Living as God's People

What unites us as human beings? What kind of things do we do we come together, do we have our community and identity in? Sometimes I think it's it's things like common goals. So on any given eve before the release of a new Apple product, there's a sense of community, a sense of identity. And those who camp out outside to wait for the new release of the whatever number iPhone it is or whatever, the new generation. There's a sense of unity and community there, even if there may also be rivalry. You know, there's a sense of unity at work when everybody's together on one big project, trying to get it done and working together and cooperating. So sometimes it's common goals. Sometimes it's common loves. So in a few short weeks, every Saturday for the foreseeable future will be marked by unity. Eighty thousand people in the stands. gathered in the colors of their favorite team to cheer them on. I can't wait for college football season. That's the kind of unity we see. Sometimes it's a political cause that unites people, a common love for a candidate or a cause that gets people together in a rally and they're excited and they're together. But it bleeds over from the assembly into everyday life. So how many times in traffic have you screened somebody's bumper stickers before you let them in front of you? No, that's one of my guys. Yeah, come on over, buddy. But you see the wrong bumper sticker and you're going to not let that person in. It happens like that. Human unity is often very shallow, isn't it? It's often very shallow. We could be at a concert, having the time of our life with this group of people around us, hands in the air, enjoying ourselves, but then ready to destroy each other when we get to the parking lot and we're trying to get home before they do. We can work side by side with a co-worker only to see that person somewhere other than work and try to avoid eye contact and get away from them, not to interact. Human unity is fragile. Even families, you see, this basic unit of human structure can come apart by silly stuff like an inheritance when somebody dies. You see the worst in people at times. When the Bible calls us to be united, it's referring to something very different than that. It's referring to a new understanding of ourselves and others in light of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. That's what biblical unity is based on, and that's what we'll be thinking about this morning in First Peter. We're going to continue a series that I've been preaching. It is a series I don't preach very often. So the first one was in January, the last one in April, but it's going through the book of First Peter. So just a refresher. Peter is writing to Gentile Christians, much like you and I writing to Christians scattered across Asia Minor. He's reminding them of the promises that are theirs in Christ. And Brian alluded to that when he read scripture earlier, that these promises that God is making to the Israelites throughout the Old Testament find their fulfillment in Jesus Christ and then are applied to God's people through him. So we saw in the beginning of chapter one how Peter calls Christians to rejoice, even though they're facing persecution because the salvation that God has in store for them. He calls them to remain hopeful, to hope and to be confident in God's grace that it will continue and complete the work of making them holy. And this morning, what I want us to see is that God calls his people to love. God's people are called to love one another because God first loved them. So we're going to be looking at first Peter chapter one verse twenty two and going through chapter two verse ten. So that's that's our text this morning. Let me read that and then I'll give you the two points. We're on pages one one hundred one thousand fourteen and one thousand fifteen of the few Bibles in front of you. So if you're new to the Bible, you don't have a Bible with you. You're welcome to turn there. If you don't have a Bible, you're welcome to take that one with you. So let me read our text this morning. First Peter one twenty two. Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart since you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable through the living and abiding word of God. For all flesh is like grass and all its glory, like the flower of grass, the grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever. And this word is the good news that was preached to you. So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander like newborn infants long for the pure spiritual milk that by it you may grow up to 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 a 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. Let's pray together. Our father in heaven, we confess that what we just read is our identity. We had not received the mercy, but through Jesus Christ, we receive mercy and we know mercy and where we pray for mercy. Now, as we turn to the study of your word, we pray for illumination. Or that you would grant us faith to hear and see what our hearts otherwise wouldn't hear and see, where we pray that as Peter commands, we would taste and see that you are good. