Steve DeWitt Stretchy Love Download Study Guide for Spiritual Exiles, 1 Peter 4:7-11 Scripture Reference: 1 Peter 4:7-11 Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter Donate to Support The Journey Sermon Transcript for Spiritual Exiles, 1 Peter 4:7-11 Sermon Series: Spiritual Exiles Message: Stretchy Love Airdate:10/27 - 10/28/26 Programs: 2387 and 2388 Good morning, Bethel Church. Great to see you all here today, and, greetings to our other campuses, this morning and, especially, Cedar Lake. How great would it be to be the Cedar Lake campus with the, upcoming weeks that they have moving into a new church home and facility and celebrations along that line. It's gonna be, gonna be a fun couple weeks for you. I also need to mention, here at Crown Point, if you look around, we're, like, packed here this morning, and, which is great, but school hasn't started yet. So we always have this big influx once school begins. And I just put out to, this service that, we have an 08:15 and an 11:15 service that if you wanna get up a little earlier, would be great. You wanna sleep in a little bit, would be great. Might be, something for you to consider to help us, to consider one of those other services that would be a blessing to us, especially coming into the school year. I want to, begin by talking about a, Christian hero. I think he's a hero by any measure. His name is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and maybe you're familiar with that name. He, was a man from the last century. There's one biography about him that, has as the subtitle, martyr, pastor, prophet, and spy. He sounds intriguing already, doesn't he? And indeed, he is. Just to tell you a little bit about the guy, he was raised in a famously intellectual family in Germany. His dad was the best known psychiatrist in the whole country. He there was a large family .He had many siblings, and all the siblings were sort of like Renaissance people. They were academics. They were into culture and art and all of that. To give you an idea of the caliber of, brain that we're talking about, his brother helped Albert Einstein crack the atomic code K? So we're talking about top tier type intellects, and this family embodied that in, in Germany in the first part of the last century. So Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, takes that intellectual capacity and points it towards theology. And he goes to school, and by 21, he has his PhD. He begins to be a lecturer at the University of Berlin, which was arguably the most prestigious theological school, at the time. And as the Nazis rose to power, Bonhoeffer became increasingly a critic of Hitler and the socialist philosophy that he was promoting. And the Lutheran church then aligned with Hitler and the Nazis. And as that happened, Bonhoeffer had a conscientious decision to make. Do I leave the Lutheran church or not? And indeed, he did. He formed essentially his own denomination called the Confessing Church of Germany. And all of this was happening in the days leading up to and after the beginning of World War two. So, during World War two, he establishes three seminaries, three, covert seminaries, dare I call them exile seminaries, and he was the teacher, he was the headmaster, and the students there, they all kind of live together in kind of a commune sort of setting. And by all accounts, the Christian fellowship and community that those students with Bonhoeffer experienced was very, very special. And this led Bonhoeffer to write a book that is considered a Christian classic called Life Together, and I have a copy of it right here. It's an entire book about healthy Christian community. And it's not very big. You can see. It's kind of a thin little book, but so much wonderful truth in this book. And I'm going to be kind of featuring Bonhoeffer and quotes from this book in my message today. Just to finish the rest of the story with, Bonhoeffer, though, one of the great ethical dilemmas he wrote a book on ethics. Probably his, signature book was a book on ethics, and his own personal ethical dilemma was whether or not he as a Christian should participate in the assassination of Adolf Hitler, which he ended up believing that he needed to do. And so he was a part of a vast kind of, network of people that were, you know, disheartened about what had was going on in Germany. And if you saw the movie Valkyrie a few years ago starring Tom Cruise, that is a story of part of the network that Bonhoeffer was associated with. And if you saw the movie or know your history, assassination attempt did not work. And so there were many arrests, and Bonhoeffer was one of them. And he spent time in some of these camps. You know? And, Himmler and Hitler personally sentenced him to execution, and he was he was he died by hanging. This would have been 04/09/1945 at the age of 39. Dietrich Bonhoeffer died three weeks before Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin. So if you think about like, if Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have lived all of the wonderful things that he would have been able to write about in a kind of peaceful setting where he could just think and write and be a theologian, but he never had that. He his life was lived in tumultuous times, some of the most in all of human history, and he died as a martyr. So I think that gives a little extra power to the words of Bonhoeffer because they're the words of a martyr. And I'm going to be quoting from him because what he talks about in this book ties very closely to the passage that we have in front of us here as we are preaching through first Peter. So let's begin with Peter, and then we'll get to Dietrich. K? Begin with Peter, and we'll get to Dietrich. And so here we are in chapter four seven verses seven through 11. Last week, we zeroed in on verse 10. This week, I wanna pull back and look at the paragraph as a whole. Now before we get into it, though, notice in verses one through six of chapter four, Peter describes the lifestyles of the pagan world around them, and he does so eloquently. We'll study this passage in the coming week, but, because we're doing this a little bit out of order. But, in it, he just talks about how the pagan world, they're just they're just off in their immorality. They're off living lives loosely and wantonly. In fact, he calls the the generally, he says, a flood of debauchery. A flood of debauchery. Now we live in a flood of our own, don't we? You think about the world that is around us. It resembles closely the kinds of things that were going on in the pagan world of the first century. And he Peter says, the people that live around you are shocked that you don't, like, jump in and be a part of the same stuff that they're all about. They're shocked that you're, like, into something different. And indeed, Christian community ought to be very much different than the kind of activities and priorities and morality that is in the world that does not know Jesus Christ. And so that contrast now, he transitions in verse seven, with these words. He says, “The end of all things is at hand. Therefore, be self controlled and sober minded for the sake of your prayers. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly since love covers a multitude of sins.” “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace.” And now he describes two general categories of service. “Whoever speaks as one who speaks oracles of God, whoever serves as one who serves by the strength that God supplies.” And here's his bottom line. “In order that in everything, God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” Now you don't have to be a Bible scholar here to see what Peter is getting at. He lays out four qualities, four attributes of healthy Christian community. Christian community and Christian relationships when the gospel is shaping it and when the Holy Spirit is empowering it? Like, what does that look like? And what should be the things that we as Christians care about? And notice the the the these are easy. You can see them right here. First of all, a self controlled life of prayer. Secondly, love that overcomes interpersonal offenses. Third, open hearted hospitality. And finally, stewarding giftedness in the direction of serving one another. So that's gonna be our outline today. And let's just walk through these now. “The end of all things is at hand. Therefore, be self controlled and sober minded for the sake of your prayers.” “The end of all things is at hand.” You might read that and say to yourself, well, Peter certainly got that wrong, didn't he? I mean, he wrote this in the first century. He says to the people he's writing, hey. The end is almost here. You better get ready. And now two thousand years have passed. He clearly got something wrong. And chronologically speaking, I would agree with that. But when the Bible talks about time, it does not do so the way that we do with, like, our calendars and our watches and our minutes and our seconds and our hours. When the Bible talks about history and time, it talks about it redemptive
