The Identity and Purpose of the Church | 1 Peter 1:22-2:10
Brian Hedges | February 27, 2022
Let me invite you this morning to turn in your Bibles to 1 Peter 1. We’re going to be reading from 1 Peter 1-2. Today is a membership Sunday, so today the sermon is kind of a one-off sermon, where we’re going to think about the church and some of Peter’s teaching about the church, and then next week we pick up again in the Gospel of John, leading us up through Holy Week and Good Friday and Easter. We’ll be looking at the Passion narratives of Jesus in the Gospel of John, and then in John 20 on Easter Sunday, and then the following Sundays the resurrection narrative. So I’m excited to be digging back into that wonderful Gospel with you. But today we’re in 1 Peter 1.
While you’re turning there, let me tell you a story I heard many years ago about a man who did not really want to go to church one Sunday morning. He was so obstinate about not going that he locked himself up in his room, and his wife was gently trying to reason with him why he should go to church. She said, “Honey, you really need to go to church. I have three reasons why you need to go. Number one, you know that you should. Number two, you’ll feel better if you go. Number three, you’re the pastor!”
Maybe you sometimes feel like that poor pastor—it wasn’t me! I do like you and I’m glad to be here. But maybe you sometimes feel the ambivalence about church, as that story represents. I think a lot of people today will say things like this: “I like Jesus, but I’m not sure about the church.”
But when we look at Scriptures, I think the Scriptures are really clear that we cannot claim allegiance to Jesus and remain indifferent or hostile or uncommitted to the church of Jesus, the people of Jesus. We show our love for Christ and our devotion to Christ by loving the people of Christ.
It’s important for us to continually be reminded of who we are as a church, what we are here for, and why being a part of the church is such a valuable thing. So today we’re looking at the identity and purpose of the church, and we’re looking at Peter’s first letter. We’re going to be reading 1 Peter 1:22-2:10, and throughout, I want to ask two questions: Who are we and why are we here? We’re looking at identity and purpose. Who are we and why are we here?
Let’s read the text, first of all, 1 Peter 1, beginning in verse 22. You can follow along in your own copy of God’s Word, or if you want to use one of those Bibles in the chair in front of you it’s page 1014.
“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for
‘All flesh is like grass
and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
and the flower falls,
but the word of the Lord remains forever.’
“And this word is the good news that was preached to you.
“So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
“As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in Scripture:
‘Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.’
“So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe,
‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone,’
and
‘A stone of stumbling,
and a rock of offense.’
“They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
This is God’s word.
This morning we’re asking these two questions: Who are we, and why are we here? What is the identity and the purpose of the church? This, of course, is one of the greatest passages of Scripture on the church in the New Testament, as Peter piles on the metaphors and the descriptions of who the church is, what the church is for.
I want you to see three things; we’re going to break this down into three points.
1. We Are the Family of God (1:22-2:3)
2. We Are the Temple of God (2:4-8)
3. We Are the People of God (2:9-10)
In each one of these descriptors or pictures of the church I want you to see how Peter highlights one particular purpose for the church. In each one we’re going to see something about our identity and something about our purpose.
1. We Are the Family of God
Just notice as we work through this passage the family language. Peter’s using family language, even as he brings in some really important theological language about our salvation. You see it in verses 22-23 in chapter 1. There’s this exhortation: “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love [here’s the command], love one another earnestly from a pure heart [here’s the reason], since you have been born again.”
This is familial language. It’s an exhortation to love one another, and we are to love one another having purified our souls by obedience to the truth. That’s a reference to conversion or to salvation. We’ve done this for a sincere brotherly love. Brotherly love; that’s familial love, that’s love as members of a family. That word for brotherly love extends to not just males, not just men or brothers, but it’s brothers and sisters. It’s the word that carries the idea of love in the family of God.
Peter here is saying that the reason why you should love one another earnestly from a pure heart is because you have been born again. He’s talking here about our new birth, about our regeneration, about our conversion. We’ve been born again.
