Blog

Staying On Target Under Fire
1 Peter 2:11-17

We left our son at a remote ranch someplace in Wyoming and drove away on a rainy morning.

There comes that inevitable moment when all your investment, all your instruction, all your parenting is put out there under the light for others to see. That frightening event where you place the product of your parenting out there and step away from your previous “interventive” posture to let them try it on their own. At that moment, it really isn’t so much about your child, now approaching “adulthood,” but its suddenly all about you!

God’s nurtured children ultimately find themselves “out there” where the inquiring minds and scrutinizing eyes can examine the product of His “parenting.” He sends us into the World, to not be of the World, but to intentionally be in it. And when He does this, His transforming work is put under the microscope. Inquiring minds want to know!

“Keep you behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may on account of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.” —1 Peter 2:12

As those born into His family, the reputation of the Father is placed upon the behavior of His children. Like sending your child to a friend’s house for an overnight event and at the moment of dropping them off you say, “You be on your very best behavior. We want them to think nicely of us, you know!” In the same way the Heavenly Father sends His own into His world and does so knowing that how the world thinks of Him will be directly related to what they see in His children.

His mother cried until we crossed back into Nebraska. I wondered all the way if we had lost our minds! He was just 16-years-old and we had just placed him into the hands of a friend who would add him to the LoneTree Bible Ranch camp staff. With us being hours away, there was no longer that parental intervention option. What he was would be what they would see!

Peter encourages us to remember Who’s we are and Why we are here as he instructs us to live in such a way as to make the Father attractive to others. Whatever we do and wherever we go, we bear the family name!

We left our son at a remote ranch someplace in Wyoming and drove away on a rainy morning.
Whatever he was and whatever he would do, he would bear our family name. With great credit to the Lord’s grace and as testimony to his own maturity, he made us look pretty good!

“So let your light shine before men that they may see YOUR good works and glorify your FATHER Who is in heaven!”

See you Sunday, Church

Pastor Tom