08-09-09 As Aliens And Strangers

Our study of 1^st Peter brings us this morning

to a turning point in Peter’s writing.

Throughout the first two chapters of this short letter

Peter has been talking with us

both about who we really are as the people of God

and also about the foundation pillars that have the strength

to support our lives during the hard times.

And you remember, don’t you,

that it was hard times that prompted Peter to write this letter in the first place.

1PE 1:6 ... even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials...

Peter knew that many of those who would read his letter

would be facing very hard times indeed.

And he knew, too, that many of them would wrestle with

why their union with Christ

was actually making life more difficult for them.

Here they were,

for the first time in their lives,

living in willing submission to the God who had created them,

filled with His Spirit,

trusting His leadership,

wanting His will to be fulfilled in their lives each day.

In other words,

for the first time in their lives

they were doing what God had created them to do -

living in a living love relationship with Him.

And yet, rather than their submission to God decreasing their suffering,

in many situations it intensified it.

It’s no wonder Peter saw the need

to write to his brothers and sisters

both to equip them for the battle they faced

and also to explain to them why they were facing what they were facing.

And the entire letter

is built around this central theme

of equipping us for the hard times in life.

He began that preparation by assuring us

that what we face right now

is not the end of the story - not even close.

Our King brought us to Himself

because He longs to be good to us

and He wants us to know that when this part of the story is over

we are going to love the way it ends.

And even now whatever we face we face with Him,

and even in the turmoil,

or rather especially in the turmoil we are 1PE 1:5 ... protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

From there he then, went on to share with us

the three essential pillars that will never fail us,

the pillars that God’s Spirit will use

to provide us with the strength we need

for the life we are called to live.

The first of those pillars

was in the form of his call to us

that we not look back at those old hiding places from our past,

those hiding places we used prior to our union with Christ,

those things we used to dull the pain before we knew the King.

He talked with us about 1PE 1:14 ... the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance...

He knows all too well

how pain can distort our memories of those lies that once bound us,

and Peter knows that especially during the hard times

we will need the solid footing that can only be found

in a life firmly built within the protective moral framework given to us by our Lord.

The second pillar he offered us

is his call to 1PE 1:22 ...fervently love one another from the heart...

He wants us to know

that building strong love relationships with our fellow Christians

is absolutely essential for our survival.

We need one another,

and the greater the pain we face,

the more true that is.

And then the third pillar Peter offers us

is the absolute security and certainty of the Word of God.

His voice is the one voice that always speaks truth,

the voice that abides forever.

And then, the second major work Peter does for us in these first two chapters

is to allow us to see ourselves through God’s eyes,

to see ourselves as He sees us.

And what he says

is nothing like what we would have expected.

1PE 2:9-10 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

And we spent several months

looking closely at what we found there,

discovering in the process that our God’s perspective on us

is radically different from our perspective on ourselves.

He has placed us in this world

as His bridge between Himself and those who have not yet met Him,

allowing our lives to daily illustrate who He is

to a world desperately in need of His love, His mercy, His kindness.

And as we move through the last half of this letter

we are going to see that frequently the hard times we face

actually provide us with a platform

on which the truth about our God

becomes more visible to those around us.

Hopefully that will make more sense as we move through the study.

OK, with that as background,

let’s see where Peter takes us.

Having given us the weapons for our warfare,

and having vividly proclaimed both our value to our God

and our vital role in His revelation of Himself to our world,

Peter then outlines for us

how we go about creating an approach to life

that makes us truly effective in the fulfillment of our calling.

And before we see what he says

let me emphasize that what he does here makes sense

only in the context of what he’s already said to us in the first two chapters.

In other words,

if we have not yet understood and applied what he’s already said

we will not be able to understand and apply what comes next.

And this becomes abundantly clear

as soon as we read the first eight words of this next section.

1PE 2:11 Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers ...

You see, that right there is the heart of everything he wanted to communicate to us up to this point in his letter.

We are the beloved of God,

and we are aliens and strangers in a world system

that hates who we have become

and all that our lives represent.

Do you know who you are?

Do you know you are the beloved of God?

Do you know you are an alien and a stranger in a hostile land?

If not,

then don’t ready any farther.

Back up and start the letter over again,

and don’t leave those first two chapters

until God’s Spirit has been able to bring you into those truths.

And what if that takes months...or years...?

