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Done with Sin

Perseverance, Strength, Endurance, Grit…These are all words that most everyone wants to have describe them. We want to be tough, to be able to handle whatever life may throw at us, and there is nothing wrong with that desire. In fact, those are all good things to aspire to! However, Peter reminds us at the beginning of his 4th chapter that the path to those things spiritually is often through suffering. That sounds cruel or depressing, but it’s a fairly universal principle we see in lots of other areas of life.

If you want a muscle to become stronger, you don’t coddle it or never let it see pain or hardship…any “fitness expert” who tells you that is trying to take all your money. To make a muscle stronger you make it suffer! You make it burn, make it strain, make it apply more force than it ever has before – and after all of that pain and exhaustion, your muscle recovers in the following couple days, and is left stronger than it was before. This should not surprise us, but this if often how God strengthens our “spiritual muscles” as well. 

The reason Peter says that “whoever suffers in his body is done with sin,” is not to call us to some sort of weird self-inflicted physical punishment to overcome our sins. (You would think that goes without saying, but history has had a handful of groups interpret it this way) No, what Peter is saying is that if you have endured hardship, trusted God to lead you through horrific situations, or – in the case of his specific audience – been physically tortured for following Christ, then your faith will have been strengthened to such a degree that sin will have lost its grip on you. To be honest, the times I reflect on when sin had the biggest hold on me were the times I was most comfortable in my life and my faith. Pursue Jesus, be a “stranger” in this world, take some heat for it, wrestle and struggle and endure some tough times for the sake of living like Jesus would, and Peter promises you will find sin has a much weaker grip on your life.