Built Up to Proclaim His Praises
Living as Exiles • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 38:13
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· 61 viewsAs Peter talks about our connection to Christ and the honor he will give, we see that we are being built up to proclaim God's praises to the world around us.
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The world around us is getting more interesting, isn’t it?
In some ways, our life as exiles is becoming more obvious.
The clearest example is the threats being made against pro-life ministries in anticipation of the Supreme Courts’ decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
There are groups who have issued serious threats to Pregnancy Resource Centers and have already vandalized at least thirteen across the country since the ruling was leaked.
Many of these agencies are filled with people who are trying to care for unborn children and their mothers and fathers and offer the hope of the gospel alongside their practical care.
We stand with our local PRC and seek to promote a culture of life in the New River Valley and beyond because we believe the Bible teaches us that God is the author of life and that every human being bears his image from the moment of conception on.
Standing on the truth of God’s word has put a target on the back of many organizations throughout history.
In other parts of the world, what we are doing here this morning would be illegal and punishable by fines, imprisonment, and death.
We are exiles, and this world is not our home.
So, what do we do? We turn to Christ.
Open your Bibles to 1 Peter 2:4 this morning.
As Peter writes to people who were experiencing life as exiles, he points them to incredible realities about what God is doing in and through their suffering.
It isn’t pointless; instead, God is working behind the scenes to build his people up so they can declare his praises.
Let’s look at it together to see more of what that looks like. Read verses 4-10 with me.
Peter first calls us to...
1) Recognize your connection to Christ.
1) Recognize your connection to Christ.
Here’s a chance for us to ask a couple of the questions we talked about last week.
Do you remember the “God/People/Learn/Questions/Do?”
Let’s start by seeing what Peter teaches us about God when he talks about Jesus.
Look at verses 4 again.
As we come to Christ, we come to a living stone.
Peter is going to come back to the idea of Jesus as a stone in a minute, but for now, let’s focus on the “living” aspect of it.
This circles us back to what we saw in 1:3 - We have a living hope because Jesus has been raised from the dead.
As we come to Christ, we aren’t coming to a dead set of truths in a dusty book; we are turning to the one who has been raised from the dead and is right now alive and seated at the right hand of God.
He is the living stone upon which we are to build our lives.
Notice what else Peter says about Jesus—he was rejected by people.
That brings us back to what we study in the gospel of John when we started last fall:
He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.
Jesus was rejected by the Jewish leaders and, in his crucifixion, by the Roman governor. He was rejected by the rich young ruler who loved his stuff more than he loved Jesus and by the man who cared more about his family than following Christ.
Jesus, the Son of God who came to save the world, was rejected.
Yet, despite human rejection, he was chosen and honored by God.
Remember what we saw in 1:20? Jesus was foreknown before the foundation of the world. He was set apart to redeem humanity.
When he completed his work, God honored him:
For this reason God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow— in heaven and on earth and under the earth—
and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Though the world rejected him, God the Father honored Jesus for the sacrifice he made.
Now, he is the living stone who is Lord over all creation.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Look again at verse 5…What does Peter say we are? Living stones.
He is connecting us with Jesus. We are not the Saviors of the world, but we have life because God has caused us to be born again through Christ.
Not only that, but think back to 1:1-2 - Peter has described us as the people who were called according to the foreknowledge of God.
He is going to explain in verse 6-7 that although people are rejecting us for following Jesus, we will receive honor when he sets everything right.
Do you see what Peter is doing? He is showing us how incredible God is in connecting the rejection and suffering his people endure for his name with rejection and suffering Jesus endured!
How unimaginable is it that God would suffer for us and be rejected? How unimaginable is it that God would also honor us for our suffering, just as he honored Christ for his?
Listen clearly: Our names will not be the names that cause the world to bow. Jesus and Jesus alone deserves that honor.
However, we are uniquely identified with Christ. As we suffer for Jesus, we suffer as the people God chose and will one day honor.
