I'd like for you to take your
Bibles this morning and turn back with me to 1 Peter 2. My goal this morning is to encourage
you in the faith. To encourage you by showing you
something in the Scriptures concerning the people of God. That's what Peter calls them.
The people of God. How do you think of yourselves?
You came in here this morning. How do you think of yourselves?
Do you think of yourselves as the people of God? Blessed above
all men? Chosen out from amongst all men? Blessed with all spiritual blessings
in heavenly places in Christ? How do you think of yourselves? When you read your Bibles and
when you go to the Lord in prayer, how do you think of yourself? My text here in verse 10 says,
Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God,
which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy. And that's the story of every
sinner saved by the free and sovereign grace of God. At one
time, he was without mercy. Without mercy. He didn't know
the mercy of God. He didn't know anything about
the mercy of God. God was merciful to him. God
was merciful to him when he chose Christ as his substitute before
the world began. He was merciful to him. But he
didn't know anything about that mercy. He had no need of that
mercy. Listen to what Paul said to the
church at Ephesus. He said, now you remember. He
said, you remember this. And I tell you, the things that
he said in those first two chapters is just unbelievably gracious. The things that he states that
God has done for us in our salvation through His Son, the Lord Jesus
Christ. But then immediately after telling him that, he tells
him this. Now he said, you remember that
you being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, heathen idolaters,
image-worshipping idolaters, who were called uncircumcised
by the Jews, and at that time you were without Christ. You
didn't know anything about the Christ. I know a lot of people
today who say they believe, who don't know anything at all about
the Christ. They don't know what the Christ is, what that term
means, who He is, why He came, what He did, where He's at. Ignorant
of those things. At that time you were without
Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel. That
is, aliens from the chosen people of God. You didn't know God had
a chosen people. But He did. Strangers from the
covenants of promise. Talk to men and women today about
the covenants of God. They don't know anything about
covenants. All that this generation is hearing
today is free will. Free will, free will, free will. Exercise your will. Choose your
destiny. All of this. They don't know
anything at all about the covenants of God. David was a man after God's own
heart. This is the sweet psalmist of
Israel. Did you know that his dying words,
he said, although it be not so with my house, yet God hath made
with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and sure,
and this is all my salvation and all my desire. Do you know
anything at all about covenants? Paul said, you remember this.
There was a time when you didn't. A time when you didn't. You were
aliens from the commonwealth of Israel. Strangers from the
covenants of promise. Oh, Gentiles didn't have any
prophets. They didn't have any promises
of God. They weren't aware of them. And being ignorant of these
things, you had no hope. No hope in the Messiah. No hope
in the promises. No hope in the covenants. And
you were without God in the world. That's the story of every believer.
That's where God found us. It's the condition of every man,
woman, and child born of Adam. Oh, he's got his ideas and philosophies. He has his concepts and theories.
He has his religion, like Abraham's father. He was an idol maker. He has his traditions and traditional
understanding, like the woman at the well. She said, you worship
God in Jerusalem. We worship God out here in the
mountains. Our Lord said, you worship you know not what. That's
the truth of it. He has his sense of right and
wrong. He has some kind of an experience or decision he made,
and under which he looks for some evidence of his relationship
with God. But in the end, in the end, he
is an alien to the children of God, a stranger to God's covenant
promises and having no hope in without God in the world. Can
you hear what Peter is saying here? Which in time past were
not a people. We're not a people. We called
ourselves the people of God. We sure did. We called ourselves
Christians, called ourselves believers, heirs, referred to
ourselves in that sense, but we were not a people. But now,
now something took place, and now we are the people of God,
which had not obtained mercy. We tried to trade things off,
didn't we? We tried to barter with God,
God you do this and I'll do that. We've all made our promises to
God. Well, what happens to these people
who were not a people to make them the people of God? What
happens? What takes place? I Peter 1.12,
listen to this. Here's where the first thing
takes place. God anointed His preacher with the Holy Ghost,
and He preached the Gospel to them. He took those Old Testament
promises and patterns and pictures and preached Christ to them.
These old prophets, they wondered about their prophecies. They
wondered about these gracious words that the Spirit of God
were giving them to speak, and they knew that these things were
not for them. They knew these things were for
another age and for another people. And Peter says, and now these
things are reported to you. They are reported to you by them
who have preached the gospel with the Holy Ghost. They are
revealed to you. Shown to you. And then in verse
22 of chapter 1, Peter says, and their souls, their souls
were purified in their obedience to the truth through the Spirit.
