What are we doing here? What does God want us to accomplish? 1 Peter 2:9-20 can help us understand our role in God’s world.

A couple of months ago, I learned that our personal information had been hacked from a company that handles medical information for hospitals and doctors—a company I’d never heard of. The very next day, my credit card company asked me if I had just purchased clothes in South America. I also learned that my social security number had been hacked. With that, a person could apply for a driver’s license, credit cards, and loans. He could open bank accounts and request benefits.

What would you call a person whose life and benefits depends on an identity they weren’t born with, an identity that belongs to someone else? You might call them an illegal alien, or a con-man, or … a Christian.

That is what we saw last week, when we looked at 1 Peter 2:4-9. Our identity comes from Christ. We are who we are not because of our birth but because of our rebirth, not because of our name but because of the name of Jesus, not because of our accomplishments but because of his. We’ve taken our identity from him.

That identity determines our mission. Who we are determines what we do. Imagine that you are hired by a large transportation firm. Who you are – your classification as a driver, a diesel mechanic, a logistics engineer, or a comptroller – will determine what you do. If you are a comptroller, you won’t be maintaining and repairing engines. If you are a mechanic, you won’t be scheduling loading times and laying out routes. Who you are shapes what you do; your identity molds your mission.

Our mission, as people who share Jesus’s identity, is (verse 9) to proclaim the praises of the one who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light. In other words, our mission at school, in our workplaces, at our homes, and in our neighborhoods – wherever we have been stationed – is an information operation. We spread the news about God.

How do we do that? Do we just walk up to someone on the street and say, “Hey, the Creator God is restoring his creation, fixing everything that’s broken, getting rid of evil forever. He’s already started by coming into our world in the person of Jesus Christ. The proof of that is that Jesus was raised from the dead.”

If you get the chance to say those things, take it! But proclaiming God’s praises doesn’t start on the street. It starts when God’s people gather to worship. With his Jewish background, Peter certainly would have thought about worship gatherings in this way. When the people of God got together for their appointed festivals, they proclaimed God’s praises. After the exile, when synagogues began appearing all over the world, they gathered there and declared his praises. And that carried over into the church’s gatherings (as we see, for example, in 1 Corinthians 14.)  

When we gather, we rehearse the praises of the Lord. We do this in our Scripture readings, like those today from Philippians 1 and Matthew 5. We do it in our songs and in our prayers. Regularly gathering to declare his praises is mission critical.

Does that mean we don’t need to do personal evangelism? Who said anything about needing to do it? We get to do it. Not everyone is gifted to be an evangelist, but everyone who belongs to Jesus gets the opportunity to declare his praises.

If you are one of Jesus’s people, that’s your mission – whether you decide to accept it or not. You are on the advance team, bringing the news about God to people who don’t know about him. And it is good news.

But our mission is more complicated than just bringing news about God to people who have never heard it. We are bringing news about God to people who have misheard it. They think they already know about “God and those Christians.” And what they think they know is that Christians are self-righteous, condemning, unhappy people—and that their God must be just like them.  

I received an email a couple of years ago from one of these people. She was sure that I would be angry because someone dared to disagree with me. When I wrote back: “I don’t mind when people disagree with me. We all need to think for ourselves,” it caught her off-guard.

She countered with something like, “Well, your God sends people to hell when they disagree with him.” She was really mixed up. She didn’t see that she was the one who was angry because someone disagreed with her. I suppose I’d be angry too if I believed what she believes.

The point is this: the people to whom we declare God’s praises are not blank slates. They already have an opinion, and it is often a negative one. The territory in which we carry out our mission is growing more hostile all the time. A case in point is the guy who said to me (and this is a direct quote), “America is not being torn apart by politics OR by the idolatry of politics, but by the idolatry of evangelists” – I’m pretty sure he was including me – “trying to wrest all control for their privilege and benefit.” Wow!

Because of my newspaper column, I’ve heard from many people who know without a doubt that Christians are selfish and hateful and that their God is spiteful and unworthy of devotion. When responding to these people, I have chosen my words carefully, but words will never be enough. They need to see what the people of Jesus look like in action.

That’s what Peter thought. He considered it our mission to speak and to act in ways that will move people to give God a hearing. This is verse 11: “I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Peter 2:11-12).

