Audio Transcript

First Peter 1:5 holds a very special place in your life, Pastor John — a precious text about God’s keeping power over his children, of those “who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” So precious. This is the promise that you wanted as a banner over the life of your mom, and so had a phrase from this text (in the King James Version) etched into her grave: “Kept by the power of God.” Ruth Piper was kept by the power of God in this life until her tragic passing in an automobile accident at the age of 56. You were 28 at the time of the accident, almost fifty years ago now. It will be fifty years ago in just a couple of months actually — on December 16. You told us about the life-altering phone call you got, back in APJs 1577 and 1936. No need to go back into that story here.

I mention 1 Peter 1:5 because the text also adorns our Bible reading from yesterday, as we start this new week. Melissa, a podcast listener, wants to know more about what the verse means. “Hello, Pastor John,” she writes. “What does Peter mean that we are guarded ‘by God’s power . . . through faith’? How exactly does God guard us by his power but through faith? Is he guarding us through our own faith? I don’t understand how this works. Is his guarding of me thereby ultimately dependent on me and my faith? This is a text that should give me great comfort and it doesn’t. Not yet.”

Here’s the passage, 1 Peter 1:4–5 — let’s get it in front of us so that we know what we’re talking about. We have “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” One of the wonderful things about this promise is that there is a double guarding or a double keeping.

First, God is keeping or guarding an inheritance in heaven for us. Verse 4: we have “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept [or guarded] in heaven” by God for us. So, when we get there, the inheritance will be fabulous and not ruined or disappointing in any way. That’s the one keeping.

Here’s the other one. The other keeping is that God is guarding us for it. He not only keeps it — the inheritance — for us in heaven, but he keeps us for it. He guarantees that it will be there and that we will get there. That’s the double amazing thing in this verse — why it’s one of the favorites of many people, including me. “By God’s power [you] are being guarded [or kept] through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” In other words, you’re going to make it.

Who Sustains Our Faith?

Now, the key question for how we get strength from this — How do we actually apply it to our lives and draw down joy from this promise? — the key question is whether “kept by God through faith” means we sustain our own faith and then God responds by guarding or keeping us, or whether God sustains our faith and in that way he keeps us and guards us. In the first meaning, we are the decisive cause of our ongoing faith, and in the second meaning, God is the decisive cause of our ongoing faith. Which is it?

The answer to that question decides how we will answer this question: How can I be sure I will wake up a believer tomorrow morning? In one case, the answer would be, “God will see to it that I believe tomorrow morning. He will sustain my faith. He’s promised to sustain it, keep it, guard it. He’ll keep me believing.” In the other case, the answer would be, “I can only hope that my independent, self-determining will is not overcome tonight by my flesh or the devil or the world since the decisive, sustaining power must come from me.”

Five Reasons for Confidence

I see at least five reasons for thinking that Peter intended to strengthen and encourage us by teaching that God sustains our faith, and that’s how he guards us for final “salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

1. The other view doesn’t make sense.

I don’t think the other interpretation — that we are the decisive sustainers of our own faith — makes any sense in this verse. I think it’s got a built-in contradiction. Suppose you — we humans — provide the decisive cause of sustaining your faith day by day. That’s what you provide. My question is, What’s left for God to do to guard you for your heavenly inheritance, your final salvation? You might answer, “In response to my faith, he defeats the destructive effects of Satan and the destructive effects of suffering and the pleasures of this world. That’s what he does in response to my self-sustained faith.”

But think about it. There’s only one way that Satan and suffering and worldly pleasures can prevent you from attaining heaven — namely, by destroying your faith, which you’ve already accomplished. So, God does not need to provide that. You’ve provided that. Satan’s accusations don’t keep you out of heaven. The pain of suffering doesn’t keep you out of heaven. The allurements of the world don’t keep you out of heaven. The only way Satan, suffering, worldly pleasures can keep you out of heaven is by causing you to turn away from Christ and stop believing in him as your supreme treasure. And that’s what you yourself have already by sustaining your own faith.

If you say God prevents the satanic destruction of your faith after or as a result of your faith, which you yourself have triumphantly and decisively sustained, that’s a contradiction. God doesn’t guard you from doing what you’ve already done. That’s a contradiction. What you are really saying is that you yourself protected yourself from the faith-destroying effects of Satan, suffering, worldly pleasure. That is, you have guarded yourself for the inheritance through faith, and God is simply not needed to get you there by guarding or sustaining your faith.

“God not only keeps our inheritance for us in heaven, but he also keeps us for it.”

So, I conclude that being guarded through faith by God’s power means God’s power sustains our faith, and that’s why Satan and suffering and pleasure do not succeed in destroying our faith. God’s power sustains our faith. He keeps us for the final salvation by keeping our faith. That’s argument number one. The other view doesn’t make sense. It has a built-in contradiction.

2. We believe ‘through him.’

In this same chapter, 1 Peter 1:20–21 says, “[Christ] was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you who through him are believers in God.” Now, I think “through him [you] are believers in God” means he is the cause and the sustaining power of your faith.

3. Faith comes by new birth.

Verse 3 says, “According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3). Now, we know that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is inseparable from hope. Hope is faith in the future tense, you might say. So, the way we became Christians was owing to no merit in ourselves. We didn’t do anything. We were dead. We had to be born again. God in “his great mercy . . . caused us to be born again.” That has caused us to have spiritual life, and that life manifests itself in hope and faith. That’s the way it remains all our lives, I’m arguing. Our faith was brought into being by mercy — undeserved mercy, totally lopsided, Godward mercy — and it is sustained by mercy.

4. God promises to keep us.

This interpretation fits with the promise of the new covenant in which Christians now live. This is who we are. We are blood-bought new-covenant people. And here’s how Jeremiah describes the new covenant, which is the experience of believers today. In Jeremiah 32:40, the Lord says, “I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.” That’s the promise of God-sustained faith. That’s the heart of the new covenant — the heart of it. God puts his fear — puts faith — in us, so that we don’t make shipwreck of our faith. That’s the promise and difference between the new and old covenant.

5. Jesus intercedes for us.

Finally, in Luke 22:31 there is a beautiful picture of how this faith-sustaining work of God happens — it happened then and happens now because of Christ’s intercession for us in heaven. Jesus says to Peter the night before his crucifixion, “Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat.” What does that mean? It means he’s going to squish you through the strainer and sift out all your faith. He’ll leave you there, and your faith will be stuck in the wires. That’s what he’s trying to do tonight. “But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32).

In other words, I have asked your Father in heaven to sustain your faith. That’s what I do. “And when you have turned again” — not if you have turned again — when you have turned again. He knows it’s going to happen. He asks God for it. When you’ve repented, then “strengthen your brothers.” So, that’s a picture of how Christ intercedes for us today. He’s interceding for us, and that’s what he’s doing — he’s asking our Father to sustain our faith just like he did for Peter.

So, for those five reasons at least — there are more — I think we can rejoice. Indeed, I think we should leap for joy that not only is God keeping a treasure for us in heaven secure; he is also keeping us secure for heaven. “By [his] power . . . through faith” — this is through sustaining our faith.