Read along with me at 2 Peter, sorry, 1 Peter 2, 9, or feel free to just listen. I'm actually going to back up to the beginning of the chapter, starting at verse 1, reading all the way down to verse 12, though I'm going to be focusing on verse 9, but read the whole section here just for context. So please tend to the reading and hearing of God's holy, precious Word. Therefore, laying aside all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all evil speaking, as newborn babes desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious. Coming to him is to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious. You also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Therefore, it is also contained in the scripture, behold, I lay in Zion a chief cornerstone, elect, precious, and he who believes on him will by no means be put to death. Therefore, to you who believe, he is precious, but to those who are disobedient, the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone, and a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. They stumble, being disobedient to the word to which they also were appointed. But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light, who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy. Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul, having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by your good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation. Let's pray. Father in heaven, I thank you for your word, every single bit of it, every jot and tittle even. We know it is significant that you have preserved it throughout history for our good and for your glory. So may we, as we look into it today, see you and see a good result of your spirit working in us. Please give me boldness and skill and a lack of confusion, but instead clarity to open it up to your people and keep me free from any error that might misguide them. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus, amen. As many of you know, I'm a bit of a missionary biography junkie. We all need to have some leisure reading, right? And so that's what the Lord has laid upon my heart. I absolutely devour stories about the people God has called to oftentimes frontline evangelistic work. really for two reasons. First, because it's thrilling to me to read about the wonderful things God has done through history, using His people to accomplish these things. Let us not forget, He could do it all by Himself, right? He doesn't need us. So to see the wonderful things, you know, the conversion of entire nations, the drawing of the heathen out of cannibalism, things like this, He's done through the weak hand and voices of men. But also, What thrills me is to read the determination displayed by people who, being so confident of their calling, know what they need to do. Without a doubt, William Carey was headed east, and a little bit different than he thought, but it turned out where exactly God planted him. Somebody like David Livingstone heading to Africa, nothing was gonna stop him on the course of his travels there. Gladys Aylward in China, if you've read those stories, absolutely incredible. I mean, she takes a train across all of Asia through Siberia in winter, right? Because she knows that God has called her to China. So that kind of determination, knowing what God has called them to is just absolutely enthralling to me. So today I want to open up for us all a bit to this verse, as I said, to focus on verse nine here in chapter two of 1 Peter. to see very clearly really two things. One, the extraordinary status we have in God, as well as the immense calling we have from God. Because while not all of us are called to frontline evangelistic work, to open up some new continent or nation or people group to the gospel, But we don't necessarily have that calling. We all do have a calling from God. So to see our status as Christians in the sight of God and our immense calling that we have from God. Because unlike the famous Great Commission, we can often, I think, get focused on that in Matthew 28 and think, oh, how am I ever going to participate in that? It's so big and, you know, do I have to teach? And well, I'm not going to be baptizing, so what's my part in this? So instead of getting lost in the big project of the Great Commission, which really is more precisely directed to church leaders or the church as a whole, but instead to look at this here in First Peter as what I'm gonna call the broad admonition, right? So the Great Commission, we have the broad admonition directed to us, every single believer, to witness, we might use in common parlance, but to speak to our neighbors about the goodness of God. focusing on those two things, again, as I said before, the status we have as Christians in the sight of God and the immense calling that we have from God. So let us begin, let me read that verse again to focus in, verse nine. But, so that contrasts with what he said before, but you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. So let's first establish who it is that Peter is speaking to. Throughout chapter 1, there's a lot of evidence. We see in verse 1, he's speaking to pilgrims. In verse 2, he uses the word elect. Next verse, those begotten through a living hope of Christ's resurrection. The next verse, those kept by the power of God. So there are four different ways and four