Light Living

1 Peter 2:4-10

June 21, 2026 (Father’s Day) • Mount Pleasant UMC

“I’ll know it when I see it!” I bet you’ve said that phrase a time or two. Maybe you’ve been out shopping for the perfect gift for a family member—or that thing for the person who has everything—and you tell someone, “I don’t know what I’m looking for but I’ll know it when I see it!” Or you head into the kitchen, craving a snack, and when someone asks what you’re looking for, you say, “I don’t know but I’ll know it when I see it! Or my stomach will!” Or you’re looking to hire a new person, and when you’re asked what kind of person you want for the job, you might even say, “I don’t quite know yet, but I’ll know them when I see them.” Our “word of life” today is kind of like that in that it’s a hard word to define or to give a good description of (cf. Gupta, 15 New Testament Words of Life, pg. 162). That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try, of course, because the word that comes from 1 Peter is a vitally important word, especially for those of us in the spiritual heritage of John Wesley. Wesley said that purpose of the people called Methodist was to “spread Scriptural holiness over the land,” and that’s still our purpose: to help people get a glimpse of holiness. But that wasn’t just John Wesley’s idea; he got it from the Bible in places like 1 Peter.

This morning we come to one of the two letters Peter wrote in the New Testament. Yes, Peter, the rock, the disciple once known as Simon until Jesus changed his name and his destiny (cf. Matthew 16:18). It’s funny (at least to me) that, for as big of a role the Peter plays in the Gospels and in Acts, he has so little presence elsewhere in the New Testament. Just two short letters, neither one written to specific churches but to Jesus followers scattered across Asia. It’s very likely these letters were widely circulated because who wouldn’t want to hear a word from the chief of the disciples? And so, as we near the end of our trek through the New Testament’s “words of life,” we come to something that seems to be Peter’s preoccupation and desire for the church: holiness.

Peter didn’t, of course, come up with the idea of holiness. The word and the idea is all through the Old Testament and was an integral part of Peter’s Jewish identity. Very early on, God had told his people they were to “be holy” because God himself is holy (cf. Leviticus 11:44). Holiness was and is “the essential character of God himself” (Marshall, 1 Peter [IVPNTC], pg. 52), which is why this command from Leviticus is repeated in the New Testament. God wants and expects his people to be like him, and so Peter frames his letter with that oh-so-Jewish idea: “Just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do” (1 Peter 1:15).

When you read the Old Testament, you find stories about holiness all through it. One of the most famous stories involves Moses, a man out in the desert tending sheep, on the run and in hiding because he killed a man in Egypt a few years back. And somehow, he notices a bush that is on fire, but it is not being burned up. When he approaches the bush, he hears a voice calling his name and saying, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). Now, the ground did not change, nor did the bush. Holiness had nothing to do with the location. The ground wasn’t holy by itself; the ground was holy because it experienced what Biblical scholar Nijay Gupta calls “the concentrated presence of God” (163). Exodus says, “Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God” (3:6). A bit later on, there’s a famous passage in the book of Isaiah, telling how Isaiah ended up being called to be a preacher of God’s word. Isaiah is in the Temple, in a time of deep grief. King Uzziah, a friend of his, has died and Isaiah is wondering what the future holds, so he’s gone to the Temple, the place that represented God on earth. And, to Isaiah’s surprise, while he’s there he gets a glimpse or a vision of the Lord. He writes, “I saw the Lord, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1). He doesn’t actually see God, but he does hear the worship of heaven. He hears seraphim, a kind of angel, singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory” (6:3). And do you remember how Isaiah reacted to being in the presence of pure holiness? “Woe to me!” he says. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (6:6). Moses and Isaiah both show us that being in the presence of true holiness is overwhelming. Isaiah realizes he’s unworthy to be there (so does Moses), but in both cases, God welcomes them anyway and proceeds to send them both on his mission.

