Live Not By Feelings: Three Ways to Love and Live the Moral Life (1 Peter 1:13–19)

To feel good or to be good. That is the question. And in Sunday’s sermon, I considered the difference between the moral life that God commands (and grants by the power of his grace) and the therapeutic life that our world gives us (with no lasting grace).

As countless cultural commentators have observed, there has been in our culture “the triumph of the therapeutic” (see Philip Rieff’s book by that title). And unfortunately, this way of thinking and living has shaped the church for the last two generations, a point David Wells makes in his book Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision. More recently, Carl Trueman has chronicled how this addiction self-oriented, inner-directed, immanent (not transcendent), feelings-obsessed way of living has consumed our world. And while understanding its origins takes time, seeing its effects does not. It’s everywhere.

And in Sunday’s sermon, I showed how 1 Peter 1:13–19 calls the followers of Christ to live by a different moral calculus and to throw off the idle and idolatrous ways of our fathers. In our case, that means rejecting a way of life controlled by our feelings.

Bought by the blood of Christ, Christians are to be holy as their Heavenly Father is holy. And this means rejecting a therapeutic worldview and the gospel of grievance that comes with it. And in its place we must learn afresh how to walk as children of God, clothed in his holiness, set apart for his glory, and satisfied with grace.

That’s what Sunday’s sermon sought argue from Peter’s first letter. You can watch that message here, or listen to it here. On these issues, a few other resources may be helpful. You can find them below.

Soli Deo Gloria, ds