Then that’s how long it takes.

The simple truth is that

until we know He loves us

and until we know, at least as some significant level,

who we have become through Christ

we have no adequate foundation for God’s Spirit bringing about significant changes in our behavior.

We can bring about brief bubbles of improved performance

through guilt or fear or other emotion-based motivators,

but the changes will be short-lived,

and the old life patterns will always return.

We can tell ourselves, “I shouldn’t do that because I might get caught.”,

or “I shouldn’t do that because God will judge me”,

or “If I do that God will bless me and be nice to me”.

And it may bring some change in our behavior for a brief period of time.

But only when we can say to ourselves,

“I’m not doing that because it’s not who I am,

and it doesn’t fit with my true identity or my high calling in this world”,

only then will the power of the lies be broken within us.

That certainly doesn’t mean that our flesh then stops reacting

and submissively bows before our righteous spirit.

Our flesh will be flesh until the day we die

and it will always war against the life of Christ within us.

But that warfare can only become winnable

when we have gained some glimpse of our true identity.

Which, of course, is why Peter begins his comments about our conduct

with the words, Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers ...

From there, he then goes on to outline in clear, specific terms,

the life God’s Spirit seeks to lead us into.

But it’s more than just that.

What he gives us

is, in fact, the most remarkable blueprint

for communicating Christ to a hostile society,

a society that views us as totally out of step with the “real world”,

a society that considers our belief systems to be absurd

and thinks we are reactionary religious nuts on the fringe of society.

How do you think we can best communicate the truth about Jesus Christ

and the values of Jesus Christ to our society?

Should we organize ourselves into rallies or protests?

Should we gain power through seeking positions of political influence?

Maybe if we could more effectively infiltrate the media

or more effectively disperse our message through the internet

we would then better proclaim the values and truths that form the foundation of our lives.

Well, I’m not suggesting that those things are necessarily wrong,

but I do know that what I see Peter saying to us in the last half of his letter

looks very different from any of those.

And I’ll tell you right now

that it has taken me more than 40 years of unlearning

before I finally saw what Peter was doing in this passage.

It goes so contrary to our assumptions

and certainly contrary to all the conventional wisdom of our society

that we don’t even see what’s right in front of us,

or at least I didn’t.

But you remember why Peter wrote this letter, don’t you,

and who he wrote it to.

He wrote it to Christians who were meeting with tremendous hostility

from the Roman society in which they lived.

And he wrote it to explain to his fellow Christians

how they could have the most powerful, most effective voice possible to that society

as they assumed the role of God’s priests on this earth,

proclaiming the truth to those around them.

And in that context

what he says is remarkable beyond words.

Because what he tells us

is that the most powerful tool for the proclamation of the truth we will ever have,

greater than any political power we could ever achieve,

greater than the effects of any rally or march or protest we could ever organize,

greater than gaining total control of the media

and infiltrating the entire entertainment industry,

the most powerful tool for the proclamation of the truth we will ever have

is our choosing to live our lives openly before our world,

one day at a time,

and doing it within the moral framework given to us by our God.

The way we respond to the lusts of our flesh,

the way we respond to the human authority figures in our lives,

the way we respond to those who abuse that authority,

the way we respond to those who ridicule our faith,

the way a wife relates to her husband and the way a husband relates to his wife,

the way we use words and the things we choose to say or choose not to say,

and the way we act toward those who treat us unjustly,

these are the things

that have the power to give us tremendous credibility

and tremendous impact in the society in which we live.

I do know, of course,

why we sometimes prefer the rallies or the marches or the protests,

or the great meetings that stir our emotions.

There simply is no better place to hide the truth of a troubled life than on stage.

And the history of the Church

is littered with the accounts

of public voices used to masque pathetic lives of unresolved inner moral corruption.

Just a few weeks ago

our own local paper had a front page story

of a Kenai youth pastor who was tried and convicted for acts of immorality

against a young person under his care.

And no one has lived for long within the family of God

without being wounded in spirit by the discovery of corruption

in the life of some prominent or trusted Christian leader.

It’s no wonder that in his second letter Peter spoke words of such strong condemnation

against such men and women,

describing them as dogs who return to their vomit,

describing them as 2PE 2:10, 12-14 ... those who indulge the flesh in its corrupt desires and despise authority...unreasoning animals, born as creatures of instinct to be captured and killed, ...stains and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, as they carouse with you, having eyes full of adultery and that never cease from sin, enticing unstable souls, having a heart trained in greed, accursed children...