Purified from their idolatry. Purified from their old concepts
of religion. Purified from their superstitious
ideas about God. Purified from their false beliefs
about man and his potential and about man and his present condition. Purified. And as the Spirit of
God worked in you through the gospel, you began to have an
affection for those you once despised. And what you've experienced,
he said, is being born of God. Being born of God. Man not born
of God, and then sometime later hears the gospel. The gospel
is the seed of regeneration. Listen to this. I Peter 1.23,
being born again, not of corruptible seed, but incorruptible by the
Word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. Verse 25, But
the word of the Lord endureth forever, and this is the word
which by the gospel is preached unto you. Are you with me so
far? What takes place in a man's life? He begins, he's not the child
of God. His beginning is not as a child
of God. He's an alien. He's a stranger. He don't know anything about
God. He don't know anything about the promised Messiah. He don't
know anything at all about the covenants, none of these things.
But something transpires, something happens in his life, and then
he becomes the child of God. Now, if this is your experience
of grace, if this is how God called you out of darkness, if
this is how you came to see yourself as a child of God, four things
are going to follow this miracle of grace. First of all, you'll
discover that there are some things which need to be laid
aside, laid aside. As Adam's sons must disrobe,
Aaron's sons, rather, must disrobe and put on that priestly uniform,
that priestly robe. They had to take theirs off and
wash themselves with pure water and put on those new robes. We
as priests of God, we've got to lay some things aside. We've
got to lay aside some of these garments, the garments of this
old nature. And he tells us, first of all,
he lays aside. He said, laying aside all malice. Malice means spiteful, ill-designed,
intentioned to do harm. Malice. Put it off. Take it off. Believers are to love one another,
and their tent is to bless, not to curse, to love, not to hate,
and to be merciful, not to be judgmental. Lay aside your filthy
garments of malice, and then all guile." He said, just put
that aside too. Take that off. Take that off. What is guile? Guile is a crafty
disguise. That's what guile is. It's to
deceive, to hide the truth. It means to defraud. Lay it aside. And all hypocrisies, pretending
to be what you're not, pretending to be righteous in ourselves,
hypocrisy, pretending to be wise in ourselves. Our Lord called
the Pharisees hypocrites. They were hypocrites. And the
believer has no need to be a hypocrite. He's righteous in Christ. He's
a son of God in Christ. His sins have been put away in
Christ. He has no reason to be a hypocrite. He has no further
need of the garment of the hypocrite. Lay aside hypocrisies and then
envies. What need does a believer have
of envy? All things are his. 1 Corinthians
3, beginning in verse 21. The apostles are His. They were
given for Him. God selected them, set them aside,
gave them a revelation above all other preachers. Set these
men aside. Gifted them with gifts of the
Holy Ghost. Gifted them with miracles. Did
miracles. He ratified these men who wrote
the Scripture. He set them apart, and they're
ours. That's what Paul said. They're
yours. They're yours. The apostles,
preachers, the world, life, death, things present, things to come,
all are yours, and you're Christ, and Christ is God's. Why do we envy? Why do we envy? because we don't
really understand that all things are ours. The scope of that promise
is so all-consuming that we just can't wrap our minds around it,
can we? All things are yours. All things are yours. And then he tells us to get shed
are these rags of evil speaking, critical, judgmental, belittling
speaking. Let my words be seasoned with
grace. Let me consider others in the
light of God's mercy and grace to me. Let me just stop. Let me not be so quick to spit
something back out. Just let me stop and think about
God's dealings with me. Let me consider others in the
light of God's mercy and grace to me. So here's the first discovery
of the believer. I'm talking about a man born
of God, called out of darkness into this marvelous light. This
man that God has chosen and empowered to become a son of God. He discovers
some things. And he discovers that his nature
is filthy and nasty and it needs to be laid aside. Just lay it
aside. Don't nourish it. Don't feed
it. Don't go along with it. Lay it
aside like an old garment. Take it off. You see how filthy
it is and how stinking it is. And why would you want to wear
such a thing in public? Why would you want to be noticed
for it? Take it off. Take it off. Lay
it aside. And then secondly, there is something
men need to desire. Watch this here, 1 Peter 2, verse
2. As newborn babes, And that's
what we are when we're born of God, newborn babes. Desire the
sincere milk of the Word that you may grow thereby. This statement
goes back to the last verse in chapter 1. This is the Word which
by the gospel is preached unto you. We desire the sincere milk
of the Word in this book, and we read this book, and we cherish
this book, and we can lean on and stand on it and have a basis,
a foundation through this book. But it's this book, as Christ
is preached, as Christ is revealed, as Christ is declared, that brings
joy to the heart. Now, I read this book a long
time before I knew Christ, and it didn't bring me any joy. It
didn't bring me any joy. As newborn babes, desire the
sincere milk of the Word that you may grow thereby. And men
and women born of God are not wearied with gospel preaching. They're not wearied by it. They
love it. They love it. They long to hear
it. I remember talking to my boss
one time about the meetings up in Ashland. And at that time,
they had three speakers in the morning and two at night. And he said, well, what do you
all do at this Bible conference? And I said, well, we have pastors
from different churches, sometimes missionaries, and they come in
here and they preach. And he said, well, how many of
them preach every day? And I said, well, there's three
in the morning and two in the afternoon. Five preachers? You
sit through five messages in a day? I said, yeah, and sometimes
we go back to the room and listen to tapes, you know, in the afternoon. He just could not imagine such
a thing. I tell you what, my wife only
breastfed one of the babies, my son. But I tell you, you could
give him a bottle and he'd spit it out. He desired that sincere
milk. That's what he wanted. He had
an appetite for it. He didn't want anything else.
