Redeemer Lubbock

January 13, 2008

1 Peter 2:1-10 “Gospel-centered missional family-part 1”

I want to welcome you to the first ever service at Redeemer Church!  Lots has gone into this and we are happy to be together as a family and happy to have new faces here to check things (and Jesus) out.  We are going to sit on the same passage, 1 Peter 2:1-10, for the next 3 weeks.  I think you’ll see that it beautifully paints a picture of a gospel-centered missional family…which is our mission/vision for Redeemer.   A super brief explanation of each will help to orient us.

1.  Gospel-This is the good news of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that converts a hard hearted rebel and transforms and encourages struggling Christians.

2.  Missional-This is the outflow of the gospel.  It’s bringing the healing of the gospel to people.

3.  Family-This is another result of the gospel.  We are bound together as a family through Jesus.

We’ll revisit this idea often, in fact, we don’t ever want to have a service or a Redeemer group where all 3 of these parts are not woven together.  This time we’ll hear it from Peter’s hand and we pledge to let you hear about it from the full counsel of Scripture…the Bible is the story of the gospel and a new people being formed who take this story of redemption to people everywhere.  Each week we’ll look at one part of our vision from this passage and we’ll start week this week with “gospel-centered.” I’ll reference 2:1-8 this morning, but we are going to go ahead and look at v. 9.

The Gospel and Light

9 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. 10 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.  Look at this awesome transition.  Christians aren’t destined for stumbling!  We’ll look at this part next week when we look at our missional outflow, but look for the gospel again here.  We are chosen and serve as priests and are now made a family, a people because of God’s mercy extended through Christ.  God’s mercy (10) has made us a people and took us from darkness to light and causes us to carry out the priestly duty of declaring the excellencies of God to Him (worship) and people (mission).  There are two parts to this awesome truth.

1.  For conversion- The mercy that God gives us is especially shocking given the context of the quotation in verse 10.  It comes from the book of Hosea in the OT and God was talking about Israel rebelling against God and He was declaring her not a people and not loved because of her rebellion.  But as you read the book, there is a promise that she would be His people and loved again.  Peter quoting this and applying it to believers in Jesus is shocking.  We had no privileges or rights, but God in His grace sought to heal the nations through Abraham’s seed, Jesus…just as He said He would! 

Moving from darkness to light might be one of the very best pictures out there of what happens when someone finds God’s mercy. It’s said elsewhere and one of the best is in 2 Cor 4:6. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The heart is awakened to see the greatness/excellence of Jesus.  I wish everyone in this room would see the excellence of Jesus and have a new heart created by the same power that made light come out of darkness at the very beginning!  And this gives us a big clue that this converting gospel does much more than just moving us from lost to saved but lets us see the glories (excellencies) of God and these are seen most clearly by carefully examining Jesus.  It’s almost like a pilot light has been ignited.

2.  For the Christian- Lots of people think that that the gospel is for conversion and then we sort of move on to other things.  This is a big mistake.  A few verses earlier in that same passage it says in 2 Cor 3:18, And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.  The flame grows and burns by looking at Jesus.  We don’t ever move past Him…the gospel of Jesus gives us Jesus.

A messed up approach

Ask yourself what a Christian moves on to if the gospel has already finished its work in us?  Rules?  Mission? Service?  Community? Well, those things are indeed part of the Christian life, but how much transformation do any of those things bring?  In fact, our first text in 1 Peter showed us that even our priestly duty of mission is declaring His excellence! No, I don’t think we can move past Jesus and his grace for any part of the Christian life.  This is the real question I wanted to explore this morning…maybe the most important question in the whole world:  What actually makes people change?  And by “change” I mean, real change that both increases that person’s joy and makes them be transformed to reflect Jesus’ glory/excellence?  Isn’t that the real question?  The texts from 1 Peter and 2 Corinthians show us that we are transformed to reflect Jesus glory a little bit at a time as we look at Jesus’ glory!  We look at His life, death, and resurrection and the story of redemption in the Bible and we are captivated.  We see His beauty and it melts our heart.  That’s why 1 Peter 2:1 sets up the problem of avoiding hateful behavior towards one another and the solution as drinking pure spiritual milk like a baby.  Many of you might expect the next sentence to be:  Get serious!  Try harder!  But Peter’s God-inspired advice was to feast on Jesus regularly like a baby wants milk.  Think about the difference between behavior modification and a heart desire and what gets someone there…even your children. 

