Christians Feeling Excluded From Society

Welcome to the New Life Ministries podcast. As you walk with Jesus and try to follow him in your days, it is not uncommon to feel like more and more you fit into society less and less. Sometimes you just don’t want to participate. Other times, people might exclude you. How are we to think about this experience? What is the best way to respond? Let’s consider what the book of First Peter says to encourage Christians who experience being excluded. So, good morning. Today, we’re going to look at the book of First Peter, page um 18:26. If you have a New Living Translation, Giant Print Bible, and let’s keep all of the talk together.

So, I returned from my canoe trip. Was that great? It’s a great backdrop. I’m going to explain it all day today. I returned from my canoe trip this week. Uh so I was on the water for uh uh 10 days paddling for nine of them. Um it was a tremendously hard trip. Uh we only covered in nine days 140 kilometers. And for perspective, last year we did a trip in 7 days, we covered 120 km. So it was slow going this year. Uh we just hit headwind the whole time. So we did a north south route in Quetico Park in Ontario and it we were against the wind all the way down and then the weather changed and we were against the wind all the way up. So one day we were doing a little east west jaunt and there was a very gentle tailwind just enough to cause ripples in the water and we did 11 8 kilometers an hour. Most of the north south trip we did 3 kilometers an hour like I can walk 5 kilometers an hour. It was slow going and then we hit these awful portages. At the end of one day, it was a 12 uh 1,200 meter or 1.2 kilometer portage that was a boulder field, but it was also 250 ft up. So, you just kept climbing up and up and up and then down and down. And another day we did two portages, one called the Bonom, the good man, and one called the Savage or the Savage. And uh we um the bonom I’m like that’s a great name. The good man this will be nice was awful. We finish it and we’re like now we’ve got to do the savage was awful. The savage portage took me two and a half hours of walking and my foot fell and got stuck between logs. Um so we walked 10 kilometers that day carrying a boat and a pack and such and then paddled 11. So, around day six of this 10day canoe trip, I started thinking about home. [laughter] Like, I’m paddling and I’m thinking about my couch in the view from my window, my dining room, my kitchen, and I’m thinking, I think I should learn to make cakes better this fall because I’ve been in a calorie deficit and I was hungry. So, chocolate cake. Yeah. And there’s a spice cake I want to make. Um, yeah, it was a hard trip. just wanted to go home. But the reality of going home for me is also hard because after a vacation, I have to work to fit myself back into a city, into this city. I just get here and I think, why do I live here? Um there’s so much speed and activity and congestion and noise, and I’m just not built for that. Um, and I have often almost always a deep sense of aloneeness for the first week that I’m back because my good friend that I’ve spent a week with lives in one province and my family lives in another province. And I just think, what am I doing here? So even though I’m home, there’s a sense of I’m not home. Like I’m in my apartment. It’s lovely. It’s better than being on the water. But this isn’t satisfying that deep desire to be home. You ever felt something similar where you might be in your house or your apartment or even with your family, but something deep inside goes, “This there’s more. I I’m I’m left wanting. I there’s more to the experience of being home.” So between now and December, we’re going to read through the book of First Peter. And it’s addressed to people who are experiencing more and more that this world doesn’t feel like home anymore, that they just don’t fit. And it might be that as they’ve become a Christian, they don’t fit with their family anymore, or they don’t fit in with their job or their job’s culture, or um they don’t fit in with their friends like they used to. or they might just find they don’t fit in with the sways of culture anymore. And so this book talks about the how do you think about this and what do you do as you live it. And the point of the book is to encourage us to keep going to encourage us to engage and to live and to live well. So I’m going to offer a prayer and then we’re just going to read the first few verses of uh chapter one. Father, Father, as we look at this new book of the Bible or new for us, would um would you help us to connect with it? Bring to mind for each of us the way it touches home the and um draw us to see its message and speak to us those words that we need to hear that help us that will help us to engage well, to live well, and to be your people well on this earth. So I ask for your help through this through your word that we would honor you and be your disciples well to your glory. Amen. So 1 Peter chapter 1 page 18:26.

