Welcome to the Paul Tripp podcast, where pastor and best-selling author Dr. Paul David Trim connects the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life.

Have you searched and inquired carefully about your salvation?

Today, we continue through Paul's series, Elect Exiles in the Book of 1st Peter, and and in this sermon Paul explains how the process of investigative reporting on the story of your eternal destiny can keep you stable in times of trouble. Here's Paul.

Well I sat in a car on the Roosevelt expressway that had just been destroyed in an accident.

Trying to make sense out of my life.

Asking those questions that you ask in those moments.

I guess I was doing what we all do.

Somehow, some way everyone in this room is an investigative reporter.

You ask tough questions about your world. Maybe you ask those

in a moment of financial difficulty. Maybe you ask those in a moment of physical sickness.

Maybe you ask those in a moment when you face the rejection of another person.

Maybe you've asked those when a dream dies. But you ask those kinds of questions. It's human to do.

You want to know. You want to understand that capacity to ask questions, that desire to know, that desire to have some kind of inward security,

something that makes sense out of your life. You will never escape that because it's part of who

you are as a creature made in God's image. And the way you answer those questions really does shape

the way that you respond to life and shaping the way you respond to life really

sets the direction of your life. You could say that that moment for me was a hermeneutic moment.

Herbinutics is the science of interpretation.

That's an interpretive moment somehow, some way.

I'm going to make sense out of that moment,

and the sense that I make is terribly important.

Now, one of the problems is that this is so natural to us and so spontaneous and so much a part of who we are as human beings, we can have this function going on profoundly important as it is and not realize that we're doing it. Not realizing again and again and again, you're stepping

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