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. I want us to see two things this morning. First, the call to love and second, the basis for love. So the call to love in chapter one, verse 22, all the way through to verse three, and then the basis for love and the remaining of the passage. So the call to love beginning in chapter one, verse 22. Peter's main exhortation here, I think, is pretty clear. He calls us to love one another. In order to see that, I want us to kind of work through the logic of the passage, and we're going to do that backwards to get to where he lands. So the call for Christians to love each other is rooted in the gospel. So look at verse 25. This word is the good news that was preached to you. This is the gospel message that these believers have responded to. The gospel message is that God has come to save his people from their sins. Through the work of his son Jesus Christ, God sent him into the world to live the life of righteousness that his people owed him, to die the death for sin that they deserved, to be raised so that he would raise all those who put their faith and trust in him, who believe in him and repent of their sins. God would raise all of them with Christ on the last day. That's the gospel. That's the heart of the gospel, that God has acted in history to save his people from their sins. That's the message that's been preached to Peter's readers. That's the message that we try to preach here every week, that God has acted to save us. So look back now at verse 24 then. All flesh is like grass, its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever." Now, we read this quotation as the call to worship this morning, this word from Isaiah where God is promising to rescue his people from exile. He's reminding them that even though they suffer under captivity, that their captor's kingdom is not eternal. God's kingdom is eternal. Their kingdom will one day fade away and God will rescue them because his kingdom endures. And what Peter and what the gospel writers affirm is that this is something that happens, that's fulfilled in the ministry and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus comes to be the fulfillment of God coming to rescue his people. John the Baptist is the voice crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord. He is preparing the way for Jesus. Jesus is coming to save his people, and that's the message of the gospel. That's the word of the Lord that remains forever. That's the message of human history. God has created us, but God is saving us. God has worked through Christ to bring us into salvation. That is the most important, the most enduring message that can exist, and it has eternal consequences for us. It endures forever, is what Peter says. This is the gospel that he's holding up. Now if we look back in verse 23, Peter says that we are born again through the gospel. You have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable. That's the eternal nature he's talking about. Through the living and abiding word of God. The gospel message is eternal and it gives us life. It gives believers life. Just as Jesus was raised from the dead, never to die again, He is living and abiding. And so too, believers are given that status of living and abiding through the work of the gospel. As the gospel is preached, God creates life. He gives us life. And what He does is nothing less than eternal. He gives us eternal life. Through the word, he creates life. He enables us to respond to the message of the gospel in faith and repentance. We believe that Jesus is who he said he was. He accomplished what he said he accomplished and that we live a life of hope in him because of that. That's the gospel giving us life. That's something we don't do on our own. God creates that in us through the seed of his word as the gospel is preached. Now we go back to verse 22. Peter says, having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth. That's how we respond to the gospel. So God gives us the life to respond. God gives us the ability to hear and see what we couldn't see before. And then we respond by obedience to the truth. We respond by obeying the commands of the gospel, repenting and believing in Jesus. We go to Jesus. We confess our sins to him. We acknowledge who we are before God. And he gives us cleansing. He gives us purity. That's what he does. So this is what I want us to see. All of that is what it is to be a Christian. That's Christianity. It's to hear the gospel, it's to have life. As you hear the gospel granted by God, it's to respond to the gospel in faith and repentance. Now look at what Peter says next. The purpose of all of that, the purpose of God making us his, of creating spiritual life in us, is at least in part this. A sincere, brotherly love. Do you see that God, through the gospel, is creating not just a bunch of individuals who worship him, but he's creating a family. He's creating a community that worships him as brothers. Peter tells us that Christian love is to be sincere, it's to be enduring, it's to be pure. He calls us to put away malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander. And so this flows very naturally from the gospel, doesn't it? If we understand the gospel, we see ourselves rightly in light of God's righteousness and who he is and what he demands from us and what he's provided for us in Christ. It then frees us. It frees us to actually love other people. See, we don't have to be slaves to advancing our own kingdoms and using others to advance our own kingdoms. We can love them purely and sincerely. So we understand that our story isn't ultimately about us, but it's about God. We find ourselves in his story. And so we don't have to look to others with evil intent to try to keep ourselves on top. We don't have to lie to each other or act differently around other people to protect some identity. We know who we are in Christ and we're free from that. Our only hope is to be hidden with him. We don't we can celebrate with each other. We can genuinely be glad for the good things each other experience. Because we know that everything that we have, everything that they have is a given by God. And we can refrain from being critical and speaking against each other because we know who we are and we know that God is the ultimate judge. We don't have to pronounce judgment upon anyone. That's the gospel active and living among us, creating that brotherly love. Now, in order to do this, Peter says, we have to long. We have to long in chapter two, verse