Different by Design

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A while back, I think it was last spring, I was trying to burn some brush behind our house and had a big pile. And the one thing I know is you don’t use gasoline to start a fire. I mean, you can, but it’s a bad idea.

Kids, what did you learn in church today? Don’t use gasoline to start a fire. So I did what I was told and soaked the burn pile in diesel and I was lighting it and it just wouldn’t catch, it wouldn’t stay lit.

And then I remembered what somebody had told me that you can use kerosene. Now the good thing is somebody along through the years figured out we need to have different colored cans for different kinds of fuel so we just know what they are. You’ve got a red can for gasoline, a yellow can for diesel, I think they used to be green, but you’ve got a yellow can for diesel and a blue can for kerosene.

Somebody told me you can use kerosene and I was in luck because Charlie’s grandfather, I had gotten a container of kerosene from him. And I thought, I’ll use that. I was born at night, but not last night, so I didn’t want to dump the kerosene directly on the part where I’d been trying to light it, and it was smoldering a little bit.

I went to the other side of the burn pile, eight or ten feet away, and I just started dumping kerosene out of that blue container. I went to go put the container down and came back and was about to light a match and toss it in there. Before I could do that, though, whatever heat there was on the other side where it was just smoldering a little bit caught those vapors and there was a mushroom cloud.

I am fortunate that I still had eyebrows when we were done with this. And I got to investigating this blue container of what was supposed to be kerosene and realized it was not kerosene at all. It was gasoline.

And I chuckled to myself and thought, man, if you didn’t like that I was married to your granddaughter, there are subtler ways to let me know, you know, try to kill me. Those cans are different on the outside because they’re supposed to show us by the outside what’s on the inside. When the contents on the inside are different, they’re supposed to show on the outside.

That’s why we have different color cans. And the same thing is true for us. As God makes us different inwardly, that inward difference is supposed to show up on the outside.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about this morning. Those of you who are with us every Sunday are probably expecting to be in 1 Corinthians. We’ve been in a study going piece by piece through the book of 1 Corinthians for a while now.

But recognizing that we were going to have so many guests with us this morning, I didn’t want to drop you into the middle of a chapter 11 of a series that we’ve been in for months now, especially since 1 Corinthians has a lot of what I call shoot the messenger passages that are easy to take the wrong way if you haven’t laid the groundwork in the other chapters. So I didn’t want to go to 1 Corinthians this morning, but for those who are here every week, I wanted to keep within the same theme. We’re going to be in 1 Peter this morning.

Where we’ve been in 1 Corinthians, one of the difficulties Paul is dealing with is with a church that many of these people have been saved out of a pagan background. They’re used to practicing idolatry. They’re used to all the wicked practices that go along with that.

And so you had people in the church that are dealing with the struggle of the old way of living and being pulled back to that and never knowing for sure which way to go. And so Paul deals with that all through 1 Corinthians. Well, I found a passage that was a little simpler in 1 Peter 2 that deals with some of these same issues about the difference that Christ makes in us when we belong to Him.

So if you would, turn with me to 1 Peter 2. And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find 1 Peter 2, it’s all right. It’ll be on the screen for you here.

But we’re going to look at four verses this morning that deal with this difference that He makes in us, that we’re not supposed to be the same. So 1 Peter 2, starting in verse 9, says, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so 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. 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 because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.

And you may be seated. So Peter, as he’s writing this in the passage just before, and for the sake of brevity this morning, I didn’t back up into the earlier part of the chapter where he’s quoting the Old Testament at length. But just before this, he’s talking about those who’ve rejected Christ, and he’s talking about the difference between those who’ve rejected Christ and those who’ve accepted Christ, and some of the difficulties that each one faces.

But we see right from the get-go in this passage, as we come to verse 9, that he’s telling us that God has designed Christians to be different. Now, understand what I mean by this. God makes a change in us as believers, and it’s supposed to, it takes place on the inside, but it’s supposed to show up on the outside too.

We don’t want to give the wrong impression of saying, well, Christians, we just think we’re perfect. We just think we’re better than everybody else. No, we understand the description the Bible gives of sin and what it does to a person.

We understand that we are sinners. We’re separated from God. We’re no better than anybody else.

