Keep Your L-Plates On – 1 Peter 1

This is the first talk of five in 1 Peter at Lee Abbey 2026

Listen here:

I’ve recently stuck L plates on our car for (hopefully) the last time as I’m teaching our third child to drive. We’ve had a few close shaves, but no prangs yet, and long may that continue.

This milestone got me thinking about five phrases Peter uses in his first letter to describe what exiles like us are actually holding onto — a living hope, a locked-in inheritance, lasting joy, long-term perspective, and a living word. Simple enough to write but tough to live out. Most of us are still learning these lessons decades into the journey.

In fact, we never really come off the L-plates with Jesus, do we? We’re disciples. That word comes from the Latin discere, to learn, and none of us graduates from learning to follow him this side of glory. Stop growing at forty, someone once told me, and you spend the rest of your life living off what you learned in your twenties. Tragic, if true.

There’s an old story about a driving instructor who asked his learner what he’d do if the engine started making a terrible knocking noise. “Turn up the radio,” came the answer. We do that spiritually more than we’d like to admit. We drown warning signs in box sets, shopping, busyness, even church activity, when wisdom says stop, lift the bonnet, and let God show us what’s actually wrong. Small problems left unattended become expensive breakdowns.

1 Peter 1 hands us five phrases, all beginning with L, for exiles like the scattered, persecuted Christians Peter first wrote to.

Living hope. Worldly hope is thin stuff: I hope she fancies me, I hope the results come back clean. It’s wishing dressed up as certainty. Biblical hope is guaranteed, because Jesus didn’t stay dead. I think of my friend Romaine, our PA at Scripture Union in Burundi, whose husband was pulled to the side of the road in an ambush with six other men and shot. Tutsi, targeted, gone. She was left a widow with four children under five and no safety net. She told me, years later, “I just rushed home and wept.” And then: but my hope is in Jesus. He has been faithful. He has provided. Sometimes literally – a knock at the door, an envelope of cash, no explanation needed.

Locked-in inheritance. Unlike every pension promise any government has ever made, ours can never perish, spoil or fade. It’s not resting on a triple lock. It’s resting on God.

Lasting joy. My mate David Madama, an evangelist in Buyenzi, was so poor he had to borrow a different friend’s shoes every time he preached. I asked him once how he could radiate so much joy living like that. He said, “Simon, how can I not have so much joy when I’ve got my Jesus?” That wasn’t meant as a rebuke. It landed like one.

Long-term perspective. Our whole life is a tiny stretch on a timeline that runs into forever, and we make huge decisions as if it’s all there is. Trials refine faith the way fire refines gold. Not that God enjoys the fire, but he’s not wasting it either.

Living word. Which brings me to Hien Phan, a Vietnamese translator imprisoned after the war for helping the Americans, fed communist propaganda until he decided he’d never pray again. The next morning he was assigned to clean the prison latrines, and found a torn page of Scripture being used as toilet paper by a guard. He washed it, dried it, and read Romans 8 by candlelight that night. He never missed a day of that duty again. Word by soiled, salvaged word, he rebuilt a Bible in his head. And God rebuilt him. He escaped, eventually, on a rickety boat in a storm that should have killed everyone aboard, with four former enemy soldiers he’d told the truth to rowing alongside him.

Living hope. Locked-in inheritance. Lasting joy. Long-term perspective. Living word.

Keep your L-plates on.