Emptying Our Suitcases

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Have any of you ever felt like you were held back by something you were holding on to? I can give you a real world example. A while back, Charlie reached through.

We have these baby gates installed in the house where we can close off certain rooms and go play. Or keep them out of Charlie’s classroom. Charlie was reaching for this toy through the gate.

And it’s one of these where you can get your hand through the gate and pick something up. But then you pick it up and you can’t get your hand through. And Charlie and I were in the kitchen, hear him squalling and screaming, because he tried to walk away and he got stuck.

And she said, she was cooking dinner, she said, can you go check and see what’s wrong with Charlie? So I went in there to see what was wrong with Charlie, and I saw that his hand was stuck because he’s holding on to the toy. He couldn’t get his fist back through the gate, even turn it sideways.

He can’t get his fist back through the gate. So I told him, I said, you’ve got to put it down. Well, he thought I meant put it down forever, and he just goes even more all to pieces.

He refused to put the toy down, and so he’s just stuck there in the gate for what seemed like forever. It was probably not even a minute, but he’s just stuck there in the gate, crying his head off and can’t get loose. He just wants loose out of this gate and can’t get free.

And finally, he stayed stuck until I convinced him to drop the toy. He dropped the toy, and suddenly his hand comes unstuck, and he backs up away from that gate. I gave him the toy, but he was held back until he let go of what he was holding on to, and then he was no longer stuck.

There’s a reason why we don’t want to let go of things. It’s called law subversion. And this is something powerful that we all have.

I think it has to do with our sinful nature. We get a little greedy. We get so attached to things that it makes it harder to let stuff go.

Social scientists tell us that for most people, the pain of losing $100 is more intense than the pleasure we feel from winning $100. Because that $100 we lost is already ours. It’s mine.

And we are averse to loss. Think about it. How mad are you going to be if somebody just pulled $100 out of your pocket and walked off?

Think about how mad you’d be. Now think about, I found $100 on the ground. And nobody else around to claim it, nobody to turn it into.

It’s free money. We’re going to be excited about that free money, but in a couple weeks, let’s be honest, a couple hours, that free money is going to be gone. Years later, we’re still going to be griping about somebody who stole $100 from us, aren’t we?

We are averse to loss. Letting go of something involves a risk, and most of the time we’d rather forfeit the reward than risk the loss. and we have to do this all the time we have to let go of things in order to to move forward I have to do this every time I plan to go out either for hunting or fishing or hiking anytime I’m going to be going out where there’s not air conditioning and hot hot and cold running water I have to prepare I have to repack my bag every time depending on what I’m going to be doing um especially with hunting.

You know, I will even pack multiple bags. I’ll have some gear that goes with me that just stays in the truck. I’ll have some gear that goes with me out to the blind, and I’ll have a smaller bag that I can take with me if I have to chase down something I’ve shot if my children haven’t scared it away first, okay?

I have still not gotten a deer, and I think I just need to go by myself next time because children are noisy. But it’s hard for me every time I’m going to do that because as I go to repacking the gear and I think, I might need this. I might need this.

I have to, I have to go back through again, ruthlessly and say, is there a strong possibility that I’m actually, is the likelihood there that I’m almost certainly going to need this? If not, either leave it here or put it in one of the other bags because otherwise, you know, if I have my way, I don’t want to risk leaving something behind. I’ll end up carrying 200 pounds of gear, trying to chase after a deer and drop dead of a heart attack.

I mean, nobody wants that. But it’s hard because I don’t want to risk leaving something behind. And we’re all that way.

But sometimes to get where we need to be, to get where we want to be, we have to be willing to leave some things behind. We have to be willing to let go of some things. And Peter described how to get where we want.

You know, throughout this section that we’ve been reading of 1 Peter, I’ve been talking to you about the subject of holiness, and that is the end goal. That is the goal of the Christian life is to be more like Jesus. The idea of holiness means God making us to be more like Jesus. To get there, Peter describes how to get there, Christians have to let go of anything that doesn’t help us.

Anything that we don’t need to help us get there to that spot and embrace the change that God is making in us. Anything that slows us down on the journey, we’re supposed to leave behind. So turn with me, if you haven’t already, to 1 Peter chapter 2.

1 Peter chapter 2, and we’re picking up where we left off last week in verse 9. This will be a familiar passage to some of you. 1 Peter chapter 2, starting in verse 9, and we’re going to go through verse 12 this morning.

He writes, But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light, who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy. Beloved, I beg you, as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul, having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works which they observe glorify God in the day of visitation. And so what Peter’s doing here initially, he’s setting up a contrast between who we are in Christ and who we were in the world.

