I consider the holiness movement to he heretical. The idea that we can be perfect in this life is wrong. We continually have to deal with our besetting sins: our favourites — the one we love.

And yet this chapter has been used as a proof text. If you are ascetic enough, if you have enough illness, you will be done with sin. Not so. You can be mighty sick and on the way out mighty corrupt: the most famous recent example was Lance Armstrong who, post surviving cancer, doped himself to multiple Tour de France wins, losing his marriage in the process.

The suffering that Christ experienced was death. And when you are dead, sin is not done with you, but you are done with sin. He is talking about your blood being a witness to Christ: which continues to this day.

Consider the Sister Sgorbati. A brief obituary,

She was born in 1940.
She entered the religious order in 1963.
She worked training nurses at a children’s hospital in Mogadishu.
Men gunned her down outside the hospital this Sunday.
Her last words before dying: “I forgive, I forgive.”

And consider this photo, taken outside the Catholic cathedral in London,

Peter is writing to a church that is under persecution: severe persecution. So his advice is important, and needed. For we again are being isolated by the new elite — who would rather consider themselves Brahmans, and keep themselves away from those so ill-bred to think they need salvation, and from the Islamists, who damn us all to hell, and think it is their duty to ensure we get there.

1 Peter 3:13-4:6

^3:13Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? ¹⁴But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, ¹⁵but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; ¹⁶yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. ¹⁷For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. ¹⁸For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, ¹⁹in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, ²⁰who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. ²¹And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you — not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, ²²who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.

^4:1Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same intention (for whoever has suffered in the flesh has finished with sin), ²so as to live for the rest of your earthly life no longer by human desires but by the will of God. ³You have already spent enough time in doing what the Gentiles like to do, living in licentiousness, passions, drunkenness, revels, carousing, and lawless idolatry. ⁴They are surprised that you no longer join them in the same excesses of dissipation, and so they blaspheme. ⁵But they will have to give an accounting to him who stands ready to judge the living and the dead. ⁶For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that, though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does

OK, what to do?

While we can, we should preach. We should do good. We should obey the authorities: not because it will stop the authorities coming for us, but because it is a witness to Christ.

But when the authorities come, we should not be afraid. Instead, we should court the crown of the martyr, and be done with this world. For an old Roman Christian Lawyer said it best, a couple of thousand years ago.

Semen est sanguis Christianorum.

The Blood of the Martyrs is the seed of the Church. The very places where Christians are dying — africa, the arab states, Korea, Burma… the church is growing. It may be that the cost of revival will not be repentance, but blood.

I pray not. I pray that the Germans will recall that Sophie Scholl and the White Rose group died as a witness to their faith, as did the Lübeck martyrs, as did many others, and that they will turn not to the EU, but to Christ. I pray that the Russians will recall the martyrs of the Soviet times and return to Christ.

And those of us in the English-speaking world will recall the missionaries we have lost — both in converting the indigenous peoples and in places from China to Africa — and their sacrifice will speak to us and cause us to repent.

I pray this for I am lazy, and really don’t want that cup. For if we do not repent, and if there is not revival, there will be blood.