verses for him to describe who. Everybody out there walking in darkness? No, those who are walking in light, as he describes it later, that is to say Christians, believers, that's who this letter is written to. So those are the people that are the chosen generation of verse nine, the royal priesthood of verse nine, the holy nation, the special people, right? A unique people that he has called out of the world to give his special grace to. And that's maybe not all of us, Lord willing, before too much more time elapses, that there would be 100% of us here that know that we are Christ and that He is our God, that we are believers, to use another terminology in verse 7 even of our text. So think of it, it should be absolutely mind-boggling to think that Christ has done this for us, that those words can describe us, that we are the elect, which is to say chosen, that we are His pilgrims, His travelers on this journey, that we are those kept by the power of God. If that doesn't awe you, I don't think you're adequately humbled as to the extent of God's special grace. And so that leads us to the status we have in God in verse nine, part A. As I've already alluded to, those descriptors, the chosen generation, the royal priesthood, the holy nation, His own special people. And these are not phrases that Peter just came up with for rhetorical flair. They all have basis in the Old Testament and the promises there about what God will do to raise up a people for himself. His grace and his mercy displayed to sinners just like us. The earlier prayer of confession, very well stated, we left to our own flesh do not want to come to God. We actually enjoy our sin, right? We do the exact opposite of coming to God, but for His special grace. So, same Old Testament as now, that by God's special action upon a people who are His chosen, his royal priesthood, his holy nation, that he would do this work in us. So those allusions all come from Deuteronomy, Exodus, Isaiah, and you can look those up. So these are not unique phrases that Peter came up with. It's based in the Old Testament, and we have that unity with them. And the thing I want to emphasize is that the key impact of these labels is to know that these people did not get rescued from Egypt or other disasters because they were so strong. They did not enter Canaan because they were so holy. They did not maintain their place in the land once brought there graciously because they were so faithful. We know from the history recorded here, they were the exact opposite. They weren't holy, they were weak, and they were sinners who walked, sometimes ran, away from God. Their status as objects of God's tremendous blessings was not due to anything they did. but entirely because of what God had done for them. So that's the status of the believer in the Old Testament, and you well know it's the same status for us as believers in the Christian era and the status of believers that Peter is writing to here. It's the status of us as Christians today. By grace we stand. So that is our status, point one, status of believers. Next, let's turn then to the calling of believers. So being those people, having that status in Christ by grace, what do we do, right? He hasn't saved us just to have a coast, you know, slight downhill with all the bumps smoothed out into heaven, right? Peter here lays out the actions that are fitting for people that have this extraordinary status. And that link, well I'll say the consequential or the causational link between the status and between the calling is seen in the New King James that I'm reading from here in the wording, that you may be. Other translations are more explicit about the cause and effect. wording it, as a result, so you can see the consequence. The direct result of having the status, being the recipients of God's special grace, is that you may, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. The point is, since we are the chosen people, the holy nation, etc., therefore we're called to do certain things. We don't just sit back, we don't just relax. We do meditate, we do express thanksgiving and all that, nothing wrong with that, but we have certain things to do in light of, because of the great status we have as Christians in God's family. And that is, as I've already said several times, but to emphasize, to quote, proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. So notice there, just in the, sort of giving an added reason within this, therefore, the idea of light and darkness. The Lord has called us out of darkness into light. So that translation, that change, what are we going to do about that? How do we act in response to that? We proclaim the praises of Him who did that for us. That, I want to suggest for you, is our calling. Every single believer has the calling to proclaim the praises of Him who has done all of these extraordinary things for us, summarized in that phrase, bringing us out of darkness into marvelous light. Focus a little bit, keeping it short though, on that word proclaim. It's a bit confusing, I think, because in our English translations, that English word proclaim is often used to speak of the gospel, even as broad as sense, right? Evangelist goes out and he proclaims the gospel. And if I said at the beginning, I'm not expecting you to be an ordained evangelist going out and, you know, discipling nations in your