But Jesus Christ has come and done something in us. And all throughout the New Testament, we read this idea of a change, but there’s a recognition that should come with it that the difference isn’t because of anything good we’ve done, it’s because of the work that Jesus Christ has done in us. And so as Christians, even as we embrace this idea of a difference, there should be a humility about it, that God has designed Christians to be different.

We see this in verse 9 in some of the things that Peter says to them. He says, you’re a chosen race. Now, he’s not talking about different races of people, the way those terms are used today, of different people from different continents.

He’s talking about the idea of a common descent coming from the same place. And it’s a spiritual descent. The idea here is a common spiritual descent coming from a common source of life.

As Christians, it’s easy to look in a very shallow way at skin color or other things like that and see where did people come from? But as Christians, ultimately, our spiritual life comes from one source that transcends everything else, no matter where we’ve come from, what country, what continent, what people group. We have a source of life that is in God himself.

And because of that, because we have been adopted, because we’ve been reborn with life from him, he says you are a chosen race. We as believers have this common descent from God himself. He says you’re a royal priesthood.

The idea of being means that you and I, as believers in Jesus Christ, we have direct access to God. That has not always been the case. We take for granted sometimes the fact that we can go directly to God, that we can talk to Him, that we can hear from Him, that we can experience Him.

It has not always been that way because sin separates us from God. Our own disobedience separates us from God. That’s why in the Old Testament, there was a veil in the temple that separated the holy of holies from any place that people were able to go.

That’s why when Jesus died on the cross, as he breathed his last and cried out, it is finished, that veil in the temple was ripped in two from top to bottom. It was God signaling that suddenly there was free access to God through Jesus Christ. So the idea of us being being a royal priesthood means that you and I have access to God directly. We don’t have to go through anybody else.

He tells us to come boldly before the throne of grace so that we can obtain mercy. He says we’re a holy nation. Again, this is talking about Christians regardless of what nation you’ve come from, regardless of where you were born or who your people are.

He says that we are a holy nation. The idea of one’s nation, especially in that time, but it’s true today, It determined some things about somebody’s identity, about how they saw themselves. It determined a person’s bonds, who they felt connected to, where they felt like they fit.

In many cases, your nation even determined who you worshipped. That’s why God is called the God of Israel, because the nation of Israel worshipped Him. The other nations around them worshipped other gods.

But Peter, looking at Christians here, and we see at the beginning of 1 Peter, He’s writing to Christians over a widespread area of the Roman Empire and what’s now Turkey. He’s writing to people of different groups and backgrounds, and he’s saying, you’re a holy nation. God has brought you together and made something new.

That now our identity is in Christ. Our bonds are to one another, and our worship is to the God of the universe, not whatever gods we formerly worshipped or whatever idols we used to show allegiance to. And he says, you’re a people for God’s own possession. Now, I grew up reading it in the King James where it says you’re a peculiar people.

I like that. I kind of took that and ran with it in my younger days. But what it really means, a more accurate or more understandable, I should say, translation in our terminology today would be a people of God’s own possession.

What makes us peculiar is that we belong to Him. We exist for Him and for His glory. And he says, we’re a people of God’s own possession so that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

So we exist for him and for his pleasure and for his glory. And our job description is given right there. That our role is to show his glory to other people.

To live in such a way that we demonstrate the amazing power of this God who has called us out of a place of darkness and brought us into the light made us different. And so God has designed Christians to be different. Now, we also acknowledge that we very often fall short of that.

I mean, daily we have difficulty living up to that, but that is still the goal for us to be different. Now again, and I’ve already alluded to this, the difference is a result of what Christ has done for us. We see this in verse 10 that it’s not because we’re better than anybody else.

It’s not because we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and made us better. It is entirely the work of Jesus Christ that changes us from the inside out. Listen, if we could change ourselves and make ourselves into what God wanted us to be, then Jesus went through a lot of unnecessary agony on the cross.

If we could do that ourselves, he made a horrendous mistake and he doesn’t make mistakes. We are entirely dependent on what he’s done for us. He says in verse 10, for you were once not a people, but now are you the people of God.

It’s the same theme of God gathering people from every conceivable background and assembling them together as the church, as the people of God. But here’s where I want you to focus in. The end of verse 10, you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

It’s amazing that the song that the three girls came up and danced to during the offering, I’ve never heard that song before. I didn’t know they were doing that, that particular song. They didn’t know what I was preaching on this morning.