So yeah our approach is messed up.  A related way we can do it is by centering on the Bible in general.  Many, probably most, center themselves on the Bible.  They assume because they have a high view of it and because they are learning true things about it that they are doing the main thing to be done.  But I think we’ve seen his morning from 1 Peter and 2 Corinthians 3-4, that we have to be given an interpretive lens by which to read the Bible before its transforming power can do its full work.  This lens is the glory of Jesus revealed in His sinless life, crucifixion, and resurrection.  This is one reason why some of you have tried to read the Bible only to get way bogged down and you have no idea how to relate to much of it.  The Bible is a story of redemption after the fall in the garden that was promised to Abraham thousands of years before Jesus came to redeem what had been lost and restore it completely when He returns.  This means you can read any text in the Bible and as long as you can locate it within the big story, you are golden.

To be clearer, the reason why Christians struggle so much here is because we might be reading/preaching one small text that is a story or a list of commandments.  We are tempted to only consider what happened and maybe draw some moral implications or to consider the rules and what our duty is.  But we come back to the primary question of this morning: what changes us? Every command has a context of grace in the Bible and we make a mistake to leave the gospel at salvation and then move to obedience on our own.  It’s been my experience that it is hard work for people to change how they read the Bible, particularly if they’ve been comfortable reading it moralistically for many years and that’s why people reading without any imprint tend to get this more quickly.

Not only is the approach messed up, but so are we!

Stumbling over Jesus.  And some of you are struggling with neither. In fact, you are recognizing His claims over you and everything and everyone else, but are refusing it for a variety of reasons.  You might think that you’ll do it later.  Another thing is that you are enjoying chasing other things that are more important to you and you are pretty sure that Jesus would step in and claim ownership of that thing and call you to change. Yeah this whole sermon of “what makes us change” isn’t what you want anyway.  So you don’t. I’ve seen this being the greatest obstacle to Jesus over my years for non-believers to starting their relationship with God.  Don’t stumble over Jesus or you’ll face God in His justice and wrath and you don’t want that.

Stopping short.    Let’s assume we are buying what I am saying here.  You know there’s more to it than some good and bad characters in the stories to emulate or avoid their examples.  You know that commands are good when connected to Jesus’ grace.  You might even roll your eyes at moralistic preaching or Christian books.  You know in theory what changes people.  But do you stop just short of actual transformation?

Look at your devotional life.  How much of your time is spent feasting on God’s excellence reflected in Jesus?  Are you taken by His glory that is reflected in a million ways in the Bible?  Are you feasting on the one angle of it you’ve seen on that particular time?  What about your time with the rest of the community?  It’s my job to place a big Jesus in front of you, but is your heart being affected by His rule over you?  What have you seen about Him this morning in the singing or preaching that is melting you?  What have you seen together in your Redeemer groups that is so great about Jesus that you’ve worked to apply together?  In sum, what are you repenting of? Think this could explain why we lack transformation as a people?

I must admit that I fall into this too often.  I read the Bible and am happy to keep it (and God) at a distance. Tell my story of this week and how little I had done this.

Focus on what changes us

            Because we believe that the only hope of change in anything from conversion to growth in Christ-like maturity is the gospel of Jesus, we put Him in front in everything we do.  The good news of Jesus shows us what is so great about Him and we see that for the first time at conversion and grow in that forever.  That’s why it ends up being the same thing to say that we need to be a Jesus-centered church or a gospel-centered church.  The good news of Jesus gives us Jesus!  And it will burn as the noon day sun.

My desire is that every one of you would stop and acknowledge His excellence.  Regardless of if you are doing it for the first or thousandth time, let’s reflect deeply on what is so great about Jesus and do our priestly duty of declaring His excellence. Good place to start:  Jesus’ death and resurrection that ignited your heart in love for Him.