Grow Up

I want to ask you a question. Do you wash your hands before you eat dinner? Do not raise your hand.

I want you to remain anonymous for your sake. A debate broke out amongst the pastors and elders in a meeting a couple years ago, not long after I moved here, and I was still getting to know the team and getting to know the personalities and the quirkiness of everybody. And a debate broke out where the question was, is it appropriate to wash your hands in the kitchen sink before dinner? Is that appropriate? Is that weird?

And the debate broke out. I'm not going to tell you who was on what side of that debate, for their sakes and for mine. But what I learned a lot from that unique debate.

I was reminded of that story because when I was preparing for this sermon, this section of first where we're going to be today, it reminds me of sitting down at a family dinner and kind of the motions that you go through. Not really the motions, but the sequence that you go through. And today does not have multiple points. We have a sequence that we're going to frame everything in. And so if you're one of those people that are waiting for three points, don't wait around.

It's not coming. But the sequence that we're going to be looking at is, wash your hands, tell that story, and clear the table. So that's the sequence that we're gonna be walking through. And it is. My kids are getting to that age where I can tell them to do these things.

I can say, hey, go wash your hands. And after about 10 times, they go and do it right. I don't have to wash them for the. I don't have to wash their hands for them like I did not too long ago. I can ask them about their day when we're sitting around the kitchen table and we're having dinner.

I can say, hey, can you tell me the story about how your day went? And they can ask questions about my day, and we can actually share different things. But then at the end of the dinner, this is maybe the best part, I can say, hey, let's clear the table. And they can actually go and do the work and take the dishes to the sink. One of my kids, that kid will also remain anonymous, not to shame the other two.

They will actually put the dishes in the dishwasher if there's room. So my kid, it's a special time in my house right now where they are getting some independence and they're growing up a little bit. And this section of First Peter reminds me of that process of that sequence. You see, this letter was written from Peter, who was a Jewish man and he was one of Jesus right hand men during his ministry. And this is about 30 years after Jesus resurrection when he writes this letter to a group of Christians, many of which were not Jewish people, did not have Jewish heritage or faith.

They were probably, and they were in modern day Turkey or Asia Minor, and they were scattered across these different towns. They had these churches that met in that area. And these people, they had heard the story of Jesus, they had responded to it in faith, and now they identify themselves as followers of Jesus, of this Jewish rabbi who lived and died and came back to Life anywhere from 400 to 900 miles from where they were currently. And because of their faith in Jesus and their proclamation that he was the son of God, that he was God, that he's the king of kings, they were being persecuted tremendously in their culture and their society. They were being persecuted with violence, with words, with oppression, economically, all these different times were tough for these Christians.

And so Peter, he writes them this letter to encourage them to and their suffering. And he gives them some instructions, reminds them of their new identity in Jesus and also to point them to a future hope. The promise that Jesus is coming back, that one of these days this is all going to end and he's going to make all things right. And because of their faith in Jesus, even though they were not Jewish people like Peter was, and even though they were not geographically close to Jerusalem, they were part of the family of God. They were born again as sons and daughters of God, as part of the family of God now.

And that's the sentiment that Peter expresses right before, where we pick up in chapter two of verse one and first Peter, and he says this, he gives a command. He says, therefore rid yourselves of all malice, all deceitful hypocrisy, envy and slander of every kind. What's common about all these different things that he lists here is that there is a two faced relational quality to each of these. Okay, so you have malice, which is treachery or evil or like bad intentions, right? You have deceit, which is a violation of allegiance or trust where you say that you're gonna be loyal to one thing and then you betray that loyalty and that trust.

You have hypocrisy, which is judging others by standard in which you are not judging yourself. You have envy, which you are seeing others enjoy things that you want to enjoy and you don't like them for it. You have slander, where it's talking bad about somebody's character. And these things are found in every nook and cranny of our world. It's part of being human is to wrestle with these things, to want to do these things.

And even though we're reading words that are 2000 years old and a place far away from here, we can read these and say, you know what, if we're honest, we struggle with these things in our society and as individuals. And Peter, he's saying here, he's telling these people that exist in these local churches that are reading this letter and he's saying, you should get rid of these things, rid yourselves of these things, to lay aside, to take them off, don't let them be a part of who you are. Especially when you gather together as followers of Jesus. He says, wash your hands before you come to this family dinner table. This might have been new to them, right?

