Peter at the beginning of both of his letters blesses his readers by saying “grace and peace be multiplied to you” (1 Pet 1:2, 2 Pet. 1:2). And throughout his letters, he speaks of “grace” a number of times. Yet, he never indicates that grace comes to us through religious rituals, as Catholics claim; and he never refers to it, either, as “God’s unmerited favor,” in the way Protestant Bible teachers like to stress.

Rather, Peter’s focus is that we should experience God’s grace in our daily living before the Lord. He even tells us, very directly,

This is grace, if anyone for the sake of conscience toward God bears sorrows, suffering unjustly.
— 1 Peter 2:19

Although Peter is giving us a general principle here regarding our experience of grace, he is very practical, and so he makes this statement when speaking to “household servants,” who may have to serve masters who are “crooked” (2:18). And then he goes on, as he always does in his letters, to relate our daily living to Christ Himself, telling us that, to experience this grace, we must follow in the steps of the one who, when He suffered, committed all to God, and eventually “bore our sins on the tree” so we might live “unto righteousness” (vv. 21-24).

We may feel we experience grace in our “quiet time” with the Lord as we pray and read our Bible, or in meetings when we praise the Lord with the other saints. But Peter does not refer to that as “the true grace of God” (5:12). Rather, according to Peter, we experience the true grace of God as we follow Christ in His path of suffering in obedience to the will of God, whatever that may be, in our daily living.

Sent to our mailing list on
—  12 November 2025 —