Strip It Off

St. Peter opens with a call to cast off malice and all that leads from it. The first step of the Christian life is stripping down to become like a newborn, hungry for the Word.

Transcript

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Good morning. This is Northwest.

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What's the one thing you're still holding on to that's keeping you from God? Good morning, this is Northword, the Word, the North, your Week Daily Podcast from St. John's Fort Smith, in collaboration with the Anglican family. I'm your host, Father Aaron. On Sunday we looked at 1 Peter chapter 2, and Peter started us in a very specific place. Not with what we're supposed to become, but with what we need to let go of first. He uses this Greek word which means to cast off. Like stripping off a garment. And the first thing we're to strip off or cast off is malice. Not because malice is the worst sin on some sort of spiritual ranking chart, but because it is the root. Malice is the bitterness we carry toward other people, and every other vice Peter names, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander, they all grow from that root. Pull the root and the rest poluded scrip. Peter doesn't necessarily say this, but we know, and it can be implied, that malice comes from somewhere deeper, from our lack of self-worth, from our undealt with wounds, from the insecurities we've never brought to God, from the undealt issues we've never brought to God. In other words, our bitterness towards others is often a symptom of something unresolved inside of ourselves. So the work isn't just to stop being bitter, the work is to get honest with God about what the bitterness is protecting. Peter goes on to tell us that when we've gotten rid of the bitterness, we have to become like newborns. And that's a striking image. A newborn has one orientation: the mother. Nothing else in the room matters. They're not distracted by yesterday or worried about tomorrow. They're just hungry, and they know exactly what they need and where to find it. That's the posture Peter is calling us back to. Stripping away the things that have cluttered our lives, the resentments, the pretenses, the games we play. And getting back to that hunger. Hunger for the word, the way a babe hungers for his mother's milk. Hungry for Christ Himself, who is the Word, who is the source of all life. So this week, I want to ask you something simple. What is still on? What haven't you taken off yet? And we don't have to figure out the answer right away, but we do have to start to explore. We need to bring that answer, that question, to the forefront of our mind so that we are thinking about what the answer is or what the answer could be. Because the journey begins not with adding more, it begins with stripping away. Thank you for having joined us this morning. I hope you've enjoyed your time with us. Please feel free to use the text us link in the description to reach out. And I want to give a shout out this morning to the young man who produced this episode, Mr. Sebastian Kikowac. And until tomorrow, God be with you.