April 26, 2026 Gerald Griffin - When Pressure Knocks. Who Answers?

Gerald Griffin — 2026-04-26

Chapters:

• 00:00 — Welcome & Introduction
• 05:43 — When Pressure Knocks
• 08:28 — Point 1: Don't Let Flesh Answer
• 23:07 — Personal Story: Visitation
• 30:37 — Point 2: Submit and Do Good
• 35:18 — Point 3: Let Christ Answer
• 40:12 — Conclusion: Pressure Will Knock

Transcript

0:00

— Welcome & Introduction —

It is great to see everyone. Let me make a comment, a moment of housekeeping, and then we will jump into the text. The comment is simply this: 0:00

I'm always surprised how that Sheila gets my notes and then pulls together songs that match. She just gets the notes. She doesn't get, you know, the content, and yet that second song was so dead on for what we're going to talk about today. Now, now some housekeeping. I do not like, unlike Jim Denison, I don't like to write. I don't like to write at all. I don't know how many times through my ministry somebody said, I want you to write a book, I want you to do this, and I'm like, no, no, I don't do it. And I resisted it so much until about year 20 of the pastorate, and one day it dawned on me that I'm writing a book every week, it's called a sermon. Every week there's a different chapter, and so I said, that's the only writing I really enjoy. That being said, I'm trying to get better about newsletters. And many of you know exactly what I do outside of coming in here to preach. I started a ministry, it's been two years now, called the number two Cultivate. You can always follow me online, it's simply 2cultivate.org. And what I do is I offer free coaching, counseling, mentoring to pastors. And so I go to see them, if they need help, I go to see them. Like for instance, on the way here, a pastor in the Austin area sent me a text, and he said, hey, I need you. Are you in Austin this week? And I said, no, I'm heading up to Possum Kingdom. But I can talk this evening or I can talk in the morning. And I sent that off, and I don't hear another word. That's just pastors. They just don't answer. You know, they need something right now, and if you can't help them, they move on. And so I'll reach out to him again next week, but that's primarily what I do is I meet one-on-one with pastors, and I kind of help them through some things. Help, you know, sometimes it's a sounding board, sometimes it's advice, it's not a lot of advice. I try not to do that, I do more coaching to where I kind of help people come to the idea themselves. So anyway, I don't like to write newsletters. I wrote a newsletter last week. So I try to put one out every couple of months. If you would like to have the newsletter, I can email it to you. Just give me your email address. Be glad to put you in the, in the, what do you call it, Excel sheet that I have, that I import, and send those out. So be glad to do that. Just let me know after it's over, give me your email address and I will make sure you're on that, and I'll forward you the one I wrote last week. Now we're going to be in, some of you asked, we're in 1 Peter chapter 2, just like Mr. Thurman told me to do. He said, take chapter 2. So taking chapter 2 means today we have a lot of scripture to go through. So here's kind of the way we're going to do it. We're going to look at the scripture. I'm going to give you from the very beginning kind of the outline of what we're going to look at, how it, how it lays out between verse 11 and 25. And then I'm going to point out certain passages, certain phrases. That's why, Mike, you have so many slides. There's certain passages that I'm just laying out. This is what this term means. And that's only because it's better if we don't just hear it, it's better if we hear it and see it, okay? So let me begin by this. As much as I hate to say it, some people in here may have a little bit of FOMO today. Y'all know what FOMO is, right? We learned that from our youngest daughter when she was in college. That is fear of missing out. And so you may have a little bit of jealousy for some of us who've reached a certain age that we understand weekends better than you do. You'll understand it someday. But Saturdays and Sundays, the best thing about Saturday and Sunday, besides worship of course, is naps. Naps. You don't have those when you have young children, and I'm sorry for that. You'll learn it later. But naps. I learned about naps when I was in college. It was Sunday afternoon, and I could take a nap. We'd go, we ate the best lunch, or the best lunch of the whole week was in the dining hall, small little Baptist school. And it was almost always fried chicken and fresh made rolls, mash-- it was that kind of stuff, right? So we would eat until we induced a carb coma. Go back to the dorm, church is over, you're full, and we would take a nap. And undoubtedly, somebody who had not learned the value of naps yet, which I then had to lay aside for several years because we had kids, and picked it back up again when appropriate. Someone would knock on the door. So I'm in the dorm. I'm having the best sleep. It is peaceful. It is restful. And... Gosh, I hate that. That is the feeling of coming out of peace and relaxation to shockingly awake. And I was known for being angry when people woke me up. That was my thing. And I thought, well, how could you not be angry? You were having the best rest and now it's gone. And when we think about what it is like to be shocked out of peace and rest, that is exactly what pressure does to us. We like to live a life where things are peaceful, things are restful, and then all of a sudden... Pressure comes in. That's what Peter is talking about in this whole passage.— When Pressure Knocks — It is, that's why I called it, "When Pressure Knocks, Who Answers?" When pressure comes into your life and it exerts itself, it makes itself known. It becomes something that you cannot ignore. Because when you're taking that nap, three taps on the door is usually followed by three more that are louder. And that's the way pressure does us. Peter was dealing with folks who were getting a lot of pounding on the door kind of pressure.