But it just fit incredibly well that there’s a before and there’s an after. And what comes in the middle that makes the difference? It’s Jesus.

It’s the mercy that we’ve received, and the source of that mercy is Jesus Christ. You and I can’t do anything to deserve God’s mercy. The fact that we need it means we don’t deserve it. And if you made a change on your own now, and somehow miraculously were able to live from here on out in a way that was perfect, You still can’t undo what you’ve done in the past. We can’t erase our own sin.

The only thing that makes us right with God is His mercy. The fact that God is willing to forgive our sin because it’s been paid for because Jesus paid for it. It’s the work that Jesus did that brought us to this place where God now works in us and makes us different.

And so as believers, we walk in this tension of recognizing we are different. And we are supposed to be different. But also we’re supposed to have some humility about it because we recognize the difference is entirely because of him and not because of ourselves.

God could have. God could have looked at us in our sin and said, I’m through with y’all. I think of what my grandfather used to say when he was done with somebody.

He was ready to write them off. He’d say, rain on them. I’ve never heard anybody else say that.

I don’t know if that was unique to him, if that was a southeast Oklahoma thing. I don’t know. But he’d look at somebody, rain on them.

And I’ve thought from time to time, God would have been entirely justified if he looked at us in our sin and said, you know what? Rain on them. I’m not doing anything.

God would have been fine. God wouldn’t have even been doing anything wrong because our sin, I love the definition that my son learned at camp of what sin is. Sin is anything we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God.

And it’s not just that God is being harsh by not being okay with our sin. When we sin, we’re looking at who God is in His holiness and saying, we want no part of that. We want to embrace this instead.

So sin is not just doing things that upset God. It’s a rejection of who God is. And knowing that, if God looked at us and said, I’m done with y’all, enjoy hell.

If He said that, He’d be completely justified. And yet God looked at us, and not because of anything we deserved or earned, but just because He is loving and because He is merciful, God said, I’m going to make a way for that sin to be forgiven. And the only way for that sin to be forgiven was for Jesus to come willingly to the cross.

I’ve heard people say, how could a loving God send his son to the cross? Listen, Jesus knew exactly what he was going to do. Jesus was a willing participant in this.

This was not child sacrifice. This was self-sacrifice by the son. And Jesus came and took responsibility for my sin and for yours.

And he was nailed to that cross and he shed his blood and he died as the payment for that sin in full. And because anybody could tell you, well, I’m going to die for you. I could tell you today, I’m going to die for you.

And it wouldn’t accomplish a blessed thing. Jesus proved that he was who he said he was, and he proved he could do what he said he would do by rising again from the dead three days later. And now he tells us, it’s written all throughout his word.

He tells us that that forgiveness, that that salvation, that that relationship with God is available, not by works of righteousness on our part, but by accepting what He’s done on our behalf, by trusting in Him as our Savior. And that’s where we receive that mercy, and that mercy begins to change us. And so if we can’t earn our salvation, if we can’t make ourselves different, why even talk about it?

Why even stand here and tell you you’re supposed to be different if you can’t do anything to make it happen? Why would Peter write about it to the churches in Turkey if they couldn’t do anything to make it happen. It’s because we do have a job and we do have a role here.

And it’s to get out of the way and let God do what God intends to do. Our job is not to make ourselves different. Our job is to embrace the difference that He’s making.

We see that in verse 11. He said, Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers. So we live in recognition that this world is not our home and its ways are not our culture.

He calls us strangers and aliens. He’s basically saying that wherever we go in this world, we are foreigners, and we need to remind ourselves of that. And it doesn’t matter how at home you feel, we have to recognize that this world is not our home.

Those of you who go to church here have heard me say many times that I very much like Lawton and this area. We felt like God was moving us here before we knew Central Baptist Church existed, and he just kind of put this together. But I feel so at home in southwest Oklahoma that as much as I’ve always loved to travel, I don’t like to leave.

I get mad if I have to go north of Elgin. At this point, I’m content to stay in Comanche County with an occasional trip over to Duncan for tacos. I’m happy here.

I feel at home. But even as much as I feel at home here, I have to recognize this is not my ultimate home. I am still a stranger and an alien in this place.

And there should be an extent to which we don’t feel at home here, and to which the culture of the world around us is not our culture, because we’re from a different nation. So he reminds us that we’re supposed to look at ourselves as aliens and strangers. He talks about these things which wage war against the soul, and we need to understand that there is a spiritual battle that rages on all around us and within us.

