Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Built on Christ (1 Peter 2:1-12)
Date: April 14, 2024
Have you ever crossed a picket line? That’s an interesting experience. I’ve done it twice. The first time was when I was pretty little. A new grocery store chain came to town that was not unionized and the union-backed employees of the major chain that had pretty much had a monopoly on the town before the new guys moved in picketed out front of their location around the corner from my house for what seemed like weeks. I’m not sure they ever really accomplished anything. The truth was, most people didn’t care. We certainly didn’t. They were closer and cheaper than the other grocery store, so off we went. I did feel a little bad for the picketers when it started getting cold outside as we drove right past them to get our groceries. Otherwise, though, I mostly just ignored it.
The other time I crossed a picket line was when I was in seminary and we were living in Denver. The church Lisa and I went to got a notice—probably in the mail, although I’m not certain about that—that the good folks from Westboro Baptist were going to be in town for a few days. They were going to picket a number of locations including the funeral of a fallen soldier from the area during the week. But before they headed back to their home base in central Kansas, they were going to stop and let the whole city know that they were not happy that our preacher—Jim Walters, who came a preached here a few years ago—preached a message that Jesus loved everyone. Such a blasphemous message had no place being preached from any pulpit, let alone ours, and they wanted us to know it.
When the Sunday for the picket arrived, they got there sometime between 8-8:30 that morning, got their signs proclaiming all of the people God hates on them ready to go, and began marching up and down the sidewalk, smiling, and waving to all the drivers honking at them and assuring them of the number one place they held in their hearts as they drove by. Our wise leaders had long before worked out a plan for us to completely ignore them, announced this to the congregation the previous week, and bussed everybody from the satellite lot to the main entrance so no one had to go anywhere near the hateful members of the infamous church.
Speaking of that, it should not be lost on us that the members of Westboro Baptist and our church at the time, Bear Valley—and for that matter, us at First Baptist Oakboro—all refer to ourselves as members of a church. I don’t know about you, but it just doesn’t sit very well with me to call them a church and us a church at the same time. It’s bad enough that we both call ourselves Baptists. To call both groups churches, though, suggests an understanding of just what a church is that’s so broad as to be totally unhelpful. Saying this, though, prompts us to ask an important question: What exactly is it that makes a church an authentic church? For the next few weeks, I’d like to explore that with you.
This morning finds us at the beginning of a brand-new teaching series called, Authentic Church. We live in a culture with a ton of different options when it comes to selecting a church. There are churches of all sorts of different shapes and sizes. There are churches that profess to believe all manner of different things. There is so much variety, in fact, that more and more people are feeling justified in giving up on the whole thing altogether. In recent months I’ve been in conversation with a couple of different atheist gentlemen, and in both cases, one of the arguments they have independently made against the legitimacy of the truth claims of Christianity boils down to this: with so many different groups claiming to represent the “real thing,” how could you possibly know which option is the real one, let alone the right one?
As a church, one of the goals I consistently lay out is for us to be fully the church God made us to be. What does that look like? What does it even mean? How do we know when we get there? We’ve rejoiced lately as we have had several new member additions to the church. It seems like it would be a pretty good thing for them to know just what exactly it is they’ve signed up for. Generally speaking, we want our visitors and guests to have confidence that they haven’t walked into one of those places where they might break out the snakes at any point (and, by the way, the only time I will handle a snake is just after I’ve chopped its head off with my trusty ice-breaker, so you can put that fear to bed).
In a word, then, how do we know whether we or anyone else is a real church, an authentic church? Now, if you were here last fall, you might remember that we had a conversation about the church then too. We spent a little bit of time then talking about what the church is, but our greater focus was on some of the nuts and bolts of how the church is designed to work. In this series, we are going to zoom out and look at the church from a bit bigger picture a perspective in order to talk about some of the things that make a church a church in the first place. These conversations are going to piggyback off of the current Sunday school series we are working through in our adult classes. By the way, that means this is a great time to join one of our Sunday school groups if you aren’t already active in one.
