Message Information
- Key Scriptures: 1 Peter 2:9-12, NASB
- Series: Sent for the Sake of the Gospel (2026), no. 8
- Date: Sunday, July 19, 2026 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Becoming the People God Has Called Us to Be
You’ve probably all heard the saying that you don’t dress for the job you have; you dress for the job you want. Right? You’ve heard that. It made it really awkward wearing a tie all those years to check groceries at Homeland, but here we are. So I guess there’s something to it.
I’ve adapted that phrase a little bit in parenting. The little ones are still too young to understand, but with the older ones, I’ll ask them periodically—and they don’t like it when we have to have these discussions. They’d rather I just give them a consequence and move on. But I ask them, “Who is it that you want to be? Who is it that you’re trying to become?”
I want them to think ahead to who God has called them to be. Where do they want to be years down the road? Then I want them to think about whether the choices they’re making right now are helping them get there. I’ll tell them, “Behave like who you want to become.” I don’t mean being fake or pretending. I mean behaving like who you want to become, and those things tend to follow.
I’m not claiming that I’ve done everything perfectly in life, but I used to ask myself, “Will this get me where I want to be fifteen years down the road?” That seemed to be a pretty helpful question.
As we continue through this series on being sent for the sake of the gospel, everything we’ve studied up to now has been about the things we’re supposed to do. It’s been about the invitation—what the invitation is to, why we’re supposed to invite people, why we’re supposed to call people to Christ, and why we’re supposed to do all these things.
At this point, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about becoming: becoming the kind of people who will do these things as second nature; becoming who we need to be in Christ; becoming who we’re trying to become as individuals and as a church.
None of what we’re going to look at over the next few weeks means, “We’re not doing any of these things,” or, “We’re terrible at these things.” But unless we’re Jesus, there’s always room for growth. Last time I checked, I’m not Jesus, and neither are you. So we have room for growth.
If we want to become the kind of people—and the kind of church—that lives on mission and lives sent, who do we need to become? That’s what we’re going to look at, beginning in 1 Peter 2:9–12. Peter writes to a group of believers about how they are supposed to live as they go on mission in order to reflect glory back to God:
But you are a chosen people, 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 foreigners 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 on the day of visitation.
Our Identity Is Defined by Christ
Peter is writing to a group of people who have been scattered. In 1 Peter 1, he names some of the places where they’ve been scattered. These are believers, many of them from a Jewish background, who have been uprooted because of persecution. Yet God used that persecution to send them to places where they could preach the gospel as they went.
Remember that the word preach doesn’t necessarily mean doing what I’m doing right now. It means taking the information we know about Jesus and conveying it to somebody else. That fits the New Testament definition of preaching the gospel as we go.
These people were uprooted from their homes because of something negative—persecution, danger, and threats. God brought something great out of it. They went to places they would not otherwise have been, and they proclaimed the gospel there.
Peter reminds them of who they are in Christ. Many of them came from a Jewish background where they had been told all along that they were God’s chosen people, a priesthood, and a holy nation. Now they had come to Christ, the Jewish community was telling them, “You’re no longer part of us,” and they had been scattered from their Christian community. They must have struggled with questions like, “Who are we? Where do we fit? How do we go forward?”
Peter answers those questions by telling them who they are in Christ, who they are becoming, and how that identity reflects on the gospel. That’s important for us to understand because sometimes we struggle with the same questions: “Who am I? Where do I fit?” Who we are is defined by Christ.
God uses even those places where we don’t seem to fit. He uses the circumstances that throw us off balance as opportunities to advance the gospel—if we’ll pay attention and look for them.
Peter begins in verse 9 by pointing out that God sets us apart to make Him known. When we see the word holy in Scripture, one way we understand it is “set apart.” God is holy because He is completely different from us. His nature, thoughts, and perspectives are different from ours. As believers, we begin to be shaped to become more like Christ and brought into line with Him in the way we see things. But at the core of who He is, He is different from us. We are created creatures, and He is the infinite Creator.
Yet He tells us that we are holy. He tells us we are set apart. That means we’ve been set apart from the world—not because we’re better, but because we’ve responded to His invitation. Now He is working in us, and anything better about us is His work, not ours. He sets us apart and says, “You have a purpose.” For us, that purpose is to make Him known.
A Chosen People
A passage like this uses a great deal of Old Testament imagery, as do the passages immediately before it. That leads to all kinds of questions people are fighting about online—maybe not in real life, but online—concerning the relationship between Israel and the church. Are they the same thing? Has God separated them? Does God still have plans for Israel? That’s not what we’re getting into this morning.
