We Need Good Nourishment
“So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— 3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
In Christian community, looking through the lens of the context of Peter’s letters to persecuted church families, we are called to throw off all sin, or “put away” as v1 says, but in particular the sins here are ones that cause disunity. Impure attitudes, actions or words towards one another have no place in Christian community, but the tragedy is they are embarrassingly all too common in churches. So what tools have we been given to deal with that struggle? The larger context of much of chapters 1 and 2 focused on the Word of the Lord and relationships within the brotherhood, with even the command for the positive alternative to the sins mentioned in 2:1 (malice, deceit, etc.) in the short and simple “love one another” in v1:22.
More than once in 1 Peter we are called to live humble and pure lives and to treat everyone with honor and to fear God (1 Peter 1:22-23, 2:11-17). The reality is, there is no room for us to speak ill of anyone, whether they’re a poor leader, a worldly sinner, or much less a fellow Christian. Our conduct should be characterized by honor and love, out of our honor and fear of the Creator God Almighty. But we know this is hard, that our “passions are at war” within us (James 4:1), and even though we might know we are empowered by the Spirit and called to maturity, our attitude and conduct towards others is still an area we fail in. What are some causes for this?
One time when left relatively unattended at a fellowship event, when he was around 3 years old, our oldest son, Valor, began visiting and revisiting the open snack table. He ended up eating an inordinate amount of things like oreos, cheetos and brownies, to then later not want any real food and then going to bed with a memorable tummy ache.
Likewise, when left unchecked we will fall into sinful habits, especially affecting our hearts and conduct towards one another. We stuff ourselves with the junk of the world and don’t realize that the junk is turning sour in our spiritual guts and then comes back out, making our conduct no different than the world around us. If this feels convicting, like I’m talking about our social media, entertainment, and news habits among other things, I probably am.
One commentary put it this way: “God’s Word has life, gives life, and nourishes life. We should have appetites for the Word just like hungry newborn babes! We should want the pure Word, unadulterated, because this alone can help us grow.” If we fill up on junk daily, wasting hours on ingesting rhetoric that does not reflect the Gospel, and allow our Christian brothers and sisters to do the same, how can we be surprised that garbage like malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander are mostly all that come out of us? We act like toddlers left alone by a junk food potluck and then get surprised when we don’t feel well and aren’t growing properly. The author of Hebrews says this:
Heb 5:11–14. “11 About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. 12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, 13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. 14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
To not continue being “dull of hearing” and to prevent us from losing the appetite for the Word of God, we have to stop feeding our appetite for the impure. We have to lay aside the attitudes, actions and habits that aren’t becoming of a Christ follower, and hold others in the believing community accountable to do the same, because “what flows from the human mouth is inseparable from the human heart (as James 3:6 points out)”. As James also says in 4:17 “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them,” and likewise if we know something is sinful or harmful for our brother or sister, we should not sin by remaining silent. This of course is in the context of personal relationships, since self-righteously putting people on blast publicly would go against v2:1.
The good news is although it’s a lifelong battle to desire what is good above all else, Peter reminds us of the encouragement in Psalm 34, instructing the believers to set aside their immoral behavior and their former lives and to taste and see that the Lord is good.
Psalm 34:8-14 “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! Oh, fear the LORD, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing. Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD. What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”
Once we have tasted the goodness of Christ and His gospel, we will long for more (1 Pet. 2:2), and it is this longing that fuels our continued growth. And to do this, remember that Peter is calling us to throw off sinful behavior (v1), as it is a distraction from our calling to grow in Christ-likeness, and to allow a desire for growth (v2-3) to replace it.