If we are going to talk about the church, then, before anything else, we need to be clear about what its foundation is, about what the centerpiece of its identity should be. Until we have that foundation down, trying to describe it or build anything with it is a fool’s errand at best. And while some of you have perhaps already jumped straight to the answer to that question, hold that thinking with me for just a second and let’s explore this together. We are going to explore it with the help of someone who had a better grasp on just what the church’s foundation was than anybody else save the One whose body it is proclaimed to be (that is, Jesus). He is so familiar with this idea because it was something he said that prompted Jesus to say, “Yep, and that right there is going to be the foundation on which I build my church.” And, of course, when Jesus said that to Peter, He didn’t actually use the word “church” at all. What He said was that He was going to build His gathering of people called out for the purposes of advancing God’s kingdom on earth. Whenever you hear the word “church” that’s what should come to mind. Don’t think about a building or even a set of activities you do with a group of people. Think about a gathering of Jesus followers called out for the specific purpose of advancing God’s kingdom on earth. Right thinking leads to right doing; wrong thinking leads to a whole host of messes.
Since I’ve said it, the person we are talking about here is the apostle Peter. It was his confession of Jesus as Messiah and Lord that Jesus Himself said would be the foundation point for His called out gathering. Just a couple of years after Jesus said that, Peter found himself as the leader of the very first church in history. He led the church in Jerusalem for several years until God sent him out to lead the church in other places including Rome where he eventually died. Peter made it to Rome about 30 years after the church exploded into existence. During that time, he had several opportunities to reflect carefully on just what the church was and what exactly that meant for Jesus’ followers. The Holy Spirit prompted him to write down some of these thoughts in a letter he sent to a group of churches along the Mediterranean coast of modern Turkey. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way with me to the New Testament letter of 1 Peter.
We are going to spend some time this morning in chapter 2 where Peter lays out his vision of the church, but I want to take just a second to set the scene for us. The first word in my Bible in 1 Peter 2 is the word, “therefore,” which means he’s explaining an idea here that he introduced previously. If you go back to the beginning of the previous section in 1 Peter 1:13, though, you find yet another “therefore,” which means we have to go back just a bit further to find out where this chain of explanation starts.
It all starts in 1 Peter 1:3. Check this out with me: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. You are being guarded by God’s power through faith for a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. You rejoice in this, even though now for a short time, if necessary, you suffer grief in various trials so that the proven character of your faith—more valuable than gold which, though perishable, is refined by fire—may result in praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen him, you love him; though not seeing him now, you believe in him, and you rejoice with inexpressible and glorious joy, because you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”
In other words, the controlling context for Peter’s entire letter is talking his audience through some of the implications of this incredible gift of salvation we have in Jesus and for which we might suffer in this world while we wait for its final delivery when Christ returns to complete His victory over sin and death. The first implication Peter explores with us is that we need to live in light of the gift we have received. More specifically, because this salvation comes from a holy and righteous God, we should pursue lives that reflect His holiness. The rest of the letter then walks us through various places this holiness comes to bear in our lives. The first one Peter addresses is the gathering of the saints, the church. That, at last, brings us back to 1 Peter 2.
Peter writes, “Therefore”—that is, in light of this call we have to holy living if we are indeed recipients of the salvation God has made available in Christ—“rid yourselves of all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all slander.” In other words, stop acting like the world. Don’t hate anybody—and let’s not confuse hate with mere disagreement, however vigorous. Be honest in your dealings. Be consistent with your confession. Don’t want what other people have. And use your words in ways that bring life, not death, to the people around you. “Like newborn infants, desire the pure milk of the word, so that you may grow up into your salvation, if ‘you have tasted that the Lord is good.’” Got that? Peter is not calling his audience spiritual infants here. He’s saying that like an infant longs only for the nourishment her mother can provide, followers of Jesus should look to be fed on a steady and healthy diet of the word of God in the Scriptures. At least, we will desire this if we have actually tasted the real thing. If your faith is built on little more than social media memes and clever bumper sticker theology, you’ll think those snacks are nourishing you properly. They won’t. That’s a little like thinking a piece of wax fruit in a table display is going to give you the same nourishment as a real one. It won’t. Once you’ve actually encountered the real, soul-deep nourishment found in God’s word, you won’t be satisfied with anything less than that.
