Well, if I may read from Isaiah 43. Isaiah 43 is one of those wonderful sections of Isaiah. The whole book is wonderful, but it helps us understand more of what God's doing as he fulfills his promises. So let's hear God's word now from Isaiah 43, verses one to seven. But now, thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel, fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned. and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba, in exchange for you, because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you. I give men in exchange, excuse me, in return for you, and peoples in exchange for your life. Fear not, for I am with you. I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, give up, and to the south, do not withhold. Bring my sons from afar, and my daughters from the end of the earth. Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made. And people of God, if you are in Jesus Christ, God knew you before the foundation of the world. He had your name written in his book, in his book of mercy and grace. And so it's remarkable when you look at verse four to think this is what God says to us as God's people. You are precious in my eyes and honored and I love you. I give men in exchange for you, peoples in exchange for your life. This is the redemption we have in Jesus Christ. So let's pray and ask God to help us all listen and think about what he says. Father in heaven, please help me. Give me strength and wisdom to talk about your word, to open your word and make it plain. We pray, Father in heaven, that our hearts will not be consumed by all the other things that crowd in when we start to take the time to look at your word. There are so many thoughts that come to mind. Please help us to focus upon what your word says. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. So I'm gonna read now. In 1 Peter chapter 2, from verse 1, we'll read down to verse 12. We're only looking at verses 9 and 10, though. But this is God's Word. I should ask you to stand. Stand and give some reverence to God's Word. 1 Peter chapter 2, verses 1 down to verse 12. So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men, but in the sight of God, chosen and precious, you yourselves, like living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood. to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in scripture, behold, I'm laying in Zion, a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious. And whoever believes in him will not be put to shame. So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone and a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense. They stumbled because they disobeyed the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation." This is God's own word. Please do have a seat. Now mission churches have the challenge of distinguishing themselves from other churches. What are we about? When you talk to somebody and invite them to church, they want to know something about your church. what you believe and what you're about. And many times people say, well, we have this program or that program. We have worship teams in Sunday mornings who bring music and such. But what are you going to say? You have to know who you are. You have to know what you're about if you're going to answer the questions. Now, there are a lot of people answering for us. If you're a Christian, they're answering for us. In Muslim countries, if you're a Christian, you're called an infidel and may be subject to a penalty. In communist country, you're a traitor to the state because the state is God. And here in America, you're a bigot or now called a hater. And the church is seen as homophobic, irrelevant, an obstacle to progress, unloving, even anti-human. So how can you as a Christian, as a member of the church or coming to this church, how can you reach out to an unbelieving world? How do you do that? Well, it has to start with what God says about us in scripture. because those who mock Christians and Christianity will, like all of us, one day appear before God as our judge. The person who labels you as a bigot or infidel has the same end as you do, appearing before God. Now in 1 Peter, the people to whom Peter is writing are a tiny, tiny church in the midst of a huge pagan empire. Some of the Christians at that time were mocked and despised and hated. There's a famous graffiti that was found. It was found in Rome, I believe, and it shows a crucified man, but the head is the head of a donkey. And underneath it says, Alexandros worships his God. The idea is that Jesus is just this animal. And Alexandros is mocked for worshiping Jesus. That's the kind of world that Peter's first hearers, first readers, lived in. Now, in America for a long time, Christians have been had it pretty easy. We've been protected by the kind of mockery that is in many places. But indifference now is being thrown aside and there is actual hatred for Christians because we are standing in the way of a progressive agenda. So we're only facing the same thing that our brothers and sisters in countries around the world have faced for years. Peter is writing to strangers. He's writing to pilgrims, those separated from the world, whose homeland is heaven. They're scattered. He talks about that scattering in verse one of chapter one. We're all awaiting the day of our deliverance that will come when Jesus returns. But right now we are for the sake of the living