Welcome to Studies with Stearman.

Join us as we look deeper into the Bible.

Strengthen your faith with us, even as we see the day approaching.

And now, here's Gary.

By way of introduction last week, we talked about the times of First Peter, and I want to repeat

that this morning for emphasis.

Peter writes about suffering and he writes about submission.

And one of the things we noted last week is in First Peter, two, 18 through 25, where Peter

talks about submission basically in the affairs of your daily life.

And he was speaking about that in the context of being submissive in all of life, even to the

affairs of government.

If you recall, he wrote this letter in about AD 64.

When Nero was just about to go through the worst of his behaviors, AD 64, he set the fire

in Rome and blamed the Christians for it, basically, had always wanted to remodel Rome in his own

image, and he really couldn't tear down longstanding edifices, but there was a way to get around that,

and that was to burn the city,

which would then give him the opportunity to rebuild it, which is what he did. And he blamed the

Christians for it, and you know the rest. Well, that was beginning in AD 64. About the time Peter

wrote these words, and Peter says, submit yourself to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, would it be to the king, as supreme, or unto governors. To submit yourself to an evil government seems wrong. And yet Christians are never called to be revolutionaries in the traditional sense. All of the epistles urge submission to government. They urge, if you will, a kind of voluntary

suffering. Suffering produces separation. And down through the history of the church, if you've ever

read Fox's book of martyrs, the martyrs are the spark, really, that keeps doctrine and purity and the word alive.

Now, we're going to continue on today with a subject that we broached last week.

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