lay role. So what's the deal here? Well, fact is, there's several Greek words that in the English are translated into proclaim. And this is not the Greek word euangelion, which is usually that basic word for preaching. The word here in 1 Peter 2 has more the sense of divulging, of celebrating. So yes, you're sharing, you're speaking about, and hopefully with joy. How can you not with joy proclaim the praises of Him who has brought you out of darkness into marvelous light? that. Very simple. I hope I can make it simple. Peter makes it simple. This is our task. You don't have to instruct your neighbors in the intricacies of Christian doctrine. You don't have to teach a multifaceted epistemological basis for Christian philosophy. You don't have to go into all the depths of the things you feel weak because you don't know, right? You simply need to praise God because of what He's done in your life and all the good things He's done in the life of your neighbors. So simple, yet so vast, really. We simply need to tell people about, to verbally celebrate, maybe to sing God's praises, to use an idiom, to celebrate the goodness of God. And to meditate on that attribute of God, He is good. How is He good? I don't want to put words in your mouth or words into your mind, but things that jumped into my mind this week is He's good in that He sustains the earth, right? He gives us every breath. I took a fall this week and had the breath knocked out of me. You take breath really carefully when it leaves and then it comes back, right? We take that for granted, but He is good that He gives us breath. He's good that He gives us food every morning. He's good that he doesn't give us 95-degree days in the spring, because we wouldn't be ready for it yet. We only get 80-degree ones. So he is good in so many ways, and we have the opportunity to proclaim his praises. So trying to keep it brief, I'll end there, but hopefully to encourage you with this great task, this great opportunity that we have. And really recognizing the fact that I'm speaking to two people here, I want to speak to the first group. Those of you who are not counted among the subject of Peter's letter, perhaps you know about God, but you don't know who He is, and you don't know His special working in your life yet, Lord willing, yet, I ask you to consider the goodness of God, that He has given you far better than you deserve. when you consider your sins against Him, your envy of your neighbor and all these things, that He's given you another day to live, that He's brought you here today to hear this. That is a display of God's goodness. And so cry out to Him for mercy, that you may be His royal priesthood, His holy nation, His own special people. And then you can praise Him to your neighbors. But also for those of us who do know His special grace, who have been brought into His family, who know without a doubt, and we have that assurance of salvation, that we are His and He is ours, I plead with you to share that good news, right? We just got a new vehicle this last week, and not that I'm going around town telling everybody about it, but if somebody asks, I'm like, yeah, God is good because I have a vehicle that drives so nice, you know? Good things happen to us, we want to share. And if we take seriously our sin and the price that Christ has paid for us, that's something we will talk to people about. And I've really been trying to implement that discipline of when I'm at Bernard's or at the grocery store and people just casually say, so how's it going? I say, great, God is good. And hopefully that opens a door because they're like, why or in what way? Well, because I didn't get into a car wreck here, because I got to say hi to you. You know, there's a lot of ways that we can share God's goodness. That he's forgiven my sins, that he rules and reigns over this world, that he is building it up in righteousness according to his divine plan. So I encourage you, encourage myself at the same time, encourage all of us to speak of him, to do it confidently, to do it frequently, to do it privately, to do it publicly, to do with your family members, with your friends, your co-workers, your neighbors. Some are going to laugh, some are going to look at you funny. It doesn't matter. It shouldn't. Only for our pride, it doesn't matter. But remember that we serve a great God in heaven who delights to know that we love him, that we want to tell others about him. So friends, let's take the opportunity on those two sides of the coin here, or two groups, to reflect on who we are before Christ and to submit ourselves before Him if we haven't already. And for those who do know Him and know that He is ours, to tell others about Him with joy and thanksgiving. Amen? Amen. Let's pray. Father God, as we come to your table here, we do have so much to be thankful for. We have been brought into your family that by faith we can partake of Christ even. And may we, as we go forth in this coming week, know clearer and clearer your goodness to us. and have that joy just seeping out of our pores to share it with others, that you have been good to us, that there's so much we can praise you for, and that we might have the joy of seeing others come to you, that your kingdom would be extended, that your mercy would be enlarged, as we have this opportunity to praise you for your goodness among men. Amen.