It might seem surprising to you that 1st Peter, this book we've been working through now for quite a while, is one of my favorite books in all the Bible because it deals over and over again with suffering and with how to get along in a hostile culture.

And I'm a dyed in the wool, committed card-carrying Christian hedonist, which means I live to

maximize my longest and highest pleasures in this and in the coming world. And yet when you take those two together, the

quest for maximum longest lasting pleasure and a book that's about suffering and about living in a hostile culture. It isn't surprising

that that would be one of my favorite books. At least it's not surprising to people who have lived long enough to discover what Paul Brant, the missionary

surgeon who lived most of his life and ministered in India, wrote in his recent book called Payne Pain the gift that nobody wants. He said, I have

come to see that pain and pleasure come to us not as opposites, but as Siamese twins, strangely joined and intertwined,

nearly all my memories of acute happiness, in fact, involve some element of pain or struggle. Now if that's true, then it wouldn't seem surprising to say that I am

bent on maximizing my happiness and I love the book of first Peter. I have never heard anybody say

I never expect to hear anybody say unless they are the most superficial of all people the deepest

rarest choicest most satisfying pleasures in life have come to me in extended seasons of ease and

earthly comfort. I've never heard anybody say that. It's always the opposite opposite it's like Samuel Rutherford who said I accept being put

into the sellers of suffering because the great king keeps his wine there.

Or like Charles Spurgeon who said, those who dive in the seas of affliction bring up the rarest pearls.

And being a Christian heedness, I am bent on drinking that wine and owning those pearls if it takes going to those sellers and going into that sea.

And First Peter is about that cellar and those C's and that wine and those

purls and they are not at odds and all of you know that you know that you have all lived

the real life and you know that Paul Brant is right.

You do not try to maximize your earthly comforts if your life is going to have the deepest, rarest, most lasting pleasures. You know there's

no correlation. There is no correlation between wealth and joy. There's no correlation between earthly ease and lasting joy.

Those two things don't fit.

It's the sellers of suffering for righteousness and walking with God through the dark paths of faithfulness

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