What is God accomplishing through all of this? Well, he is giving us something to do, which answers another one of our questions.
He is building us up to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
The priests of the Old Testament represented the people of Israel as they prayed and offered sacrifices on their behalf.
We don’t have to offer animal sacrifices anymore because those sacrifices simply pointed to Jesus; his death fulfilled those.
However, we still offer spiritual sacrifices.
John MacArthur gives us several different ways we offer spiritual sacrifices:
We allow God to use all that we are – our minds, bodies, everything yielded to him.
We worship and praise God for who he is and what he has done.
We do what is right
We are generous
We pray
Finally, we help people find out about Jesus, which we will talk about more in a minute when we get to verses 9-10.[1]
Isn’t that what Jesus did? He surrendered fully to the Father’s plan, yielding everything to him.
He gave the the Father honor and glory.
He did what was right
He was generous to those who had need
He prayed to the Father
He demonstrated and declared the greatness of God on the earth
He took it one step further in offering the final sacrifice for sin.
As you suffer shame, ridicule, and worse, you are connected to Christ.
We have already alluded to this, but that calls us to...
2) Rest in the honor to come.
2) Rest in the honor to come.
Using quotes from the Old Testament, Peter points out that Jesus is the cornerstone we are to build our lives on.
I have been watching them build the new Sheetz. One interesting thing I noticed was that they put up a single piece of steel at the very beginning. They didn’t add anything else for a while, but it seemed like that piece of steel marked the corner of where the building was going to be, and everything else was measured and constructed around that point. That’s what Jesus is for us.
He is the foundation, he is the starting point, he is where we go to look for help.
And again, he isn’t just a dead set of principles we affirm; Jesus is a living person who we relate to.
Throughout the entire letter, Peter has been teaching us to look beyond what is happening now to see what God has promised in the future.
Part of our hope is that we will be honored when Christ returns.
We have mentioned the concept of honor and shame before, but we need to understand the impact this would have had on the Christians in Peter’s day.
The persecution they endured wasn’t yet full government persecution. Instead, they faced rejection by their family, loss of friends, loss of their business.
By following Jesus, they were bringing shame on their families and their community, and the way the community would respond is by breaking ties and pushing them away.
The best picture we have of this in our culture right now is what has been called “cancel culture.”
When a person, especially a celebrity or public figure, does the wrong thing or says the wrong thing, they face a public shaming that goes beyond holding people accountable for wrong actions.
Here’s how one writer explains it:
“When a person does or says something that runs afoul of current cultural preferences, we cancel that person. We shut her down with names, epithets, and ad hominem attacks. If she’s a musician, we call for boycotts of her music. If she’s an athlete, we delight in burning her jersey and posting the bonfire on social media. We now hoist the socially guilty onto a pike for all to see as they writhe, justly deserving what they get for having offended the collective. Be warned: we won’t engage your ideas; we will engage you and shame you out of existence. You will be canceled.”[2]
This is the kind of persecution that believers in Peter’s day were experiencing. They were being canceled for following Christ.
So, to the canceled exiles, he writes the words of verses 6-7. You may be experiencing shame right now, but when it counts, when it really matters, the one who believes in Jesus will not be put to shame. Instead, he would be honored.
For many of us who have grown up in a country that has historically allowed us to openly practice our faith, it is hard to imagine the pain of having the majority of people we know turn their back on us simply because we follow Christ.
Yet to believers facing that depth of pain, God reminds them that the shame they experience now is temporary and weak compared to the honor that will come when they see Christ.
As we watch America becoming more hostile to the claims of Christ, we need to be prepared to be shamed, to be canceled, to be exiled.
When we experience that kind of suffering, we need to rest in the honor that will come.
Why? Because God is playing the long game here.
Remember, we saw last week that all flesh is like grass but God’s word stands forever.
He will ultimately be vindicated, as will those who call on him.
Did you see what fate is waiting on those who reject Christ, though? Read verse 7-8...
Instead of building their lives on Jesus, he becomes the stone over which they will trip when they stand before God.