This letter is from Peter an apostle of Jesus Christ. I am writing to God’s chosen people who are living as foreigners in the provinces of Pontis, Galatia, Capidosia, Asia, and Bethnia. God the Father knew you and chose you long ago, and his spirit has made you holy. As a result, you have obeyed him and have become cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ. May God give you more and more grace and peace. All praise to God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is by his great mercy that we’ve been born again because God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Now we live with great expectation. And we have a priceless inheritance. An inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay. And through your faith, God is protecting you by his power until you reach this salvation, which is ready to be revealed in the last day for all to see. So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead. Even though you must endure many trials for a little while, these trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold. Though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world. You love him even though you have never seen him. And though you do not see him now, you trust him and you rejoice with a glorious inexpressable joy. The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls. This salvation was something even the prophets wanted to know more about when they prophesied about this gracious salvation prepared for you. They wondered what time or situation the spirit of Christ within them was talking about when he told them in advance about Christ’s suffering and his great glory afterwards. They were told that their messages were not for themselves but for you. And now this good news has been preached to you by those who preached in the power of the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. It is all so wonderful that even the angels are eagerly watching things happen. We’re going to stop there. The opening section of the book actually goes on for for quite a bit. Um I want to start by thinking about the folks who first received this letter from Peter. Verse one, I am writing to God’s chosen people who are living as foreigners in the provinces of Pontis, Galatia, Capidosia, Asia, and Bethany. So God’s chosen people who are living as foreigners. Who’s he talking to or who’s he talking about? There’s actually quite a bit of discussion on this. In another translation, it says to God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout the provinces. So Peter might be talking to folks who are literal strangers in the cities that they live in and work in. migrant workers who find themselves working in a city but they’re not native to that city and therefore have no rights in that city. So being a migrant worker was a class of people in Rome. They had no legal rights. They had no property. They were just above slaves and they were excluded from the Roman system that they were actually working to help build. So they lived in a society and yet were actually kind of excluded from that society. So, a current example for us might be folks who were evacuated um from their homes because of the wildfires this summer and they’re not on their homeland and instead they’ve been shipped to a hotel in the middle of the city. So, if there was an election in the city, they would not be able to vote because their home base is actually outside of the city even though they’re living in the city. and they might find temporary work in the city, but they’re not putting down roots because they live in a hotel and the city is not their home. So, they’re like, “We’re here. They’re here, but they’re not of here. They’re not staying here.” Why this matters is because we will hear the phrase, “God’s chosen people who are living as foreigners in the world, and we very quickly spiritualize that phrase, and we think, oh, this planet is not our real home. Our real home is in heaven. And when we think my real home is in heaven, not on this earth, then questions like, how do we relate with this world? How should I behave in this world? How does it relate to us? We skip those questions. We’re like, well, I’m not really part of this world. I belong to heaven. And this pass, this book wants us to realize, no, no, we are of earth, but we’ve become foreigners to this world. So, let me elaborate. If we are just temporary workers, then how do we relate with the world around us? And it’s kind of like elves in Lord of the Rings. They live in Middle Earth, but they don’t participate in the life of Middle Earth, and it doesn’t go well. And when bad things happen, they’re standing aside going, “Yeah, that’s really bad.” And the elves have to talk with each other and say, “Shouldn’t we get involved and bring hope to what is despair?” So as Christians uh disciples of Jesus, if we are uninvolved in the world’s affairs because you know we don’t really belong here, well then how does the world get better? How do we be salt and light in the world the way Jesus calls us to be salt and light? How do we engage in acts of justice if we don’t see ourselves part of this world? And yet scripture says do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with the Lord. How do we play our role in bringing God’s blessing to the world the way uh this whole story with God’s people began in Genesis 12 where through my people I will bring a blessing to the world. So we don’t want to see ourselves as not really belonging here. Rather we do belong here but it no longer feels like home anymore because we don’t fit especially as we grow in our faith. So I think a better path to understanding this book is to consider how in fact we have become strangers in our world. Um things change when you follow Jesus such that the way the world works doesn’t resonate with you anymore. Um you make new decisions that are out of step with the average person around you. So I noticed this one of my little frustrations and this is trivial. Uh it has to do with entertainment. like I don’t know what to do for entertainment anymore because my humor is not what it was when I was very weak in my faith. I’m not interested in crude jokes. I don’t want to hear sexual uh I don’t want to hear sexual jokes. I don’t want to watch uh sexually explicit material in my entertainment which is more and more common in entertainment these days. So I I feel outside of the