1 Peter 1:8-9,“And though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls.” Another translation says, “You love Him even though you have never seen Him. Though you do not see Him now, you trust Him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. The reward for trusting Him will be the salvation of your souls.”

The question I want to start with is this: “Why does Peter remind his listeners about what they are experiencing? He says, "You are loving Christ; you are believing in Christ; you are rejoicing in Christ with inexpressible and glorified joy. All of that even though you do not see Him." Why? Why remind them of what they are already experiencing? I think the reason is that he wants to describe (for them) what true Christianity is. And, to do it in such a way that, if they ever drift away from it they will have a fixed standard to show them what's happened so they can wake up and return to what they’ve lost.

I picture it like this: True Christianity is like swimming upstream in a river of godlessness. We swim (a) with the stroke of faith in Christ, and (b) the stroke of joy in Christ. Consequently, while we are swimming we don't get swept away in the current of corrupt practices (the temptations of a godless society). God keeps us (verse 5), through faith. He enables us to keep on swimming against the stream with the stroke of faith and stroke joy. However, if we were to stop using the swimming stroke of faith in Christ, and the stroke joy in Christ, we would begin to float downstream (in the river of godlessness).

Notice, Peter reveals three things (in verses 8–9) about his readers:

•   They love Christ;

•   They believe in Christ;

•   They rejoice in Christ;

And they are experiencing this even though, like us, they have never seen Christ in person. This is true Christianity! God is saving our souls by working in our hearts a love, a confidence and a joy that is against the stream of secularism and godlessness and worldliness in our society. True Christianity is simply - loving Christ, trusting Christ and enjoying Christ. In other words, Christianity is first and foremost a matter of the heart (love, trust, and joy), not a matter of external performances.

Let's see if we can get inside these three experiences (to love, trust and rejoice), and see how they relate, and whether we are in fact experiencing them or not. So what do we really mean when we speak of loving Christ and trusting Christ and enjoying Christ? Let’s start with three basic definitions:

Loving Christ means accepting Christ as being “precious” for all His character and virtue.

Trusting Christ means accepting Christ as being “reliable” in all His promises and all His counsel.

In other words: Love is attracted to the Beloved for who He is. And faith is confident in the Trusted for what He will do.

Now what about joy? Peter says (verse 8), "We rejoice [in Christ] with inexpressible and glorified joy." The more I think about it, the less I think we should see joy as separate from love and faith. Joy in Christ stems from the deep good feelings we get from loving Him, trusting Him and believing in Him. It's the echo in our emotions - our hearts. When experiencing Christ as precious and experiencing Christ as reliable. It's the deep good feelings of being attracted to Him for who He is, and the deep good feelings of being confident in Him for what He will do.

Therefore, joy is part of love and part of faith. Because it would be a contradiction to say, "I am attracted to the preciousness of what Christ is, but I have no good feelings within this attraction." What is attraction without good feelings? There may be fear in the attraction (as with a Lion named Aslan), but if there were no deep good feelings in it, it would not be experienced as attraction at all, but only as rejection.

It’s the same with faith: it would be a contradiction to say, "I am confidently trusting in what Christ will do for me, but I have no good feelings in this confidence." What is confidence without good feelings of hope and assurance in the One you trust? There may be expectation of hardship on the way, but if there were no deep good feeling that it's going to turn out well, it would not be called trust or confidence at all. So I conclude that attraction to the ultimate preciousness of Christ (which we call “love”), and confidence in the ultimate reliability of Christ (which we call “faith”) are no less than a deep good feeling called joy.

Please note, there are other characteristics in love and faith besides the deep good feeling of joy, but they are not less than joy. So this Holy joy that Peter refers to in verse 8 is a constituent part of love and faith. This goes a long way to explaining why Peter calls this joy "inexpressible and full of glory [or glorified]."

So what gives joy this quality? I don't mean merely its intensity, but its moral character? What makes joy ugly or beautiful? Depraved or noble? Dirty or clean? The answer is that the thing you enjoy most gives joy its character. If you enjoy cruelty and arrogance and revenge, then your heart and your joy have that character. Also, the more you get your joy from material things, the more your heart and your joy shrivel up like a mere material things. You become what you crave.

Peter says (in verse 8) that joy is inexpressible and glorified. So how does it become that like that? It becomes like that because Christian joy is the joy of craving the preciousness of Christ and the reliability of Christ. You become like what you crave. Christians should crave Christ. Hence, they will become like Christ. Christ's preciousness and reliability are inexpressibly great, and therefore, our joy is “inexpressible” in Him. And Christ has “in Him” all the glory of the Father, and so our joy “in Him” is a glorified joy. That is, a joy being changed from one degree to another by His glory as we are attracted by its preciousness and as we are confident in its reliability. We become what we crave, and what Christians should crave above all else is the glory of Christ. So our joy is "inexpressible and glorified" because it is joy founded in loving Christ and trusting Christ - who is inexpressibly glorious.

But how do we come to crave the preciousness of Christ and trust the reliability of Christ if we can't see him? How do you love Him and believe in Him, if you can't see Him?

I think the answer to that question is that even though we don't see Him face to face (with our physical eyes), we do see Him in another way that is even more important. For example, in Romans 15:20-21, Paul described his mission to the Gentiles (who could never see Christ physically) like this: "I aspired to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named …but as it is written, 'They who had no news of him shall see, and they who have not heard shall understand.'" In the preaching of the gospel Christ can be seen in a way that is more important than seeing Him physically. There is a spiritual “seeing”, and without it no one can be saved.

How does it happen? How is this kind of seeing happen? It happens through the Word of God. When the gospel of Christ is preached, we can see Christ more clearly for who He really is than many could see in His own lifetime. Reading the gospels is better than being there. You are taken into the inner circle where you never could have gone. You go with Jesus through Gethsemane, the trial, the crucifixion and the resurrection. You hear whole sermons - not in isolated snatches on hillsides but in rich God-inspired contexts that take you deeper than you ever could have gone.

You see the whole range of His divine character which nobody on earth saw as fully as you can see now: You see His freedom from anxiety, His courage in the face of death, His unanswerable wisdom, His honouring women, His tenderness with children, His compassion toward lepers, His meekness in suffering, His patience with Peter, His heart for the nations, His love for the glory of God, His simplicity and His devotion. Yes, you see His miraculous power to still storms and heal the sick and multiply bread and cast out demons. You see Him through the eyes of faith and through the emotions of inexpressible joy!

Though you do not see Him, yet in another sense you do see Him far better than thousands who saw Him face to face. You see the glory of God shining in this Man's face at every turn in the gospels. And because you see Him with the eyes of the heart, you love him and trust Him and rejoice with joy inexpressible. This is true Christianity.