Keep in mind here, none of this is to be taken as a message about, here’s how you clean up your life so that you can get God to forgive you. This is all written by Peter under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to Christians. He’s talking to people who have already been forgiven of their sins by God because of Jesus Christ and talking about what we’re supposed to do as a result.

And he’s setting up a contrast here between who we are in Christ and who we were in the world. And because verse 8, where we left off last week, ends with this description of people rejecting Christ and as a result stumbling around in disobedience.

and then the contrast is set up here in the very first words we read this morning in verse 9 but you he’s saying you’re but you’re different you’re different and it’s not so much a contrast between us and them it’s a contrast between us now and us back then he says but you and in verse 9 he says we are a chosen generation and in contrast to to when we were stumbling in disobedience he said you have become a chosen generation that word chosen means we were named it describes and the word generation describes a common descent that we were named and brought into the family of God he called us out and this all tells us this chosen generation idea tells us that we were lovingly called out by God this idea of a royal priesthood which he says we are also tells us we’re not merely servants in the kingdom. And I’ve told you this many, many times.

It’s one of the most amazing aspects of the gospel to me. That God would not only save us, but also bring us into His family. Because you see, God could have saved us and forgiven us and brought us in as servants in the kingdom.

Just like the prodigal son. The father could have let him come back as a servant like he asked. And that would have been more mercy than he deserved.

Just to forgive us and make us servants in the kingdom is more mercy than we deserve. And yet God takes it a step further and says, you’re not just my servants today. I’m calling you my sons and daughters.

He adopts us into his family. We are a royal priesthood. And this idea of being a priesthood is a real connection to God.

Because if you think about it in the Old Testament, the priests were the intermediaries. You had to go through the priest to connect with God. And he says we are a royal priesthood.

We are part of God’s family. As believers in Jesus Christ, we are part of God’s family and we have a genuine connection to God as part of that royal priesthood. And then he calls us a holy nation.

This idea of being a nation is a bonded body of people. People that are connected. People that are knit together.

That have something in common. I feel like we’ve lost some of that in our nation because we look around and we see people who are different from us who think differently from us, and people who live differently from us. And we always think of them as the other, but there used to be this idea, or did it really exist, or do we just remember it that way?

There was at least the ideal that we were all Americans. And despite our differences, we were all one group of people. We were all Americans.

Folks, that may have existed in America. Some people are now saying, oh, it never did. I don’t know.

I wasn’t alive back then. But I can tell you, whether it whether it stopped existing or whether it no longer exists in America, it does exist in the kingdom of God. We are one body.

We are one group of people in the kingdom. We are a nation. We have this bond together that holds us together in Jesus Christ. And the idea that we’re not just a nation, but we are a holy nation means that we are a nation of people.

I’m not talking about America. I’m talking about Christians. We are a nation.

we are a body of people that are set apart to God for His purposes. And we read through that so quickly, usually those things that He uses to describe us, also His own special people. He’s telling us we have value because we belong to Him.

And we read over all those descriptions there in verse 9, and usually we like to talk about peculiar people and how some of us take it more literally than others, this call to be peculiar. But all these things together, we typically quote through that really quickly, and we don’t always stop to think about the implications of what God is saying, that He has basically called us out from the world, and He has transformed us not only in who we are, but also in our relationship to Him, our relationship to one another, and our relationship to the world that we stand in the midst of and represent Him to. It’s an incredible thing that He’s done, and it’s an incredible contrast between that and stumbling and disobedience because of rejecting Christ in verse 8.

And again, I want to be very clear on this. That comparing the church with the world here is not to show that we are somehow inherently superior to other people. It’s not saying, oh, we’re better than the world outside.

This contrast is to highlight the change that God has made in us. Not that we’re better than them, but that we are better than we used to be. It’s like I tell my children all the time.

Because when you’re a kid, everything is a competition. especially when you inherited my competitive genes. Everything’s a competition, and I’ve told my children something I wished I’d learned years earlier.

You’re not in competition with anybody else. You’re in competition with who you were yesterday. He’s not comparing and contrasting the church with the world so much as the church today with who we were before Christ. Christ makes the difference.

That’s where the contrast is. who we are now in Christ versus who we were in the world. And he describes here a change in our standing, that we are a people of God.

We’re not saved by our physical descent. So much of this talks about nationhood and generation. He’s talking to a Christian audience that primarily came from a Jewish background and thought they were going to be close to God because of their physical descent from Abraham, because of their nationality.

