1 Peter 4:7-11

7 The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray.                                                           8 Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

This message is sounded out loud, clear and consistently all the way through the New Testament. It is a summons to wake up out of our spiritual sleep, for the night is far spent and the day is at hand (Rom.13:12). “The Lord is at hand,” we read in Philippians (Php.4:5). “The coming of the Lord is at hand,” writes James (Jas.5:8). John says that the days in which his people are living are the last hour (1Jn.2:18). “The time is near,” says the John of the Revelation, and he hears the Risen Christ testify: “Surely I am coming soon” (Rev.1:3; Rev.22:20).

For some these passages create problems, they think the New Testament writers must have been mistaken. Two thousand years have passed and the end has not yet come. Actually, there are a number of ways looking at these passages.

Some think that people in New Testament days looked for the return of Christ and the end of the world in their own day and generation. and these events did not take place. I don’t think there were many in the First Century Church thought this because the Christian Church allowed these words to stand although it would have been easy to quietly remove them from the original documents if that was what they believed. It was not until late in the second century that the New Testament began to take the form in which we have it today and yet statements such as these became unquestioned parts of it and have remained in it through numerous translations and revisions. The conclusion is that the people of the early church believed these words to be true and succeeding generations agreed with them.

The consummation of history was the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. In Him time was invaded by eternity. In him God entered into the human situation. In him the O.T. prophecies were fulfilled. In him the end has come. Paul speaks of himself and his people as those on whom the ends of the ages have come (1Cor.10:11). Peter in his first sermon speaks of Joel's prophecy of the outpouring of the Spirit and of all that should happen in the last days, and then says that at that very time men were actually living in those last days (Ac.2:16-21).

If we accept that, it means that in Jesus the end of history has come. The battle has been won; there remain only skirmishes with the last remnants of opposition. It means that at this very moment we are living in the “end time,” in what someone has called “the epilogue to history.” Evil is still rampant and the world is still far from having accepted Christ as King but He will return in clouds of glory and all men will bow the knee to Him.

Regardless of when Christ shall return and the Bible is quite clear that no man knows when that day shall be, the one thing which can be said of everybody is that he will die. For every one of us the Lord is at hand. We cannot tell the day and the hour when we shall go to meet him. Therefore, all life is lived in the shadow of eternity. “The end of all things is near,” said Peter. Some may have been wrong in thinking that the end of the world was round the corner, but the end of the world was just around the corner for many of them and they have left us with the warning that for every one of us personally the end is near. This warning is as valid today as it was back then.

In the light of that fact, what kind of people should we be? In view of the nearness of that day Peter spells out certain consequences for the way that we should live.

The N.I.V. says should be clear minded and self-controlled so that we can pray. The A.V. uses the word “sober” to describe the clear minded and self controlled person.

The word translated “clear minded” means sane. The advice is to protect your sanity. Do not lose your cool. The great characteristic of sanity is that it sees things in their proper perspective. It distinguishes between things which are important and those which are not. The person who has a sane approach to life is not swept away by sudden and transitory enthusiasms. He is not given to unbalanced fanaticism but weighs up the options. When we see the affairs of earth in the light of eternity then we see them in their proper proportions. When God is given His proper place then everything else takes its proper place.

The verb Peter uses originally meant to be sober in contrast to being drunk. It then came to mean to act soberly and sensibly. It does not mean that the Christian is to be eternally joyless. Long faces are not essential to live in Heaven. It does mean that our approach to life should not be irresponsible. To take things seriously is to be aware of their real importance and to be mindful of their consequences in time and in eternity. Life is not one big joke, but it is a serious matter for which we are answerable.

The reason we should have this single-minded approach to life is in order that we can pray as we should. When a man's mind is unbalanced and his approach to life is frivolous and irresponsible, he cannot pray as he should. James tells us that, “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” The first necessity of prayer is to be single-minded in our desire to discover God’s will for our lives. We learn to pray properly when we take life seriously so that we begin to say, whatever happens to us, “Thy will be done.”

When our Christian experience is rooted in our minds rather than in our emotions and is based on God’s Word instead of in our feelings then we can sort out our relationships with one another. When I woke up this morning my feelings told me that my bed was comfortable and it would be nice to lie on for a while. My mind, on the other hand, told me that I had responsibilities and that God's Word tells me not to forsake meeting with the Saints for worship. On this occasion I listened to my mind and not to my feelings. Our Christianity must always obey what we know to be truth and not what we feel is nice. 

V8. says that we must cherish for each other a love that is constant and intense. The adjective used to describe this love has two meanings. It means it should be consistent and it means that it should be energetic. Our love must be the love that never fails. That is what it means to be consistent. This love also involves effort. It should stretch us as an athlete stretches himself. It describes a horse at full gallop and requires strenuous and sustained effort. It may be rebuffed and it may not always reach the high standard that Scripture sets for it but it keeps on making the effort to demonstrate the love of God in Christ to those around us who are desperately needing to see God’s love in action.

Here is a fundamental Christian truth. Christian love is not an easy, sentimental reaction. It demands our all. It requires all the mental and spiritual energy that we can muster. It means loving the unlovely and the unlovable; it means loving in spite of insult and injury; it means loving even when love is not returned. Christian love is the love which never fails and into which every atom of the Christian's strength is directed.

The Christian, in the light of the nearness of eternity, must be clear minded and self-controlled in order to maintain a prayer life that reaches out to God on behalf of others in the sure knowledge that Jesus is coming again.