Turn in your Bibles this evening to 1st Peter chapter 2, 1st Peter chapter 2, if you find Hebrews, just keep going, and there you'll find 1st Peter towards the back of your New Testament. 1st Peter chapter 2, the preaching passage is just a couple of verses, but we'll read the chapter, it's not too long. 1st Peter chapter 2, the preaching passage is just a couple of verses, but we'll read 1 Peter chapter 2, God's holy and inspired word. So put away all malice and deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn infants longing 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 am 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 the stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. They stumble because they disobey 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. Be subject, for the Lord's sake, to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the emperor. Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the unjust, for this is a gracious thing. When mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But when you do good and suffer for it, if you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you. leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued to entrust himself to him who judges justly. He himself 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, and now will return to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. As far as the reading of God's word, may he write this word on our hearts, and may he give us true understanding. Let's ask his blessing. Father, we're so grateful that we do not live in darkness, but that we live in the light, and we have your word. And it is so remarkably clear, and yet our minds are clouded with sin and confusion and uncertainty and doubt and ignorance. So we pray, O Lord, that you would bless this reading and this exposition of your word that you might be glorified and that we might be edified and that we may go out of this place further equipped to serve you and to love one another and to give witness to the reality that the tomb is empty, that Christ reigns and that we have been redeemed by his grace. Hear our prayer and be with us even this evening for we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, congregation, we're focusing this evening on verses 11 and 12 in this fascinating, to me anyway, fascinating passage, and I hope to you this evening. I've been drawn back over the years to 1 and 2 Peter, but particularly 1 Peter, because it seems to me that it so describes the world in which we live. It's almost as if Peter was writing to a world that's very much like ours. And when I first started working on this many, many years ago, in the mid-1980s, I was struck by how relevant it is. And over the years, it seems to me that these words have become only more relevant as our world has become more and more like the world to which Peter wrote in 64, 65, 66, somewhere in the mid to late 60s, probably not much after 66 A.D. And of course, the language of pilgrims and exiles and aliens and sojourners is very much in the news, isn't it? This language could have come right off of the television or off of your favorite news site online. When I was writing about this a little bit, I didn't have to look hard at all to find pictures of aliens or strangers or sojourners or pilgrims. I just typed pilgrims and up came thousands and thousands of images of people fleeing persecution and war and danger and whatnot. It seems like the whole world has sort of been turned on its head and set on fire and set into chaos. So we understand, I think, what it means to say pilgrims, and of course we just observed Thanksgiving, which is all about pilgrims coming to the new world, and I know as I stand here that I'm looking at more than a few actual first-generation or perhaps second-generation pilgrims who came to this country from other lands. So I know that you know what it's like to leave something that is established and to go to a new world and to start from scratch. Now these pilgrims to whom the Apostle Peter wrote had not actually moved, and that's the sort of odd thing about it. They hadn't, as far as we know, actually gotten up and gone from one place to another. It was more like a treadmill. And I guess this is a good time of year to be thinking about treadmills. I saw an email the other day, someone trying to get rid of a treadmill, And then, of course, now, after all this eating in November and December, you're going to probably be looking, some of you, for a treadmill, or joining a gym, or getting on a treadmill, so you know what this is. And the world changed for these people so that these folks, when they became Christians, and we don't know if they're Gentiles or Jews, maybe these are mixed congregations, but the world changed for them, not because they went anywhere, but because they were translated right where they were. And so it's like a treadmill. You stand on the treadmill and you turn it on and it starts moving underneath you. Well, that's what happened. Their world moved right underneath them. Their whole relationship to the world around them changed when they were changed. One moment they fit into the surrounding Greco-Roman pagan world. One moment they were polytheists worshiping the local deities with everyone else, recognizing Caesar as a god, pouring out offerings to Caesar and doing all of the things that they were meant to do, buying meat offerings, buying meat to make sacrificial offerings, buying wine to pour out sacrificial libations. They said all the words that everyone else said. They looked at the world the way everyone else looked at the world. They fit in and they were comfortable. They were at home. And then they heard the gospel and the law, and God transformed them through the hearing and the preaching and the proclamation of the gospel. God, the Holy Spirit, translated them right where they were in what we would think of as Turkey. If you go and look at the various places that are mentioned in chapter 1, Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, that makes up about 80-85% of modern-day Turkey. So he's writing to Turkish Christians, what we would think of as Turkish