I want to come to this General Assembly with a word of encouragement to strengthen us to do the Lord’s work well. I would like it to be a word that would be suitable for the church in all the circumstances in which she needs encouragement to do the Lord’s work well.

For this, there can be no better book of the Bible to turn to than 1 Peter as it is essentially an epistle of encouragement. Towards the end, Peter says, “I have written to you briefly, encouraging you and testifying that this is the true grace of God. Stand fast in it” (5:12). He gives the reason why we so often need encouragement in the opening words of the epistle when he describes the church as “elect strangers in the world (and) scattered” The church has a work to do for God in an alien, hostile environment which saps the energy out of us. We need strength that will keep us going to the end. And for this challenge to perseverance we have to address not only the environment on the outside but the spiritual condition within, “everything that hinders and the sin the so easily entangles” (Hebrews 12:1). For perseverance to do the Lord’s work well there is grace. This is the great encouragement. Peter has written to encourage by articulating the good news of grace (5:12), both how it is “accomplished and applied” (to use the wording of Professor John Murray’s book title).

The words of our text are core words of encouragement within the epistle. Peter is saying, “the way of Christian service is hard and long, the environment is hostile, the spiritual muscles are flabby because of remaining indwelling sin, so come on now, crave the spiritual milk of God’s Word!” Peter is saying that to be strong in the Lord’s service we need to be eating properly and for that we need a proper appetite. Whatever ministry we are called to in Christ’s church today it needs to be undergirded with an appetite that ensures we feed on Christ’s Word. If the leadership of the church is not exemplifying a healthy appetite for God’s Word then the people may imagine that other food will suffice and the church will lose its strength and fail the Lord. But the encouragement is that with a constant healthy appetite for God’s Word we will come to that Word and be strengthened for all the service that God may call us to.

Peter highlights one or two things to ensure a healthy appetite.

Preparing the Appetite⤒🔗

There is no use having all the right fare if you have no appetite for it. My wife and I can still recall the agony of thirty years ago when invited for the evening to the home of a fellow Free Church College student. After a particularly hearty meal of mince and tatties followed by left-over Christmas pudding and custard we arrived to discover to our dismay that a most beautiful meal awaited us! Now if we had realised we might have starved ourselves all day in preparation. Peter is saying that that is exactly the sort of preparation our appetite for God’s Word requires. The particular connection between 1 Peter 2:1 and 2 is “while ridding yourselves… crave...”

We prepare a healthy appetite for God’s Word by starving ourselves of all wrong attitudes to other people, especially believers. “Rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander of every kind.” I wonder how often we have offered all sorts of excuses why we have felt unmoved by the reading and the hearing of God’s Word, when all the time we have been neglecting the wrong attitudes we bear to others. The Bible emphasises that our horizontal relationships will affect our vertical relationship. Later on in the epistle Peter exhorts Christian husbands to be careful about the way they consider their wives “so that nothing will hinder your prayers” (3:7). And Jesus reminds us that if we are approaching worship and remember there is a difficulty between ourselves and a brother, then “First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:24).

We probably think more easily of the way that a wrong relationship with God (the vertical) will affect our relationship with our Christian brothers and sisters (the horizontal), but here we are being reminded that it works the other way round too. We should be all too aware of the terrible consequences of wrong relations among brethren. Let us use that to direct us to new pleading with God to help us root out those sins listed in 1 Peter 2:1. Let us persevere in the battle against them in our preaching and in our practice, for that is the way to prepare the appetite for God’s Word and it is God’s Word alone that will strengthen us to persevere in every good work to His glory.

Indulging the Appetite←⤒🔗

The picture projected by the exhortation, “as newborn babies, crave…” is a vivid one and one with which we will all have some familiarity. As Edmund Clowney says, “For an infant, milk is not a fringe benefit”, and that is what the believer must proclaim about the Word by his desire and delight in feeding on that Word. One or two points need to be unpacked from this picture.