The church does not replace Israel, but some of the promises God made to Israel find fulfillment in the church. God has extended some of those promises. Paul talks about Gentile believers being grafted into the people and promises of God. Without getting too deeply into that relationship, some of these promises now apply to us as the church. I’m not saying they no longer apply to Israel, but they do apply to us.
Peter tells these believers, “You are a chosen people.” The church is God’s chosen people. What about Israel? I’m not saying anything here about Israel. Peter is extending this language to us. He calls us a chosen people, using imagery from Deuteronomy 10 and Isaiah 43.
This means God has called us and chosen to have a people for Himself—a people who would give Him glory, reflect Him, and serve Him throughout the world. He has restored us to Himself through Jesus Christ.
What does it mean to be chosen? In this passage, Peter’s emphasis is corporate: God has chosen to have a people for Himself. Did God owe any of us salvation? No. Would it have been easier in some ways if God had simply written us off altogether, left us alone, and let the angels give Him glory? I think so.
But God was loving enough to say, “I want to make a way for them to come to Me. I want to make a way for them to come to Me through Jesus. I want to have a relationship with those who will come.” God has chosen to have us at all and has chosen to make a way. He has restored us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and we are a chosen people.
Understand this: God chose to have a relationship with you. If you’re a believer in Jesus Christ, God chose to have a relationship with you. It wasn’t something you were owed or deserved.
A Royal Priesthood and a Holy Nation
Peter also calls us a royal priesthood. This is language God had used for Israel. The priesthood was part of Israel, but the Father has now given us access to Himself through Jesus Christ.
Think about what life was like in the Old Testament. We take it for granted that we can go directly to God at any given time. Something goes wrong, and we can pray directly to Him. We can worship and enter His presence. In the Old Testament, you went through the priest. You went through the priest to be restored to fellowship with God. You went to the priest to receive an answer from God. You went to the priest for any number of things.
When Jesus was crucified, He breathed His last, and Scripture says He gave up His spirit. At that moment, the veil in the temple that separated the Most Holy Place—where God dwelled—was torn in two from top to bottom. God took that heavy curtain that separated Him from humanity and ripped it in two because, through Jesus, we have direct access to God. That’s why He tells us to come boldly before the throne of grace.
As believers, we are a royal priesthood. Looking back at the imagery from Exodus 19, there is a sense in which Israel’s priesthood was meant to be a blessing to all humanity. We are a blessing to all humanity as we carry the best news anyone has ever heard: they can have access to God too.
Peter calls us a holy nation, again echoing Exodus 19 and Deuteronomy 7. The Father has brought us into a covenant relationship with Himself and blesses us through Jesus Christ.
The relationship God had with Israel in the Old Testament was something special. No other nation on earth had it. The blessings He gave them, the promises He made them, and the repeated chances He gave them were unlike anything any other nation received.
Again, without taking away from that, He extends this language to us and tells us that, as believers in Jesus Christ—as His church—we are a holy nation. He has brought us into a covenant relationship the rest of the world does not have, but they can have it. They don’t have to be born into it; they have to be born again into it. We carry them that message, and He blesses us through Jesus Christ.
Peter also tells us that we are “a people for God’s own possession,” borrowing language from Exodus 19 and Deuteronomy 4. I love the way I learned and memorized this verse as a child from the King James Version, where it says “a peculiar people.” Some of us took that and ran with it, didn’t we?
I was a little disappointed to realize that four hundred years ago, peculiar simply meant that something belonged to one particular person. It didn’t mean weird. So if we’re weird, that’s on us, not God. To be peculiar means that we are His own people. Peter takes all the rest of this and wraps it up in a bow: “You belong to Me.”
That’s why I say our identity is defined by Christ. As we go out on mission for Christ, we can’t let the mission—as important as it is—become our identity. Our identity is who we are in Christ. We are those with whom God has created this covenant relationship, not because of anything special or praiseworthy in us, but because Jesus Christ died to pay for our sins so that we could be restored.
God loved you enough that He sacrificed His only Son to pay the ultimate price so that He could have a relationship with you.
The world bombards us day in and day out with messages about how to define our worth. You don’t buy these products. You don’t look like this. You don’t live in this place. You don’t have a certain number of friends. You don’t participate in whatever the current thing is. The world will devalue us if we’ll let it.