entertainment industry because I I just this isn’t what I find entertaining. You might find that uh your business practices change and that things that used to be normal for you, you no longer have a taste for like getting a big profit or getting a big paycheck, but at the cost of treating someone unfairly loses its appeal and and you don’t want to engage in that. Or you might find you don’t have a stomach for your own family gathering at celebrations and at holidays because maybe there’s too much drinking, there’s too much gossip, there’s too much complaining, and you just don’t want to participate in that kind of behavior. And you find that as you don’t participate in that behavior, your family’s not particularly pleased with you. That they feel like you’ve gone weird and you should maybe leave. And that even as you restrain some of your sexual behavior might put you at odds with other people and even though you’re just trying to live your life, um others feel judged because you don’t participate in what they want to do. So you start to feel in whatever field that you just you don’t fit here anymore. And yet you’re part of society. You play a role in society. Um like you’re you’re part of this system. So what’s their response? So part of first Peter is to say when your home is no longer your home, you don’t feel, you know, that you’re settled in your workplace with your family, even perhaps in your own apartment, the church is your home. Um, and the first Peter’s going to talk a lot about church being your home. Uh, because especially if you imagine you’re a migrant worker, where is your community base? It’s church. And then how do you do that? And first Peter’s going to talk about how do you this is how you do the church thing. Um but there’s also a a couple uh good news pieces I want to highlight and it’s in verses one and two about how do you address this tension, this problem of not feeling at home. The first one verse one to God’s chosen people to God’s elect. This is a term that has been used all through the Bible for God’s people on earth. It started with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Jacob had 12 sons. Those 12 sons developed into the nation of Israel. This is God’s chosen nation, special to the Lord. And the ones who receive his special uh promise of love and care. And by calling the church God’s chosen people, he’s including them in the history of God’s work on earth. You are part of this special covenant. To this group of folks who experience being excluded in reality like in their life, you are part of something much bigger. You are part of a great community of the of the great community of the Lord with its blessings and its privileges and its responsibilities. You are not alone. Um you are not excluded. You belong to something magnificent. And you can say that I belong to something magnificent.

So in a few days it’s going to be orange shirt day, right? The national day for truth and reconciliation. We were not around when those treaties were signed and we were not part of the people who made those actual decisions. But we recognize that as Canadians, we take that history and that heritage as our own experience. Even if I was not part of the story, it’s my story and I must move forward in life with this as part of my story even though I didn’t make those first decisions. That’s a great way of thinking about becoming part of God’s people on earth. You are his elect people. You were not there when Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the, you know, the nation started, but you are part of that story now. This is your community, and you must move forward with that. Uh, I was thinking you could say to yourself, I am known by the Lord. When he looks in your eyes and you look back at him, you see that he knows you and he likes you and he is with you. He loves you in a beautiful special way. You are part of his people on earth and it’s magnificent.

And if you are part of God’s people on earth now and new folks are coming into the church and as they grow in their faith, they are feeling more and more excluded from the world, then we owe it to help everybody feel at home here. As Charles started the service, we’re a community of equals and we all play a role to help everybody here feel like this is home because they might not feel like home is out there anymore. And that starts by being friends with each other, walking alongside each other, helping each other figure out how to follow Jesus together. Um, so the second piece I want to highlight is in verse two. God the Father knew you and chose you long ago and his spirit has made you holy. As a result, you have obeyed him and have been cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ. May God give you more and more grace and peace. So the idea behind the god the father knowing us and choosing us is that it was his plan and initiative like he came after us. Uh he put the pieces in place for us to discover him and to find out how much he loved us. In fact the whole story of history is him unfolding his plan. So what’s happening to you? what you’re going through, the difficulty you are finding is not a surprise. It’s not unknown. It’s not necessarily even outside of the plan. So, there’s two life experiences we have that collide against each other. One life experience is, wow, life is hard. You know, I try to follow Jesus and someone in my family starts to fight me. I try to follow Jesus and I lose my promotion at work. I try to follow Jesus and I feel more alone. I try to follow Jesus and my temptations get stronger or my car blows up in the middle of Regent. Right? So that’s one side. The other reality that collides I had to include it. The other reality is Jesus said that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. God is all powerful. He’s able to do anything and Jesus reconciles me to the father. Why is my life so hard if Jesus is in charge and can do anything? Why does he not exercise his authority and his power and may make life easier for me and the truths collide against each other? And that’s part of what this book is talking about. But in the opening in verse two, God has the father has made a plan and you are part of it. And the Holy Spirit has set you apart for a special purpose, God’s purposes. and he is shaping your character so that it’ll have less sin in it and you will be more like Jesus and how you