. 29 years ago, I trusted Christ as my Savior.

Would you believe He’s still working on me? He’s still changing me. There are still things that need to be fixed.

There are still places where I fall massively short of who He desires me to be. But I look over time and I see how He has changed me. I know there was an instant transformation in some areas, but I know there’s still work of sanctification left for Him to do.

So don’t get discouraged if you’re looking at this saying, I’ve been a believer for X number of years or X number of months and I’m still struggling with this. God’s not making you perfect overnight. But there should be some evidence of a change, even in our desires.

That’s where a lot of this comes down to. Because we still have a sin nature. We still sin.

But a believer should be changed to the point, not that we never sin again. We should over time sin less. But definitely our desire for sin should go way down.

And I know one of the most notable changes in my life has been how quickly I feel that conviction. I’ll say something. I’ll demonstrate an attitude.

I’ll do something. And used to, it would take a long time before it bothered me. Maybe even just the next time I was sitting in church, I’d hear the preacher preach and felt something completely different, but I’d feel convicted and I’d feel bad about what I’d done.

Now I feel like even as the words are coming out of my mouth, you can’t pull them back in, but they barely lift my lips. Or as soon as I display this attitude, as soon as I do anything that’s not pleasing to Him, I immediately feel this sense of having disappointed my Father. And it is a terrible, terrible feeling.

And I go and ask God for forgiveness, which I know He’s forgiven it all in Jesus Christ, but I want the fellowship to be what it ought to be. And so I go deal with him about that. I ask him to change that.

I ask him to help me do differently. And that’s been the biggest change in my life over these past almost three decades. It’s not that I’ve become perfect.

It’s that he’s changed my heart and softened my heart toward his desires and toward his truth. And my desires have changed. Sin is not fun.

It’s just not as much fun as it used to be. So my hope for you, my prayer for you today is that you’ll see evidence of change somewhere. understand that it takes God will be working on you for the rest of your life.

God will be changing you and transforming you for the rest of your life. But this is more concerning those who would say, I’m a Christian, but they have never shown any evidence. They live exactly the same way as they did before Christ, before professing Christ. Years later, they live the same way they always have.

There’s been no change. The Bible argues that there’s going to be a change if we belong to him. Is there some evidence in your life?

And so the message to us from this passage this morning is to be different. Be different as a result of what Christ has done in us. Don’t take from this, if you’re listening to this and you’ve never trusted Christ as your savior, don’t take from this, oh I need to go out and live differently so God will love me.

You cannot live differently enough for God to love you. I’m saying to you this morning, live differently. Be different as a result of what Jesus has done for you.

As believers, the word calls us to be transformed. It says we’re going to be transformed. Don’t fight that transformation.

Look for that transformation. Embrace that transformation. Pray about the places where God has shown you you fall short.

Ask him to change you in that area. Study his word and learn what he wants you to do. Embrace the transformation that God wants to make in your life.

Believers should be different as a result of what Jesus has done for us. And those who’ve never trusted Christ as their Savior, they need to be made different as well. If you’ve never trusted him as your Savior, you are separated from God because of your sin.

And you need to be transformed and you need to be cleansed and you need to be made different as well. But you can’t do it on your own. the only way for that transformation to take place in us, the only way for us to have that relationship with God where our slate is wiped clean, our sins are forgiven, and then where God begins to change us from the inside out, the only way that happens is because we’ve been purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ. And this morning, if you’ve never trusted Him as your Savior, I’d invite you to do it.

I’d invite you to trust Him this morning. Ask God’s forgiveness and be saved.