But our identity isn’t found in what we look like. It isn’t found in where we came from, who our lineage is, what side of the tracks we came from, our life experiences, our bank account, or what other people think or say about us. It is found in who Jesus Christ says we are—and He died to back it up.
For us to be effective on mission for Him, we have to begin by recognizing that we are a people defined by what Jesus says about us.
Our Purpose Is Defined by Christ
We take this new identity as believers in Christ—not merely as individuals, but as a body of believers—and recognize that this identity serves a purpose. Our purpose is also defined by Christ.
Going back to verse 9, Peter says God has made us all these things—a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and 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.”
Because of this new identity we have in Christ—because of who He has changed us and made us to be—we now have the purpose of going out and bringing God glory. Peter says we proclaim His excellencies. That’s a poetic way of saying that we let other people know what is praiseworthy about Him.
Several weeks ago on a Sunday night, we talked about the overlap between our witness and our worship. We asked, “What are some of the things we would praise God for? What are some of His attributes?” We talked about His love, mercy, justice, goodness, and power. Everything we praise God for is also something we can tell other people about as we point them to find salvation in Him.
There is a huge connection between how we worship and how we witness. Peter is telling us the same thing here: we proclaim His excellencies. We let other people know who He is and what He has done.
This is why I say all the time that our witness doesn’t have to be a canned, memorized presentation. I think some of those tools are wonderful, and I’m more than happy to connect you with them if they help you as a stepping-stone into sharing the gospel. But you don’t have to have a canned, memorized presentation.
What you need to be able to do is tell people what He has done for you and how He can do it for them too. Tell them who He is. Tell your story of who He is—or, perhaps better, His story as it has played out in your life. That’s proclaiming His excellencies.
We have plenty for which to glorify Him. Sitting in this room today, we have plenty for which to glorify Him, though it may not always feel like it. On any given Sunday, there are people who have had the best week of their lives. There are others in the same room who feel fortunate simply to have made it through the week. We have people at every point on that spectrum.
For some, it may not feel as though there is much to be thankful for. But Peter gives us a place to begin: we proclaim the excellencies of the One “who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.”
It starts with the eternal change He has made in us by calling us out of darkness into His marvelous light. He is talking about salvation. You and I were utterly, completely, and hopelessly lost in the darkness of sin, with no hope of rescuing ourselves or extracting ourselves from it. Honestly, we didn’t deserve to be rescued by Him.
Yet, in spite of that, He came and grabbed us. He scooped us out of that darkness and brought us into His marvelous light—the light of truth, righteousness, and holiness; the light that shows us the way we’re supposed to live. He did that for us.
Whatever you’re facing, begin there. Begin with what He has done for you. That will give you plenty for which to praise Him until you think of the rest. I say that as somebody who has been through those weeks when you wonder, “What do I have to be thankful for? What do I have to praise Him for?”
If God never did anything else for us, the salvation He has provided would be reason enough for us never to stop praising Him. Our purpose is to glorify Him. That includes proclaiming the gospel—telling other people what He has done for us.
That’s what you need to know, and that’s what you need to share: How did Jesus call you out of darkness and into His light? Share that story. That’s our purpose.
God’s Mercy Makes Us His
In verse 10, we see that God’s mercy makes us His. Peter says, “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.”
This is God’s faithfulness to remind us that we’re not as great as we think we are. We can go in one direction and let the world define and devalue us. We can go in the other direction and begin to think we’re just a little better than everyone else.
Sometimes we become prideful. If we’ve been believers long enough, that sinful past—not that we no longer sin, but the past that was defined by sin—can seem far enough in the rearview mirror that we start thinking, “We’re pretty good people.”
But Peter reminds us that our standing isn’t based on who we are or what we’ve done. So that we don’t misuse the mission to promote ourselves, he reminds us that it was God’s mercy that made us His.
Peter is referring to the transformation that took place in Israel despite their sin. He is almost directly quoting Hosea 2 with these references to “not My people” becoming “My people.” In Hosea 2, God says, “I will say to those who were not My people, ‘You are My people!’ And they will say, ‘You are my God!’”
God says this after spending much of Hosea comparing Israel to adulterers. Because of their faithlessness to Him, He compares them to one of the most public and grievous sins under the Old Testament law. Yet He says, “I will say to those who were not My people, ‘You are My people.’” He does this because of His mercy.
Peter applies this to us. We didn’t begin as His people. As believers, we aren’t naturally born into this covenant; we’re born again into it. We began far away from Him, and the transformation happened only because of His mercy.
“You once were not a people, but now you are the people of God.” Why? “You had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” His mercy made the difference.