Christians. Of course, things have changed rather considerably since then and now, but geographically, if you look at a map, the only places that he doesn't mention are two little places in the sort of very southernmost part, and we assume that they're just sort of included in all of this. I don't think Peter meant to exclude those poor people in the very southernmost part of Turkey. And he's writing to them as pilgrims and strangers and aliens. And he calls them sojourners. But as I say, they're sojourners without traveling. And now, having heard the gospel, having been brought to faith, having been given new life sovereignly by God the Holy Spirit, Where once, one day they were at peace with their surrounding culture, now suddenly they are at odds with the surrounding culture. And maybe you understand that, especially if you're of a certain age. If you remember the 50s and the 60s, it was a much more comfortable time and place to be a Christian in America. Today, it's a much less comfortable place to be a Christian in America. We haven't gone anywhere, but the culture has moved out from under our feet, as it were. I remember as a child, the streets on Sunday being absolutely desolate. And as a little pagan, I thought that was terrible. It was boring, it was quiet, I hated it. Today, I would like very much for the streets to be desolate, if it meant that all of those people were in church hearing the word of God. But they're not. They're at the mall, and they're out hiking, and they're at the ocean and doing lots of other things. We have become strangers and aliens in our own culture. Now, there's maybe one difference between them and us. They were suffering persecution of a sort, probably not very much from the government, although it would be about 60 years before there would be some actual persecution from the government. A governor would write a letter back to Trajan, the emperor, and this governor's name was Pliny the Younger, and he would be responding to, this is about 112, 114, in this very area, he writes a letter back to the emperor, well, we've been getting complaints about these Christians. And so I'd come to investigate, and in order to investigate, he found a couple of female members of the congregation, whom he describes as deaconesses, And in order to get good information from them, he tortured them. And he was not able to find anything out. In fact, what he discovered was that these people aren't doing anything. They haven't broken the law. They don't do anything dangerous. He actually describes an early Christian worship service so that we have a pretty good idea of what they were doing. In fact, it wasn't very different from what we are doing this evening and what we did this morning. What do you want me to do with them, he says to the emperor. People were circulating pamphlets. Somebody printed a pamphlet. Now this is, as I say, about 60 years later, but it gives you an idea of the kinds of things that people were saying. And in this pamphlet, they listed the names of the Christians. How would that be if suddenly a website went up and listed your name as Christians, and it said, everyone be on the lookout for the following people in Escondido, because these people bear the name of Christ. They were baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Treat them accordingly. Some of you can remember a time in Europe where something like that happened, something actually rather worse. Stars were put on people's houses for the religion that they held. So it was difficult. As I say, in the early 60s or mid-60s, we don't know a lot about persecution of Christians by the government, in Turkey or Asia Minor or throughout that broader region there. But we know that there were Jewish synagogues complaining about the Christians, and we know that there were pagans putting pressure on the Christians. We know that there were lies being told. The Christians were killing babies. Why do you think, children, they were saying that Christians killed babies? Because they didn't understand what we were doing when we put water on them in baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. They thought this must be some kind of death ritual. In fact, we were accused of being a burial cult because we kept talking about this Jesus fellow who was crucified, dead, and buried. Other people suspected that we were a guild. The various craftsmen had a guild. There was a woodworker's guild, and there was this guild, this and that guild. These were sort of trade unions with religious overtones, and they suspected, well, this must be another sort of guild. Kind of like the Masons, if you know anything about the Masonic Lodge. So there were lots of things being said. We were said to have been cannibals eating somebody. How do you suppose that happened? Well, because they misunderstood what we were saying in the Lord's Supper. This is one of the reasons why the early Christians in the services has actually dismissed those who were not members when they administered the Lord's Supper because it was prone to misunderstanding when we said, this is the body of Christ, broken for you. And so there are all kinds of false stories told about us. And how do we respond? What do we do? Well, you know, so-and-so, he used to be a good fellow, he used to be a good citizen. There was an ancient historian in this, roughly in this period, a little later, who would say about the Christians because they didn't go along, because they didn't do what everyone else did, because they didn't say what everyone else did, because they didn't honor the gods and they didn't honor Caesar as a god, that they were haters of humanity. We were getting, in contemporary terms, terrible PR. Our brand was suffering very much. What do you do when everyone around you misunderstands you, doesn't know what you are, why you are, what you say, what you believe, has no way of making sense of it? Well, that's a very good question. Where do you start with people who have no background in Scripture? Where do you start with people who have no background in the history of redemption, who have no idea, really, who Jesus is? And this is not a stretch. Do you