And so we're going to look at that passage today because life pressure works the same way like that knock. It punches you out of that peace and rest. And here's the crazy thing. We don't seem to understand that pressure is a norm. It's what happens in our lives. So here's the question: 6:16

When pressure does knock, who or what inside of you answers the door? Because the reality is you don't answer in a vacuum. Something inside you answers first. Sometimes it's like I did out of those naps, it's anger. Pressure knocks and I'm angry because of it. Sometimes it's fear. Sometimes it's pride, and I don't want to deal with this, and sometimes it's just the need to control. And pressure comes knocking, and I think I have to control this. Whatever answers in that moment reveals who really is in control. What's really in control of your life. And Peter is telling these folks exactly how they should answer the door when pressure knocks. He's writing to people who are living with that knock. And what's striking is he doesn't tell them how to get out of being interrupted in life by pressure. He tells them how to answer that pressure. In our text, he begins with a pressure. And this is the outline, this is kind of the overflow of the whole passage. He begins with, first of all, when pressure comes from the outside, and then he talks about when pressure comes from the... I'm sorry, the inside. And then he talks about the outside, and then he talks about the extreme. The inside, the outside, and the extreme. So you have internal pressure, external pressure, and extreme pressure. But one question will run through all of it. Who answers? What answers when that comes into your life? So point number one. And by the way, I do have three points. I heard Chuck Swindoll this last week, I heard a little clip of what he said. And I thought about it when Tammy and I drove in and we saw the Longhorns. Swindoll said that some sermons are Longhorn sermons. Y'all heard this? There are two points on the end and a lot of bull in between. So, that's, uh, I have three points for that very reason. So there's not a lot of bull in between.

— Point 1: 8:27

Don't Let Flesh Answer —

Number one: When pressure knocks, don't let the flesh answer. That is the norm. We talked a little bit about that last week. Living in the old man, living in the new man. The old person, the new person. Living led by the spirit of God, guided by the spirit of God, or led by the old desires and the old ambitions and the old attitudes that we have. Here it is, in verse 11: 8:28

"Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage against your soul.""Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, not if they do, but when they do, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation." There's several things, several phrases, several terms in here that when people read this, they don't always understand it. It doesn't flow very easily. Peter, many times when he writes, I think he's a little wooden in the way he says things, and you have to kind of dig into it and think about it. I think Paul is easier to understand, in my opinion, than Peter. Paul's theology is deep, but he writes a little bit smoother. So we're going to try to break this down a little bit. Because Peter doesn't start with behavior outside of us. He starts with behavior inside of us. He starts by identity. Just like we did last week, the same kind of passage. He starts with who we really are. And that first word is beloved. Now, I grew up listening to old sermons. I mean, I was a teenager, I came to Christ at 14 years old. And I was introduced by our youth minister that we should listen to these old sermons. So we had cassettes. And we had these cassettes of these guys preaching. And almost always when you get an older preacher in the pulpit, he would say, "Beloved, turn in your Bibles to say... Beloved." And I thought, that's the strangest language in the world, beloved. But beloved is exactly the way Peter hits hits it here. And so before he tells us how to deal with pressure, how to answer pressure on the inside, he reminds us of actually who we are before God. Beloved reminding them that above everything else, even when pressure, here's a key, even when pressure comes into your life, something you do not like, you are still loved by God. That doesn't change anything. Testing, temptations, trials, problems, do not tell you God is mad at me. They do not tell you God doesn't love me. You keep the identity of who you are. You are always beloved by God. Not barely tolerated. We might know some people that we barely tolerate, but God does not barely tolerate you. He absolutely genuinely and securely loves you.