Just because you belong to Jesus doesn’t mean that Satan has decided he can lay off of you. As a matter of fact, that seems to be where the battle starts. There is a spiritual war that takes place within each of us, and we’re expected to get up and put on the armor of God every day and go into battle trusting him to use our efforts, but for him to give us the victory.

But we’re expected to step into the battle. And he says these things that wage war against the soul are these fleshly lusts, and he says abstain from them. So we avoid the things that are going to tempt us to draw back from Jesus.

Peter was writing to a group of people who were scattered by persecution. We believe that he was writing to this group of people who had been under Paul’s spiritual care because Paul had been executed, and Peter’s trying to hold this together, and these people were being scattered. They were being persecuted.

They were being driven different places. They didn’t know what they were doing, and the pull of the old life back to the comfort of the old ways was very strong for them. And Peter said, you’ve got to fight it.

For us, there are going to be times when those fleshly lusts of the old way of living, they pull back. They call out to us. Sometimes it’s going to be at a moment where we’re at a spiritual low and we feel vulnerable.

Sometimes Satan comes with the strongest attack when we feel like we’re up on top of the mountain. We have to be ready at any moment to war against those fleshly lusts that that Peter talks about. And what he’s telling us to do is to embrace what God is doing.

God is at work and you recognize it and get out of the way and let him do it. Stop throwing obstacles in the way. And then finally we come to verse 12, which teaches us that devoting our lives to Jesus, the purpose for all this is because devoting our lives to Jesus has a powerful effect on the world around us.

He says, keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles. He said, live in such a way that you have a good reputation among the Gentiles. And these were Gentiles too.

So he’s talking about non-believers here. Keep your behavior excellent among the non-believers so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds as they observe them glorify God in the day of visitation. He said, live your life in such a way among non-believers that they see the good you’re doing.

And when they talk about you as evildoers, they have to shut their mouths. Now notice he says, slander, as they slander you. To be slander, it has to be false.

So he’s not saying live in such a way that when they see you doing wrong, they shut their mouths. The assumption here is that you’re not giving them something to speak against. This is not, oh, the Christians are acting badly, but we want to close the mouths of the people who are calling them out for it. The Christians were already being slandered without doing anything wrong.

just one example in the ancient Roman world the early churches were accused of cannibalism because people misunderstood the idea of this is my body which is broken for you this is my blood which was shed for you and accused the churches of participating in cannibalism that was just one accusation that was made against the church and that’s not for them doing anything wrong that’s them following Jesus and the world is going to find negative things to say about it so what Peter is telling them here is live your life in such a way that even though they want to make up negative things to say about your faith, about the body, about you as individuals, they want to come up with negative things to say, but they look at the way you live and they can’t come up with anything.

He’s telling the church, your witness, your witness points them to Jesus Christ. Being the same person out in the world as you are in the assembly of believers will eventually point some of these people to Jesus Christ. Now, does it mean we’re going to win everybody over? Unfortunately, probably not. But there are going to be some who are put to shame over the slander when they see the way that we live that’s different.

And it brings us back to verse 9 where it comes full circle. When we live our lives for Jesus, when we devote our lives to Jesus, we not only draw others to Him, we bring glory to God. Because He said in verse 9, at the beginning of all of this, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Each day, every one of us is faced with choices, whether we walk with Jesus or walk with the pagan culture around us. And sometimes those choices are more difficult than others. We may think, what does it matter?

What does it matter if I do this versus that? What does it matter if I make this choice versus that one? It matters immensely.

It matters immensely because we’re pointing others to Jesus. We’re giving God glory. We’re embracing the work that God is choosing to do in us.

And that’s why he’s left us here. And so if you’re a believer in Jesus this morning, you have a job to do. And your job is to let him do his job and stay out of his way.

If you’re not a believer in Jesus, nothing about this is to give you a list of things that you have to do to be right with God. You can’t. You can’t check off enough boxes on the list. But for you, the starting place for all of this is to recognize that your sin has separated you from God, but that God has made a way for you to be forgiven, that Jesus Christ paid the price for your sin in full and rose again to prove it.

And all that you have to do is believe that and ask for his forgiveness and you’ll have it. And that’s when God starts doing the work inside of you to make you different.