ever see these man-on-the-street interviews where Jesse Waters or someone else sticks a microphone in some otherwise ostensibly bright person's face and says, what's Thanksgiving about? And they don't have the faintest idea. If they don't know what Thanksgiving is, they don't know who the first president of the United States is, what makes you think they have the faintest idea of who Jesus is? What do we do? How do we respond? Well, God's word tells us here this evening, and it's in blessedly three points. The main thing I want you to take away tonight is that how believers live is our first apology, that is our first defense of the Christian faith before watching pagans. How we live is our first public defense of the Christian faith before the watching pagan world, because that is where we are, brothers and sisters. And there are three things that God wants you to see this evening. We are pilgrims and we are strangers. We are aliens who are abstaining, apologizing, and anticipating. Abstaining, apologizing, and anticipating. We're sojourners and exiles who are, first of all, according to God's word, abstaining. He says, Beloved, I exhort you as sojourners and exiles, or strangers and aliens, to abstain from the strong desires of the flesh. First, then, we are to abstain. What does it mean to abstain? What a foreign and strange word to use in an age of instant gratification. How many of you, particularly those of you who are under, let's say, 40, how many of you are suffering a slight case of withdrawal because you know you can't look at your cell phone in church? and you want to so badly because you know that something really important is happening on Facebook right now or somebody's saying something that's going to revolutionize your life on Snapchat or Twitter or something. You just need to know that. Some text messages are buzzing now even as the preacher is speaking. When will he stop? This is so important. I need to know. We live in an age of instant gratification. We can't even, scholars have studied memory function in the cell phone age, and we can't remember anything anymore because we've become dependent on our phones. Google is the collective memory of our civilization. May the Lord help us. The first thing that comes up when you search is Wikipedia, which is largely, at least potentially, a collection of errors and fables. And yet God's word calls us to abstain, not to indulge. We live in an age of instant gratification. Oh, I want something. You open the Amazon app, and then you punch it up and bang, it's there. And if you have Amazon Prime, it's there in a day or two. You get what you want, when you want it, the way you want it. And Peter says, beloved, I exhort you as strangers and aliens or sojourners and exiles to abstain. wow the Christian faith has consequences for the way we live and it begins with abstinence abstaining from what well this is where it gets interesting it's not what we might think it's not the kinds of lists that some of us know from years past don't touch, don't taste don't drink, don't smoke or whatever it is the old rules that we used to hear from our fundamentalist brothers and sisters. No, he says, abstain from the strong desires or the lusts of the flesh. And what are those? They are those that war against your soul. He doesn't give you a list. You were hoping he'd give you a list. Well, what do I have to do? He doesn't give you a list so that you can check it off, say, well, I've done that one, I've abstained from that one, I'm good, and oh, there's B, I'll abstain from that one, and I'm good there, and C, and I've, no. A whole class of things, whatever it is that wars against your soul, whatever it is that does spiritual damage to you, that leads you away from being a guest in this world. That's a nice phrase that I picked up from Calvin. We are to live in this world, he says, as guests in the world. That's a very nice phrase, and I think that's exactly right. This is God's world, and we do live in this world. We're not saying that we don't have a real vocation in this world, but we live in tension with it. Sin and redemption have created tension with this age. Sin creates tension with God. To be redeemed from sin creates tension with the surrounding world that is not yet reconciled to God, or to whom God is not yet reconciled, more importantly. And that puts us at odds with this age, with the surrounding world. And that's what makes us strangers and aliens. So this is the odd thing. is God's world, but nobody recognizes it as God's world, and we don't experience it fully as God's world yet because of sin, because of the tension, because of the alienation. And therefore, we have these desires within us that war against the soul. We have been redeemed, but we're not utterly transformed. We have been redeemed, but we're not utterly transformed, and we won't be transformed until Christ comes. And therefore, we are at war even within ourselves. And Peter says, it's when you see yourself as a stranger and an alien and not fully at home in this world that you are prepared to abstain. Because my identity is not completely associated with or conformed to or identified with this world. And you know this, of course, if you travel. You sit down at a table and somebody serves you something that they're all familiar with and that they like and that you've never seen before. Smells disgusting and you really, really hope that there's a polite way that you cannot eat it. And now you know you're a stranger and an alien. When the language isn't quite right or maybe something that you don't really understand at all. That within the course of the day, even though you didn't mean to, you offended several people just because you didn't know the customs. When I lived overseas, the thing that struck me every day was every time I reached into my pocket, this is before we used credit cards quite as much as we do now, every time I put my hands into my pocket to get a coin, I had to take it out and I had to look at it to see what it was. Because I could inadvertently end up spending a lot more money than I needed to to get something. And because it wasn't my country, I had to look and