This is a reading from first Peter 2:4-
12.
As you come to him
a living stone, rejected by men,
but in the sight of God chosen and precious,
you yourself, 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 am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious.
And whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.
So the honors 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 stumble 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.
Hey, everybody, good morning and welcome
to CCC, really, really glad that you're here.
Thanks for coming.
This is our fourth week of our ten week series.
We are calling Rise Up.
We're spending ten weeks in the book of first Peter.
And first Peter was written to a group of Christians
who are living in a culture that was antagonistic toward Christianity.
It was a culture that was hostile toward Christianity.
And what's wild is that this group of Christians in the first century
ended up changing the culture around them, and it was amazing.
It was breathtaking.
And they did it with no political power.
They did it with no economic influence.
And of course, the question then is how?
Because a lot of us would love for our culture to be different.
And it's frustrating because it seems like our culture is
going from bad to worse,
and we don't know what to do.
That's why we're spending ten weeks in first Peter,
because this group of early Christians, within about three generations
changed the culture they were living in
into a culture worth living in.
And that's what we want.
So if you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to First Peter chapter two.
If you don't want to use one of our church Bibles.
It's on page 953 and 954.
And if you're not very familiar with the Bible, that's fine.
We are going to put the verses up on the screen
as I talk about them, so you don't have to worry about it.
But I want to read the passage again.
I love this passage, but there's a lot there.
And we had to read to us once.
Let me read it again.
So it's fresh in your mind that I'll give you the three points
that I want to cover this morning together.
Here it is. What Peter says.
This begins in verse four as you come to him, him being Jesus,
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 a fence.
They stumble because they disobey the word as they were destined to do.
But you are 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. All right,
here are the
three points that I want to pull out of this passage.
These are the three things that Peter told a group of Christians
like us to remind us
so that we could live in a culture that was antagonistic
and hostile and actually change the culture.
I the first point is what Jesus is for
us, what Jesus is for us.
The second point is what we are for Jesus and the third point is,
what it means to the world, what Jesus is for us,
what we are for Jesus, and what it means for the world.
First, what we are for Jesus.
Oh no, what Jesus has for us.
This is verse six, 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.
It's a great verse.
It's a it's a really it's an interesting image for Peter to pick,
like when he's going to talk to them about Jesus, remind them about Jesus.
Seems like he could say, don't forget, Jesus is your Savior.
Jesus is your Redeemer.
Jesus is your Lord.
But instead he says, don't forget, Jesus is
your stone, your cornerstone.
And what he's doing is he's using an image from ancient architecture.
If you were going to build a house, you started with a cornerstone,
and the cornerstone would be the most expensive stone
in your whole house because it needed to be the strongest stone.
That's why it's called a precious cornerstone.
And the reason it needed to be strong is because in ancient architecture,
every stone then of your house would be leaning on the cornerstone
and in one way or another, if you had a great cornerstone, you had a great house.
If you had a weak cornerstone,
your house was vulnerable.
Jesus preached a sermon called the sermon on the Mount.
It was his most famous sermon.
It's found in the Gospel of Matthew.
And at the end of that sermon, he sums it up by telling a story.
And this is the story that Jesus tells.
He says, everyone, then, who hears these words of mine
and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock cornerstone.
And the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house.
But it did not fall because it had been founded on the rock.
And everyone who hears these words of mine does not do
them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand,
and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew
and beat against that house, and it fell.
And great was the fall of it.
You get Jesus point, right.
You're a lot of people, a lot of us.
It's easy to do.
We think if God really loved us, he would keep us out of storms.
And that's what we hope God does.
And I get that.
But that's not what the Bible says.
Jesus says the same storm is going to come to you.
That comes maybe to your neighbor
or to your friend at work.
The difference in weathering the storm is not the severity
of the storm, it's the solidity of the house.
And this is what struck me is that everybody's leaning on something.
Everyone has a cornerstone.
Well, one of my family members,
when they first got married, they bought these glasses.
And the glasses lean, they're made to lean.
They did just,
I don't know, cracked me up.
They didn't have kids yet, because kids would never.
That would never be a good class for kids.
And I was I was uneasy.
And then, they, you know, I ended up by when they had kids,
they bought regular glasses and they put these away.
But the good news is, now I can use it as a sermon illustration.
So ends up being okay.
But every human being is like that.
Every human being.
You're like that.
You lean on something,
your friends lean on something that people around you lean on something.
This is the kicker, though.
You don't really know
what your cornerstone is
until there's a storm
and storms will hit some people
and other storms will hit other people.
For instance, if you don't have any money in the stock market
and the stock market crashes, that's a storm that won't impact you.
But if you just retired and all your money is in the stock market
and the stock market crashes, that's a storm.
That's a storm.
And the way you know, your cornerstone
is how much you shake
when you're in the midst of a storm.
The level of your anxiety, the level of your fear.
And there are all kinds of cornerstones that people use.
They have, you a career can be a cornerstone.