think and how you talk and how you behave. That’s being sanctified. You’ve been chosen by the father. You’ve been set apart by the spirit for obedience to Jesus and for his forgiveness and cleansing. And that always strikes me. We’ve been chosen for obedience to Jesus. We’ve been chosen to be obedient. Which means there is something about my obedience that is part of God unfolding his plan for creation. There is something about your obedience to Jesus that is part of God renewing the earth and unfolding his plan of salvation. So every hard decision you and I make that is our best effort at trying to be obedient in whatever limited capacity we have or limited understanding, every hard decision we make matters. It plays some kind of role and that is beautiful to the Lord. So when you choose to be sexually pure rather than give in to your desire expressed inappropriately, that plays a role in salvation somehow. When you choose to be patient and faithful with a friend or a family member when they’re being a jerk towards you, that plays a role. When you choose to be honest at work and you work well for your employer employer, but you also care for your clients, somehow that plays a role in God’s plan for creation. Every time you make a decision and think, I think this is how Jesus wants me to do this. You are part of God’s plan for his planet. You are doing his plan for his planet. You were set aside to be obedient. And through your obedience, God is doing what he wants to do with his creation. That is magnificent. And I want to add the way we come to our decisions about our behavior can be very different from each other and very different in decision to decision. Because sometimes you might um have a decision and you just use your logic and you come to a conclusion and you act on it. Great. At other times logic might not be the way, but you may have a strong pull towards a direction or a strong push away from a direction. Um and that’s just the spirit working in you. You can’t quite put words in it, but that might be how you make a decision to to obey Jesus. Other times, you might read scripture and realize, “Wow, that passage speaks directly to the situation I’m having. And so, whether I understand how this works or not, I’m going to do what scripture says.” That’s a way of making decisions. You might talk your idea out with another believer and consider all the different angles and come to a decision. That’s good, too. Um, there’s no one right way, but we’ve been chosen for obedience. And every act of obedience plays a role in God’s plan for renewing and saving his creation. That’s verse two. And when we live out being obedient to Jesus, we will inevitably run up against folks who don’t want to live obedient to Jesus. And that creates conflict. And that creates a sense of distance and feeling excluded. And we all want to feel included. But one day all will be revealed. And God’s redemption will come in a complete way. And our decisions and our behavior and the things we did that didn’t make sense, but we knew we had to do it that way. It will bring glory to Jesus. And and first Peter’s going to say, “Even those who didn’t respond to Jesus will give thanks for your behavior.” and will say, “Wow, you actually were showing me what it means to follow Jesus and I rejected it, but you were faithfully showing it to me.” And they will praise God. Until that day, we live as a group growing in the Lord together in a world that as we grow in our faith will exclude us, will push us away. We just won’t fit so much anymore. So, we are a beautiful bouquet of flowers in a hostile environment. So, let’s talk about this. What catches your attention? What stirs in your heart and mind in this passage? Let me summarize where we’ve been as disciples. As we grow in the Lord, we start to feel like strangers in our world, like temporary workers. We desired to go home and yet home eludes us. So, the church becomes home. And we must help each other. We must welcome each other at church. The passage calls the church God’s chosen people which includes us in the history of God’s chosen people right from Abraham. The people he calls into his covenantal love. You belong to something magnificent. But life is really hard and Jesus really is Lord and there’s a tension there. We are chosen by the father to be part of his plan. We are set aside by the spirit for obedience to Jesus and for forgiveness. Which means there’s something about your and my your and my obedience that is part of God unfolding his plan for his creation. So every heart decision you make matters. Every act of obedience contributes. It’s beautiful to the Lord. So what catches your attention? What stirs in your heart and mind and just these first two verses from first Peter? Two thoughts. I’m listening to an audio book again. It’s the second time we’ll listen to it by um an author that I enjoy. His name is John Mark Comr. He’s a pastor in Seattle. Young guy. He can often write about pretty serious important stuff in a way that’s light enough that you can actually swallow it if that makes sense. Yeah. So, this book is called God Has a Name, and the uh the subtitle is what you believe about God Will Shape Who You Become. It’s not a light or fluffy book. It’s like it’s quite a lot of thoughtful grit in it that you kind of have to chew over. It’s interesting. It’s well done. But some of the stuff is the same like how his identity and our identity are we do end up being his presence in the world. Like we we’re we’re kind of like a family resemblance, right? Like, you know, and have you seen you meet some families and you’re like, “Oh, you’re a whatever whatever because look at your nose. You clearly are, you know, like there’s some families that really have a resemblance.” And we are supposed to have a strong family resemblance, too. It’s kind of neat. And one thing I wanted to say, I think that Christians have a tendency to think, “Oh, we don’t belong, so it’s they ostracize us and they hate us and that’s just how it is and you can’t do anything about it.” And I get that. part of by doing things differently, even if you’re not being strident about it, you’re saying a there’s a different way to do it than how everybody is doing it. And also, no, I actually don’t agree with how you guys are doing it. And it’s hard to accept that. It’s easier if they’re being gracious about it, but really it’s people