And the reason I think that Peter calls them beloved to begin the whole passage is because he's about to say some pretty strong things. Some things that are not easy. So then he says the next thing: 11:27

"I urge you." This is not casual advice. This is a pressing language. He's saying something that carries weight, and he expects a response. If I were to bring all of us together, and we were talking about something, and I said, "I urge you to do this." That's strong language. It's not a suggestion. And so he reframes it right from the beginning. First of all, reminding us that his identity is loved by God, but then reframing their entire existence. He says, "You are sojourners and exiles." That's what that second song had in it. I thought that was interesting. It talked about pilgrims. The same word. In other words, you don't really belong here. So the first thing we need to understand is our identity. We're totally loved by God. No matter what comes in our lives, he loves us. Number two, we're not really a part of where we are anymore. We're pilgrims, we're traveling through this life.

And then he gives the command. The command is simply this: 12:30

abstain from the passions of the flesh. Not manage them, not put passion on a diet, not redirect them, but abstain from them. Why should we do that? Because those passions, those desires that are not the desires that are of the spirit. Those desires that we used to have, such things as hate, and envy, and pride. Such things as always trying to get even, such things as always trying to win. Such things as always trying to have the last word. Such things as always trying to be above everyone else and be the real winner in this situation. The things that we hear in every phase of our culture, and I think of every culture that has ever existed, there are winners and losers, you got to be a winner. He says you need to put that down, because it wages war against your soul. Identity. We are loved by God. We are not really a part of where we are anymore. We are transported, we are children of God. We belong to heaven. We belong to the Lord. We are led by the spirit. And because of that, we should abstain, put to death those things that are trying to destroy us, and that's namely our sins. Because when you don't do that, you're not realizing that the things that you give in to are waging against your soul, the battle within. That's not exaggerated language. Peter is saying something about a real, ongoing battle. The desires that are active and pressing and constantly looking for ground to take. And here's the point. If we give in to sin nature, if we live in a way that has nothing to do with following Jesus, not obeying the spirit. If we do that, then that part of our lives is taking ground. Do y'all understand that language? Taking ground. Anybody watch the Wonder Woman movie that came out about 10 years ago? I don't remember the exact name of it, but y'all know who Wonder Woman is, right? So she lands on a beach, and they're saying, "We can't, this is No Man's Land. You can't get across it. Every time we start sending men out, they get shot." And so Wonder Woman is here folks, there's no need to fear anymore. And she steps forth on that battlefield, and they're shooting bullets at her, and she has these little bracelets on, she's knocking that bullet away, and knocking that bullet away, and it goes in slow motion a couple times. Real slow moving, and she's tossing this thing, and it all goes over here and tears up everything. She took the ground back. Well, I'm going to tell you, your internal desires to sin are stronger than Wonder Woman. They can devastate you. They can devastate you by what you think about, by the way you look, I mean, the way you see things, the way you say things. Remember in the book of James, he keeps talking about the tongue being a small member of the body, yet it can set the course of life on fire.

Yet the tongue can steer the whole ship. So it takes ground if you let it. So Peter's first statement is simply this: 15:51

you can't let your carnal desire, that's the Bible term, your sinful nature, your inward man that is not renewed by the spirit take over. Which means that pressure doesn't create what comes out of you. Pressure reveals what's in you. Put someone under pressure and you see who they are. Years ago, there was a... there was a writer, I think he was a Presbyterian, old Presbyterian pastor and he became a writer, and he started writing some songs. Some of you may have heard his most famous song, which is "No One Ever Cared For Me Like Jesus". Anybody ever hear that song? His name was Charles Weigle. Charles Weigle lived in Tennessee, and he was identified with a church there, he would go to that church and do different things, he's writing all these songs, and he loved roses. Loved roses, and he had a rose garden. He lived by himself, his wife had died earlier. And someone came to visit him one time, and they knocked on the door, he didn't come, they kept knocking on the door, finally he comes to the door and he was a little bit sweaty. And he said, "I'm sorry, I was outside," and they let him in, after a few moments they said, "Uh, Dr. Weigle, I think I know where you've been." "You've been out with the roses in your rose garden. Because the fragrance of the roses is still on you. I can still smell it." Because that's where you've been. That's where you've been spending your time.