You lose your job, or your career goes in the dumpster
and you feel yourself shaking.
A lot of people make their kids cornerstone,
especially here in this community.
You know, I always think kids are terrible cornerstones
because they grow up and they move away, right?
They quit being your cornerstone.
A spouse, a great marriage
is a wonderful cornerstone until it's not until something happens.
You say, you know what I was thinking through this illustration?
I was thinking about having different things up here that I could lean on.
That would be obvious.
Obviously not be able to bear my weight, but I was afraid I would fall over.
It took me a while to get up and yeah, you guys would miss the whole point.
But everybody's got a cornerstone.
And if your cornerstone is finite,
no matter what it is, a storm's coming.
A storm's coming.
It's going to wipe out
your life.
See? And that's what
that's what Peter tells them.
You do this, and you got to remember it.
It's so easy to think of Jesus just as a savior.
And that's great.
I mean, Jesus, through his life, death and resurrection means that
we don't have to count on our own goodness to get us reconciled to God.
But Jesus did that for us. Wonderful.
But what Peter reminds them of you're going to live in a hostile culture.
Jesus has to be more than your Savior.
He's got to be your cornerstone.
And then no matter what storm comes your way,
you will survive.
Even the final storm of death itself.
I remember sitting with my mom when she was dying.
I was holding her hand
and she was in some obvious pain, and we both knew she was dying.
She would actually die within the hour,
but she had her eyes clenched shut and she said to me, Joe,
tell me something good.
Tell me something good.
What would you tell somebody?
What I told my mom.
I quoted an old him that she would know.
And I said, mom,
there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
lose all their guilty saints.
My mom had her eyes still clenched shut,
but she smiled and she said yes. Yes.
What I was reminding my mom is not just that
Jesus was her Savior, but that Jesus was her cornerstone.
And even in this final storm, she was going to be okay.
She was going to be okay.
That's the first thing.
Peter reminds us all what Jesus is for us.
Then he reminds us what we are for Jesus.
Good verses five and nine and ten sweat.
It says, 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.
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.
It's so interesting.
Another this is another time where he chooses particular words.
Now they're very religious words
that the phrase spiritual house is actually the word for temple.
So he he goes through this list of words and saying,
you're talk about a temple and sacrifices
and priesthood twice a royal priesthood proclaiming the excellencies of him
who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
You're a holy nation.
The reason that's so interesting is that in the first century,
the Roman Empire was very tolerant of religions.
For the most part.
But they persecuted Christians
because they didn't believe that Christianity was a religion.
They actually thought Christians were atheists.
And the reason they thought that is because Christians didn't have temples,
Christians didn't have sacrifices,
Christians didn't have priests that went between them.
And God Christians.
And the reason that they thought that they weren't a religion is because
every religion understood that there was a chasm.
There's a gap between God and human beings that has to be bridged somehow.
That's why there were temples.
That's why there were sacrifices.
And but Christians came along and said, oh, no,
Jesus has closed the chasm.
So now we have direct access to God.
We don't have to go through any mediator.
It's Jesus that's our mediator,
and we call God Father.
It was remarkable.
But here Peter uses all those
same words to describe Christians themselves.
He said, but you're a spiritual house.
You're a temple because God now lives in you.
You're a royal priesthood.
You you are the ones who proclaim the excellencies of him
who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
You're a holy nation.
Was he doing
what he was telling
the Christians?
Was that
they were the ones that God was going to use.
Every single one of them.
One of the things that's interesting is
Peter doesn't tell them, listen, I'm coming into town.
I'm an apostle.
Get people together.
I'll preach.
Of course, that's the way it works.
That's not what he does.
What he says is you all are the ones who will be like priests,
who will tell people what God is, what God has done.
You know, there are two important religious roles in the Old Testament.
There is the role of the priest, the role of the prophet.
A prophet stood between God and people and would tell them the truth of God.
A priest stood between people and God,
and would bring people to God so that he could connect them with God.
Right.
What Peter says here is that
we become we become the role of priest and prophet.
And I know some of you grew up in a Catholic tradition.
I'm not talking about priests the way you think of priest
when I when you when you think of the prophetic role, think of truth.
When you think of the priestly role, think of of love.
Most of us are heavy on one and light on the other.
Some of us don't mind telling the truth to anybody.
We just will bring it out right.
But we're light on love.
Other people are so heavy on love.
They never speak truth to anybody.
Never tell anybody about Jesus.
But what Peter said is that if you're going
to change your culture, you got to be both prophet and priest.
One of my favorite
stories I've only told this once,
here,
when I was first
on staff here at Ksdk, I was part time because we were very small church.
My full time job was being that the chaplain
and the head of the Bible department of Cog Christian Academy
and, one year a student transferred in named Stacy.
And Stacy didn't want to be at CVC.
I don't know what was what forced her to come, but she didn't like it.
She particularly hated Bible class,
and even more, her Bible teacher, whose name was Mrs.