Peter does not say, “Speak such eloquent words that people will glorify God,” but rather, “Live such good lives…” Their lives are different because they abstain – the idea is that they keep away from – “sinful desires.” That translation might give the wrong idea. The word “sinful” produces in our minds a list of bad actions. Peter, however, does not use the word “sinful” but the word “fleshly. And he is not talking about “actions”; he’s talking about “desires.” That’s important. He doesn’t want Christians to be driven by the same desires that drive everyone else.

We’re supposed to be different, and not just in what we do but in what we want. One of the clearest marks of spiritual formation in Christ is that we no longer want what we used to want. Our desires are being changed through union with Christ, just as our identity has been changed.

We don’t do what everyone else does and we don’t want whatever everyone else wants. That’s the negative side of the equation (what we don’t do). The positive side (what we do) is live beautiful lives. The word the NIV translates as “good” carries that idea. These are lives that are not just morally upright but are beautiful and full of good deeds. The deeds we do in verse 12 confirm the praises we declare in verse 10, so people not only hear; they see.

Timothy Dalrymple is the President and CEO at Christianity Today. In college, he was a top NCAA gymnast until he broke his neck. He then changed direction, went off to Harvard (where he found people who thought they knew all about Christians and their God), and faced tough questions about his faith.

The person who helped him most was not some brilliant and eloquent Christian apologist; it was his dad, whom he described as “a genuinely loving, faithful, righteous person.” He said, “I saw in his life something undeniably true that I couldn’t explain away.” A sermon you see stays with you longer than one you just hear.

Let’s recap: Our mission is to declare God’s praises from lives that are (1) different and (2) beautiful. They are different – again, this is important – because our desires are different from most people’s. And they are beautiful because they are full of good, surprising, generous deeds – things that other people wouldn’t do.

I’ll give you an example. Christians Ricky and Toni Sexton were at their home on April 6, 2000, when Dennis Lewis and Angela Tanner, who were fleeing the police, came roaring into their driveway. Toni, who was outside with the dog, was forced back into her home at gunpoint, and a 36-hour standoff with police ensued.

The Sextons, who were being held hostage in their own home, didn’t act like you’d expect hostages to act. They were different. Their deeds were beautiful. They listened to their captors’ troubles, fed them, showed them gospel videos, read to them from the Bible, and prayed and cried with them. When police negotiated the release of Ricky, who had Lou Gerig’s disease, he refused to go because his captors were thinking they had no alternative but to commit suicide.

The fugitives eventually surrendered to police but, before they did, the woman left $135 and a note for the Sextons that read: “Thank you for your hospitality. We really appreciate it. I hope he gets better. Wish all luck & love. Please accept this. It really is all we have to offer. Love, Angela and Dennis.” As a condition of their surrender, they asked to speak to a state police chaplain.

That was what it looked like for Christians to live a different and beautiful life in an extraordinary circumstance. But what does that look like in ordinary circumstances? Peter describes what it looks like, starting in verse 13 and running through 3:7. If you wonder how to go about living differently and attractively, Peter is going to tell you. There are two things to note before we look at it.

First, it really is a different kind of life we’re talking about. It’s not the kind of life the average American (or Canadian, Zimbabwean, or German) is living. If we just live average lives, no one will pay attention when we declare the praises of God. It is essential to the plan that our lives look different.

A few years ago, there was a guy at Columbia University named John Reider who was different. While his friends were playing video games and partying, he was cooking. Cooking is his hobby, so he started making five to eight course meals and inviting people to his rooms to share them. They’d sit around the table and enjoy stimulating conversations and a great meal.

The student newspaper heard about what John was doing and published a story, which the New York Post picked up. John soon found himself with a wait list that was months long and included bankers, lawyers, restaurant owners, and magazine editors. They were coming to his dorm to enjoy a meal and conversation. When he was asked about it, John said the idea was never to make it big, but to make it different. He was on to something. That’s God’s idea too.

If we will only do what Jesus and his apostles told us to do, we will be different. Speaking well of people who speak badly of us – that’s different. Praying for people who are out to get us is different. So is helping people who hurt us. Those are just a few of the things Jesus told us to do.