stone. We who are living stones ourselves are in the world and the church is to be living for God's glory. So as we look at verses nine and 10, we wanna think about, first of all, who we are and then what we do. Who we are and what we do as we look at verses nine and 10. Now if you look at verse nine, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession. One of the interesting things about that verse is that there is no verb there. I'm reading from the English Standard Version, and it inserts the word are, but there is no verb there. It is simply you are, or you, a chosen race, a royal priesthood, and so on. Well, that's a dramatic effect if you think about it. When you talk to someone, you usually insert a verb. If I say to one of my grandchildren, you, gymnast, you eight-year-old, you Lego-loving girl, you Junie B. Jones reading girl, if I say that kind of thing, it sounds kind of strange. But this is what we are. It's God's declaration of who we are, what we are. And it's a collective word. It talks about all Christians. It's not just some elite Christians. It's every Christian. And it's the church. He's talking about the church. It's God's description of the Christian, whether we're in North Korea or whether we're in some communist country like North Korea or Vietnam. We're living stones together. There's no despising of one stone over another for we're all bound together by what God has done in Jesus Christ. Now, if you know the Old Testament somewhat, you'll know that Peter is really putting some words from the Old Testament here in his letter. This is a list of Old Testament phrases. And so Peter is tying the church that he's writing to, the church that's scattered in Galatia and Cappadocia and all the rest of the places, he's tying them to the Old Testament people of God. So that means that the promises of God in the Old Testament to his people, to Abraham and others, are our promises. We are the heirs of Abraham, as Paul says in Galatians 3.29. So you have to read the Old Testament as a Christian book. In other words, you have to read it as your book, We read all the Bible as Christian scriptures and we look at ourselves as those in the Old Testament are seen as well as who we are in Christ. So let's look at the four things that he mentions here in verse nine. The first of all, he says, chosen people. There's no article there. There's no the chosen people. It's the genus elect. You're of the genus elect. You're a people whose background is being chosen. A genus has common characteristics, and the common characteristic of Christians is that they are elect, they are chosen by God. Not because of their own merit, but because of God's mercy and grace in Jesus Christ. Deuteronomy has a lot about this. Deuteronomy 10.15, for instance, says, The Lord God set his heart on your fathers and chose their offspring after them. You above all peoples, as you are this day, God chose." And then Deuteronomy 7 says, it's not because you are more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it's because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers. So God's choosing is what sets the people of God apart. God chose them in Christ. They were born again by the power of God to a new genus, the spiritual DNA that God alone gives, a genus called Christian because of Jesus Christ. This isn't a reason for pride, but for praise because the grace of God is behind it. So he says, first of all, a chosen people. Then he says a royal priesthood, or as some translations put it, a kingdom of priests. Peter is quoting from Exodus 19 verse six here. You will be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Now God at this point was addressing the entire nation of Israel assembled in his presence at Mount Sinai. He delivered them from bondage in Egypt and they were about to receive the Ten Commandments from God's own house, own hand. And what's God saying to them? God is saying, Israel, you're set apart, you're unique because you belong to me and you're to be living sacrifices here to be a people who bring sacrifices because priests bring sacrifices. Priests stand between God and people. Priests intercede for people and speak for God. Israel was to be serving all mankind. So we're a kingdom where God himself is king and we speak what God says to all other kingdoms. That's evangelism. So we need to know what God says. God told Abraham in his covenant promise that all the nations of the earth would be blessed because of him. And so, we are now declaring the excellencies of God, as Peter says here. There is no division between the offices of priest and king, as there was later, because everyone from every tribe was both a king and a priest. And that's in the church too. There's the general office of believer. In that general office, everyone is offering up sacrifices, living sacrifices of themselves. Everyone is a king ruling this world for God's glory because Jesus Christ, our great high priest, is a king. Psalm 110 says. So through faith in Christ, we are united to Christ. We are sacrificing our lives. We're living in the holy presence of God through Jesus Christ. We serve our King in all that we do. We obey his word. This is not Christian nationalism, but this is a kingdom service to those around us. So we are chosen people. We are royal priesthood. We are also a holy nation. This is the second quote from Exodus 19 verse six. We are an ethnos here. a multitude of people with the same nature. That's what a nation is. Many nations are made up of a kind of a unified group of people from a different, not from different tribes, but from one tribe or racial grouping or so forth. But in America, we are so diverse With so many people, we are united by our ideals, our ideas. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the idea of America, these things bind us together as one nation under God. But America is not a holy nation. The church is a holy nation. The church binds people from all the nations of the earth together around one idea that God has saved the people for himself. We're a covenant community that the triune God has delivered from sin by the blood of the covenant shed by Jesus Christ. It doesn't matter where a Christian lives in this world or what language they speak or what their background is. The unity of this nation is that it's God's. And so holiness, the set apartness from the world is what marks us out. More and more, this is a challenge to the church. The church is often becoming like the world. Many churches have abandoned the idea of being God's holy people and are actually taking their cues from the world. And you can see it in the, particularly, how churches have changed things like what homosexuality is or transgenderism or such like is. The essential characteristics of the church are to be holy. It's what Jesus Christ did when he claimed the church for himself. He said, he's gonna wash the church with the washing of the word by the Holy Spirit, as Paul wrote in Ephesians 5. It's counterintuitive, but the way of evangelism must be by being a holy people, being against the culture in that way. And the final thing that Peter writes in verse nine is that we are people belonging to God. God possesses everything, the world and all that's in it. God creates and he keeps the entire universe. This God, who is said to possess all things, has still acquired a people for himself. Why would God, who needs nothing, who has hosts of heaven at his command, regard weak, mortal sinners as worthy of acquiring at the cost of his son's life, We can't understand this except that mercy and grace come out of God's very character, the being of God, because it doesn't come from anything in us. We have a high regard for ourselves, we tend to anyway. We think that we're something special, but we are lost and dead in our sins, and we need to be redeemed by the work of God. God calls us to holiness, and this again is Deuteronomy 7.6, for you are people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. The nation of Israel wasn't a sophisticated or advanced society like India or China at that same period. It was a wandering band of nomads, stubborn and foolish, often disobedient and blind, yet God determined that he would make them his own treasured possession. The church seems weak. The church seems foolish, even set against mankind, scattered, powerless, but it's loved by God. Not because of what we are in ourselves, but because of what God has said about us. One of the treasured possessions that I have is an antique egg cup. If anybody has seen one of these things, it's a little cup that you put soft-boiled eggs in. The reason it's precious to me is not because it's extremely valuable, because it's probably not, but it's something my mom had. And because of my love for my mom, I'm glad to have something that belonged to her. Some things have little value in themselves, but they have value because of who they're related to, how God has set them apart and made them his own. And that's what God has done. He loves his people in Jesus Christ. And because they are the apple of his eye, woe to those who misuse Christians. Xi Jinping thinks he's got all power over the church. He closes churches regularly and sends pastors to prison. But someday he's gonna appear before God. We want people to join us in believing Jesus, that they might find what it means to be God's treasured possession. Now Peter, writing to this tiny little church, this tiny minority in a vast pagan empire, had to remind them of who they were. They met in homes. Some would be dragged into the arena to be killed. Some suffered the loss of all things for the sake of Jesus Christ. They had to remember that the world's judgment is not the same as God's. We have to remember this in our own day. The day of biblical Christianity's acceptance and favor by our culture has passed. God's pronouncement hasn't changed. And this is what the church has to remember, has to understand. PRPC has to say, what are we? We are God's people. We are chosen by God, holy, set apart for his purposes. If you remember that, when you do evangelism, when you invite people to church, you're inviting them to become part of the glorious future that God has for his people. And so Peter spells out what we're to do. He's not just writing a feel-good, positive thinking piece, like some motivational speaker. Peter is going someplace with what he has just written. He wants us to advertise it. Listen to what he says. but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim or advertise the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. We can't be silent. This is more than doing a radio spot The devil is advertising all the time. He's advertising that sin doesn't have any consequences, that it's not that bad at all, that the pleasure you get from whatever you do following