two, he says, we have to long for the pure spiritual milk that by it we may grow up to salvation. And the emphasis there is on the longing, just like a newborn baby. Most of you know, we have a five month old at our house. And when when it's mealtime, there's only one thing that satisfies. Right. It's milk. It's not, you know, holding him. It's not TV. It's not rocking. It's not sleep. It's not changing diapers. Not any of those things. When he's hungry, he needs to eat. He needs milk. And so just like that, just like newborn infants, Peter says, we are to long for the pure spiritual milk, which is the word of God. Christians, just like babies, just like babies live by feeding on milk. Christians live by the gospel, by hearing the gospel. That's what satisfies us. For Christians, nothing can satisfy our hearts like the gospel, and we know that. And yet so often we try to do all those other things, just like when the baby's hungry and you think, well, maybe we'll just rock him or maybe we'll just change him or whatever. None of that's going to work if he's hungry. He needs to eat. But as Christians, we do the same thing. We know that the gospel is our comfort, and yet we go to other things. We lose sight of the gospel, and so often we're tempted when we do that to move toward either legalism or lawlessness. We tend to think we can somehow make our own righteousness before God by being legalist or we go to lawlessness and think that it doesn't really matter, that it's not that important. And of course, when we do those things, the fruit that we see in our lives is being judgmental toward others if we're legalist or being passive and unconcerning toward others if we're lawless. Neither one of those are acceptable for Christians. When we understand who we are, when we understand that we are sinners before God, we understand that our only source of righteousness is through Jesus Christ. We won't settle for those things. We won't settle for malice and deceit and envy and slander. We know that merely feeling more righteous than somebody else doesn't actually make us righteous inside. Only Christ's blood does that. So we don't settle for those forms of legalism. And at the same time, we understand that God has saved us in order to be his people, in order to be holy. And so we pursue holiness because he is holy. Now, moreover, what the New Testament emphasizes is this fraternal, this brotherhood that the gospel creates among Christians. When we understand our identity in Christ, it changes the way we see people around us. Those who are also in Christ aren't just like fans of the same team or the same political candidate. They're brothers, they're members of the same family. And just like a healthy family, we strive for and work for the good of the whole. We're less concerned about the individual and more concerned about the family as a whole. We can see good in each other and rejoice without being jealous. We see that we have this common identity as children of God, the father. We celebrate his manifold goodness, the ways that he shows his goodness, his perfection and the diversity of his gifts to his children. That's how we live together. That makes sense. It makes sense, doesn't it? We have a common father. We have a common identity of being born again in the gospel. We have common values, understanding the eternal nature of the gospel. We have a common love for Jesus Christ, our savior. And so with those essentials in place, God calls us to live together as a family. And when we really taste and we really feed on and we really love the gospel, it naturally creates in us a love for those who love the gospel. This is how we are sanctified, is what Peter says. Look at verse two. By feeding on the gospel, we grow up into salvation. The gospel isn't just the door to Christianity. It's the door and it's the road and it's the end. The gospel is how we live the Christian life. It's grace every step of the way. It starts us with grace and we're finished with grace. We live the Christian life by feeding on the truth of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, applying the gospel every day. That's why having a gospel-centered community is so important, it's so essential to our lives as Christians. So we come together as a church, we come together to love each other and to love the gospel. So often we and we've a lot of us have experienced this churches that tend to miss one or those of the other to go. So be so focused on loving each other that we compromise on the truth. You start to neglect the word of God in the name of unity, and the result of that is to discover that in the absence of the gospel, there's no foundation for unity and the church crumbles. On the other hand, you can focus so much on the truth. and neglect actually tasting and experiencing the gospel and loving each other and result in a stale and stagnant body. High on truth, but low on love. And when that's the case, the church has misunderstood the truth entirely and the church becomes fragile and brittle and stagnant. Churches have to hold these two together. They have to have truth and they have to have love. Love without truth causes love to become stale. And truth without love proves itself ultimately void of truth and falls apart. But God calls us to come together in love based on the truth of the gospel, that's what the church is to be a place where the gospel is taught and lived and loved both in the pulpit and in the living rooms of its members. So as we think about this, this section, I want us to apply a few things. First. Glory fates. That's a very direct, very clear application from this text. Glory fades. And so especially for those of you who are here who are not Christians, but it applies to Christians as well. The Bible is really honest about this subject. And sometimes Christians aren't. Sometimes