Make The Most – 1 Peter 4

This is session 4 in 1 Peter from the Lee Abbey talks 2026

Every evening my phone tells me exactly how long I spent on it that day, and most days I don’t love the answer. An hour and forty-two minutes on Facebook. That’s the world we live in – brilliant minds in Silicon Valley working out how to keep us scrolling, while the things that actually matter wait for the leftovers of our attention.

That’s roughly where I started when I gave this session on 1 Peter 4, a passage I find more prickly than most. Peter isn’t gentle: “The end of all things is near. Therefore, be alert and of sober mind.” Most of us reading this aren’t suffering for our faith the way the original readers were, or the way our brothers and sisters in Iran, Somalia or China still are today. But the challenge still lands. Four things stood out to me.

Make the most of your time. I once interviewed George Verwer, the OM founder, not long before he died. He was 84, he’d just had quadruple heart bypass surgery, and he’d dictated 25 letters to his secretary that morning. As I tried to wrap up the interview, he interrupted me: “Simon, one more thing. Tell your people – maximise your time.” I’ve never forgotten it, not least because he was so clearly living it. We make time for what we think matters. The question is whether we’ve let that get hijacked.

Make the most of your gifts. We’re all given different gifts – some five talents, some two, some one – and none of us is accountable for someone else’s portion. What we are accountable for is what we’ve actually been given. That’s uncomfortable for those of us who’ve had more opportunity than most of the world, but the answer isn’t guilt, it’s stewardship. Run your own race. Offer whatever hospitality you can, even if it’s just noticing who’s sitting alone.

Make the most of your words. There’s an old parable about a group of demons graduating from training school. One plans to tell people there’s no God. Another, that there’s no judgment. Satan waves both away – creation and conscience will see through them. The third says, “I’ll tell them there’s a God, and there’s a judgment, but there’s still time.” Satan loves that one. It’s the lie that costs the most people the most. I think about Amy Carmichael’s vision, The Cry of the Blood – believers making daisy chains with their backs turned while, unseen, a blind mother walks her children off the edge of a cliff. It’s a heavy image. But we live next to people for years and sometimes never tell them the one thing that matters most.

Make the most of your suffering. I want to close with a story most of us have never heard. Robert Jermain Thomas was a young Welsh missionary. He sailed to China in 1863 with his new wife, Caroline. Within months she was dead, along with the child neither of them knew she was carrying. Grief-stricken, he became determined to get Bibles into Korea – then a completely closed, hostile “Hermit Kingdom” where thousands of Christians had already been killed. In 1866 he boarded a ship called the General Sherman. As it came under attack and caught fire, he stayed aboard as long as he could, throwing Bibles to the shore. When he finally jumped into the water and reached land, still holding a Bible, he looked the soldier who killed him in the eye and said, “Take the Bible.” He died at 27, having – by every visible measure – accomplished nothing.

Fifty years later, revival broke out in Pyongyang. Ten thousand became Christians in 1904, thirty thousand in 1906, fifty thousand in 1907. At one of those meetings, an old man came forward, weeping, confessing that as a young soldier he had killed a missionary who told him to take his book. He’d kept it all those years. It was that book that led him to Christ.

Today something like sixteen percent of Koreans identify as evangelical Christians, that’s over eight million people, a far stronger church than we have here. It started with a man who died thinking he’d failed.

That’s the story I want to leave you with. We don’t get to see the whole picture from where we’re standing. We just get to be faithful with the time, the gifts, the words and the suffering we’ve been given, and trust God with what it adds up to.

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