your heart, and I get sick of that phrase, just do what your heart says. Our hearts are fallen. They're sinful. We need to say, No, the advertisement that you need to pay attention to are the promises of God. God announces a very different message than Satan does. And when we speak about God, we talk about the God of our salvation, the God who has done great things for us. I had a blood draw on Friday, which I don't particularly enjoy, but Jennifer and I got to talking, the phlebotomist. And we got to talking about spiritual things. And she responded so quickly when I talked about my hope of heaven. She responded to that because that drew her out and made her think about what she believes. Talk to my neighbor, Jim. Jim has non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He has had God's mercy shown to him again and again. He had just ended his chemo at one point. And as we were talking, we talked about the hope of the resurrection. He's a non-practicing Catholic. And we had to remind ourselves that our bodies are subject to all sorts of things in this world. And so I declared to Jim at that point that my God is the God of sovereign power and resurrection promise. The cardiac arrest that I had wasn't my bad luck. It wasn't good luck that saved my life. God's hand was present and active. As the church, we have to declare what we believe about God. One writer has called it having a God space, remembering that God is in everything, in every moment of your life, in every action of your life, in every event of your life. And spiritual conversations can arise when we keep remembering that our God is the God of mercy, the God who says, you are mine. The God who takes sinners for his own possession. He's the God of all grace. The gospel news is of God's saving work. It's always before us. It's what we breathe, you might say. The gospel that Peter describes throughout this letter is summarized at the end of chapter two in first Peter. where he says, he himself, that is Jesus Christ, bore our sins in his body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds, you have been healed, for you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. God takes what are dead stones and makes us living stones by a sovereign electing grace, bringing us into his marvelous light, the wonderful, amazing, extraordinary, astonishing light of the gospel. that God would forgive our sins, adopt us as his children, call us by name, allow us to call him father, promise us eternal life in his son, make us dwell in his holy presence forever. That is stunning if you'll think about it. We are like the believers on the day of Pentecost to be announcing the mighty acts of God. Why do we declare God's excellencies? Because it's not about us. The story is not about you. God's glory is the most important thing in the world. More important than whether I'm happy or fulfilled or have an easy life. It's our chief end. Our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. The prophet Hosea married a soiled, tarnished woman. And God said that that marriage pictures his relationship to his people. We are soiled and tarnished. We are besmudged by sin. But God's grace conquers us. Apart from Jesus Christ, there is no mercy. But in Jesus Christ, believers receive mercy. To not understand this is to not understand what it means to be a Christian. and to not be saved and to have the wrath of God still abiding on you. This demands repentance for sin and turning to faith in Jesus Christ as the only savior for sinners. And we are not to be silent about our salvation. If this deliverance, this adoption is purchased for us at the cost of the life of the son of God, we How can we not declare God's excellencies? How can we not be part of a community that worships him? How can we not sing his praise? You know, I used the illustration earlier about the Roman graffiti that was found in a ruined Roman building. It was a place that housed young men who served in the emperor's palace. And it was a picture of a man crucified and having a donkey's head. And it was saying that he had been crucified by the Roman state and he was the God who was worthless, lowly as a donkey. Alexandros must have been a fool for worshiping such a God. But there was another phrase written below. The first phrase says, Alexandros worships his God. And the other phrase written below said, Alexandros is faithful. The young man didn't give up on Jesus in the face of the mockery of his fellow servants. He knew who he was. He declared the excellencies of the God who saved him, who made him a part of a chosen race, the royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of God's own possession. How will this church stand out in this community, stand out in the world, if not by being what you are, knowing that you receive mercy, mercy that you have to tell to the world, the mercy in Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Father, we pray that you might have mercy upon us and allow us to honor you and serve you in our lives, to turn from sin, and instead of loving sin, to love Christ who delivered us from sin. Help us to see what it means to be a holy people, a people for your own possession, a people that are called out, Help us, Lord, to see these things by your grace and the power of your Holy Spirit. We thank you that you will do all that's right, and we trust in you. Please help us now. In Jesus' name, amen.