1 Peter - Following Jesus Sample

If you have put your faith in Jesus Christ, you are a person with a glorious future, but your privileges are not all in the future. Peter wants to show his Christian readers more about what they have now.

Peter has been calling on his friends to keep craving the ‘spiritual milk’ of the Lord’s word (2:2). As Christians engage with Christ’s word, they are engaging with Christ himself. They are coming to him (v. 4). We can’t see Jesus yet, but we can encounter him today as we hear his word and respond rightly to it. Let’s keep coming to Jesus!

• We come to Jesus – that is what we do. But what is God doing as we do that (v. 5)?

God is at work on a building project. We are ‘being built into a spiritual house’. Peter pictures Jesus as ‘the living Stone’ and Christians as ‘living stones’ (vv. 4–5). God is joining us to Jesus and to each other to make something new and hugely important. Peter will use lots of other images from the old Jerusalem temple to explain this.

• What does Peter want these believers to know about Jesus, ‘the living Stone’ (v. 4)?

Here are two different views of Jesus. God sees Jesus as precious. He is God’s chosen one. But when Jesus came to earth, people did not choose Jesus. They rejected him. They didn’t treat him as precious at all.

Peter wants to reassure his Christian readers. They live amongst people who continue to reject Jesus and his people. Peter wants these believers to know that in choosing Jesus and seeing him as precious, they are on God’s side. That is the side to be on. People rejected Jesus. They killed him. But Jesus is not dead now. He is the living stone. He is the living foundation of God’s new community.

We, together with Christ, are being built into a new temple, a new spiritual house, where God lives by his Spirit. If we can, we choose our homes with great care. They are very important to us. It is a tremendous privilege to be part of the place God chooses to make his home!

Pray

Thank God that he is building us, ‘like living stones’, into a spiritual house where he chooses to dwell.