He didn't want baby food and he didn't want anything else.
He wanted that. That's the way the believer is. The believer
feeds on the gospel. It's his food. It's his drink. It's his necessary nourishment. A bunch of those folks despised
that manna that fell on the ground. Some of them understood what
that manna was. And they went out and gathered
it up and were thankful for it and rejoiced in it. This is what
he's telling us here. Newborn babes desire the sincere
milk of the Word that you may grow thereby. And they long to
hear it. They look forward to it. They
prepare themselves to hear it. And they purpose to be there.
They arrange their lives around it. They arrange their schedules
around it. They have an appetite for Christ. And they desire to know everything
they can know about Him. He's their hope. He's their hope. He's their Lord. We were talking
this morning about submission to the will of God. And I was
telling them, you'll submit to God when you realize that His
will is right. His will is good. His will is
sovereign. It's going to be done anyway.
But it's everything that He does is right and good, and it's for
your good and for His glory. Why would we want anything else?
How do you learn that? Sincere milk of the Word. He's our Lord. He's our righteousness. He's our rest. And we rejoice
in Him. And so Peter prefaces this statement
with verse 3. You desire the sincere milk of
the Word that you may grow thereby, if so be you tasted that the
Lord is gracious. If you have. And then secondly, believers
desire the sincere milk of the Word. Milk denotes the basic
fundamentals of the gospel of God's dear Son. Who He is and
why He came and what He did and where He's at. The first eating
of the sincere milk is where babies get their nutrients and
vitamins and all their immunities and all those things which they
need to grow and get stronger. And it's the same way with the
believer. He gets that from the Gospel. And then thirdly, the
chosen and beloved sons are given direction. Look here in verse
4, "...to whom coming as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed
of men, but chosen of God and precious." My friend, I do my
best to preach Christ and point every interested soul to Him.
This was such a sweet letter I received in the mail, but what's
happening with this dear believer is he's examining himself. He's looking to himself, and
all he's finding there is a man who's come short of the glory
of God. He's looking for perfect faith, and it's not there. perfect
trust, and it's not there. And he's looking for perfect
love, and the love's not there. And he's disappointed, and he
fears, and he doubts, and he begins to doubt his relationship
with Christ. And I wrote him back, and I said,
your salvation's not in your love for Him, it's in His love
for you. It's not by your strength, it's
by His strength. It's not by your faithfulness.
It's through His faithfulness. He's the faithful one. And you're
never going to find peace in your soul until you find peace
in Christ. You find peace in Him. You find
strength in Him. You find honor and glory in Him. Not in you. And then it's Christ
in you is the hope of glory. You see what I'm saying? When
that hope becomes all Him, all Him, He's the one who's able
to keep that which I've committed unto Him against that day. I
can't keep it. But He can. He can. We don't preserve ourselves.
We're preserved in Him. John said, this is the record
that God hath given to us eternal life. And this life is in His
Son. And he that hath the Son hath
life. And he that hath not the Son of God hath not life. What's
he talking about having the Son? He's talking about coming to
Him by faith. Same thing Peter said. To whom coming? Coming
to Him. Embracing Him by faith as God
has set Him forth. Well, how does God set Him forth?
As a propitiation for our sins. No other way that God can be
propitious. No other way that God can show
mercy and grace to us except through His Son. God set Him forth as the sin
bearer, the substitute, the one acceptable sacrifice for sin. By His own blood, Christ entered
in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption
for us. Once in the end of the world
hath Christ appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. How did God send Him forth? As
the sin bearer, as the substitute and sacrifice for sin. And then
He sends Him forth as the righteousness of God. In Romans chapter 10,
Paul pours out his heart for his kinsmen in the flesh, and
he prays that God will save them. Well, I thought they were saved.