Christians like to pretend that there is no glory elsewhere, that the world has nothing to offer, that there's no fun out there. It's all really in here. We have the secret. And the Bible doesn't say that at all. The Bible is very honest to say there is glory out there, but it's fading. It's fleeting. It's temporary. It's a vapor. It's here for an instant and then gone. So if you're here this morning, you're living for another glory than God's. Just realize and hear this warning from scripture that what you're living for is fading away. It's going to vanish. Peter pleads with you and I plead with you this morning not to make the mistake of living your life for something that will certainly fail, that will certainly fade. Only God offers enduring, unfading glory. It comes by emptying yourself, by admitting your spiritual poverty before him and coming to him for life, for the gospel, for Christ, and by being identified with Christ, being adopted into his kingdom. Then you find lasting glory in being identified with him and sharing in his eternal reward. So if you're here this morning, you're not a Christian, we'd love to talk to you more about that. If you want to talk to me after the service or somebody that you came with, we would love to talk to you more about that. But Christians do. We can live in that danger, like I was saying, of trying to satisfy our appetites with something other than the milk of the word. So remember this warning of labor for that which is eternal and not fading. A second thing I want us to consider is what is the source of your identity? Now, where is it that you find unity and community? Is it in some of those common interests and patterns and hobbies and things like I talked about earlier? Please see this morning from the text that the only source of real lasting identity is in the gospel, is in part of being part of God's family. That's where true community, true identity is established. And just to take that a step further, I'm preaching mostly to the choir about this, but that's why church membership is so important. It's where we come together to really put our money where our mouth is in terms of our commitment to God and his people. As church members, we covenant together on the basis of the gospel in love for each other. And it's how God sanctifies us. It's how he challenges us to love people that we wouldn't otherwise love. It's how we grow up into salvation by applying the gospel to our lives in the context of the messiness of life together. It's God's appointed. The church is God's appointed means of our sanctification. And so this must be the source of our identity as his people. Third. Who is it that you love? So this is related to the last point, but who do you love as you as you consider your relationships? Do you love sincerely from a pure heart? Are you tempted to love people who are easy to love or people who you get something from from loving? Or is your love a brotherly love that's self-denying and other-centered? Another question is, who is it in your life that's difficult to love, but that you love anyway? And your spouse doesn't count. You have to love your spouse. Who is it in your life that you have to love? That's, again, where the local church is important. We let God set the agenda of who we love. God says, these are the people I expect you to love and to carry out these commands with. The text calls us to take a careful look of our relationships in ourselves, and if we aren't demonstrating real brotherly love, then it means we're misunderstanding the gospel. Fourth, what is it that you long for? So when those moments of crisis come, when the need arises, what is it that you turn to? And this is what I talked about a minute ago, that we're so prone, we're so tempted to try to feed our longing, to feed our appetite for the pure milk, the word of God with other things. The gospel is the only real lasting source of satisfaction. So as a Christian, what are you doing to cultivate an appetite for the word of God? That's why we have a gospel centered community. That's why we labor to preach the gospel here every week and to teach it in Sunday school classes and on Wednesday nights. We want the gospel to saturate this body. We commit to the gospel. We commit to each other and to feeding the gospel to each other. So what are you doing to cultivate that taste in your own life and what are you doing to help others cultivate that taste to feed the gospel to them? And let me just say, based on all of these things, how thankful I am for this body. How much I see this, how I see that gospel longing being cultivated, how I see hunger for the word of God, how I see people loving each other purely as brothers and sisters, how I see identity being rooted in Christ. So for those of you who are struggling this morning, just be encouraged that is happening in this body. God is at work. Before we move on to the second section, I just want us to look at verse three. If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good, it's not safe to assume that just because you're here this morning, you are a Christian by being here. Have you experienced personally God's mercy to you in Jesus Christ? Have you come to see who you are in your sin and what Christ has done through the cross, through his death and resurrection? Have you experienced God's goodness in the context of community, the saints who love you in the gospel? And have you loved others this way? For most of us this morning, that it's a resounding yes, we have tasted, we have experienced God's goodness in so many ways. But if you haven't, then pursue the gospel, cultivate a taste, just like a child trying to learn to like a food, keep exposing yourself, keep pursuing the gospel, keep tasting until you really have an appetite for it. And again, I would love to talk to you more about that after the service. So that was the call to love. Second, I want us to see the basis for love. Let me read the second half of the text. 