This idea that they were part of God's family, that even though they were non Jewish people, they could now participate in this new covenant because of their faith in Jesus. And Peter's saying, you need to not bring that filth in here that exists out there, that duplicitousness, that two facedness, don't bring it in here, it should not exist in this family.

And he continues in verse two, he says, like newborn babies crave spiritual milk so that by it you may grow up in your salvation. Now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. We're going to cover a lot of ground today. I hope to get out of here in a reasonable amount of time, but I want us to think about each one of these things and spend. There's gonna be a lot of ground that we cover.

But I wanna ask you this question, like, what are you craving when it comes to your relationships within the family of God? When you come here and you come and you participate in something like a Sunday service here at Southbridge, relationally, like, what are you craving when you come here? What are you hoping to get out of it? From a relationship standpoint, are you excited to pretend to be somebody that you're not? You may struggle with all these different things.

You may be somebody that may not even know that you're a Christian by your actions. And so you're excited that you get to come and you get to put on your little church face for a while. Maybe you like to hear what's going on in people's lives and we are tempted and this is our flesh, right? This is what we all struggle with, is that we. I like to hear what's going on in people's lives.

And I struggle mightily with gossip. I struggle with judging others. I struggle with seeing what other people enjoying in their life and saying, you know what? Why don't I have that? This is a common thing.

It's out there in the world. You see, you can't get away from it in the outside world. But what Peter's saying here, when you come here, do not crave those things. Get rid of those things. Wash your hands of those things.

Lay them aside, put them at the. And when you come to family dinner, you make sure you wash your hands. And you crave pure, spiritual milk. Meaning. Pure meaning.

Not duplicitous, straightforward. It is what it says that it is. There's just purity to it. And spiritual meaning, like of the word of God or true, you should want that. You should want the truth of God.

You should crave it. And it says that you will buy it. You may grow up, and in your salvation that you will begin to fill out your salvation. You'll be able to look like what God wants you to look.

We know better than to keep a duplicitous filth around us, right? But we still struggle with these different things. Why do we still struggle? Well, the name of this sermon is called Grow up because you and I struggled with the title, and it's right there, I think, in verse two. And so I was like, all right, grow up.

Pastor Brad was like, that's a good title. So I was like, all right, blame Brad if you hate it. Well, why don't we want to grow up?

Why do we still struggle with these things that we know better than to continue to participate in?

Growing up is scary. Well, growing up looks like for me is like having to take responsibility for other people. The older I get, who I'm responsible for isn't shrinking. It's only growing, right? So 10 years ago, I didn't have any kids.

Now I got three kids. Like, how'd that happen? How am I responsible for these kids? I didn't want a dog. Carrie got a dog.

So now I'm responsible for this dog. And now I have a house that we just bought. I'm responsible for this house. I'm on a team. I'm pastor at a church.

Now I'm respons. Like all these things keep growing. And the reason, I think, in our day and time, why growing up isn't appealing is because we don't like to take responsibility.

It's hard enough to take responsibility for ourselves. But when we grow up, and the older that we get, hopefully the more mature we get. Who we're responsible for keeps growing and growing and growing. Man, is that a scary thing. And Peter's saying, he's like, you need to grow up.

You need to crave the things that you need. So as you mature, as you grow in Christ, you actually have what you need that demands the demands of this life, of the following Jesus, that you actually get what you need from the pure spiritual truth.

Do you want to grow up? Hmm.

And here's what Peter says. He says, you know, it's going to be good. You have tasted that the Lord is good, so you should want more and more and more of it. So Peter here, he's saying, you need to wash yourselves of these things. When you come around the dinner table, when we gather as a church family, when we gather as believers in the name of Jesus, and you come and you have a seat and you should crave not the things that we struggle with out in the world, but we should lay those aside and crave the things that are actually going to help us become like Jesus and to live the life that we were created for and paid for to live.