Usually, when we think about new birth we think about being born of the Spirit, being born from above, right? That’s right. Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born again. You must be born of water and of the Spirit, otherwise you cannot see the kingdom of God.” So being born again is essential, it’s necessary for a right relationship with God.
Peter’s focus here is not just on the vertical relationship with God, it’s on the horizontal relationship with others. He’s actually appealing to their new birth as a motivation for loving one another with a brotherly love.
Again, it’s because of this new relationship that we have with God that we have a new relationship with one another. It’s family language that Peter’s using here, and he’s appealing to our new birth as a reason why we are to love one another.
In verses 23-25 he shows why or how we have been born again. If the reason we’ve been born again is an order to love one another, the power that has brought about his new birth is the word of God.
Look at verse 23. “Since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God . . .” and then he quotes from Isaiah 40, “All flesh is like grass and its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.”
Then Peter equates this word with the gospel, the good news that has been preached, in verse 25, “And this word is the good news that was preached to you.”
This shows us how the church comes into being. The church comes into being through the word of God, which brings about new birth. Of course, it is both new birth that comes from the Spirit and then comes through the instrumentality of the word. The Spirit of God (John 3) is the agent of new birth, but the word of God is the instrument that God uses to bring about conversion and to bring people to faith in Christ. “Faith comes by hearing and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).
What this is showing us is that the word, or the gospel, is the source of this family relationship in the church. The word creates the church; the gospel creates the church. It’s not the other way around. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that the church created the gospel or the church created the word of God or that we got the word of God from the church. That’s one of those myths that’s commonly stated out there, that the Council of Nicaea, they’re the ones who came up with the Bible and decided which books were canonical or not. That’s not right. It’s actually the other way around. The word of God, as it was effectively proclaimed in those first several centuries, was creating the church; the word was the power that brought the church into being.
You see this over and over again in the book of Acts. You read through the book of Acts, and what you see is that the church grows right alongside the progress of the word of God. So throughout Acts you have scattered these little reports, they’re like progress reports of the growth of the church. It’s worded like this: “The word of God multiplied and prevailed,” and then people are added to the church. Over and again Luke makes these statements, and he’s showing us that as the word of God is preached in power, that this is what brings about the new people of God, the church.
This is so important for us, because it shows us that the source of our life and our strength and our power is the word of God. It shows us that God performs his work through his word. His word creates and sustains his people. The word that he speaks is effective and dynamic and powerful, and it brings about the reality that he intends. His word does not return to him void; his word lives, and it abides forever.
This word is so crucial to the life of the church, it not only creates the family of God, it sustains the family of God. One of the things that means for us is that we must be people of the book. As a church, we must be people of the book, people of the word. That means not just on Sundays at church, when the pastors preach, but it means that every individual and every home and every small group and every class and every ministry should be profoundly word-centered, so that the word is bearing fruit, the word is powerfully working and bringing about transformation in the lives of the people of God.
When this happens, it leads directly into real transformation and spiritual growth in the family. You see this in the first several verses in chapter two. Chapter 2:1 says, “So put away all malice and all deceit,” and so on. That first word, “so,” that’s important. That’s a connector. That word is connecting us to what went before.
The chapter divisions here are arbitrary. Someone else put those in later; that’s the original. This originally was just a letter that Peter wrote without chapter divisions, and the logic just follows right from what he has just said. “This good news which was preached to you is the living and abiding word of God. So [therefore],” live in a certain kind of way.
What Peter is doing here in these first three verses of chapter 2 is he’s showing us both the negative and the positive implications of being the family of God, created by the word of God. Negatively, he says, “Put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.” There are five categories of sin there, and it’s ruling out all of the sinful attitudes that bring about division in the church. Malice, these negative feelings towards others. But not just malice, also deceit, lying, hypocrisy, pretense; envy, coveting, and being envious of one another; and slander, backstabbing, talking about each other behind their backs—those kinds of things. I mean, it’s the ridiculous kind of stuff that leads to these horrible church splits.