That all being said, living a holy life and studying the word aren’t enough to constitute a church. Those are necessary, but they do not provide a sufficient foundation. They are merely the structures built on that foundation. And what is this foundation? Verse 4 now: “As you come to him, a living stone—rejected by people but chosen and honored by God—you yourselves, as living stones, a spiritual house, are being built to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
Okay, so, what is this? Peter is talking here about what the church—the authentic church—most fundamentally is. It is a building. Wait! I thought the church was a people, not a building. It’s not a physical building. It is a spiritual building. It is a building being built with living stones. That is, it is being built out of the lives of those who follow Jesus, the original living stone. He is the cornerstone of God’s kingdom on earth. The rest of the building finds its strength and support and even its substance when it rests on that original stone. But here’s the thing: this thing God was (and is) building wasn’t necessarily something the world wanted God to build. In fact, we’ll just go ahead and state the matter plainly: The world didn’t want God to build this thing. His kingdom, Christ’s body, was not a welcome addition to the world. It was rejected and despised. Yet God built it anyway, and He is building us to be a part of it. In fact, we are the structure of it.
Listen as Peter spells all of this out for us: “For it stands in Scripture [in other words, this was always what God was doing]: ‘See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and honored cornerstone, and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame.’” That is, when your life is built as a part of what God is building on the foundation of Jesus, you’re never going to regret it. Now, if you build your life on some other foundation but are deceived or even merely mistaken into believing this other foundation is Jesus, you may very well regret it. In fact, there are scores of stories of people who left their faith behind. But when you start really digging into the details of those stories, what they are leaving behind is not a genuine faith in Jesus, but one built on a false foundation they were deceived into thinking was Jesus. That’s a faith worth leaving. When we stake our lives on the right foundation, we will not ever be given reason to be ashamed of it. “So honor will come to you who believe; but for the unbelieving, ‘The stone that the builders rejected—this one has become the cornerstone.’ and ‘A stone to stumble over, and a rock to trip over.’ They stumble because they disobey the word; they were destined for this.”
Now, that last part warrants just a second’s worth of attention here. This is one of those verses that seems to imply that God knows who will and who won’t ultimately accept His offer of salvation in Christ. More than that, it seems like He actively chooses some people who will not be saved in the end. This, of course, raises all kinds of terribly hard questions about God’s character like what kind of a God creates people solely to condemn them? When you take the full scope of the Scriptures into account, though, the picture becomes quite a bit murkier. While God’s knowledge of who will and won’t be saved in the end is unquestionably perfect, we also find apparently competing ideas like the notion that God loved the whole world so much that He gave His Son such that anyone who believes in Him can have eternal life. Much to our philosophical and theological discomfort, the guys who contributed to the Scriptures hold multiple ideas that seem at first glance to contradict each other in tension. There’s obviously a whole sermon series waiting to be unpacked here and that’ll have to be for another day. For now, it’s worth noting that we don’t have even the foggiest idea who is destined for what. That’s God’s prerogative and His alone. Our place is to assume that the message of salvation is for everyone and that Jesus’ command to love our neighbors really does apply to all of our neighbors. The building He is building is one that anyone can be a part of if they are willing to put their faith in Christ.
Speaking of this building, that’s where Peter goes next. “But you are ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, so that you may proclaim the praises’ of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” God is building something in this world. He’s been building it for a long time. This something is the church. We can talk another time about Peter’s various descriptions of the building, but the point I want us to not miss right now is the building’s foundation. This thing God is building is founded on Christ and Christ alone. And when we are a part of this building, in fulfillment to the prophecy God made to Hosea, we have an identity. We are a people. We have been redeemed from our broken pasts whatever those pasts happened to involve. And this identity is entirely centered on Jesus.