When I gather around the dinner table, I could think throughout my life I've had different seasons where the dinner table was prioritized or not. And very fortunately, my wife, she has prioritized us gathering together as a family and eating dinner. I think over the course of my life, I think about all the different stories that are shared around the dinner table. And now my family gets to participate in these. Whether it's talking about our day or asking about different family members, or asking different traditions in our house or the plans for the future of our family.

I love being able to have those conversations around the dinner table. And these conversations, they help form us. They help create some expectations of what we're supposed to be growing into, what we're supposed to be going after. And this is what Peter is doing in his next section of chapter two in verse four, he says, as you come to him, talking about Jesus, the living stone, rejected by humans, but chosen by God and precious to him, you also, like living stones, are being built up into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Because of the Holy Spirit living within us, we have faith in Jesus.

And when we depend on him and trust in him, we receive the Holy Spirit. It indwells us. And now we can live these lives that God has created us to live. And because of that, we can become like Jesus, what does it say together being built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood?

A sign of maturity is that you are growing, not as an individual, but you are growing together, that you are taking responsibility for your fellow believer, your brother and sister in Christ. In our culture, we can really individualize it, right? We can make it about your personal faithfulness, your personal devotion, the way that you serve, the way that you come to God. And what you see in New Testament scripture, what you see, the way that Jesus and his followers and the early church leaders, the way that they led and the way that they pursued God, was a lot like inviting people to come be a part of what they're doing. And so spiritual maturity, for me, when I look at, I'm like, all right, how many people am I inviting to grow with me that I'm also taking responsibility for so I can help them grow?

And also I'm looking for other people to help me grow. And real temptation in our world is that we just make it about us and we think, well, I read my Bible every day. I'm faithful to Sunday service.

That's not maturity. That's a stunted growth. When you still year after year, decade after decades, it's just about you and your faithfulness. Real spiritual maturity is you being built into a spiritual house, not to be a holy priest, but a holy priesthood. There's relationships that you need, and through those relationships, we can offer our lives as a spiritual sacrifice.

And somehow, because of God's amazing grace and mercy, he looks at our devotion. He looks and he takes our devotion and it's acceptable to him as a sacrifice. That's a whole nother sermon, but we don't have the time today. Verse 6, he says, for in Scripture it says, see, I lay a stone in Zion or Jerusalem, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame. See, this is a prophecy that Jewish readers knew, like they absolutely knew this prophecy from Isaiah, chapter 28, verse 16.

And we can go and read it. And what's great and awesome about this is that the non Jewish readers of this letter from Peter can read this. And he's saying to them, like, this is your heritage. This is about you, too. That you can look and you can look at Jesus.

And Even though you're 900, 400, 500 miles away from Jerusalem, you can look at the story of Jesus and see that God chose Jesus. He was precious to him. And he put them in Zion. And he lived and he died and he came back to life. And when you trust in him.

700 years before that happened is when these words were written in Isaiah. But Jesus fulfilled them. And when we trust in him, we will never be put to shame. We build our lives, we can build our community, we can build this church around this precious cornerstone.

There's a challenge to us. We should seek to build this church around this precious cornerstone.

Not our common interests, not our common location. Not because we all love the style of music, not because we like the emphasis on kids ministry, not because we love the way the different methods that the Bible is taught or preached here, not our prefaces. This church should be built around the cornerstone and the precious cornerstone, the person of Jesus. And that's it, full stop. There's a lot more to that.

But if we don't put that cornerstone in the proper place, if we don't prioritize the person of Jesus and start there, we are gonna get it all messed up. And so many of us, we invest in church community, we invest in relationships, we gather around the family dinner table and we get frustrated about this, we get frustrated about that. Why don't we do this? Why don't we add that? And we do have all these preferences that we bake into it.

And we get dissatisfied with the family of God and the local church because we're building our participation in it, not on the precious cornerstone of the person of Jesus, but what we want and what we prefer. Man, what Peter is saying here, he's letting them know, like, you may not know this, but you need to know that your participation in the family of God is built around this precious cornerstone. Trust in him, you'll never be put to shame. Continues on in verse seven. Now, to you who believe this stone is precious, you know it's changed your life, you know it's changed your eternity.