You know, when you read about the reasons why churches split, they’re sad and tragic, and one reason they’re so tragic is most of the time when churches split it’s not over important doctrine. It’s usually over really petty, insignificant differences. It’s people who are behaving carnally towards one another.
I read a list of 25 reasons why churches split. I won’t read all of these to you, but this is actually from a church researcher; these were actual reasons that he had discovered in surveys. You’re not going to believe some of these.
- A church that split over whether or not to build a children’s playground or to use the land for a cemetery. An obvious division right there between the old and the young.
- An argument in church over who has access to the coffee machine.
- An argument over whether to have gluten free communion bread or not.
- A church member who was chastised because she brought vanilla syrup to the coffee server and it looked too much like liquor.
- A petition to have all church staff clean-shaven. (I don’t think that’d go well here.)
Now, they’re sad and they’re tragic, but they’re not unbelievable, because if you spend much time in the church you know that sometimes we (let’s all own it) can be pretty petty in our disagreements. But listen, when we do that we are forgetting our purpose, we are forgetting our identity, we are forgetting we are the family of God. We are forgetting that we’ve been born again of this living and abiding word of God for the purpose of loving one another with a sincere brotherly love, and we are forgetting to put away these attitudes of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander. Since we’ve been born again by this powerful word, we are to behave in a certain kind of way.
Not only are we to negatively put away these sins, but positively, we’re to grow. Notice how we grow. Look at verses 2-3. “As newborn infants—” there’s the family language again. These people who have been born into the family of God, as newborn infants are now to “long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation, in indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
I think what he’s saying here is that you keep growing in the same way that you came into being. The word of God brought you into being, gave you new birth, and now you are to long for the pure spiritual milk, which I think is the gospel that is embodied in the word of God. You long for that pure spiritual milk so that you may grow. We grow by our devotion to the word and to the gospel.
Here’s the summary for point number one. Who are we? We are the family of God. Why are we here? We’re here for what we call in our core values community; that is, brotherly love, loving one another sincerely with a pure heart, and living out these “one another” commands in Scripture, as we try to embody the character of Christ together in the way we love one another.
2. We Are the Temple of God
Then in verses 4-8 Peter adds another picture of the church, and here we see that the church is not only the family of God, but the church is the temple of God. Look at verses 4-5.
“As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves, like living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
This is a very different image than the first image of family, but this one’s important. It helps complete our understanding of what it means to be the church. The language here is temple language. He doesn’t use the word temple, but he uses the word “spiritual house,” and he’s talking about living stones and a cornerstone and offering spiritual sacrifices and being a holy priesthood. All of these things have to do with the temple.
If you remember in the Old Testament, the temple was the place where God’s glory dwelt; it was the dwelling place of God. First the tabernacle, then the temple. This temple was built to be a place on earth, where heaven and earth met, where the glory of God dwelt, it’s the place where sacrifices were offered, it’s the place where the worship took place.
The interesting thing when you get into the New Testament is that after the resurrection of Jesus, when the gospel begins to spread, the new Christians who are banding together in fellowship together, they don’t go around building temples. They don’t. Most of them are meeting in, first of all, synagogues, and then they’re meeting in house churches, and sometimes Paul will even rent a public hall; because they didn’t view the buildings as being sacred. They knew that the temple in the Old Testament had been replaced.
It had been replaced, first of all, with the temple of Jesus’ own body. Jesus himself is the temple. In John 2 Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” He’s speaking about his body. Jesus himself is the locus, the dwelling place of the glory of God, the place where God meets us. Jesus is the place where heaven and earth intersect.
But then, as we are incorporated into Christ, who is this living stone, this new temple, Peter says we are ourselves, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house. Not only is Jesus the new temple, but you’re the new temple, we are the new temple.