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 us inside on 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 a 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. In this section, we see that we love God because he first loved us. Notice first that God first loved Jesus. Jesus is the chosen and the precious stone. Jesus is the one who was rejected by men. who was crucified by men, but he was chosen and precious in God's sight so that God raised him from the dead and appointed him as the living stone. We see later in the text, Jesus is called the cornerstone. He is the foundation. All of God's work in humanity is being established through Jesus. He's the foundation. And so second, then we see that through Jesus, God loves us. Through Jesus, God loves us. We see this Christ-centered nature of this passage over and over again. As you come to him, whoever believes in him, Jesus is the cornerstone. Through him, by faith, we are being built together as the people of God. God is making us a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable through Jesus. So I just wanted to make sure we understand the weight of what Peter is saying here. Through Christ, God is creating a new temple. But it's not the physical building in a particular place in Israel. It's a spiritual house made up of men and women who have been given new life through Jesus Christ. He's establishing a priesthood, but it has nothing to do with the bloodline of Aaron. It's a priesthood who's holy, who offers Holy Spirit born sacrifices of praise to God through Jesus Christ. And we'll come back to that in just a little bit. But do you see this? Peter is reminding us of this extraordinary nature of God's work, that in God's sovereign majesty, he's bringing about all these promises that he made to his people, all these pictures in the Old Testament find their fulfillment in the Church of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the chosen cornerstone laid in Zion. God had promised his people that he would he would establish them on this cornerstone, that the only escape from judgment would be to be found in him. Whoever believes in him will not be put to shame. And Peter said earlier in the text, there is praise and honor and glory in store for those who belong to Jesus. This was good news for the suffering Christians that Peter was writing to, and it's good news for us today, as we live in a world where we experience the suffering of a fallen world, we resist the urges of the culture to think that there's another glory out there. We are encouraged to remember that the gospel. is God's glory. It's the day of vindication is coming, where God unites us with Christ in resurrected bodies and we're vindicated before all men. All those who hope in Christ will not be disappointed, but will be honored. Jesus has been raised from the dead, and so he has promised to raise all of us who are with him in faith from the dead. That's the hope that we have. While that coming day of resurrection is a day of honor for those who are in Christ, It's a day of shame for those who are not in Christ. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone and a stone of stumbling and rock of offense. God has appointed Jesus Christ as the foundation for his work in this world. But there are many who reject Jesus, there are many who reject him. In Jesus's time, the builders were those religious leaders who should have been looking to his coming, who should have been expecting his coming. But instead, they missed him. They were offended by him. They stumbled over him. They rejected him. And so that continues to the day as the gospel is preached or shared. There are those who who respond by faith, who have life as they hear the gospel. But there are some who reject, who take offense and who stumble, who don't accept the gospel. I think verse eight is probably one of the hardest verses in all of scripture. They stumble because they disobey the word as they were destined to do. There are some who disobey the gospel, some who hear the gospel call to repent and believe and don't. Their disobedience flows from their disbelief, so they're at their core, they are unwilling to submit to God, they're unwilling to come to him through Jesus Christ. They are responsible, according to this text, for their unbelief, for their rebellion. But at the same time, God is sovereign even over their unbelief. They stumble because they disobey the word as they were destined to do. Those who reject the gospel are not somehow outside of God's plan. They're not outside of God's sovereignty. In God's sovereign mercy, he has chosen some to receive the gospel. When the gospel is preached, he gives life to receive the gospel in his mercy and in his sovereign holiness and justice. He doesn't provide that for everyone. For some, God has ordained them to continue in sin and rebellion for eternal destruction. And we call that, if you're interested, the doctrine of reprobation. Now, we have to confess, we don't fully understand how this doctrine works. We know that God is not the author of evil. We know that he takes no delight in the death of the wicked. We know that God is perfectly righteous and just. Now, Peter brings these words to us to be words of comfort. And I want us to hear that this morning, that God is utterly sovereign. Peter's believers lived in a time of persecution where they were being attacked for their Christianity. And just as Christians around the world today are attacked, are persecuted for their faith in Christ. And what Peter wants us to see is those who persecuted Christians then, those who persecuted Christians now are no different than those people who put our Lord Jesus Christ to death. All of them act in accord with their nature. They are all completely responsible to God for their actions. And yet their actions are not outside of the sovereign rule of God. God uses even the most horrible actions, indeed has used the most horrible human actions to bring glory to himself and good to his people. Look at the cross. Look at the cross, men crucified, the son of God, the only innocent man ever to die was put to death, was murdered at the hands of men. And yet it's the very means that God uses to accomplish the greatest good of salvation for his people. If God is really sovereign, if we really believe that God is sovereign, then it must be this way. If we're going to have any assurance in our salvation, it must be that God reigns completely over our salvation. Listen to verse nine. 