But to those who do not believe, the stone that the builders rejected has become the corruption cornerstone, another fulfilled prophecy and a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. They stumble because they disobey the message, which is also what they were destined for. The cool thing about prophecy is that there's hundreds of years that separate when it's originally written down to when it's foretold, sometimes longer than that. And with this in particular, there's layers of meaning to them. Meaning it can mean different things at different times and it can be fulfilled multiple different ways over the course of the centuries.

And the way that he is referring here is that he is referring to the people that looked at the person of Jesus, that heard the words of Jesus that saw his ministry and they decided, you know what, we're gonna kill this guy for it. He was a stumbling block, he was an obstacle. And they had to do something with his message. And what they decided to do with his message was, was kill him for it. But what they meant for bad, God meant for good.

And it was actually the salvation of humanity that Jesus came and was killed for. It says that they stumbled because they disobeyed the message, which is also what they were destined for. You see, God worked their murderous hearts into his will, and it meant our salvation for it. I believe that this passage is not just referring to that, and it's not referring to people who are destined to be cut off from receiving salvation. I don't think that's what it means here, but I think it's also talking about how people can receive salvation.

That for those people that do not believe, you gotta deal with the person of Jesus. You can't just easily navigate around him. You have to consider him. You have to take into account what he has to say. You have to take into account what he has done.

You have to take into account his witnesses, you have to take into account his church. See history. It can't deny that Jesus existed. He's someone that you can't just say, well, he didn't exist. So I don't even have to think about it.

His selflessness that we can read about in Scripture, it reveals our selfishness and cuts us to the core. Whenever we do that, sit and think about it and read His Word and read what he did in his life and his hope that he offered, like it's appealing. You can't navigate around that, that his hope is appealing to us. And his condemnation of you and me, it demands thought, it demands meditation. But when you respond to this stumbling block, this thing, you can't dismiss this person that you can't navigate around.

When you respond to it in faith, then this stone becomes precious to you. And you can build your whole life on it. You can look at the words of Jesus, you can look at the story of Jesus, you can look at the commission of Jesus and you can make your whole life about it. And man, that's really when the value, the preciousness of it in Jesus, he changes everything. And Peter, a Jewish man, is writing to these people in modern day Turkey, and he is saying, hey, guys, you now know how precious this person is.

You now know that he is the cornerstone of your life. He's the cornerstone of your community. Everything should be built around Him. And he continues, and he says, but you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession. You are his that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into this wonderful light.

Peter is telling them a story of who they are.

These were words that the Jewish people would read and they would internalized and they knew that it was their identity. See, God called them out. He called out Father Abraham, he gave a covenant to him and his son Isaac and his son Jacob. There are these 12 tribes that come from Jacob's children. Then you have this epic story where they find themselves in slavery in Egypt and God rescues them out of slavery.

And that's where these words originally come from that Peter wrote to these people in modern day Turkey, a long way away from Jerusalem. And he writes these same words that were written that we can find in Exodus 19:5,6. God is telling Moses to tell the people of Israel after they exited slavery. Now, if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations, you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites because of their faith in Jesus.

They could look at these words and Peter tells them like, this is you. This is now you. God has chosen you. You are now a royal priesthood. You are now a holy nation.

You are now gods. And what it was originally meant for God's chosen people, the nation of Israel, after they exited slavery, are now words that you can take and eternalize. And they are now your story because of Jesus and your faith in Jesus. This is now your story. We're a long way away and many, many centuries after the fact that these words were Originally written in 2000 years after Jesus lived, died, and resurrected.

So no matter where you were born, no matter, no matter what language you speak, no matter where you're going in this life, when you trust in Jesus, you belong to God. You're part of God's family.

God saved you as an individual, but he saved you and brought you into a family. You're part of a unique group of people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.

Peter, he's inviting the original readers of this letter and telling them to wash their hands, sit down at the table, listen to this story. Let's tell that story, and it's meant for us. This is our story. Last year, my grandfather passed away and we were at his funeral. And I was told before the funeral, like, hey, I asked how long is this going to be?

I had three kids that were going to be there and they're like, it's going to be two hours. I said two hours. Oh man. And the reason that we wanted to allot two hours is because people wanted to share stories. They wanted to tell about who my grandfather was to them.