First of all we must be clear that the milk is a metaphor here for the Word of God. The NIV goes for a very possible translation of the Greek word logiko~ i.e. “spiritual” rather than literal, but the term may be translated more straight-forwardly, as in the AV, as “of the word” which fits in with the context where Peter has just been describing the living Word of God by which believers are given new birth (1:25). The closely accompanying truth that requires even more emphasis is that this word-milk must be “pure”, unadulterated. At the time of writing, the thought may have been of being watered down as wine often was. We are thinking here of the Word sustaining the believer in the ongoing service of our Lord and so a more appropriate picture may be of the long distance athlete having to avoid banned substances in his training. Christ promised that to the end there would be false prophets who would “deceive even the elect — if it were possible.” The epistles make clear that false teaching has been a problem for the church even from the earliest church times. The teachers in the church mustn’t be complacent to think that our traditional orthodoxy will automatically guard us from error. Much learning is not sufficient to protect us from the wiles of the devil but only the wearing of the full armour of God as detailed in Ephesians 6. The men in the pulpits must then preach in a way that will enable the people in the pews to recognise false doctrine for what it is. It is only the wholesome doctrines of the Scriptures that will build us up in faith and love for Christ and bring delight to our service for Him.

But this excellent fare must be matched by an excellent appetite. We must crave this food as new babies crave milk. My memories of babies feeding conjure up a number of sights and sounds. The determination to have the milk is evidenced of course by the crying that we all associate with young babies, but also by the searching wriggles of near panic when they realise the feed is imminent and while they ensure it reaches the taste buds! But then there follows the contented murmuring of delight in the enjoyment of the feed. If we truly crave God’s Word we will display both the determination to have and the delight in having. There must be immediate application here for ourselves as members of the General Assembly. Those of us who are preachers should revisit our desire for God’s Word and examine our daily yearning for its sustenance and our regular enjoyment of its powerful effect. If we do not know these experiences ourselves how will we preach with a zeal that will enthuse our people for the Word. How will elders who are to be apt to teach guide the people into all the truth except with a passion for the worth of the truth which they nurture by the regular blessing they themselves gain from the truth.

There is one thing about this picture of the church feeding on the Word like babies feeding on milk that is perplexing. The church is being commanded to indulge her appetite. But babies do not need such a command; they just do! Babies don’t need the command because they are conditioned to crave their milk, but the church has a fatal tendency to get out of condition and lose a healthy appetite. We must therefore counteract this debilitating bias of our fleshly nature. This is a responsibility for every member of the church, for the church is not stronger than its individual members and our strength only comes by indulging our appetite for God’s Word. We so need to be strong in the strength of the Lord and the power of his might for the many challenges that face us in these days.

So there are various considerations that will help to keep our appetite in good condition. We need the humility to face up to our proneness to weaken in the life of faith because of indwelling sin and so come hungrily to the Word where you may know “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” We need to remember the many biblical descriptions of the testing nature of the way of salvation with the encouragements to persevere so that we will hunger for the Word that brings strength and growth. We must meditate often on the goal of our salvation, “the joy set before us” so that we will delight in the living word that equips us to advance steadily towards that glory.

These are some of the very incentives that we will include in our witness to the world to persuade the unbeliever to trust in Christ the Word.

Justifying the Appetite←⤒🔗

Peter adds one further argument to stimulate a healthy appetite for the Word of God among the people of God. We live in a day when we are bombarded with precautions about satisfying our appetite. We are advised to carefully consider the effect of genetically modified foods, additives, E’s and allergens, so that we might wonder if we can justify eating at all! Peter’s argument is simple. You have experienced that God is good in Jesus Christ; to come to the Word is to come to Christ; crave that milk of God’s Word because there you will meet with Christ and Christ is good and he does you good.

This is surely telling us that our preaching needs to major on the attractiveness of Christ to satisfy all the deep needs of the human soul. We who are the servant-leaders of the church must persuade our people by argument and example that our calling to serve Christ in our day can only be sustained by a determined and delighted feeding on Christ in his Word. A central goal of the witness of all church-members must be to so convince unbelievers of the loveliness of Jesus the Saviour, found in the Bible, that they will learn to turn to that Word for themselves with hungry appetites.

Let us be prayerful that the discussions and decisions of this Assembly and the activities of our congregations will advance that cause of craving the pure milk of the Word.