It’s not just individually, although it’s true to say that individually our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit; but here what Peter has in view is that we together, corporately, when we come together as living stones, fit together, are built into this spiritual house, this spiritual temple, so that we together are the temple of God; that is, we together are the place where God dwells, and it’s when we come together that there is a very special way in which we worship God. This is the reason for our existence. The reason for our existence as the new people of God, the new temple of God, is to offer spiritual sacrifices to God that are acceptable through Jesus Christ.
You see, the purpose is to worship. If our identity is the temple of God, our purpose is to worship God, to offer spiritual sacrifices to God.
How is it that we do that? What are these spiritual sacrifices? Peter doesn’t tell us, but I think it includes everything that can be included in our worship, a part of our worship. It includes the offering of ourselves to God—see Romans 12:1, where Paul appeals to us by the mercies of God, to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God, holy and acceptable to him. It includes that.
Of course, it includes the fruit of our lips, where we give praise to God, thanksgiving to God. It includes our words and our songs and our prayers. We come and we verbally and vocally and corporately together lift up our voices in praise to God. Hebrews talks about that, the fruit of our lips giving praise to God.
It even includes the offerings or our goods, our finances, when we give to the work of the Lord. That’s a sacrifice that we make to the Lord, and it’s a part of our worship.
But get this: the only way in which that worship is acceptable, those offerings are acceptable, is when we offer them through Jesus Christ. Isn’t that what Peter says? “You yourselves, like living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
Then he goes on to describe who Jesus Christ is. He is this living stone who has been rejected by men but in the sight of God is chosen and precious, and then, in the verses that follow, Peter piles on the Old Testament references—Isaiah 28:16, Psalm 118:22, and then Isaiah 8:14—to talk about Christ as this cornerstone.
The cornerstone was not some insignificant stone that was kind of hidden in the corner of the building, right? Don’t think that. Don’t get the idea that the cornerstone was some insignificant stone that the people ignored or neglected. That’s not the idea. In fact, archeologists have uncovered stones from ancient temples, and they are huge! They were these large, massive stones that were foundational for the whole building. One such stone was 69 feet by 12 feet by 13 feet. That’s big. That’s a really, really big stone.
The idea here is the stone that has been counted as insignificant was actually the most important stone of all. What Peter is saying is that here was Christ, the most important person of all, and people rejected him and stumbled over him, so that this cornerstone became to them a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.
I think what Peter is telling us here is that foundational to the life of church as the temple of God is Jesus Christ himself. He’s showing us that Jesus will either be the cornerstone of our lives both as individuals and as a church, or he will be a stumbling stone. He will either be the foundation on which we build or the rock over which we stumble. We either build our lives and our church on Jesus Christ and align ourselves with him and his word and his will and his purposes, or we will ruin ourselves by trying to build on another foundation. Christ is central.
How is it that we build on Christ, the cornerstone? I think Peter basically tells us. He points out the way we are to relate to Christ. He says we come to him, verse 4. As you
“come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious . . .” Coming to him; that’s a present participle verb. It means that we keep on coming to Jesus.
That should be true for us every week—really, every day, but thinking of our corporate worship, when we gather as the people of God. What do you do when you come to church? Are you just coming to see friends? Coming to be entertained? Probably not. Most of us probably think, “Well, I’m coming to learn something.” And that’s good; we ought to learn something from the word of God. But listen, we don’t even come supremely and mainly to learn something; we’re coming to come to Jesus, we’re coming to meet with him, we’re coming to engage him, we’re coming to have an encounter with the true and the living God. We come to Jesus; we’re approaching him.
We not only come to him, but we believe in him. Look at verses 6-7. “For it stands in Scripture, ‘Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.’ So the honor is for you who believe.” What does it mean to believe? It means to trust him; it means to depend on him; it means to make him our anchor, to make him our foundation, to build our lives on him, to trust his word, trust his promises, to entrust our souls to him and our lives to him. It means to call upon his name in faith. We do this because we count him as precious.
Verse 4, “As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious.” God counts Jesus precious. But look at verse 6. “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious.” Christ should be precious to us as well.