And so when he talks about people and nation and generation, So much of that is tied up in that Jewish understanding that they had. And he says, in the kingdom, we were not a people. He says in verse 10, all these who were not a people.

We were once a random collection of people because there are Christians, there are people who have come to Christ from every nation, tribe, and tongue in this world who were not a people, but he says in verse 10, but are now the people of God. In Christ, we’ve been brought together into this new nation. And it’s not dependent on our physical descent or our social class or where we’ve come from or who we are.

It’s all dependent on who Jesus is. And if you’re thinking some of this is driven by the events of the last couple weeks of the unrest in our country, it’s not. I had this series mapped out.

Isn’t God amazing? I had this series mapped out over a month ago. But he says in the kingdom, we’ve all been brought from these random groups of people and we’ve been made one people in Jesus Christ. We are his people.

So we’re not only the people of God, but we’re the recipients of mercy because we were once destined for judgment. He says in verse 10 that we had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy. Once we were destined for judgment, but now we’ve been blessed with God’s mercy.

And how did God make this change in our standing? It was through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. All of this reconciliation to God and to one another in the kingdom takes place because of what Jesus did. Ephesians chapter 2 tells us that he reconciled both the Jews and the Gentiles to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity.

And he came and preached peace to you that were far off and to those who were near. For through him we both have access by one spirit to the Father. So he describes how Jesus is the one who reconciled us, not just to God, but reconciled us to one another.

Sort of like this idea of a triangle. You start from these two bottom points of the triangle and as you move toward that top point, these are going to grow closer together. As we grow closer to God, as we are reconciled to God, we can’t help but be drawn closer together.

How did God make this change in our standing. He did it because Jesus Christ died for us. That’s how anything was able to change.

Why did God make this change in us? Well, he tells us in verse 9, he says that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. The transformation that he’s made in us advertises the glory of the one who changes us.

When He transforms us into something else, into something better, it advertises His glory and shows the world how great He is. And there’s a change in perspective that He creates in us as a result of this change in standing. Because we realize that this world is not our home.

It’s not our ultimate destination. As our standing with God changes, so does our standing and our perspective of how we view the world and how we view our life. We realize this world is not our destination ultimately, but as verse 11 says, we are sojourners and pilgrims. A sojourner is a traveler, and a pilgrim is somebody who travels for a religious purpose.

And that’s what we’re doing here on earth. We are travelers passing through a strange land. We need to remember that because sometimes we get a little too comfortable here, don’t we?

We get a little too comfortable where we’re traveling, but rather than growing comfortable in our host country, We should instead be longing for our king and our country, our real country. We should be mindful that everything that we do here represents our king and our country. See, he changed us so we would show forth his praises, as it says in verse 9.

And he tells us in verse 12, to have our conduct honorable among the Gentiles, so when they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works which they observe glorify God in the day of visitation. As we are foreigners and strangers and pilgrims traveling through this strange land, we should love the people of our host country, this world, knowing they’re not always going to love us or like us back. But we ought to live in such a way that even when the locals dislike us, our goodness should be so evident that they can’t help but glorify our King.

And we’ve seen a few instances of that in the last week or so where something will happen, some moment will happen, and some protesters will say, well, see, I guess not all cops are bad. Look at what this guy did. Or where some protester will do something and people will say, well, not all the protesters are bad.

Look at what this one did. Folks, we ought to live in such a way that people see our conduct and they say, You know, I kind of hate those Christians, but I guess they can’t be all bad. Look at what this one did.

That ought to become a regular part of our lives to live that way and represent our king in that way. We operate differently. Focus in on this.

He calls us sojourners and pilgrims. We’re traveling. We’re on our way to the kingdom. And we operate differently on a long journey than we do when we’re settled in at home, right?

I hope so. I feel like to go on a day trip, we have to pack half our house, but that’s because we have small kids. It’s not supposed to be that way.

You travel light when you’re going for a distance. Christians have to keep the journey in mind. We’ve got to keep the journey in mind.

Remember that we’re sojourners and pilgrims. Our ultimate goal is not to be comfortable here, but to move toward that ultimate destination. Keep moving toward the kingdom. Keep working for the kingdom until we arrive.

we need to act like sojourners and pilgrims by packing light and by abstaining from the fleshly lusts that war against the soul, as it says in verse 11. He tells us, cut some things out. Knock some things off.

Leave some things behind. And I want to caution you again, to anybody that’s listening either here in person or online, I want to caution you again. God is speaking to Christians about how we should live because of our salvation.

He’s not giving instructions here to the world on how to obtain that salvation. This is not, hey, stop sinning and be a better person so God will love you. Okay?

