A sheep by itself is easy prey. You don’t find healthy sheep wandering the countryside alone. If you do, they are generally the ones who are sick and lagging along the side of the road. God made sheep to flock together, and He made them to flock under a shepherd. This is by design.

Nobody puts suffering on the calendar. You don’t pencil it in alongside your vacations and doctor appointments. Suffering almost always comes out of nowhere and suddenly everything changes. The apostle Peter knew his readers were living in exactly that kind of disruption, enduring the normal aches of a broken world and on top of that suffering because they were Christians. First Peter 4 is his pastoral word to them, and to us. “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12).

Think about your relationships like a rubber band. When you first enter into a relationship with someone, love does not have to stretch much to fit. You enjoy this person. You are aligned. Everything is comfortable. But then you find out what they believe and it stretches. They say the wrong thing and it stretches further. Most of our closest relationships look like a rubber band pulled in six directions at once. The apostle Peter has something to say about that.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that goes like this: “He who waits for a roast duck to fly into his mouth must wait a very long time.” You can sit back, open your mouth, and hope that what you are craving will fly right in, but you will be waiting a long time.

Marriage is not primarily a mechanism for personal happiness. It is a mechanism for spiritual growth. The qualities a good marriage requires align very closely with what Christlikeness looks like in a man’s life. It means dying to yourself. That is not a metaphor. It is the daily reality of what it means to be a Christian husband.

Billy Hunley was not the kind of woman you would notice right away. Quiet, unassuming, married to an intimidating man named Richard who had no spiritual interest whatsoever. Richard was a great big guy who worked on cars. And as a kid hanging around their house, I just steered clear of him. Billy was the only spiritual influence my best friend Matt and his brother Jason ever had. She hauled them to church, hauled them to Vacation Bible School, and prayed faithfully. Billy told me not long ago that every day she prays for me too, the kid who once hung around her house. That has probably been true for thirty years.

We never really outgrow the question of where we belong. It follows us from childhood into adulthood, showing up every time a job ends, a relationship fractures, or the things we built our lives around suddenly shift. The human heart craves identity, and we spend most of our lives trying to find it.

Nobody who goes looking for spiritual answers gets to step around Jesus. Sooner or later, every person searching for God, for meaning, for ultimate truth is going to come face to face with His life. In that moment, Jesus becomes the pathway to eternal life or a stone you stumble over into destruction. There is no neutral ground. That is exactly what Peter is driving at in 1 Peter 2:4–8, where he describes Jesus as three kinds of stones, each one revealing something essential about who He is and what it means to believe in Him or reject Him.

There is something wonderfully strange about the Christian life. We sing to somebody we have never seen. We live our lives to glorify somebody none of us has ever laid eyes on. If your average person walked in here and asked what we were doing, they would probably think we were strange. Is this a religious version of marrying someone you’ve never met? Or is there something more wonderful going on?

Christianity is built on suffering. While that doesn’t look great on a billboard, it is the truth. Our entire faith is built on a suffering Savior who stepped into this world, lived among us, and died on the cross bearing all our sins.

We have all, at various points, convinced ourselves that our problem is geography. If we could just get somewhere else, things would be better. If only we had a different job, a different marriage, or a different body then all our problems would be solved. The Apostle Peter had something to say to people who felt this way, and it is not what most of us would expect to hear.