He outlines the appropriate response to the news of salvation:
Consider what's important.
Consider what lasts.
As Beverly Gaventa puts it in Texts for Preaching, a new life and a new way of living it are required:
While this new birth is intensely personal, in that it involves individual human beings who find their lives radically changed by the gospel, it also involves an intensely social dimension. Those who experience the new birth belong to one another in a profound and unrelenting way. These newborns are not members of disparate family units, each of which may take its own infant and go home. They belong to one another, as surely as they belong to the God who granted them this new birth.
How much of Peter's instruction is palatable to us today? Do any congregations exhibit the kind of love that he is talking about?
Not included in the lectionary, but read it anyway, is his quotation from Isaiah:
All human life on the earth is like grass,
and all human glory is like a flower in a field.
The grass dries up and its flower falls off
but the word of the Lord endures forever(CEB).
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