And he wrote a song later called "A Garden of Roses is Jesus." Talking about when we spend time with Jesus. Listen folks, the difference is, if we're not with Jesus, we really don't smell that good. I mean our sin nature is not great. And so Peter is simply saying this: 17:38

you need to understand that there are times when pressure comes and what is stepping forward during those pressure times needs to be reflective of Jesus. So don't let sin control you. Because if you haven't already decided how you're going to respond when pressure happens. If every time you act like it's a nap and I just woke up and I can't believe it happened. If instead you understand things will happen, then you can be ready for it. And that's when Peter says, "Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable." So do you see the the whole point of what Peter is trying to say in chapter two is simply this. Last week we talked about unity within the church. Today he's taking a turn and saying, because of that unity, now we need to firm up the way we answer when pressure is coming because the people outside the church. Last week it's all about us doing the right things, loving one another. This week it's all about, since we're loving one another and doing the right things, how are we going to appear, he calls them the Gentiles, the witness outside. "So that when they speak against you as evildoers." It's really shocking to me how we think everyone will absolutely love us. When I started pastoring, I was told by so many older pastors, when you start pastoring, when you preach, don't think everybody's gonna love it. And I said, you mean everybody won't like my style? No, it means they won't like you. Not your style, you. And I thought to myself, I wouldn't have said it out loud, I would have thought, that's ridiculous. Everybody loves me. How could you not love me? My mama told me that. And then I found out, people didn't like me sometimes. And it was shocking to me, because I thought, well, I'm trying to do the right thing. I'm not doing this for the wrong reasons. But here's the thing, some people just won't like you, and that's not just pastors, that's anybody. But when you represent Jesus, when you are someone part of a united group of people called Christians and you say we follow Jesus. And even though, and they're looking at this, we talked about it last week, they're looking to see whether or not you really love one another. Jesus said that's how they'll know you're my disciples, 'cause you love one another. And you work through all that, and the Spirit is working to unify you. Even at that, when you turn outward and you get the pressure from outside, and even if you handle it well, even if when they knock on the door and that pressure, and you the one that answers is full of peace and love and joy and longsuffering, they still won't like you. There's still going to be that. So he says simply this, when they speak evil against you, it's not that you fight harder or argue better, but when they speak against you, they may see your good deeds. That's the quote. They can see them, watch them, observe them over time. Even those who may oppose you for what you believe and who you say you are are still watching. And what they see over time can do something significant. Next passage says, "and glorify God on the day of visitation." Do you know what that means? Most people read that and say, well, what in the world is that? Now I grew up as a Baptist. I knew what the day of visitation was. It was Tuesday nights. Tuesday nights is when the church invited you to come back to the church and go on visitation. Do y'all know what visitation is? Do we have any old Baptists here? Anybody know what that is? Okay. Visitation is, again, back to knocking on a door. I'd get somebody's name, maybe they visited the church before, and I know that on Tuesday night, at about dinner time, they want me to knock on their door, don't they? What were we thinking? Anyway, so we'd go and we'd knock on a door and we'd say, "Hey, I'm so-and-so and I'm from the church you visited last week, and we wanted to pay that visit back tonight right as your family is sitting down to a nice dinner, and you've been at work all day and you are so tired, but here I am in my suit knocking on your door to tell you about our church." What? It's not that visitation. It's not that visitation. He says glorify God on the day of visitation. So what does that mean? The day of visitation is Peter's way of saying there is going to be a time when God is going to visit into their life. God is going to make Himself known in their life. Stop everything. When did that happen to you? Let's make it personal. Can I give you my quick personal story? Of course I can, I have the pulpit. Here we go.