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 has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Through God, through God's mercy, through Christ, we are God's chosen race in the line of Abraham. Through Christ, we are God's royal priesthood in the line of Aaron. And through Christ, we are God's holy nation, a people for his own possession, as Israel was called to be. Don't you hear the sovereignty of God in that verse? Don't you hear how it's God's work? This is God's plan of salvation from the beginning of the word. This is the glory of the gospel. It's God making a people for himself. It's what he does. He creates us. He calls us, not just inviting us to himself, but enabling us to come and respond to the invitation. Our assurance of our salvation is grounded in God's sovereignty. his work to make us his people. That's our only comfort in our salvation friends. Why has God saved us? Why has God saved us? According to verse 9, to proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. And that's what it means for us to be a holy priesthood. That's what it means for us to be the priesthood of believers is not a status that we wear like a badge. It's a commissioning that God gives us to proclaim his excellencies. God has made us his people in order that we might worship him and know him and love him. That's why he's shown us his mercy as his people. We are called to proclaim his excellencies to the world around us. We are called to make God's glory and his mercy known. Those are the spiritual sacrifices we make through Christ. See, words like election and reprobation, even they shouldn't weaken our desire to evangelize at all. If we don't desire to proclaim God's mercy, it's because we're not really tasting it. We're not really experiencing it. We're not really believing the gospel, who we really are and what God has really done for us. When we understand that, when we understand who we are apart from Christ and who we are in Christ, we can't help but respond in worship and praise and adoration to God. When we see the cross as the emblem of God's love for us, then our hearts overflow into our mouths and it just spews out of us all and wonder and praise to God for his love. So if you're struggling this morning with that, if you're struggling thinking about evangelism, taste the gospel, go back to the gospel and continue to drink and drink and drink until it flows out from you. This is the call upon us as a church. It's how we live together as a kingdom of priests. We come together as a community. We commit to the gospel and to each other, and we remind one another constantly of God's mercy to us in Jesus Christ. We seek to apply the gospel to every facet of our life. So if you're struggling, you're in the right place. This is where the gospel is taught and lived and loved. But it's also how we relate to the world around us. We proclaim God's excellencies. We preach the good news of Christ crucify. We understand that the gospel is God's appointed means for bringing people into his family. And so just as someone just once spoke the gospel to each one of us and God granted faith and we responded with spiritual life. So, too, we continue to speak the gospel, asking God to bring fruit from the seed of the word. So God's sovereignty doesn't at all quench our desire to evangelize. It fuels it. Verse 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. Brothers and sisters, what a simple and beautiful statement of who we were and who we are in Christ. Once we were not a people, once we were without mercy, once we had no identity, we had no purpose, no no calling in life now. The highest calling of all through Jesus Christ, we are the people of God's mercy. Let us worship God and let us love one another because God has so loved us. Let's pray. Our father in heaven, we praise you this morning because you are the God of mercy. We're not one of us can make a claim. for anything from you or we are not entitled to anything but wrath and condemnation. And yet, through the gospel of Jesus Christ, you have set your love upon sinners, upon rebels, Lord. And so we praise you for that, Lord. We wonder at your love. Father, we confess that as we study texts like this, Lord, we get over our heads very quickly. There are things that we don't understand, and so we pray that you would give us faith to trust you, to trust your character, to trust your faithfulness in the past. Lord, most of all, we pray that you would grant us to taste and see that you are good. We pray that the gospel would take root in our hearts deeper and deeper, that it would be established firmly in this community of Jefferson Park Baptist Church, that we would love the gospel and love one another in the gospel, that this church would be a place where your excellencies are proclaimed, where we marvel and wonder at your mercy, calling us out of darkness and into your light. So, Father, we praise you for that. And we pray for those who are here that may not believe that you would grant them to see your light and to come into it. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.