This is Israel. This is the chosen people of
God. I thought they were saved. Paul prays for their salvation.
And he tells us why in verse 2. For I bear them record that
they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. For
they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about
to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves
unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the
law for righteousness to everyone that believeth. How does God
set him forth? As the righteousness of God. Why would we come to Him as the
end of the law for righteousness? Why is that so important? Because
in Romans 3.20 it said, By the deeds of the law there shall
no flesh be justified in His sight. There is no other way
to produce this righteousness before God. except by the righteousness
of Christ. And then thirdly, God set him
forth as the King of glory. He said, I've set my King on
my holy hill in Zion. Jesus Christ sits upon the throne
of glory, and every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess
Jesus to be Lord to the glory of God. You'll do it here, you'll
do it there, but you're going to do it. You're going to do
it. God doesn't have any sons who do not bow at the feet of
Christ. Old Joseph, he was a son of Jacob. Joseph was. But God made him
king over all his other sons. And all his other sons had to
come and bow down before him. Every last one of them. Jesus Christ was made of a woman. He was born of the tribe of Judah,
and He was the offspring of David. Yet all His sons are going to
come and bow down before Him. You know why? Because God put
Him on His holy hill in Zion. We come to Christ as God has
set Him forth, a living stone, disallowed indeed of men. What
is a living stone? What's He talking about there?
He is talking about this sure foundation, this only foundation,
this foundation that God has ordained and decreed, which is
the Lord Jesus Christ. And we come and we are built
on Him. He is a living stone, and we
are lively stones born of God, and we are built on Him. Built
on Him. And this living stone is disallowed
of men, but it is chosen of God and precious. Disallowed indeed
of men. Not as they see Him as serving.
Not as Him who is willing to compromise. That's how they see
Him. He's willing to compromise the
Father's glory to win souls. And not as they see Him subject
to the will of men. And not as they see Him as their
helper. But disallowed as He's set forth
as the one foundation upon which needy sinners can be saved. He tells us in Acts 4, verse
12, "...neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none
other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be
saved." It was lively stones, 1 Peter 2, 5. You built up a
spiritual house and holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices
acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. So how did these people, this
people of God, they weren't a people in the beginning, but somehow
they got to be people of God. And at one time, they hadn't
received mercy, but now they've obtained it. Now they've obtained
it. And being born of God, we're
brought to see that we have these filthy rags that we're dressed
in that have got to be laid aside, and something to desire the sincere
milk of the Word. And somewhere to go, we go to
Him. Go to Him. Point men to Him. And then lastly, there's something
to be obtained. Something to be obtained. We
obtain mercy. Every time I think of this, I
think of old Mephibosheth. Old Mephibosheth. He was the
last of Saul's children, grandchildren. They'd all been put to death,
all been slain. Slain for their rebellion against
the king. And slain because they were a
threat to the king. All but Mephibosheth. Years ago,
old David made a covenant with Jonathan to show mercy. And here's
old Mephibosheth. And they brought him up there
crippled. Somebody said, ruined by the
fall. There he is. had to be carried in. And they
put him up on whatever it was they carried him on. And they
carried him right into the king's palace. And he's expecting to
be put to death before the king. This is the final son. This is
the final rebel. He's being brought before the
king. He expects, surely I'm going to be put to death. And
they bring on Mephibosheth into that room. And David said, my
house is going to be your house. And you're going to eat at my
table forever. Huh? Oh, my soul. You see what he's saying? At
one time you hadn't obtained mercy. But then there was a time
when you did. There was a time when you did. And I tell you this, those who
obtained this mercy and those who weren't the people of God
but now are the people... They've been given power. Isn't
that what this says in John chapter 1? Those who received Him, to
them gave He power to become the sons of God. Now, they weren't
a people, but now they are. They hadn't obtained mercy, but
now they have. And I tell you, that man who's
obtained mercy, that man who's discovered himself a stranger,
who's now the child of God, is overwhelmed by these things.
And he becomes gracious. He becomes merciful. And he becomes
loving. And He does all these things
through this experience of grace, through this new nature, this
new mind, this new heart. And He has Christ in Him, the
hope of glory. That's His hope. That's His joy. You see what Peter is saying?
This is what every one of these epistles teaches. He talks about
us before we were regenerated and then He talks about us after
we are regenerated. He talks about those things that
we did before and those things that we do now. And all of these
motives and all of this affection and all of these things that
we have, they are the natural result of those who were not
children of God being made the children of God. And those who
have not obtained mercy, now obtaining mercy. I tell you,
when you do, you'll have no problem walking before the Lord. Won't
have a better problem. You'll love Him. You'll love
Him, and you'll love others. You'll love even your enemies.