Pastor Sullivan's Blog

In the Name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. On Sunday we entered into the most solemn part of the Lenten season. Passiontide directs our focus upon the sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ for our sins. St. Peter has written quite a bit about Christ’s suffering and death for such a short epistle, saying that “ Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit ” (3:18). He has said that Christ “ bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness -- by whose stripes you were healed ” ( 2:24). Peter has taught us much about the significance of Christ’s death. But He teaches us more. At the beginning of this final chapter he calls himself “ a witness of the sufferings of Christ .” He witnessed Christ’s agony in Gethsemane. He saw Christ’s trial in the house of the High Priest. That’s where he den...

In the Name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. “ Christ suffered for us in the flesh. ” This is mystery of the gospel. What’s so mysterious about it is that Christ consists of two natures, a human nature and a divine nature. It’s impossible for divinity to suffer. Suffering is the antithesis of divinity. So God the Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity, condescends and assumes human flesh. He doesn’t possess a man that already existed. Nor did He come only in the appearance of flesh, like a hologram man. He assumes human nature so that He might suffer and die. This means that we can call Christ’s suffering God’s suffering. Christ’s blood is God’s blood. Christ’s death is God’s death. All these happened according to the human nature in Christ, but that humanity is inseparably united to the divine nature. That’s what makes this suffering and death so mysterious. On Sunday we enter into Passiontide, the final two weeks of Lent and those final two weeks ...

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. I think it’s self-evident, to Christians at least, that our day is very similar to the patriarch Noah’s day. Genesis 6:5 says, “T he LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually .” That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We live in an age in which everyone does what is right in their own eyes. They’ve cast off the true God, their Creator, and His will in order to be their own gods, living according the desires and imaginations of their hearts. In the days of Noah the Lord put a time limit on mankind’s wickedness of one hundred and twenty years. That’s how long they had to repent or they would face destruction. Noah, the “ preacher of righteousness ” ( 2 Peter 2:5) proclaimed this to the unbelieving world while building his ark as the Lord had commanded him. His preaching only hardened them all the more. They rejected repentanc...

In the Name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. In chapter 1, St. Peter taught us that we live in the world but we are not of it. We are elect foreigners, refugees of the heavenly country because we have been “ born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever ” ( 1:23). At the beginning of chapter 2 Peter continues this initial thought. “ Desires the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good ” (2:2). Peter isn’t making a distinction between “infant” Christians and mature Christians. St. Paul makes than comparison in 1 Corinthians 3. He tells the Corinthians that he initially fed them with milk, not solid food, but he had expected them to have been weaned off milk and eating solid food, though they weren’t. That’s not what Peter is doing here. Peter writes to all Christians to tell them that they should be like newborn babes. As newborn babes ...

In the Name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. St. Peter writes to “ the pilgrims of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia ” (1:1) to encourage them to live their lives as what they truly are. What are they? They are pilgrims, but perhaps the word ‘refugees’ strikes a more familiar tone in our ears. These refugees haven’t cross a border. They’re not living in a nation not their own. They are Christians, scattered across the provinces in Asia Minor, modern day Turkey. They are “ elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father ,” (1:2) meaning that God has chosen them from eternity for salvation. They are sanctified in the Spirit, that is, they have been given faith to believe the gospel. They have been set apart “ for obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ ,” (1:2) which means they obey, or hear, the gospel. By faith they are sprinkled with the blood of Jesus and cleansed from all their sins. They are God’s...