Holiness in Jewish perspective is all about God. Maybe the best definition is "set apart.” Just as God is different from us, we’re called to be “set apart” from the world around us. Basically this: wherever God is, there is holiness. The first time I went to Israel was on a trip led by Bishop Woodie White, the bishop who ordained me, and on the first morning we gathered on boats on the Sea of Galilee as Bishop White preached. He reminded us that morning that we were on the very lake Jesus walked on, but in a lot of the places throughout the country, we may not know exactly where this or that happened. So, Bishop White said, that makes all of the land holy, because in every place, we can say, “It might be here! He might have walked here!” He said, “I’m going to be looking for Jesus everywhere we go because you never know, this might be the place.” It reminded me the land isn’t holy because of where it is or because the soil or water are somehow different (though I do have water from the Jordan River in my office). No, it’s holy, set apart, because he was there. Holiness is wherever God is.

And that’s why Peter can say to his people, “Be holy, because God is holy.” In the Old Testament, there was a lot of concern about what was holy and what was not. And, it was believed, God lived in the Temple, in the place called the Holy of Holies. But when Jesus came, and when he died on the cross, the wall (or curtain) of separation (cf. Ephesians 2:14) between the Holy of Holies and the rest of the world was torn, broken, opened (cf. Matthew 27:51). God no longer dwells in a building made by human hands (cf. Acts 7:48; 17:24); he dwells in each and every one who call upon his name. He lives in you and he lives in me, and that’s why we can dare to accept the challenge to “be holy”—because we are a place where God is. And ultimately, that is the promise for the culmination of all things. In the book of Revelation (which we will get to next week), we are given this promise, this glimpse of the future: “God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God” (Revelation 21:3). Holiness is wherever God is, and when God shows up, you’ll know it when you see it.

In this morning’s passage, another one of my favorites by the way, Peter expands his description of the people of God, the place where God dwells, using four primary phrases and two additional promises—all drawn from Hebrew Scripture. Here is what Peter says you are: “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy people, God’s special possession” (2:9). Those are some packed phrases, so let’s try to unpack them a bit! First, “a chosen people.” We probably all have some sense of what it means to be chosen. For me, it brings back memories of lining up on the playground for a kickball game with two usually self-appointed captains picking teams. I know it’s hard to believe but I was not usually the first one chosen. It was more like, “There isn’t anyone else left? Okay, I’ll take Dennis.” But we’ve all been chosen from time to time—for a job, to be a friend, as a spouse, for a leadership position. Peter pulls this phrase out of his religious history because Israel knew what it was to be chosen. God had chosen them to be his “special people,” Exodus (19:6) says. But he didn’t just choose them so they could feel special. He chose them for a task, a mission. Way back at the beginning, he told Abraham (forefather of the Jewish people) he would be “blessed to be a blessing” (cf. Genesis 12:1-3). And later that mission was explained even more clearly when God called the Hebrew people to be servants (cf. Isaiah 44:1. Chosenness has never meant privilege. It means servanthood, which Jesus embodied when he washed the feet of his closest friends and told them, “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you” (John 13:15). You are a chosen people—chosen to serve the world.

Second, Peter says, you are a royal priesthood. That’s a harder phrase to relate to, since we are not royalty and we tend to think of the priesthood as a professional occupation. That phrase, “royal priesthood,” indicates a group of priests who belong to a king (cf. Marshall 74), and the king we belong to is, of course, King Jesus. But what does a priest do? Let’s ignore what our own experience might be with that title because in the Bible, a priest is the person who has access to the king (God), who serves him and who offers sacrifices on behalf of the people. A priest is someone who stands in the gap, and in the Protestant tradition that Methodists are a part of, one of the big ideas is the “priesthood of all believers.” The New Testament says we no longer need someone to represent us before God; all of us are priests to each other, priests to the world. We all represent God; we all bring the world to the king through our prayers, our service and our worship. That’s why Peter says to everyone: you are a royal priesthood. Part of your service is bringing people before God and representing God to the world. You are set apart as servants of a king.