This is to Christians saying you’ve been saved, now act like it. But there ought to be a change in our walk as a result of what Jesus has done for us. So let me ask you this morning, as a fellow sojourner, that’s a hard word to say.

I want to add extra sounds to it. As a fellow traveler, can I use that word instead? as a fellow traveler, as a fellow pilgrim, what is it that keeps you tied to this place instead of inspiring you to press ahead?

What is it that, to borrow from verse 11, wars against your soul instead of encouraging you to draw closer to Christ? What is it that gives the world, what is it that gives the locals the opportunity to accuse you rather than helping you glorify God among them? What is it that distracts you from being who God created you to be?

From doing what God called you to do and from going where he planned for you to go. What are the things that we, he says to abstain here. That means to let go of some things.

And he calls us these sojourners, these travelers and pilgrims. What are the things that burden us in that journey? That’s not a question I can answer for you. It’s one that you’ll have to soul search with the Holy Spirit and come to a conclusion on yourself.

But Peter describes us as being on this journey of following Jesus. And then he calls us to abstain from the things that war against us and war against that and tells us to take what we need in order to glorify God among the Gentiles. Folks, this is a call for us to empty our suitcases of anything that doesn’t aid our travels.

This passage is a call to empty our suitcases of anything that doesn’t aid in our travels. Abstain in verse 11 means to put down everything that doesn’t aid in the journey. Sometimes we’re held back because we are holding on to and carrying the very sins and the very old ways of living that war against our soul and fight us every step of the way.

It’s like carrying dead weight, And he tells us to put it down. And in verse 12, he tells us to conduct ourselves in a certain way among the Gentiles. Folks, we need to carry only what we need to follow Jesus’ example and to glorify God.

This passage tells us to be willing to lose anything in order to be more like Jesus. Be a pilgrim. Be a traveler on the journey of following Jesus.

Take only what you need. Empty your suitcase of anything that gets in the way. again I’ve said this already but I want to be very clear I want to be absolutely clear so that you can only misunderstand if you’re trying to do it on purpose okay laying down our old sinful behaviors is not a shortcut to getting right with God so if you’re sitting here this morning or if you’re listening online and you’re saying you know I know I’m not right with God I know I’ve never been saved I’ve never been forgiven, so I guess I need to put down these old sinful behaviors.

And I need to start following Jesus. You’re jumping ahead here. Can’t use that as a shortcut.

See, Christians are not right with God because we stopped sinning and cleaned up our lives and started trying to be holy. Instead, we’re right with God only because we trusted Jesus. There’s nothing I could do to make myself holy before God.

I’m a sinner. And every good thing I do is just what God’s law requires. I don’t get extra credit for that, and it doesn’t erase the wrong that I’ve done.

No, that sin had to be paid for. And so Jesus paid for it. Only Jesus can make us holy.

Only Jesus can make us acceptable to God. And he did that by coming to pay for every sin that you and I have ever committed. See, because God created us to have a perfect relationship with him, to enjoy perfect fellowship with him.

But through disobedience, which the Bible calls sin, by these actions and words and attitudes that are offensive to God, we have separated ourselves from him. And no amount of good we do can erase the wrong that we’ve done. It has to be paid for because God is holy and God is just. And God could have sent us to hell because of our sin.

And yet God loved us enough that he said, even though I can’t overlook the sin, I’ve got another plan. And he sent Jesus Christ to live a perfect sinless life, to die on the cross for our sins. When he was nailed to that cross, he took responsibility for my sin and for yours.

And he was nailed there in our place and he shed his blood and he died to pay for all of that sin in full. So that now that sin can be forgiven. God looks at us and He’s willing to wipe our slate clean.

He’s willing to erase our record, not because He suddenly became okay with sin, but because Jesus paid for it. It’s already been punished in Jesus Christ. And so God now offers to forgive us and adopt us as His children because Jesus died to pay for our sins and rose again. The only thing there is for us to do is to respond in faith.

To come to that point where we recognize our sin is wrong and God is right. And believe that we deserve punishment and hell. Acknowledge, cry out to God and admit that we are sinners.

Admit that our sin is wrong, but also acknowledge we believe that Jesus died to pay for our sins in full as the only way we could be saved and that He rose again. And this morning you can do that. You can cry out to God wherever you are.

You can admit your sin. You can acknowledge your total faith in Jesus Christ as your Savior. And you can ask God to forgive you because of what He did.

And if you will genuinely turn to Christ and ask God’s forgiveness, believing that Jesus died for you, if you will do that this morning, have the promise of God’s Word that He will hear you, He’ll save you, He’ll forgive you, and He’ll change you.