I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Peter 1-5.

Peter warns us that we will face trials and suffering for our faith.  However, these trials and suffering will bring us great joy if we remain strong in our faith.  Later in this letter, Peter tells us that when we suffer for following Christ that suffering will remove from us the wish to satisfy our own desires and instead make us anxious to do the will of God.  Peter tells us to live such lives that when people malign us they will be embarrassed by our behavior.  By that he means that we must be done with deceit, hypocrisy, and unkind speech.  IF we live such lives, those who seek to portray us as hateful bigoted people will have their claims rejected by those who know us.

Some time back, my wife was unhappy about the negative things which our nonbeliever friends said about Christians.  She felt like the terrible things which others who claimed to be Christians did made our friends think badly about us.  It occurred to me that when our friends said these things they did not think about the fact that we were Christians.  So, I told her that the next time one of them expressed opinions about how terrible Christians were, she should apologize for behaving in that manner.  The thing is, many of our nonbeliever friends don’t actually know any other people who openly profess to be Christians (or, if they do, they do not think about them as Christians any more than they think about us that way, because, you know, Christians are all hateful people and those people aren’t hateful).  Sure enough, when my wife did that, our friends said, “Oh no, I didn’t mean you.”  To which my wife replied, “Who else do you know whose a Christian?”  My wife and I are definitely less than the ideal people of faith, but we had behaved as Peter recommends in the presence of these friends (or, at least, my wife had).