Therefore, you are a holy nation. Now Peter is getting even more direct, using the world “holy” to describe the people, to describe us. Holiness, remember, is where God is, so Peter is saying we are the presence of God in the midst of the world. To put it another way: if anyone is going to see Jesus in the world, they’re going to see it through us. And, just as an aside, when he says “nation,” he’s talking about a collective group, not necessarily a political body like our country or another one. Despite what some claim, there is really no such thing as a “Christian nation,” ours or anyone else’s. There are Christians in a nation, but the nation itself, as a body, cannot commit its life to Jesus. That doesn’t mean we don’t seek to, again as Wesley said, spread holiness across the land. We most certainly do. We live as the presence of Jesus wherever we are and we hope for and live for and pray for everyone to know Jesus. But until the day that is promised in Philippians, the day when “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:10), we keep living in the way God would have us live because we are a holy nation. We are the visible evidence of God’s presence on earth. No pressure.

And that leads to Peter’s fourth name for God’s people: “God’s special possession.” This very well may be my favorite because when I first learned this verse, it was in the King James Version. It’s actually better there; it says we are “a peculiar people.” I understand why more modern translations don’t use that word because it doesn’t mean now what it did in the 1600’s. Peter isn’t saying you’re strange, though you may be. The word he uses there means something purchased, something possessed, and here’s my favorite: something worth saving. You are valuable. You’re not just a trinket that God doesn't think about much. We all have stuff like that, right? Things we have but we don’t pay much attention to them. Like, “I remember when Aunt Matilda gave me that keychain but I don’t know where it is now.” No, you are someone God wanted, someone God purchased at a high cost—the life of his Son, Jesus. You are worth saving, worth dying for. You are even important enough that God will come and dwell within you, making you holy, setting you apart from the rest of the world. So maybe you are strange, peculiar in that sense, because being loved and wanted like that is largely something the world just does not understand. You are chosen. You are royal. You are special. You are holy.

We’re beginning to see, then, that holiness is a matter of being different, not in our behaviors necessarily but in our whole life. That’s what Peter says next, that we are different from what we once were and different from the world around us. “Once you not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (2:10). Because of that truth, we make different choices from the world around us. We live differently from the way the world says we should. We make choices that lead to life rather than death (cf. Deuteronomy 30:19). Sometimes I think people hear the word “holiness” or “holy living” and we think it’s impossible. We think it’s a burden. I hear people say it’s “no fun” to be a Christian. But holiness we never meant to be a burden. It’s a privilege, that the creator of the universe chooses to live within us and through us and to give us very life for us. One scholar compares holiness to being accepted as an Olympic athlete. It’s a privilege, an honor, and you train and work and eat and live in a certain way so that you can live up to the privilege you have been given. It’s the same with God. He welcomes us but he expects us to live in a certain way, the way he wants us to (cf. Gupta 165).

The good news is that we don’t have to summon up the strength on our own to live that way. Peter says God has called us out of darkness into his wonderful light (2:9) and he wants us to live in that light. In the passage just past when we read this morning, Peter urges his readers, “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” (2:12). “The entire sweep of the Bible teaches that Christians in non-Christian environments are not to be worried so much about changing their environments as they are to remain faithful in whatever kind of environment they find themselves” (NIV Application Commentary on the Bible: One-Volume Edition, pg. 1256). Live as people of the light, set apart in a world of darkness; that’s holiness. Live in the light, and God himself will live in us, giving us the strength and the desire to engage in such “light living.” Then people will see the way we’re living and give praise to God. Because God is seen wherever people of holiness are.

