Safe In The Suffering

Turn with me to 1 Peter 3
Peter was a preacher, and he wanted to encourage his people when it comes to suffering. So he structured his message this way:
1. INFORMATION. Life or death important information. -First he is going to give some information straight from God. You need to know.
2. IILLUSTRATION. -Then he is going to illustrate how this all works with a pretty crazy illustration
3. APPLICATION -Then he is going to show you how to live out what you now know.

1 Peter 3:13 Now who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is good? This is a rhetorical question. You know, a question that has an obvious answer. But I am not so sure it is obvious. So let us consider this thesis, I got this thesis from AW Tozer, and I think he is correct: The Christian, faithfully following our Lord, cannot be harmed. This is the INFORMATION he says YOU HAVE GOT TO KNOW a Christian is SAFE IN THEIR SUFFERING.

Now, he moves from information to ILLUSTRATION. And what comes next next. Ya’ll. Seriously. What comes next is one of the trickiest, most obscure passages in the NT. And most preachers with a lick of sense would skip it. Even Martin Luther said this about 1 Peter 3:18-22 "A wonderful text this is, and a more obscure passage perhaps than any other in the NT, so that I do not know for a certainty just what Peter means." --Martin Luther
If you have no idea what I am talking about, let's read it.

And finally the APPLICATION
We have to dip into chapter 4, but he uses three interesting verbs for how to apply all this to your life:
Two verbs are what NOT to do, and one is what to DO -Look at chapter 4, verse 12