And it was a great time of sharing those stories. And one story that sticks out, it may mean nothing to you, but it was a guy that was the guy that actually did the sermon. He was sharing the story the first time that he saw my grandfather. Grandfather was a father of four kids. Good looking family.

It skipped a generation with me, but we had a good looking family. My kids inherited, but I didn't. That's the point of the joke. Sorry.

And he sees this good looking and this guy's from Oklahoma that's telling this story and where the story is taking place is also in Oklahoma. And this guy says, it didn't take long for me to figure out that this guy was all Arkansas. You may think that sounds like an insult, but to me I got great pride, like a sense of identity, like a sense of who I am. You know, I think I don't know exactly what you mean by that. You may be trying to insult me, Mr. Oklahoma, I.

But for me this is a connection to home, connection to familiarity, connection into an ethic that comes from being from a time and a place. That's what Peter's doing here. He is telling them this story about this is who you are now, your faith. It doesn't just change your eternity, but it gives you that these precious relationships where you can come together and be built into this spiritual temple together, this, this presence of God together. And you can live these lives as brothers and sisters that represent who God is to the people around you.

And Peter, he quotes something that may not have been familiar to them, but it was definitely familiar to Jewish people from the prophet Hosea, which is a weird story where he has these kids that need to be redeemed. And he quotes from that story in verse 10 of First Peter, chapter 2, he says, once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

We are recipients of this ridiculously abundant love and mercy and grace from a God that desires to have a relationship with us, but also desires for us to have a relationship with each other.

He says that you once were not a people, that you were orphaned, that because of your sin. And Paul puts it differently, you were dead in your transgressions that you were separated from from God. And because of his love and his mercy for us, he sent Jesus to bridge that gap that we could not bridge. And he invites us. And now we are a people.

Once we had no mercy, but now we have mercy. Out of darkness into marvelous light in the family of God, subject to God's wrath. But now we have this relationship with God where He gives us a pardon from ever having to experience his wrath and instead gives us a loving relationship with Him.

For those of us that believe in Jesus, this is our story. And when we gather around the proverbial family dinner table and we gather together as a people, this is the story that we share. The Holy Spirit of God is not in some temple somewhere far away from here. It's within us. We are indwelled by the very presence of God.

And we gather together. And just think about how heaven looks at us gathering here together in the name of Jesus as brothers and sisters, co heirs with Christ and proclaiming what God has done. And when we tell that story to each other, it should give us this firm, tangible sense of who we are, the power that comes with that and this security that we have that only can come from being a part of the family of God. This isn't an individual thing. This isn't something that you come and you just consume and you walk out of here.

Church isn't some utility that you just use for your own good. No, it's a family man is family dinner tables, they get messy. There's a lot of arguments that get started at the family dinner table. There's a lot of dirty laundry that gets aired at a family dinner table. There's a lot that can be worked through.

There's a lot of value in having those awkward conversations. There's a lot of value in leaning in to the fact that no matter what you do, they are your brother or sister. No matter how many times you say you're not my brother anymore. I had a cousin that would tell me that all the time. Now he said, now that we're old men, he tells me that.

I would say that. He would say, you're not my cousin anymore. I say, no, that's not true. That's not the way it works. Cody.

Now he says the same thing about me. I'm like, well, I'm right, you're wrong.

We have this shared relationship that because of Jesus, we have this brotherhood. We have this sisterhood. We're a holy nation. We are a people. What we bring to God together God takes and uses for his honor and for his glory as we have come out of darkness into marvelous light.

We have come from not being a part of a family into the family of God. We have gone from desperately needing mercy because of where we fall short and given abundant mercy and abundant grace through Jesus.

Just like any family dinner. This is my least favorite part. We get to the part where we transition to where it's time to clear the table. Family dinner is over for the evening and it's time to clear the table. And we gotta do whatever we need to with the dishes.

We gotta wipe down that. We gotta. And we gotta go back out there and we gotta continue about our lives. And we can't just sit here in this room, on this church campus, at church events and fully experience what God has for us. As much as I love church, I love church more than any of you, I guarantee you.