Brothers and sisters, think about worship, this purpose for which we exist as the temple of God. When you gather Sunday after Sunday, do you come for this, to meet him, to know him, to love him, to worship him, to offer a spiritual sacrifice to God, acceptable through Jesus Christ?
Who are we? We are the temple of God. Why are we here? For worship.
3. We are the People of God
Thirdly, in verses 9-10 Peter adds something still more. In fact, verse 9 gives us a whole gallery of pictures of the church, descriptions of the church. “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” Then verse 10, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
We could summarize all of those and say that the third image that Peter gives us for the church is the people of God. We’re not only the family of God, we’re not only the temple of God, we are the people of God.
I think the interesting thing to note here from verse 9 is that the language that Peter uses to describe the church is language that comes straight out of Exodus 19, language that was used to describe the nation of Israel when they were constituted as a nation, as the people of God, there are Mount Sinai.
In Exodus 19:6 Israel is called a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, and Peter’s using that language, and he’s saying, “This is now you. You are the people of God. You are a royal priesthood. You are a holy nation. You are this chosen people. You are God’s people.”
He shows us the purpose here. It adds to the picture, it fills it out even more. So far we’ve seen the church is the family of God, and the purpose we have as the family of God is a horizontal purpose that relates to our internal life. The purpose is community; it’s brotherly love, it’s “love another from a sincere and a pure heart,” right? Then our purpose as the temple of God is vertical, it’s addressed to God. We are to worship him; we offer these spiritual sacrifices to him. But notice here, the purpose relates to our whole stance to the world.
Look again at verse 9. “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” That’s our mission; it is to proclaim him, to proclaim his excellencies, his perfections. It is to spread the good news of who he is and what he has done.
Tom Schreiner in his commentary says that this proclaiming or this declaration of God’s praises includes both worship and evangelism, “spreading the good news of God’s saving wonders to all people.” Notice this is something we do with our words.
You’ve probably heard this saying before, attributed to Francis of Assissi: “Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.” I get what whoever said that was getting at; that our lives should constantly be a witness. That’s right. But listen, there’s something wrong with that, because you can’t actually proclaim without using words. You can’t actually proclaim the gospel without there being content. Certainly our lives should validate that, certainly our lives should be light and salt, and that’s part of who we’re called to be. But the main way in which we proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light is to use words and share words with people, point people to who Jesus is and what he has done. That’s our mission; it’s sharing Jesus in word and in deed, as our lives verify the message. We are called to do this.
Who is it that we are proclaiming? We’re proclaiming “him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light.” That speaks of the effective call, the summons of Jesus Christ that brought us out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light; out of the thralldom and the slavery to sin and Satan and into the kingdom of God, rescuing us from sin and death and darkness and bringing us into light, making us people of light. We proclaim him, the one who saved us, the one who rescued us.
Who are we? We are the people of God. Why are we here? We’re here for the mission, to proclaim his excellencies.
Final question: How do we live into this identity and this purpose? Maybe you’ve already caught the key answer. The key answer is the key to every one of these things: it’s the gospel itself. Maybe you’ve also caught that I’ve tried to intentionally use the language of our core values: community, worship, mission; but the central, foundational core value of our church (and I think it should be of every church) is the gospel itself. I want you to see this.
We are the family of God, and our purpose is community, loving one another with a brotherly love. How do we do that? We do that as we remember the gospel, the living word that brought us into life, the good new which was preached to us, by which we’ve been born again; and as we continue to feed on the pure spiritual milk, that makes us grow. As we continue to feast on the goodness of God in the gospel, as we do that, the more you taste that God is good, the more you’re able to extend love and goodness to one another.
We have to ask ourselves this question: have we experienced that? Ask yourself, have you been born again by the word? How do you know? How do you know whether you’re born again? This is what the apostle John says: “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers.” You know that you’re born again if you love others. Love is the fruit. The key here is the gospel. It gives us life, sustains our lives, and helps us grow.
