God calls us to pursue obedience to him. I was struck this morning by 1 Peter 4:1. I have this verse in my memory verses to remind myself to make war on Sin, but I wanted to know the whole context, so I dropped back to 1 Peter 3. We see here Peter, encouraging us and making arguments for why we should live righteously, that is without sin. You can see in verse 18 that one purpose of Christ's death on the cross is to make us alive in the spirit. Contrast that with the first part of the verse, separating just (him, the sinless one) with the unjust (us, sinners) and we can understand that to be alive in the spirit is a reference to living lives that are free from sin.
Not that we can be sinless! Beautifully, Christ the sinless one bore our unjustness on the Cross and died in our stead to bring us to God!
Again, in verse 20-21, Peter gives us a terrible picture in which God the holy and just destroys all life on Earth in order to save a few righteous and begin again. I say he is just and allowed to do as he wants!, but Peter contrasts this picture with what has happened in believers lives, not that we are saved to continue in sin, but that God has destroyed that which had it's control over us in the same way he destroyed evil men in Noah's time.
That brings us to 1 Peter 4:1-2 in which our lives are compared to the Man Jesus Christ, in which he suffered in flesh to the end that he might not live in sin but that he would live for the will of God. Be encouraged Christian when suffering comes because "he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for the lusts of men, but for the will of God."!