Well, I don't know. That's a promise I can't fully fall through with. But my point is, I really love the family of God. I really love what we do here. I love Sunday mornings.

I love my small group. I love the different things that we get to do together.

Just like any family, we're not just meant to just huddle up together and just make it about each other all the time. It comes a time where you gotta clear the table. And for you to fully experience what it's like to be a part of this family, you need to get out there and do what Jesus has called you to do out in the dark world. You can come here and get what you need, find relationships that you can rely on, share burdens, confess sin, hear the story of who you are and who we are as a people. You can worship, you can feel recharged, but all that is for the purpose so you can go and do what God has called you to do, to get back out there, to take this marvelous light back out into the dark world.

And Peter puts it this way. In verse 11, he says, Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles to abstain from sinful desires which wage war against your soul. He calls them a familiar title to the Jewish people, that they had embraced this idea that they are exiles because they had experienced that in different ways, in different seasons. And he is saying that you too now are foreigners, strangers in a strange land. You are exiles, you are far from home, and you need to abstain from sinful desires because they wage war against your soul.

The stakes are super high when we get out into the world, because when we sin what happens is we have desires within ourselves that we want to do, even though we know that they are wrong. And when we encounter the opportunity to do those things, that's how sin comes about. Whenever we give in to that temptation, we actually do the things that our flesh wants to do as opposed to what our spirit wants to do. And when we give in to those things, it betrays our identity as a family of God. People don't look at us and see the family of God.

They look at us and just see what the rest of the world offers. See the culture that these original readers, they were dealing with. They were in a pagan community and society, and they would go and, like, prostitution was a common thing, going and getting drunk at the religious services were a common thing. You name it, like, all kinds of debauchery. And it was done in the name of their religion.

And so Peter's saying, hey, when you go out to your world, like, the stakes are super high. You need to abstain from those things. As appealing as it is, you need to hold yourself back because they wage war against who you are, against your very soul, against your identity. But in our culture, like, Christianity is accepted in a way, like, it's changed over the course of my lifetime, even. But even still, like, it's not uncommon for you to go to a restaurant after this and see other people that are clearly coming from a church service or to pull into your neighborhood one Tuesday night and try to drive around the cars that are parked on the street because somebody's having small groups.

Right? It's not uncommon in our culture. Like, we like the sins that are more invisible than prostitution or getting drunk at the pagan temple.

Pornography, wanting things that, like materialism, the status, the perceived status that comes with having stuff, the pride that comes with that. That's something that's a big problem in our culture. That's something that probably all of us struggle with. Where we're insecure about the things that we have and what we don't have. Or we look at how lustful our world is, whether it be sexual or just material.

Well, there's those things or things that the first readers of this letter were written. These things they destroy. They wage war against who we are. They wage war against our identity. They wage war against us.

And so the stakes are super high, and we need to take that into account. And we need to make sure that we are using the family of God and our family time together to make us stronger. And so we can get out there and actually do the things that God is asking you. And Peter wraps up this section by saying this. He says, live such good lives among the pagans that though they accuse you of doing wrong, that even though to them, when you're just trying to be your best representative of God's family, they look at that and say, well, something's wrong with that guy, or they're actually doing something morally wrong, you do that so that when they see.

When they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

What's challenging about this letter is how much these people were suffering, how much persecution and oppression these original readers of this letter were under. And so for them, whenever one of the big themes in this letter is that Jesus is coming back. And it's this promise that brought this hope and this purpose in their suffering. For us. We have a different relationship with Jesus coming back and we don't read it.

And even though, like our lives aren't easy, we aren't experiencing the kind we don't desire, the kind of hope that these people were needing, that these people were experiencing violence and economic exploitation, all these different things. And they were like, Jesus Christ, come back. I want these things to end. That doesn't change the fact that we're closer to Jesus coming back than ever before. Like, that's just truth.

And so Peter's words here are urgent to us in a way that's even more urgent to them. And we should look at that and say we should live amongst our pagan society and our world that's all backwards and thinks they have morality figured out and it's all kinds of messed up and we should live such good lives that even though they may look at us and call us the immoral ones, that when Jesus does come back, they'll glorify God, all of a sudden it makes sense to them. All of a sudden they now give God the glory.