— Personal Story: 23:06

Visitation — I told you before, last week I told you my mom and dad divorced when I was ten. I was with my mom for about six months, then I went to live with my dad. My dad had remarried. And I'm not trying to use terms unkindly here, but he did not know when he married this lady, which was pretty fast, it was one of those rebound things, right? She's a very pretty lady, but she had some real issues mentally. And I'm not giving you a layman's definition, we found out later, yeah, she really had real issues. So much so that I was scared of her. So much so that my dad and I both when we talked about it thought she could actually hurt us. I mean, and so at 13 years old, the strangest thing happened. I began to learn to sleep with an eye open. I hope you've never done that. I hope you've never had to learn that. But I just think about, I've been ripped out of my home as a kid, I don't have any of my relatives around me, none of my cousins, and I have a lot of them. And I'm far away from all of them, and I'm with my dad, and my brother's moved off to another state, it's just me and my dad, and this lady that he's married is now exhibiting, it was actually schizophrenia, and she's exhibiting these behaviors where she actually called herself a different name. And she dressed differently and wore her hair differently. And she would come in looking like that, you'd say, "Oh, she's so and so today." And my dad doesn't know what to do. I mean, it wasn't like today, you just, you know, run, go find a good counselor. He did not know what to do. So I started sleeping with the eye open towards the door. It's the weirdest thing in the world. And then I realized that sometimes I would hallucinate someone coming in, and I could not wake myself up. Anybody have a dream like that before? Something's happening, you can't wake up? So I had those things going on. So a lot of turmoil was going on in my life. And at one point, at one point, one night, it was so bad that it dawned on me, maybe I should pray about it. I thought, well, I guess I could. So I'm lying in the bed, and I look up at the ceiling, and I started talking to God about it. And a little voice inside of me said, "Well, you remember when the last time you prayed was, right?" And I stopped and started thinking about it. Ah, that was when I was nine. I was pray-- I was praying my parents wouldn't divorce. That little voice came back and said, "How'd that turn out for you? Well, they divorced anyway. So God didn't answer that prayer, did He?" "That little voice just kept talking to me. And I said, well, I guess He didn't. I wonder why God didn't answer the prayer. Oh, I don't know. But does God always answer prayer?""That little guy, he should have shut his mouth. But he kept talking to me, and he finally said, 'Well, maybe He didn't answer your prayer 'cause He's not there. Maybe there is no God.' " And that scared me. Because I started thinking, well, maybe there's not. And so it was the first real prayer I probably have ever prayed. And it, I'm almost 14, I'm 13. I'm lying in the bed, and my prayer, I will not tell you what it was, but I'll tell you what it was like. It was me, a little kid, lying on a bed shaking my fist up at the ceiling, saying, "I don't even believe in you. I don't think you're there. If you're there, you need to do something. Otherwise, I'm going to do whatever I want, and I'm not going to try to live like a good life, I'm going to do whatever, I'm going to do everything wrong." And I said, "I dare you." And then I started crying, and I fell asleep. One week later, my dad says, "Let's go visit your brother." Your brother is back in Texas. So we drove from Houston to Dallas. And we drove to Dallas, and my brother's different. He's talking differently, he's, I can't figure out what's going on with him, but he's just not quite the same person. He seems happy, he seems like he's got, you know, just a peace that he never had. He was always angry about everything. And he says, hey, to me, "Why don't you come over tonight? There's a birthday party I'm going to with my friends." Now my brother is six years older. And so I thought, this is cool. I'm just, you know, 14 or 13 right now, there'll be like 19 year old girls there. This is good. Yeah, I'll go. So we go to that party, and when we got to the party, these girls were different. They were just sweet, and they were kind, and they weren't, you know, what the kind of girls I used to be around, trying to figure it out. And this one guy walks up to me and he says, "Hey, you're Don't brother, right?" And I said, "I am." He said, "You got, got a second? I want to talk to you." Sure. I mean, I don't know if he's going to try to sell me dope or what is, I don't know who this guy is. And by the way, selling me dope was something I heard a lot, people trying to sell me dope. So I was like, sure, whatever. And I sat across from him. He turns out to be a youth pastor. I don't even know what that is. And I said, "I don't know what that is." He said, "Well, I work at a church, and I work with the youth." I said, "So you're a youth director?" "No, we call 'em pastors." "I thought you had a pastor in a church." "Well, they call me a youth pas--" "Okay, whatever." And for the first time in my life, someone shared Christ with me. That is the day of visitation. God was revealing Himself to me. Do you want to know how I can tell it? He said, "Are you a Christian?" And I said, "Yes." And the Holy Spirit brought back that last week, that prayer, where I was trying to talk to God, just didn't know the right language, where I was screaming out saying, I dare you, I don't even believe in you. And the Holy Spirit just jammed that into my heart and said, "Oh, you're a Christian, huh? What'd you say last week?" And it was that moment, where confronted with the gospel, I realized that I was actually a sinner. I wasn't earning my way to heaven. I was just a sinner, and I needed Jesus. And that's when I trusted Christ. It was at that little birthday party with some girl that I did not know. And what Peter is saying right here, is the day of visitation is when God steps into someone's life and makes Himself very clearly seen. And that is God's grace. He doesn't have to do that. And it'd be just like me. God could have taken that little voice of me crying out at him and said, "Then see how well you do on your own. Challenge accepted. I'll leave you alone." But He didn't. And Peter is saying this, the way we li-- and here's the takeaway, the way you live under pressure now becomes part of what God will use to bring that person to Him. So when God opens their eyes, they don't just see Him, they remember what they saw in you, and that glorifies God. Your life becomes evidence. Not a perfect life, none of us have that, but a consistent life. That's why last week we talked about unity, and this week we we talk about pressure happening. Because the big, it's a whole lot bigger than just us getting through the moment when pressure knocks.