Second, while there are many things that make us different, there is one that Peter emphasizes repeatedly. He sees it as a primary characteristic of Jesus’s people and identifies four specific relationships in which it manifests itself: our relationship (this is 2:13ff.) to the government (that is a hot-button issue right now, but it was a hot-button issue when Peter wrote this letter); to our bosses (2:18ff.); to our spouses (3:1-7); and to the church (5:1-5).

When I have spoken on this subject in the past, it has made people uncomfortable. Once, a woman came up to me the moment the service was over and said, “When you started speaking, it took everything I had not to get up and walk out.” Even talking about this can upset people.

What makes it worse is that I must use the “s-word.” (Not that “s-word” – I don’t say that.) But using the other one upsets people too. The word is “submit.”

Peter says (this in verses 13-14) that Jesus’s people should submit to every human authority through the Lord, whether that authority is the emperor or the people who govern at more local levels. After mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and heated elections, we don’t want to hear about submitting to those in authority. It’s not that we’re unwilling to obey God’s word … but God couldn’t really mean that we should submit when the future of our nation is at stake!

What do you think those early Christians thought when they read Peter’s letter? Their country, their towns, had been overrun by a foreign power. The taxes they were forced to pay supported the foreign troops that patrolled their streets! And Peter told them to submit! Why? Because submission is essential to the mission.

We must remember that we are not private agents. We serve the Kingdom of God. Our objective is not to maintain a way of life – not even the American way of life – but to prepare for the arrival of the King. That preparation includes, among other things, silencing the ignorant talk of foolish people (v. 15) – and there has been a lot of ignorant talk about Christians in our day. We will never silence it by demanding our rights; we will silence it by doing good.

(As an aside, in a democracy we have opportunities to do good that were not available to Peter’s first readers. We can vote, organize, protest, run for office, and more. We should take advantage of those opportunities when doing so is one of those good and beautiful deeds. But if we allow current cultural concerns to drive the mission from our minds, our agency for the Kingdom of God will have been neutralized.)

We’ve already seen that we are supposed to be different. Being submissive is radically different. It is one of the marks of God’s kingdom agents on earth. They submit to a government for the sake of the mission. They also submit in the workplace (this is verse 18) for the same reason. In Peter’s day, the largest employment category was “slave.” So, Peter told slaves to submit. If the largest category had been, as it is in America, what the Bureau of Labor statistics calls Healthcare Support Occupations (which share some of the duties of a first century slave), Peter would have told health care workers to submit.

But why? Why should they submit? Because (vs. 19) they are mindful of God. They know who they are serving. They remember the mission. They are working for the King.

Submission is the mark of the Jesus-agent in every area of life: social life (with government, vv. 13-17); work life (with bosses, vv. 18-20), domestic life (in families, chapter 3:1-7); and spiritual life (in church, chapter 5:1-5). Why must submission be the mark? Why couldn’t it be something else—anything else: wisdom, or courage, or, for that matter, stubbornness? Because we have taken the identity of Jesus, whose submission to the Father has vanquished the powers of darkness and won for us eternal life.

If we identify with Jesus in our submission, we can be wise and courageous like him. And we can even be stubborn when some authority (in society, at work, at home, or in the church) requires us to disobey God. Being submissive does not mean being a doormat.

Our success depends on keeping the mission in mind: to declare the praises of our king while leading lives that are full of good and lovely deeds. If we live that way, we’re going to be different, not because we are trying to be different but because we are serious about being like Jesus.

Being different is not the goal; it’s the result. When people make it the goal – and I’ve seen it happen – it gets in the way of the mission. And when I’ve seen it, the thing I’ve noticed most is pride. Pride makes submission impossible. Pride gets in the way of people coming to God.

The New Testament scholar Scot McKnight says that the first task “for Christians in society is to live before God in love and holiness in such a way that culture sees the radical difference between the two worlds.”^[1] That’s just what Peter has been saying.

I earlier told you about Ricky and Toni Sexton who behaved differently – beautifully – when they were taken hostage. They would not have been different in that extraordinary situation had they not been different in ordinary situations. That surely was not the first time they did good and beautiful things for the sake of the king. They lived the mission. So must we.

What good and beautiful thing – what different thing – is God putting into your mind to do? Will you submit to the Lord, trust him, and do it?

---

^[1] McKnight, S. (1996). 1 Peter (p. 141). Zondervan Publishing House.