We’re not God’s people because we’re wonderful. We’re not God’s people because we’re so different from the people we see on the streets or in our neighborhoods. We’re not so different from them. We are the people of God because there is mercy, and they too can be His if they receive that mercy.
We need that reminder. Peter doesn’t merely refer to us as individual people who belong to God, though that is true. He refers to us collectively as a people. The reconciliation that takes place between God and humanity, and the bond that forms among His people, are results of His mercy.
Because of His mercy, we are His people, and we are a people who belong to Him. It has nothing to do with our own goodness.
Holy Lives in a Watching World
In the next verse, Peter calls us to live holy lives in a watching world. He calls us to live lives that are different. “Just a little bit different” is probably an understatement. We’re supposed to be distinct.
So while peculiar doesn’t mean weird, it’s not entirely wrong either. We are supposed to be distinct from the world we’re traveling through. That doesn’t mean we make ourselves obnoxious simply for the sake of being obnoxious, but we aren’t supposed to blend in.
Peter says, “Beloved, I urge you as foreigners and strangers.” The world should look at us and, in some sense, think, “They’re not from around here,” because of the way we live.
He tells us to do this in verse 11 by refusing to give in to sinful desires that hinder our walk with God: “Abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.” As long as we live here on earth, there will be things that call for our attention and try to drag it away from God. It’s easy to give in to those things.
I remember one of my heroes in ministry. He was in his eighties, and a younger man asked him, “At what age do these temptations stop bothering us?” He answered, “I’ll let you know.”
It is easy to fall into sin and into things that distract us from God. But Peter says these things wage war against the soul. Sin promises happiness, fulfillment, and satisfaction, but it destroys us from the inside out.
As believers, I don’t believe sin steals our salvation, but it can certainly hinder our fellowship with God and rob us of the joy of our salvation. So Peter calls us to live differently because we walk according to a different standard. It isn’t our own standard; it’s His.
He says, “Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles.” You mean that, as I’m out among unbelievers, I have to live like Jesus all the time? Yes. That’s the job.
Are you going to do that perfectly every day? No. That’s still the job. We fall short of the job description all the time. That’s when we return to Him, deal honestly with Him about it, and ask His forgiveness—not because we’ve lost our salvation, but because we want to be right with Him.
We don’t lower the job description simply because we have trouble meeting it. Peter still says, “Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles.” We should live differently—not to bring glory to ourselves, but in such a way that people see us and can’t help but notice the difference.
Let Your Walk Support Your Witness
God uses our walk to support our witness. To be clear, saying that we live in a way that points people to Jesus does not remove our responsibility to tell people about Jesus.
If you’ve said this, I’m not trying to attack you, because I’ve said it too. Years later, I realized how ridiculous it can sound. There’s a quote attributed to Francis of Assisi: “Preach the gospel to the whole world, and if necessary, use words.” That may sound good at first. But think about saying, “Feed the hungry, and if necessary, use food.”
We are called to speak the gospel. I understand the point people are trying to make: let your walk support your witness. Don’t proclaim Jesus with your words and then live in a way that distracts people from Jesus. I understand that.
But we can do both. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. As we’re telling people about Jesus with our words, our lives should point them in the same direction.
Peter says we’re supposed to keep our behavior excellent among the Gentiles so that, even in the things for which they slander us as evildoers, they may see our good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
Live in such a way that, even if they mock you for your faith, say bad things about you, criticize you, judge you, or treat you unkindly, they still see what you do. They see how you live. They see how you respond. Then, one day, when the Lord deals with them, your witness helps draw them to Him rather than pushing them farther away.
I keep hearing conversations about church hurt, and some of it is real. You’ve probably experienced it. I’ve experienced it. Some of it is also inevitable. When you put sinners together, there’s going to be friction.
But Peter is telling us to behave in such a way that we don’t give the world outside ammunition. When people have been unkind to us and ridiculed us, we shouldn’t respond harshly in a way that drives them farther from Christ.
We’re supposed to keep our behavior excellent among the Gentiles. Let them mock, criticize, and put down our faith in Christ if they choose. But let them remember the godly way we lived. Let them remember that our behavior and our responses reflected the message we shared, so that one day, when the Holy Spirit brings conviction, they are drawn to Christ and not pushed away.
This is a lot for us to absorb. It’s a lot for us to try to do, but it’s only the beginning of considering who we need to be in order to be faithful and effective on mission for Christ.
Are we going to walk out of here and do all these things perfectly? No. But this is the goal we’re aiming for.
