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God’s Design for Relationships

1 & 2 Peter: Our Living Hope

Pastor Jim Thomas

1 Peter 3

“God created us as social beings. Love is the greatest thing in the world. For God is love, and when he made us in his own image, he gave us the capacity to love and to be loved. So we need each other. Yet marriage and family are not the only antidotes to loneliness.” 
John Stott

1. Our relationship with Christ must come first and He must be our example and guide in all our relationships.
2. The indicatives of the NT provide the unquenchable hope that our relationships can be transformed as we sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts.

God’s instructions for imperishable beauty in wives v1-6: 

1. Actions 
2. Adornment
3. Attitude
4. Attentiveness

“She served her husband as her master, and did all she could to win him for You, speaking to him of You by her conduct, by which You made her beautiful … Finally, when her husband was at the end of his earthly span, she gained him for You.” 
Augustine

God’s instructions for believing husbands v7:

1. Engagement
2. Understanding
3. Respecting
4. Honoring as joint heirs

“Rarely will we agree on all the topics of marriage. Rarely will we agree on the exact proper use of money, or the exact proper amount of sexual intimacy, or the exact proper way to handle the children. God did not design everyone to agree exactly on all these matters. Rather, God redeems and enables husbands and wives to reflect Christ and the Church amidst their disagreements, and to grow in love for one another under every circumstance. This love tends to be expressed through gracious speech, humble listening, eagerness to serve, and longing for Christ to be magnified in our marriages.”
Dr. John Henderson, Catching Foxes: A Gospel-Guided Journey to Marriage

God’s relationship instructions for ALL believers v8-9

1. Be harmonious
2. Be sympathetic
3. Brotherly
4. Kindhearted
5. Humble in spirit
6. Not vengeful or vindictive
7. Giving blessings

“The Christian community, when it is working properly, offers men and women a way of being related to one another that cuts across all the things that divide us… There is nothing else in human life that levels distinctions and creates new relationships like the knowledge that one has been saved by grace.”
Fleming Rutledge, Means of Grace

“Satan wants us to shape our relationships around what he is doing in the world. God wants us to shape our relationships around what the Lord Jesus has already done for us.”
An unnamed Palestinian pastor in Bethlehem, quoted by Christopher J. H. Wright at Langham Partnership Vision weekend 2024

“It is the cross that allows us, no, demands of us, that we put down our weapons and let go of our anger. There God’s righteous anger against us was appeased.  Now he calls us to the same forgiveness, so that our relationships are ruled by grace and kindness rather than bitterness and revenge.”

Richard Gibson, The Consolations of Theology