Engle,
and I would meet with Stacy every once in a while,
and she would tell me how much she hated Mrs.
Single.
And then when she was a senior, I found out that she was Mrs.
Engel's, student assistant.
And I was
met with her, and I said, Stacy, is this true that you are Mr.
Single Student Assistant?
Why are you trying to poison her? Coffee?
What are you doing?
And she said, no, let me tell you why
I hated her.
I made sure she knew I hate her.
I was terrible to her.
I made sure everybody in the classroom knew I hated her.
And then.
And Stacy's parents were divorced.
She said around Thanksgiving, my mom kicked me out of the house.
My dad wouldn't take me in.
And when Mrs.
Engle found out about it, she invited me to her home for Thanksgiving.
And then Stacy said, this will never forget this.
She said, Pastor Joe, I didn't go,
but I've loved her ever since.
Priest and prophet.
Truth and love.
I saw Stacy just a few months ago,
and she told me.
She reminded me of that story and she said, Now I'm married to a Christian man.
My kids go to BCA, my kids love Jesus.
All because it goes back to that.
You want to change the culture.
You really want to change the culture.
You got to be the ones that will be priests and prophets,
where people will come to you to know truth,
but they'll come to you because you will in love.
Bring them to God through Jesus.
That brings my final point, which is what we are
for the world, or what happens to the world.
So I started this by saying that
this is a small group of Christians
who ended up changing their culture,
and they did it without political power, without economic means.
And the
way they did it is they created a counter culture
that was characterized by a few things.
The first thing was that Christians were
incredibly resilient people,
that what people would watch with Christians, they would go through storms,
but they went through storms in a different way than anybody else.
Because Jesus was the cornerstone.
In acts chapter 16, there's a story of the apostle Paul with a guy named Silas,
and they get arrested and beaten
because they were telling people about Jesus, and they're thrown in jail.
And then this is the verse.
This is what it says.
It says around midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns
and then this phrase and all the prisoners were listening.
And I have in the margin of my Bible, I wrote, no kidding,
because no one
had ever heard anyone get beaten and thrown in prison and sing hymns.
But they were incredibly resilient.
The other thing, the second thing was that
every Christian declared the excellencies of Jesus,
that every one was
somebody that would talk about Jesus.
And the early church was known for what they were for, not what they were against.
They didn't rail against the culture of the Roman Empire.
What they did was say to people, you got to know Jesus.
You got to just just come just see.
Because he called me out of darkness into his marvelous light.
In John chapter one, there's the story of Philip, who became a disciple.
But when he first met Jesus,
the first thing he did was he went to find his friend Nathaniel.
Now, Nathaniel was a little snarky, and when Philip told him about Jesus,
Nathaniel responded, can any good thing come out of Nazareth?
And what Philip said to his friend was this just come and see.
And Nathaniel did.
And then Nathaniel became a disciple as well.
But the last two things
are really captured in verses 11 and 12.
What it says is belove.
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 evil doers, they may see your good deeds
and glorify God on the day of visitation.
He mentions two things.
There are two ways that Christians stood out
against the culture of the Roman culture.
One was how they handled sex and the other was how they handled money.
When he says abstain from those passions, what he's saying is
what happened with Christians is that Christians,
they treated sex as if it was sacred
and they would only have sex with their wives or only have sex
with their husbands, and they never had sex outside of that,
which was completely different than the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire was wildly sexual.
They would have sex with anyone and everyone at any time,
very much like our culture.
But the other way that Christians were known
as they were very generous with their money.
They did a lot of good deeds and good.
A lot of good deeds cost some money,
and that's what people notice there.
Archeologists discovered a letter
back from the first century where the writer describes Christians.
And this way the writer described him.
He said Christians open their table
to everyone, but close their bedroom to anyone.
They open their table, which was their generous
with their money.
But their pure with their sexuality.
Listen.
What what happened in the first century was that Christians gathered
and they started to create a counter culture.
And when someone would meet a Christian, what they realized is that there was
something different about them, about the way they weathered storms,
about the way they talked about Jesus, about
the way they handled their sexuality, the way they handled their money.
And it made the people around them
hunger for something they didn't even know they were hungry for
this.
And if we're ever going
to change this culture and believe me, this culture needs to be changed.
It starts with us and it starts with us
becoming 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 were God's people.
Once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy.
Let's be that kind of church, and let's change this culture
into a culture that's worth living in.
Would you pray with me,
father in heaven, we are so grateful for, your word.
Grateful for what Peter wrote
and how surprising
it is to me that he didn't just talk about
Jesus as being our Savior, not our Lord, but as our cornerstone.
I know there are a lot of people
that are going through different storms right now right here.
I pray that you would help them lean on you
even as the storm rages around them.
I pray that you would make us an oasis,
a different kind of culture.
So when people walk in here, they realize that something
is radically different and it incites in them a hunger
for something that they didn't even know they were hungry for.
Make us into a chosen race, a royal priesthood.
The people after you,
and let that change our culture into what you want it to be.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.