see, well, what is that and what does it say and how much is that really? Well, don't think about that, just do it. Because I was a stranger and an alien. I didn't always know what was going on. I didn't always, sometimes frequently, quite understand what people were saying to me. The word sorry has about 23 different connotations depending on the circumstances. I'm sure you understand that. If you don't, you will. Children, it's like this. When you're in one school and then mom and dad move and you go to another school and your first school, you knew everybody and you knew all the rules and you knew all the teachers and you knew the schedule and then you go to another school and they talk differently and the schedule is different. You don't know the kids. You don't know the teachers. It's like that. That's who we are now. We're on another playground and another school, another set of rules, except we didn't move, the school moved. It's very disorienting. And in the midst of this disorientation, the pagans around us now are looking at us and they can see us before they can hear us. They can see us before they hear us. And that's why he says in verse 12, keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable. That's the second thing. We are, as strangers and aliens, we are abstaining, but we're also apologizing in an age of apologies. And what I mean by apologizing is giving a defense. I don't mean the apology in the sense in which we mean it now. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. This is my favorite. If anyone was offended by what I said, I'm sorry. Where I was raised, that doesn't count as an apology. That would get the belt when and where I was raised. I know you're not allowed to do that anymore. What I mean by apologizing is in the strict old-fashioned technical sense of giving a defense. The first defense of the faith that we give is the way that we live in light of what we confess to be the case. Keep your conduct among the honorable, he says, among the Gentiles. Keep your conduct, literally, good among the Gentiles. Now that's such an interesting expression because it's quite likely that the congregations to which he was writing, that are scattered across modern-day Turkey, were at least partially, if not wholly, Gentile. We don't know. Maybe they were mixed. But there was probably a Gentile component in those congregations. So what does it mean when he says, keep your conduct good among the Gentiles. This is a wonderful thing, and I want you to listen to this. By virtue of God's grace in Christ to us, he had translated us from being outside the promises, outside the covenants, to now being inside the promises, inside the covenants, to being once not my people, to being the people of God in Christ, such that we are now the Israel of God. Jesus is the Israel, and insofar as we are related to him by grace alone through faith alone, we're united to him, we're connected to him, we're bound up with him, we have become the Israel of God, which is, of course, the language of the Apostle Paul in the book of Galatians. The dividing wall has been broken down, Paul says in Ephesians. And now we are the Israel, we are the temple, we are the people of God. I know you know that, but that's a shocking thing for a lot of people, which makes everyone outside of the administration, the visible administration of the kingdom of God and the covenant of grace here in the church, it makes them all out there who are not part of that administration, not necessarily this particular congregation, but you know what I mean, outside of the visible church, wherever there is a true church, it makes them Gentiles. This is Old Testament imagery. and were now not called to go to war against the Gentiles because that war that God commissioned national Israel to conduct was a picture of the final judgment. It was a picture of the judgment which was going to be poured out on Christ. God the Son became incarnate, endured that wrath, and all of the wrath and righteous judgment that was illustrated by the war of the Israelites against the pagans around them, that was all executed on the cross and upon Jesus. He endured all of that for us so that we might now be God's people, God's Israel, which makes all those people outside of us Gentiles. But what do we do with the Gentiles? We don't pick up a sword and seek to conquer them. God has not called the Escondido United Reformed Church to go to war with those pagans in San Marcos or Vista or anywhere else. But he has called us to live our lives as those who have been redeemed by the righteous, precious blood of Jesus because that's the first thing that the Gentiles see. And how damaging has it been in the modern history of the church every time a notable Christian is involved in a gross scandal, public scandal. I used to think, well, nobody really cares. I mean, they would say what they say anyway, but I think now that was wrong. I think those things really do have an effect, and they really do damage our ability to give witness to the truth as it is in Christ. And I think it's the one thing that we can do by God's grace. We're probably not going to buy time on CNN and Fox and CBS and NBC and ABC to run an ad campaign. But as we conduct ourselves as strangers and aliens in our daily lives, at work and at the market and on the freeway and on the Internet, as we conduct ourselves as strangers and aliens, as we keep our conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that we thereby, he says, falsify, we falsify all the terrible slanders that they say against us. And this is what he means. In the middle of the second century and even before, the strongest defense that the Christians were able to offer, one of the strongest defenses, was that they wrote to the authorities, because by this time we were being arrested in cases. By this time we were being punished. By this time we were being mocked and ridiculed and humiliated. And sometimes even put to death. Sometimes even set on fire. And we had been already in Rome under Nero in this very time frame in which Peter is writing. And it wouldn't be very long after Peter wrote this that he himself most likely suffered