They will have no excuse; they have disobeyed God’s command and rejected his Savior. They will stand condemned.
By the way, do you realize that this is the fate of over half the world’s population today?
According to the International Mission Board, over 4.5 billion people, 59% of the population, live in places where there are less than two believers out of every 100 people.
“Every day, 157,960 people are dying without Christ.”
[3]
Montgomery County - 99,721
Pulaski County - 34,872
Radford City - 16,408
(population numbers for 2020 census)
Every single day, the amount of people who live from Elliston to Draper die and enter eternity without Christ.
That’s why this section builds to a final call to:
3) Represent him to the world.
3) Represent him to the world.
Look at verses 9-10...
Here’s where we really lean in for the answer of the question, “What do I need to do?”
Peter takes all of these terms that applied to Jews in the Old Testament and shows that they now apply to followers of Christ as well.
By God’s grace, we are a chosen race no matter what our natural ethnic background is.
Together, followers of Christ make up a royal priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices to the God who saved us.
We are a people for God’s own possession; we belong to him, and he is pleased by that.
Why? Why did God do all of those things, setting us apart and making us a people for his own possession and priests?
So we would worship him and declare his goodness to the world still lost in darkness.
Look at all that God has done for us in uniting us to Christ, promising to honor the sacrifices made on his behalf, and making us into his unique possession. We have so much to praise him for, even just in these verses.
However, proclaiming his praises isn’t limited to just what takes place in here on a Sunday. Instead, he is calling us to proclaim his praises into the world of people who are dying without him.
He has called us out of darkness and into his marvelous light.
Part of why he has done that for us is so we will tell the world that is still lost in darkness that God offers them light through Christ.
The Bible Exposition Commentary Chapter Four: Christian Togetherness (1 Peter 1:22–2:10)
Because the world is “in the dark,” people do not know the “excellencies” of God; but they should see them in our lives. Each citizen of heaven is a living “advertisement” for the virtues of God and the blessings of the Christian life. Our lives should radiate the “marvelous light” into which God has graciously called us.
Our lives should be like blindingly bright LED signs that constantly display the goodness of God.
He is calling us to proclaim that light anywhere and everywhere we go through our words and our actions.
This has both an individual and a group component, doesn’t it?
We have to worship and praise him as individuals before we can praise him as a group, but look at the emphasis here—we are together in this.
If you were one of the only believers in your community, you would have to go it alone.
You aren’t, though! There is a room full of people here who want to see Jesus exalted.
Together, when our kids are on the same soccer team or we go to the same doctor or eat together at a restaurant, we have the opportunity to proclaim his praises together.
Not only that, but we can invite our friends who don’t know Jesus to come hang out with our friends who know Jesus and they can see how Christ impacts our relationships in a different way.
We don’t want to treat our lost friends as “projects” or anything like that, and we don’t want to make it seem like we are trying to get them to join a pyramid scheme.
I read recently about a church in a city with a number of different Starbucks. One of their small group leaders was challenged to ask people, “How can I pray for God to bless you today?” when he attended a conference. He went back and began asking the baristas at Starbucks that question. Although it was awkward at first, the baristas started coming over and sharing more about their lives with him. He challenged his small group to do the same thing, and they realized that through the group, they frequented every Starbucks in a 13 block radius. Eventually, the group leader found himself at a Starbucks he didn’t normally frequent. He asked a barista the question, and the barista replied, “Oh, are you one of those blessing people?” They were having an impact and pointing people to Christ as they declared the praises of God. [4]
As we genuinely love them and invite them into our lives, we will be able to live like Jesus and lead others to do the same.
Let’s pray…
Endnote:
[1] MacArthur, John Jr. The MacArthur New Testament Commentary: 1 Peter. Chicago: Moody Publishers (2004). 115-117.
[2] https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/canceled-understanding-eastern-honor-shame/
[3] https://www.imb.org/impact/
[4] Reggie McNeal, Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church. San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass (2009), 48.