want to think that what they’re doing is the right thing. And so sometimes there’s a lot of push back like like even Shannon saying on standing on the doorstep of that woman’s home, she was not able to go, “Oh, hey, you know, thank you. You know, I’ve been so worried. I’m out of my mind or whatever was going on for her. There was a clash there, right? And good for you for continuing to be gracious about it instead of being like anyway. Um, you know, I wanted to Well, I know cuz it’s part of it. Hey, but you’re like family resemblance. It’s like, wait a second, there’s more going on here, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and sometimes what we offer though, like there’s the push back. Yeah. Yeah. But also what we have or what we’re trying to figure out is what people long for. like they want to feel like they’re at home with a bunch of people that they’re not like because that’s not normal in our world now. Now it’s like you got to be with your peeps. You got to be with the people that you’re all exactly like, whatever myth that is because there’s nobody that’s exactly like you. So good luck. But people and then they can’t disagree because they’ll get outed, right? You’ll get cancelled. And so there’s this whole thing now where people are feeling lonely everywhere, even in places that they seems like they should belong because they can’t disagree cuz they’ll just get, you know, bye girl, you know. And so if people would come in here and be like, “What the heck is with this little group of bunch of weirdos? It’s like a bunch of fruit salad because none of us are the same as anybody else in this room.” And yet there’s a lot of care here and we we’ve getting to know each other and value what each other brings to the mix even if it’s not how we would do it or we would bring it. And I think that that’s one of the things now that that the church can offer. Not everybody’s going to want it, but it’s what church can offer that people are starving for because they feel so not belonging in so many places. So there’s things like that that it’s like if we do take seriously his call to be what like him in the world, there are people that are going to go, “What is that? That is neat and weird. What’s going on here?” And they’ll and there won’t be the majority of people, but people will. So don’t don’t give up and be like, “Oh, we’re just the outcasts.” It’s like, “Nah, don’t play that role. Don’t bother.” So beautiful. I thought it’s so interesting that you talked about the quitico canoe trip and how you’re constantly struggling against the wind and against the elements and things that you absolutely cannot control. And when I’m dealing with people in my neighborhood, this tends to be my mission field of late. I find in their lives kind of the same thing. They’re battling against the elements. The strife is so much like that of an immigrant where you come to a place and you don’t feel at home and you aren’t at home and all of the things are strange and and everything seems to be working against you. And this is a lot of the cry that I’m hearing from people who are born here, whose families are here, and yet they still have that same feeling of this is not the way it’s supposed to work. And what God’s been leading me into is a lot of listening and being open to hearing things in their language and in their way without being offended. They’re telling their story, you know, don’t be offended by what they say, by what they use. That’s their language. We don’t have to use it. But in sharing that same feeling of, you know, I don’t feel like things are right here either. And just being able to draw them into the reality of there is more here than meets the eye. That there is a real battle going on and I’m willing to stand with you and help you through this battle. And I’ve been seeing changes in the people in the neighborhood. It’s been very cool. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. This is the price of free will. That there are those of us who choose to try to be obedient to God as best we can. And often that’s not great either. But then we are faced with the majority who don’t feel that they owe any allegiance to God. And even among those who say they are being obedient to God, they have become what they picture God. And often that God is horrible. We just have to continue to be obedient and not be defeated by those who choose not to be and those who would treat us badly because we do choose to be obedient. We have to remember some of the promises that God makes and that when we come up against those who are opposed to us, we need to remember that greater is he that was in me than he who is in the world. Yeah. Even though it may seem otherwise, we have to remember that as recent books and so on, you know, love wins, God wins. One of the ways that we win is, you know, we together as a church, that’s our strength. But he talks about that the people are it sounds to me like in his opening that he’s speaking to a diaspora. Yeah. And a diaspora who is not welcome. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Let me offer a prayer and we’ll close with a song. Father, uh you are so good to us and I praise you and I thank you that you have sought us out and invited us into your story of redemption. And Holy Spirit, I praise you for the work you are doing, changing us and helping us to live uh as Jesus is to to understand who Jesus is and to live like him. And Jesus, I praise you for the work you are doing in us, the work you are doing in saving your creation. Jesus, thank you for being Lord. Help us, Father, uh to follow you faithfully. Show us how to be obedient. Show us how to be a place that creates home. that through this we would bring glory to you and a smile on your face and really a celebration that when you look Lord may we be a celebration and a beautiful bouquet when you look at us we praise you we love you amen thank you for listening to our podcast today Ministries is located in Winnipeg Manitoba you are invited to join our service in person or over Zoom please use the contact us link to send an email to the church office and request the address or Zoom link. If you would like to use these podcasts as part of your home church or local church gathering, you are free to do so. We do request that you let us know. If there is any other way that we can help you in your ministry, please send us an email.