for Christ as a martyr. But one of the strongest arguments we were able to make to the pagans was to say, go ahead and investigate us. Go ahead and look into our lives. Because you won't find anything, and you'll find that everything that's being said about us is not true. It's all a lie. We want you to investigate us. Because then you will see that everything you've heard is false. Let me ask you, particularly you men tonight, are you ready for that investigation of your browsing history? And you wives, you talk to the neighbors and co-workers. Are you ready for that investigation? You children, because they will see our good works. So that when, he says in verse 12, they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good works, he says. That's our apology. That's our defense. if what we say is at such variance with what we do. Our message lacks that much credibility. And finally, we are strangers and aliens and sojourners and exiles who are not only abstaining, not only apologizing, but also anticipating. We're also anticipating. If you knew certain things were going to happen, would it change your behavior? If you could find out what the doctor was going to say about you in two or three years with absolute certainty, how would that change your behavior? Not a guess, but dead certainty. How would that change your behavior? I think it probably would change your behavior. The future changes the present, and we have an absolutely certain word from God about the future that ought to affect the present. And it ought to put this present life in a proper perspective. And Peter doesn't say a great deal about it, but he, at least not in this passage, but he's alluding to things that he's already said and things that he will say. That they may glorify God. How are they going to glorify God? They're going to glorify God by telling the truth. They may tell lies about us now. They may misrepresent us now. They may spread rumors about us now. But there will come a time when they will be forced to tell the truth. I didn't say they're going to enjoy telling the truth, but they're going to be forced to tell the truth. And it's that time when Paul says, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ really is the Lord. There is a time coming. There is a reckoning. And Jesus is going to come not secretly, but visibly, audibly, gloriously, finally, physically. And then at that day, they will confess the truth. And Peter uses this interesting expression here on the day of visitation. That's an interesting expression, day of visitation. It occurs several times in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, Frequently to refer to God's visitation, for example, of Israel in Genesis 50-25. Isaiah uses a related expression in 10-3 when he speaks of the day of punishment, to refer to the day of judgment. Jeremiah 10-15 speaks of the season of visitation. In the season of visitation. All these are ways of talking about the day when God comes and sets all things right. We are pilgrims in this life. We will be pilgrims in this life until such time as the Lord calls us out of this life or he returns. But rest assured this evening that he will return and one day we will not be pilgrims because as I said at the beginning, this is God's world. Even though we don't see everything under Jesus' dominion, we shall see. Not on your time frame, not on my time frame. And certainly no one knows when that will be, but I can guarantee you this, it shall be. I didn't say it will be, I said it shall be. And I hope you know the difference. Shall is the language of legislation. It shall happen. You shall register your automobile every year. You shall pay your taxes. There are lots of things about which we say will. Well, I will do that, maybe, when it's convenient. But there are some things that you shall do. And this is one of those shall things that shall happen. Jesus shall return. And it's called the day of visitation, because I think what's being invoked here is two things simultaneously. It's a day of royal visitation, and it's a day of Episcopal visitation. He is the chief shepherd. He is the chief overseer of our soul. It is he who laid down his life. It is he who is interceding for us. It is he who is ruling the church. It is he who is ruling the nations. And he shall return and set all things right. If you're not happy with the way things are, good. You shouldn't be. If you're uncomfortable with the world as it is, that's a good thing. You shouldn't be comfortable. And if you are comfortable, and if you like it here, and if you don't want to go somewhere else, and if you're sort of secretly sitting there thinking, tonight I hope Jesus takes his time because I'm having a good time. I like this. And I suggest to you that your priorities are a little confused. That you're not really a stranger and an alien, but that you're at home in this world and in this life. And that's not how God's word describes us. I hope tonight that as you meditate on this passage, that the Lord gives you a growing sense of an identity as a stranger and an alien. That in some senses you belong here, but that in important ways that you really don't. And that you're not really at home. And that you're longing for a better, more righteous, more just time and place that is really not possible in this world. But that will occur when Jesus comes. The Lord grant us grace tonight to abstain, to apologize, and to anticipate as we are strangers and aliens. Let's pray. Father, we give you thanks tonight for your grace and mercy to us in Jesus that by your grace you have translated us from being citizens of this world to being citizens, first of all, of the heavenly city with a citizenship in heaven. And we pray that you'll grant us grace to live in a way that is befitting the citizenship that we have been given. Oh Lord, forgive our sins. Forgive our comfort in this world and in this life and grant us the grace of being uncomfortable and to look forward to that day when Jesus returns and all things are made as they ought to be. Oh Lord, hear our prayer. Forgive our sins and renew us in every grace in the image of Jesus. For we ask it in his name. Amen.