But here in his first letter,

when he shares with us how to do it right,

when he reveals to us the secrets of impacting a society with tremendous power,

and doing it in a way that literally 1PE 2:9 proclaims the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light...,

what he offers us

is not at all what we might have expected,

and perhaps at first glance not what we would have wanted.

He doesn’t tell his fellow Christians

that they should devise schemes to infiltrate the Roman political system

with the hope of gaining more power.

He doesn’t suggest marches, or mass rallies, or protests against corruption.

What he does do

is to talk with us in clear, simple terms

about the way we conduct our own private lives,

telling us that the greatest defense we will ever have

against the attacks brought against us

will not be found in positions we hold,

or the power we gain within the system,

or the effectiveness with which we publicly proclaim our message.

The greatest defense we will ever have

against those who attack us

is the quality of our life

and the moral integrity we bring to each relationship.

Our great defense,

and the one thing that proclaims the truth with a voice that cannot be silenced

is the way we live.

1PE 2:11-12 Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts, which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may on account of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.

Those are Peter’s opening words

as he begins this section of his letter.

And what he’s saying is obvious -

it’s not what we say, it’s the way we live

that has the power to silence those who attack us.

And with these words

Peter is once again bringing us right back

to both the most basic truth of effective communication of the Gospel

and the basic strategy designed by God for that communication.

The basic truth is simply this -

by far the most effective means for the communication of the truth

is from one person to one person within the context of a real, growing, personal friendship.

Unless a person sees the truth illustrated in another person’s life,

unless they see it being lived out in front of them

they will rarely respond.

There is nothing more powerful

than the impact of a person - a friend, or a colleague, or a neighbor, or a teacher, or a client, or a customer...

a person who genuinely seems to care about us.

This shouldn’t surprise us, of course,

given the lengths to which our God went

to illustrate this truth through His own interaction with us.

When He was here, in human form,

He didn’t set up His headquarters in the capitol city,

and then organize His staff

and administrate.

He simply built friendships one person at a time.

Certainly He held public teaching times,

some of them with attendance in excess of fifteen or twenty thousand people.

But when it was all over

do you know how many people He’d won to Himself in His four years of public ministry?

Acts 1:15 tells us -120.

That’s all - just 120,

and most certainly He’d built a friendship with every one of those 120 when He was here.

Now certainly public teaching and public evangelistic meetings

serve a valuable role in God’s design for His Church,

but they are always simply supplemental doorways through which people can see the truth,

and by far the greatest impact

in the effective presentation of Himself to our world

comes through just one person bumping up against the life of one other person.

That is the most basic truth of the effective communication of the Gospel-

one person touching one person touching one person.

And the basic strategy designed by God for that communication flows from it.

He takes His people, His family

and spreads us throughout the entire spectrum of human society,

giving each of us access to just a few people around us.

I know, of course, that some of you would have preferred

that He would have given you access

to a different level of society than the one assigned to you,

but trust me in this -

He has perfectly matched you to the ones He’s given you access to.

I have a friend who, for some time now,

has been living among the young homeless segment of our society.

It is a world I couldn’t survive in for 24 hours.

I was talking with him a while back

about that world,

actually sort of trying to find a way

to get him to reconsider his chosen approach to life.

His response to me made me realize

that God knows what He’s doing with our lives

far better than we ever will.

He said, “Larry, I know I live in a really cruddy world. But I’m doing really good things in that really cruddy world.”

Well, actually, his word usage was a good deal stronger than mine,

but I got the message.

You think your life doesn’t matter?

If so, then you simply do not understand

what your Lord is doing or how He’s doing it on this earth.

And when Peter suddenly shifts the focus of his letter

onto the very practical details of our daily lives,

he hasn’t changed his purpose for writing

and decided he really should tack on some moral platitudes before he closes.

He is staying directly on track,

and immediately after telling us that we are the holy priests of God on this earth

and that we are here to proclaim the excellencies of our God to a dying world,

the next thing he does is to reveal to us exactly how we do that.

We do it by illustrating through our own life

within our own God-given sphere of influence

God’s power to change the human race

one life at a time.

Now, there is a great deal more we need to look at here,

but this, at least, will serve as an introduction for what comes next.