— Point 2: 30:36

Submit and Do Good — Number two, when pressure knocks, submit and do good. Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Boy, there's so much in this passage. I mean, like for instance, I could just pull out right here, you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. How do you do that? By doing good. Not by having a quick response. And then he finally ends, he finishes by say, he says, honor everyone. Love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the emperor. Peter has now moved from the inside, where I have to fight who I am, and what I have to struggle with my flesh, to now the outside. And he uses these words, be subject. But be subject for the Lord's sake. In other words, this is willingly placing yourself under authority. It seems that from the moment we understand, and I think it's around three years old, maybe it's earlier for some, maybe it's later for some, around three years old, a child begins to truly understand that they are a separate individual. And this is why my daughter, when Finn reached three, she said he's now a threenager. Y'all heard that term before? A threenager. I said, "What's a threenager?" She said, "He's a teenager at three." 'Cause everything's a battle. Everything-- by the way, any teenagers? I apologize. But this is what my daughter said, not me. And so it's a, it's a pushback, why? Because he's beginning to understand he's his own individual, and he doesn't have to say yes to Mommy. He can say no. Listen, be subject is something we have fought since we were three years old. It's still a part of who is in us. But we don't do it simply because we're good people, we do it for the Lord's sake. It means we willingly place ourselves under authority for the Lord's sake. Because your response is showing who you trust. Not who you submit to. If I submit to authority, it's because of who I trust. Now, I was taught a certain way of acting if the police ever pulled me over. My dad taught me how to do that. He said, "Keep your hands on the wheel. Be absolutely courteous. Do what they say." I never had a problem with that. The guy standing outside the door would be, his hip was about eye level, where I saw a gun. I didn't have a real issue with this. Just rolled the window down, back then it was like this. "Yes, sir." What was I doing wrong? Assumption of guilt. What was I doing wrong? "You were going a little fast, are you in a hurry?""Uh, I don't think I quite understood how fast I was going." "You were doing 15 miles over the speed limit. I'm sorry." And we see where it goes from there. That is submitting. Why am I submitting like that? Well, honestly to the police, because I didn't want to go to jail. But when it's other people, it's because we're submitting to the Lord. And so what Peter's trying to say here is authority can be difficult, but if authority is in your life, submit to it. Now not if it's asking you to sin, and this was in this day and time early Christianity, they could be asking you to sin. They could be asking you to praise the emperor as God. But even then, you don't become bitter. You com-- you obey God and you don't become disrespectful. Peter then says, "For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people." In other words, their lives were their defense to the people that he's talking to. Think about it this way, you've been under leadership that made a bad call in your life, right? You entered under a boss perhaps that absolutely was doing everything wrong. But what we do is we still show honor. Be honorable. Your life is making an argument, and you don't win the argument by being the loudest voice in the room. You win an argument by being the clearest witness in the room. So live as people who are free.