What’s the key to being the temple of God? How do we live into that identity? How do we continue to worship? We only do it through Jesus Christ. He is the one who makes our spiritual sacrifices, our offerings acceptable to God. He is the priest who constitutes us a royal priesthood. We offer our worship to God through him. Once again, the gospel is central.
How do we live as the people of God, fulfilling our mission? The key is proclaiming his excellencies, the one who called us out of darkness into his light, the one who made us, who at one time were not a people, has made us now into people of God.
I can’t resist ending with a quote from Spurgeon. I’m sequentially trying to read through Spurgeon’s sermons. Spurgeon was a 19th-century pastor in London. When he came to London, he was pastoring the New Park Street Baptist Church; that’s where he started. As his ministry took off, people were flocking to this church by the thousands, and it wasn’t a big enough church to hold them, so they were constantly having to rent out other buildings, public halls, music halls, things like that, to house all the people who were coming to hear Spurgeon and then were being saved and converted and added to the church. There were hundreds of people being converted every year; it really was a time of revival.
So they built a new church, and they were in the fundraising for this and the building of this for several years. The church was called the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Spurgeon was very intentional that it not be called a “temple,” and he gave all the reasons for that.
The very first sermon that Spurgeon preached in the Metropolitan Tabernacle, he said something I think really important, and I think it’s something that serves as a good motto for our own church. This is what he said.
“I would propose that the subject of the ministry of this house, as long as this platform shall stand and as long as this house shall be frequented by worshippers, shall be the person of Jesus Christ. I’m never ashamed to avow myself a Calvinist,” Spurgeon said, “I do not hesitate to take the name of Baptist; but if I am asked to say what is my creed, I think I must reply, ‘It is Jesus Christ.’”
He went on to describe how Jesus Christ is "the sum and the substance of the gospel, the one who is in himself all theology, the incarnation of every precious truth, the all-glorious, personal embodiment of the way, the truth, and the life." What Spurgeon was saying is, “This is the message, this is the key to our church, to our life, to our ministry, to everything. It’s Jesus! Jesus is at the center.”
Brothers and sisters, that must be true for us as well. As we think about who we are as the church—God’s family, God’s temple, God’s people—with all of the things that God has called us to do in terms of our life together and our mission in the world and our calling to worship and to glorify God, don’t forget that the center of it all is Jesus. Have you come to him? Is he precious to you? Have you trusted in him, his death, his resurrection, for your sins, for your forgiveness? If not, let me invite you to do that today. Let’s pray together.
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we thank you this morning for the good news, we thank you for the gospel, and we thank you that this good news, by which we are born again and brought into relationship with you, does not leave us as solitary Christians, but it puts us in a family and makes us a part of the church, the body of Christ.
Father, I thank you for this particular church, for Redeemer Church and for what you’re doing here. We are far from perfect, and I think we all know that, but how grateful we are for your grace that is evident in the lives and in the hearts of people here. We thank you for the ongoing, sanctifying, transforming work that you’re doing. We thank you for the power of your word, which is working effectually in us, and we pray that in your grace and mercy you would help us to humbly continue to walk with you, to be sensitive to your spirit, to be loyal to Jesus, to be obedient to your word, and to love one another with sincere, brotherly love.
We pray that you would be glorified as we bring our spiritual offerings to you and offer them through Jesus Christ, and we pray that the gospel would go forth from this place, not just week by week through the messages on Sunday, but through the words we speak as ambassadors of Christ in the workplace, on the college campus, at school, in our neighborhoods; as we spread the good news of who Jesus is and what he has done. Lord, give us the heart to do that, give us the boldness, the confidence. Lord, continue your work in us.
As we come to the Lord’s table this morning, may we come with deep gratitude in our hearts as we think about what Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior has done for us, and may we come with faith in him as we trust in his finished work with all of our hearts. Draw near to us in these moments; may these be moments of real fellowship with you and with one another, and may you be glorified. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