So what does “light living” mean today? In past generations, “holy living” easily fell into traps of legalism, where a whole lot of rules and boundaries defined what it meant to “be holy.” It meant wearing certain clothes and not wearing other styles, not just to church but certainly there. Women were to wear dresses and men were to wear ties; that somehow showed you were truly Christian. Holiness meant not going to certain establishments. I had a friend whose church tradition defined “holy living” as not going to movie theaters—because someone might see you there and think you were going to an R-rated movie. This was in the heyday of the video stores, which they were allowed to go to, and when I asked what the difference was, because you could easily rent R-rated movies or worse, I didn’t get an answer. Today, of course, we can get far worse than what is in the theaters from the comfort of our own home. Everything is available via streaming. What does holiness look like in this setting?

I believe holiness today does still mean we make different choices than most of the world around us. We live by a different value system, one that does not focus so much on acquisition, getting more and more stuff, but one that focuses instead on blessing the world around us. No one is really sure who said it, but the proverb is true: “Live simply so that others can simply live.” It’s not true that the one with the most toys wins. In Biblical terms, the one who “wins” is the one who becomes most like Jesus. And so we give a cup of cold water to the person who is thirsty. We listen to a friend who is struggling. We value each and every person who walks this planet because God values them and loves them. We live by a different set of values and we bring those values to everything we say and do. As people who are seeking to be holy, we vote and we respond and we care and we serve and we live as people who have seen the light of Jesus Christ. We live differently.

And we suffer differently. Yes, I know, that sounds strange and maybe even makes us uncomfortable. I get it, but it’s true. Jesus said we would have trouble (cf. John 16:33) and that the world would hate us because it hated him first (cf. John 15:18). The New Testament witness is that suffering is going to be part of our experience in this broken world, whether through opposition or through physical illness or disease. Suffering should not take us by surprise, but as people within whom God dwells, we are able to face it in his strength. Peter, who was most likely writing during or after a time of intense persecution of the early church, says that trials come “so that the proven genuineness of your faith…may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1:7). And, more than that, he says we can rejoice even when we are suffering. That doesn’t mean we live in denial and say, “Yay! I’m suffering!” Or even, “It’s God’s will that I suffer.” That’s bad theology. God doesn’t desire that anyone suffers, but we live in a world broken by sin and sickness and disease and bad things happen. God doesn’t cause suffering but he will be with us in it, is always with us in it. Maybe you’ve heard someone talk about John Wesley’s understanding of the way God’s grace works in prevenient, justifying and sanctifying ways. But the one we usually forget (or ignore) is glorifying grace. When asked by a local doctor why the Methodists he knew were so peaceful at their death, Wesley said, “Our people die well” (https://seedbed.com/dying-well-according-to-john-wesley/). It’s not because we seek it out or long for suffering but because we know, again in Wesley’s words, “The best of all is, God is with us.” God dwells in us, making us holy, making us more like him, even in suffering.

But notice Peter says everything, even suffering, is meant to result in “praise, glory and honor” (1:7). Holiness is also demonstrated in worship. There may be nothing more counter-cultural that we do than gather here each week and worship a God we cannot see but who lives within us. The wondering world doesn’t get that. Why would we waste our time? Why doesn’t the church do something useful? The world doesn’t understand and sometimes the church forgets that our whole purpose here on this planet is not to be a social service agency or a country club or a political action committee. The world already has plenty of those things. We are here to lift up the name of Jesus so that others will be drawn to him and find eternal life. Everything else we do, while maybe “nice things,” is secondary. We are a church gathered to thank God for dwelling within us, for giving us a new life, and for bringing us from darkness into the light. We come here to acknowledge that the way he calls us is the only way to true life, the life that really is life (cf. 1 Timothy 6:19). We come here to be a community defined by holiness, to better love God, love people and love life. We are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation and a peculiar people—so that others might see the light of Christ. There is an old story that says when Jesus returned to heaven, an angel asked him what his plan was now for spreading the message. “I have a people down there,” Jesus said, “and they will spread my message.” The angel said, “But what if they don’t? What is your back-up plan?” And Jesus said, “I have no back-up plan” (Coker, Let the Church Be the Church, pg. ). He still doesn’t. Let’s pray.