1 Peter 5:10, Hebrews 12:11, 1 Peter 2:2

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Have you ever thought about how to survive in this world? Maybe that’s something you think about every day as you get up and you look at all of the challenges that face you. And we know we live in difficult times.

I want to share with you a verse from First Peter, chapter five that gives us some encouragement in this regard, emphasizing all of the things that God does so that you can not only survive in this world, but you can thrive in this world

After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who called you into his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, will himself restore, establish, strengthen, and support you. (1 Peter 5:10)

It’s those four things that God is doing for us and will do for us that I want to focus on. First off, that he will restore us. Have you ever broken a bone? What happens when you do that? You go to the doctor, you go to the emergency room and they figure out that the bone is broken via x-rays or such, and then the doctor will take those two bones and put them back together so that they can start to grow back together. And that’s what God does in your life. He restores you. Maybe it’s restoring a relationship that you have with someone that you’ve hurt or been hurt by. But more importantly, he restores the relationship between him and you. He takes us and brings us back together with him. He forgives our sins through Jesus and brings us back into a relationship with Him. God restores you.

And God establishes you. If you have ever walked on a floor that seemed a little bit mushy, maybe you didn’t trust whether or not that floor was going to hold you up. It’s probably because all of the floorboards, everything underneath was rotten. And so you had to have somebody come in and rip out all of those boards and put in new boards so that the floor was solid. And the world’s best carpenter has done that for you. He has come to you and he has taken out that heart of yours that was sinful and rotten, and he’s replaced it with a new heart. He has given you new life. He has established you.

And God also strengthens you. It’s not easy to go through this life and realize that my body is getting weaker. Or maybe you’ve had an injury and your body just needs some strengthening. And so maybe you have a physical therapist to help you out. And he comes in and works with you and works those muscles to make you stronger. Well, that’s what God does for you too. That he comes to you and he makes you stronger through various means. Sometimes it’s through discipline. And that’s not something necessarily that’s fun to go through. In Hebrews chapter 12, verse 11, it says this

No discipline seems pleasant when it is happening, but painful, yet later it yields a peaceful harvest of righteousness for those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:11)

So that’s one way that God might strengthen you. He might cause you to go through difficult times, and those things are going to make you stronger. God strengthens you.

And finally, God supports you. When you’re building a house. One of the most important things to have is a solid foundation. If you have a foundation that has a crack in it or some sort of imperfection, it might cause problems down the road for the whole house. That’s why Jesus uses that picture in Matthew chapter seven when he talks about the wise man building his house on the rock versus the foolish man who built his house on the sand. Which house was it that survived the storm? So God supports you, and he does that actually through what we call the means of grace, through his word, through his sacraments. Peter talks about that earlier in his letter, in chapter two, in the second verse, when he says,

Like newborn babies, crave the pure milk of the word so that by it you may grow up with the result being salvation. (1 Peter 2:2)

That’s how God strengthens you. He gives you a solid foundation. He supports you by listening, having you listen to his word. That’s what he does when we take his supper, when we take the body and blood of our Savior. That’s what happens when every day we go back to our baptisms as we repent of our sins and go back and receive that forgiveness that God gives us through his word. God definitely supports you. So in all of these ways, God restoring you, establishing you, strengthening you, supporting you, he does bring us through this life and takes us all the way to eternal life.

John 6:32-35

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In the United States today, there are 32 million people who have food allergies. That’s one of every ten adults. Now, these culprits of the allergies are about eight or nine primary ones and can range anywhere from milk to eggs to shellfish to wheat to nuts. Sometimes the reaction to eating these foods, if you’re allergic, can be relatively minor. Sometimes it can be a life threatening situation.

In the U.S. today, one of every five adults think that they have an allergy to a food. But the experts say that half of those people truly don’t have allergies in the strict sense of the word. Maybe they have a little bit of a food sensitivity. Maybe they’re just trying to avoid eating certain foods that they don’t like. It’s kind of like how I used to say I was allergic to brussel sprouts.

There’s one food, however, to which we can never say anyone is truly allergic in the sense that it would actually do them harm. In John Chapter six, Jesus talks about this food. He’s having a conversation with some of the 5000 plus people that he had fed miraculously with the five loaves and the two fish. And they were asking him about the manna that had been sent to their ancestors in the wilderness. And Jesus goes on to explain the true source of that manna. He says in John six, starting at verse 32,

Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” (John 6:32-35)

35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

Jesus is the bread of life. Now, maybe you’ve been eating this bread and you’ve been believing in Jesus for longer than you can remember. But is it always pleasant to hear what Jesus says about us in his word? We know He comes to us in his word. Is it always nice to hear that on our own, by ourselves, the way we’re born, that we are completely sinful, that we’re repulsive to God? Do we like to hear that every single day we fall short of God’s standard of perfection? Sometimes we might start to feel that we’re kind of allergic to that sort of talk.

But that’s the difficult part of hearing what God says about us in his word. When we keep eating of Jesus in his word, we hear that He truly is the bread of life. He came to this world not to condemn us, but to save us. When we come to him in faith, when we believe in him, he gives us forgiveness of our sins. He gives us eternal life. He is the only true spiritual nourishment that we need, and we can never truly be allergic to him. Amen.

Luke 15:24

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How do you help someone remember something that’s important? A music teacher might tell her beginning music students that every good boy does fine can help them remember the notes on the treble clef of music. Or maybe you’ll set something to music. Think about when you hear the familiar tune of a hymn and and how the words of that hymn come to mind. Or you might tell a story.

One of Jesus favorite teaching techniques was telling stories. We know them as parables. We’re familiar with most of the parables that Jesus told in the Gospels. Parable of the Prodigal Son. The Parable of the Sower and the soils. The Parable of the Good Samaritan. And there are about 40 others. Some of his parables were pretty short. Some of them were a little bit long. Some of his parables he told to crowds of people. Some of his parables he told to his enemies. Some of his parables he told just to his disciples.

So why parables? Why did Jesus use parables to teach? Well, let’s think about the parable of the prodigal son as an example. One of the main points that Jesus is trying to make in that parable is that no matter how much we sin against God, he’s always willing to welcome us back with open arms. Now, Jesus could have said as much. I mean, it wasn’t like that was a new concept. You go back in the Old Testament and you look at the history of his people and how many times did they run away from God chasing after idols? And yet when they came back to Him in repentance, God was always willing to welcome them back.

So Jesus could have just told his disciples. God is always willing to welcome you back when you come to Him in repentance. But to tell a story with characters, characters to whom they could relate. Characters who could see and touch and and hear things and smell things that they could. Characters for whom or against whom they could root. Well, that would be memorable. You see, when Jesus was telling parables, he wasn’t just trying to convey information. He was actually trying to bring about a change in our hearts. Again, the parable of the Prodigal Son, as an example. When you have run off and you’ve been on your own personal pleasure hunt and you’ve wound up with the pigs instead, is all hope lost? No. Turn to God in repentance. He’s always willing to welcome you back with open and forgiving arms. He wants you to come to him in repentance.

So turn to him in repentance. And the verse from Luke 15:24 that Jesus says in the parable applies to us also, as the father in the parable says about the his son who came back to him, “this son of mine, this child of mine who was dead, is alive. He was lost. But he’s found.”

Pretty powerful pictures, right when it’s Jesus painting these pictures in parables. It’s more than a story. He’s trying to make a connection with you. He’s trying to bring about a change in you. So as you listen to these parables of Jesus, think about that. What kind of change is Jesus looking for? Many times that change is a simple one. He wants you to believe. He wants you to trust in him as your savior. Amen.