You may walked in here and you may have treated your relationship with this church or any church as like an individual thing. It's not that this is supposed to be a community of believers, the family of God. You can't. It's meant to be a lived thing in theory, like we have the family of God. You can include anybody who trusts in Jesus and believes in him, you can include it.

But what we clearly see from these letters throughout the New Testament is that God wants us to experience real community and real relationships with fellow believers, to experience brotherhood and sisterhood in a tangible way. And so when you come in here and you may feel like you're alone you need to know that we're here so we can be in relationship with each other, so that we can depend on one another. That you may feel like you're not a part of a people, but you come in here and you realize, oh, I'm now part of a people. I am now part of the family of God. That I am a part of a holy priesthood.

I am part of the nation that God has chosen to be his representatives.

But what you need to do with that is you need to think, okay, what sin am I tempted to bring in here? What's the filth that I've got from the world that's on me? I need to wash my hands before I sit at the dinner table. When you sit at that dinner table with clean hands, because you've laid them aside, you've gotten rid of those things, and you come, you listen, you want it, you crave the pure spiritual milk, the truth of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ, and you listen to it and you respond to it. And through that, you can grow into the salvation that you have been given.

That you start to look like someone who follows Jesus. That as a church, we do that together. So we start to look like the body of Jesus.

And we do that. We can look at that, and we can clear the table, and we say, all right, guys, what a great time together. But now let's take this good news, this story that we've all had our lives changed by, and let's go tell people about it. Let's get it from the table and start to tell people about Jesus.

Which part of that are you struggling with? Which part of that are you feel resistant to? Is it setting aside the. Where you struggle with sin, or is it where you struggle to believe the story that you're part of God's family and that you really wrestle with this idea that it's not an individual thing, that you're meant to have relationships with other people, real relationships with other people. You struggle with the idea that we got to get up, we got to go out there, we got to tell people how Jesus has changed our lives.

You're invited into that kind of life that puts all those pieces together because the stakes are high. There's a world out there that needs what we have.

We got to do here, what we need to do here, so we can do there what we need to do there. So I want to close by taking a few moments, if you would, bow your head and ask yourself where you struggle with these things. Which part of this do you struggle with maybe for you it's different sin in your life and you do struggle with talking trash about other people, gossip. Maybe it's materialism, maybe.

You're struggling with.

Letting people into your life and you've gotten to a place where your individualism has become like sinful, where you push good intentioned, loving brothers and sisters in the faith away.

Maybe for you it's. You hear the story of Jesus and you know that you've had your eternity changed, but you're still struggling with this idea that you're part of something bigger than yourself, That God has changed who you are, that you are now a part of the family of God, that you belong to him. And maybe you condemn yourself in a way that God no longer condemns you.

In that past life, the life that God has rescued you from.

Because of that, you don't, you don't believe the story that you're a son or a daughter, you have brothers and sisters in Jesus.

Maybe for you it's. You're uncomfortable with the risk of getting up from the table, going beyond the walls of this church and telling people about the story that you have.

God. I ask that no matter where we find ourselves, where we're struggling in this, that we give it to you. We give you our sin and embrace your mercy, your forgiveness, your grace.

We give you our doubt.

We give you our old identity. We give you how we struggle to be in relationship with other people and to trust other people and to let other people in. We give that to you and we embrace this new identity as your son, as your daughter, as part of a holy priesthood, a holy nation.

Give us conversations this week. Give us conversations today. Give us encouragement and a revelation of the reality that we are loved by the family of God and that we are invited to be in relationship with each other and start to live out this identity together.

Give us courage to clear the table and be passionate about telling people what you've done in our lives, that you sent Jesus to a broken world to redeem us, to bring us back into a relationship with you, that Jesus died for and paid for it all, all of our sin everywhere, we fall short.

Also, he came back to life and is inviting us to follow him in that life, death and resurrection.

Help us to take that risk, to tell our neighbor, to tell our co worker, tell our family member to look for opportunities to share. Create within us a passion so that when Jesus comes back, when that day comes, they glorify you.

We ask that you do this in the name of Jesus. Amen.