Right at the end of this section, then, in a couple of verses that are often grouped with the next section, Peter ends where he began and tells us what we should do in light of this. “Dear friends, I urge you as strangers and exiles to abstain from sinful desires that wage war against the soul. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that when they slander you as evildoers, they will observe your good works and will glorify God on the day he visits.”
We’ll come back to that in just a minute. For now, let’s take stock of where we are. What has Peter laid out for us here? He’s given us two different things, one that follows directly from the other. This whole passage is yet another example of a biblical chiasm. The word there sounds scary, but it’s just a repeating pattern aimed at helping to make a certain part of the text more memorable for readers. A chiasm starts out with one idea, talks about another idea for a little while, and then goes back to the first idea. It’s a way of indicating to the reader that the stuff in the middle of the sandwich is the best part—not many people eat a sandwich just for the bread, after all—but that the outsides give important support and structure and context to the meat of the matter.
In this case, what was at the heart of these verses? In a word: Jesus. Peter’s point here is that Jesus is at the center of the church. He wasn’t just making this up either. Remember what we said a little while ago. Jesus Himself said He was going to be the center of the church. When Jesus asked the disciples who they thought He was, Peter’s response was that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Jesus replied with high praise and told Peter that His confession was going to be the thing on which the whole structure of His church—the building God is building with the living stones of the lives of His followers—was founded. Peter here is just further unpacking this idea and helping us see how it was always God’s plan to do this.
To put a point on everything we’ve been saying here, let’s put it like this: Everything in the church centers on Jesus. Everything in the church centers on Jesus. If a church is an authentic part of the body of Christ, everything that church is and does centers on who Jesus is and what Jesus said and did. Everything in the church centers on Jesus. He is our foundation. There is no other foundation but for Him. If He is not the foundation, then what you have is not the church. It may look like a church and talk like a church and even walk like a church, but if Jesus isn’t the center, then it isn’t a church. Period.
That brings us to the other part of what Peter was doing here. He wants us to understand what this means for us. If Jesus is our foundation, if everything in the church centers on Jesus, what does that mean for us? It means that if we are going to be the church, then we had better look like Jesus. We had better talk like Jesus. We had better walk like Jesus. And this goes in two different ways. It goes upwards and it goes outwards.
It goes upwards in that if we are going to be an authentic church for whom Jesus is the center of everything we are and do, then we had better be getting right that holy living as a proper response to the salvation we have in Him. We need to get rid of all those things Peter talked about at the beginning of the chapter—malice and deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander—and nourish ourselves with His help on a steady diet of the word.
It goes outwards in that how we live when we are out in the world really matters. It matters a great deal. Someone who talks the talk of faith but goes out and curses a neighbor, or worse, a brother or sister, is not living a life founded on Jesus. Listen, the world is going to hate us because we are part of God’s building founded on Christ, the living stone the world despised and rejected. Given that, we don’t need to give them any ammunition for their hatred. We need to live in such a way, reflecting the holiness of God like we talked about last week, that the people in our communities who don’t follow Jesus say, “I don’t like what they believe, but I sure hope one of them moves in next door to me.” We want them to think, “Their beliefs seem like so much nonsense, but I’d sure be glad if one of them married my daughter.” We want them telling everyone they meet, “I don’t have any interest in this Jesus guy, but I hire every single one of His followers that I can get my hands on because they make the best employees.”
Everything in the church centers on Jesus. He is the one who pervades every single facet of our existence. He determines what we do, how we think, where we go, what we say, how we carry ourselves, how we face trials and temptations, the way we manage stress, the nature of our worship, who we serve, how we love, why we vote, the nature of our giving, and so on and so forth. He is the heart of our identity. We shouldn’t make any sense apart from knowing who He is. Everything in the church centers on Jesus. Whenever we are getting that right both as individual followers of Jesus and as a whole community, we are being an authentic church.
Of course, if Jesus really is the center of everything, that means His words should play a pretty important role in determining what we do. If you’ll come back next week, we’ll spend some time talking about one of the last commands He gave us and what that means for us.