— Point 3: 35:17

Let Christ Answer —

Point number three: When pressure knocks... and this is the extreme, when pressure knocks let Christ answer. And this, he says simply here: 35:18

"Servants be subject to your masters." By the way, when I first wrote this sermon, it was 14 pages long, I cut it down to six. I had to cut out all the stuff about slavery and servanthood. So I feel like I need to say something here. Peter is not saying servants or slaves, it's not saying that's a good system. In fact, I think that if, if the Bible writers were to write about our systems today, they still couldn't say everything was a good system. What they are telling us is how to live a godly life in a bad system. Even in a bad system. The Bible was not written as a, as a physical rebellion against culture. If it had been written that way, everything about the Bible was different. The Bible was not about transforming culture with physical force. The Bible is about transforming culture by transforming us. Once I change, it starts to change everything. Here, here's a, here's a microcosm of that. How do you change a family to being a good family? Do I impose limitations upon them? Do I put rules upon this family? Does a government come in and say you must do this, you must eat dinner together, you must be nice to one another, you must forgive one another? No, you don't do it from the outside. You do it from the inside. You change a family by changing the people that are in the family. And someone has to step forward and say, I'll go first. This is exactly what scripture is trying to do right here. It's trying to show us that we change the entire society by starting with us. He says to us, "For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps." "He committed no sin," talking about Jesus. "Neither was deceit found in his mouth. And when he was reviled, he did not revile in return. And when he suffered, he did not threaten, but he continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.""He," Jesus, "bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness." At this point, Peter has summed up all that we've talked about to this point, and then he says this. "By his wounds, you have been healed." If you had not been healed from who you are, you could not do anything he's talked about yet. "For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls." So let's hit this and let's go out strong. You ready? This is where everything comes to a head. There are times that we won't just have pressure, not just a knock on the door, but I mean extreme pressure. I mean someone running and trying to break down the door kind of pressure. And in those times, Peter is saying, it may not be fair. Fact is, it's not. But we still have to learn how to deal with it. This is not a command to endorse sin, or abuse sin, or ignore sin, scripture makes it clear. There's going to be times in our lives we're called to do things that we have to simply say, no, I can't do that, but even then you do it respectfully. And he says, "For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows." That mindful of God is key to that passage. This is a gracious thing when you're enduring pressure, you have to think about God. You have to remember who to respond to. You're not responding to the person bringing pressure, you're responding to the God who owns, loves, and watches over you. For to this you have been called. That's pretty strong language. You've been called to go through this, because Christ suffered for you. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. That's not weakness. Jesus wasn't weak. He was controlled, he was deliberate, he trusted. That means let Christ answer the door. Let him live in you. And that is a deliberate decision to trust God with more than your instincts. The Bible says he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that means he stood and took our place, that we might die to sin also. And that changes everything. By his wounds you have been healed. That is not surface change, that's deep transformation. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. You're not alone in this. You're with the overseer of your souls. So even when pressure is knocking, you're not alone in this. You don't answer that door to pressure alone.

— Conclusion: 40:11

Pressure Will Knock — Jesus is with you. So let me close this way. Pressure will knock this week for you. Well, how do you know that? Cause it's life. We can pretend it's not going to happen, but it will knock. Some of you may go through really hard pressure this week. Some of you, it's minor. You can plan for the heavier stuff next week. But that's pressure. It's going to happen. It always does. And when it does, something will answer. Something from inside you will respond to that kind of pressure. The pressure could be something as simple as your kids are not doing well. Your pressure could be something as crazy as we have to work through now. Your kids may not be living exactly or doing exactly or making choices exactly the way you raised them.