The Elect Exiles [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

The power of his call is greater than your rebellion. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, The Elect Exiles, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. Now, if you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

So as you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. More on this later in the program. But right now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. Okay, are you ready for some good news? You might be like an exile in this world, but you are no ordinary exile. You are, Peter says, the elect exiles. You might be a sojourner, but you are a saint. You might sometimes feel like a misfit, but you are, according to the Word of God, a marvel.

You are a marvelous misfit. You are the elect exiles. That will be our theme as we start into a series on the epistle of 1 Peter. And we start today with just the first verse, and we'll read some later in the message from the first chapter, but just the first verse is really most of what I need for today. We'll go faster in coming weeks, but today, one half of a verse is what I need.

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who are elect exiles of the dispersion. One of our staff members, his son asked him one day, his young son said, why does Spider-Man take the school bus to school? Why didn't he just, you know, web sling and swing himself to class?

Isn't that cute? It's sort of like asking, why does Superman take the elevator to his office at the newspaper job at the Daily Planet? And the answer is fairly complicated. It is, on the one hand, sometimes the superhero is protecting his or her identity in order to protect loved ones from being targeted, perhaps, by evil. But the real answer is that they are both superhero and mild-mannered Clark Kent. And so the drama, you know, is heightened by the fact that they are both seemingly ordinary citizens, but are really a superhero.

And people don't know their identity. And I like the superhero movies. And you just find yourself watching them sometimes going, oh, just tell her who you are.

You know, Peter Parker and the girls not interested in them, but she ought to be. And I'm like, feel me, I just tell her I'm Spider-Man. Or when the people are misunderstanding Batman and think that he might be a menace to society, I wish Bruce Wayne sometimes would just tell everybody, I'm not just an eccentric multi-millionaire.

I care about Gotham City. I'm actually Batman. But you live in this tension, this alter ego, this both-and. And what we're going to see in 1 Peter, starting in verse 1, is that this is the way Peter addresses Christians. This is the way God wants us to understand ourselves to the elect exiles, as we'll see today, elect, the chosen, the favored, the heirs, the co-heirs with Christ, the superheroes, who are also exiles in this world. Like, here's what you are as a Christian.

You are not by any means an ordinary citizen. You are destined for glorious eternal reign with the Son of God in a new heaven and a new earth. In the spirit realm, if we had any real idea of the amount of power and authority that has been invested in us by God through the gift of His Spirit on this Pentecost day, remembering the power of God that came in that first century, the power that raised Jesus from the dead, the Bible says over and over, is the same power that has raised you to new life in Christ and is at work in and through you.

You've got more power in a single word spoken in the name of Jesus than all the power of every demon in the invisible kingdom. You are a superhero. You're not ordinary. And yet, you live in this world and you roll your trash can out to the road and pay your taxes and get up and go to the job, maybe that supervisor you don't like that much. And when it's hot outside, you sweat and you feel too hot. And when it's cold, you wish you'd warm up and you get misunderstood and mistreated.

You're like a Clark Kent that everybody else thinks is just kind of a real ordinary, boring person in their eyes and yet you're Superman. That's the tension we live in as Christians. And what 1 Peter, and this is the reason I'm drawn to 1 Peter for us this summer, what 1 Peter is about, it is about addressing Christians in a first century world that is owned and operated by a Roman Empire that has not issued an edict that says Christianity is illegal, but the persecution is real. And the Christians are misunderstood, mistreated. And I think that in our day and time in this American culture for Christians, we need to study some on this because how are we to live in a world that all of a sudden seems like misunderstands us, like it happened in my lifetime, like in the span of my own ministry, where almost, you know, when I started ministry, almost everybody in America went to church that I talked to and church was revered and Christians were highly thought of and how could that all change so fast, where you're in a culture that really honestly most people don't go to church and the weight of the inertia of the public and social media and vitriol against Christians has become more intense really quickly. And it hurts to be misunderstood, it hurts to be mistreated, and I'm not sure what levels of persecution we might face.

How are we going to live in that? That's what 1 Peter is all about. It's to the elect exiles.

You're not just an exile and you're not just elect, you're the elect exiles. Modern day life coaches call it mindfulness, but it isn't a new psychological program, and it isn't rooted in Eastern religion. Mindfulness, living in the present is God's idea and the Bible unveils the way Pastor Alan Wright invites you to savor life each day. When you make your gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's eight messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Make your gift today and learn how to savor the textures and flavors of God's grace each moment in the moment every day of your life. The Gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support. When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues.

Here once again is Alan Wright. The world in which Peter was writing probably was around 62 AD, probably under Nero's leadership. And most evangelical scholars agree this is Peter that's writing this. And so he's writing to a culture that has some similarities to our own. They were highly advanced, the Roman Empire, and they were known famously for their roads, their transportation, their technology, lots of love of cultural things and arts. And yet it was also highly immoral. It was a real sex-soaked, lust-driven culture.

It was a culture of idolatry, idols on every corner. And into this, Peter writes this gracious, powerful letter to the elect exiles. I struggled a lot with the title for the series because I started with elect exiles right here from verse 1 because, well, that tells it all. But on the other hand, elect and exile, both those are not really warm words. My wife said, don't name it that.

Nobody likes either one of those words. But anyway, I went through every kind of title possibility and we wound up with going right back to elect exiles. And we don't like the word elect that much because, you know, you just, it just sounds like something the Puritans would say. I mean, we just don't, you don't put it in the church bulletin and there'll be a covered dish supper for the elect after the meeting. It just doesn't sound, it doesn't sound right. And it can sound a little bit haughty too, like, you know, who are you as a Christian?

I'm the elect of God. We just don't like the idea of a God that might be seeming arbitrary in the way that he interacts with us as if he is just picking out some for heaven and some for hell. We hate the idea of that. Hate the idea of fatalism.

I hate the idea of fatalism. Like the story of the Calvinist who got up one morning, fell down the stairs, got up and dusted himself off and said, shoo, I'm glad that's over. We don't want to feel like we live in a predetermined world, you know, and the word elect can have some of that.

And we need to remember when you think about this word elect, which I hope that by the end of the day, you'll come to love. We need to remember the Bible's full of, and Peter himself in 2 Peter 3, you know, speaks of how much God wants everybody to be saved. He says at verse 9 of 2 Peter 3, the Lord's not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness.

He's talking about why hadn't Jesus come back yet? He said, but is patient towards you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. Paul wrote this in 1 Timothy. It's good and it's pleasing in the sight of God our Savior who desires all people to be saved. So there's that deep pervasive reality of the heart of God is he's not capricious.

He's not just, he's not just fatalistically, you know, damning some people and all that, that caricature of it all. But at the same time, the Bible and the New Testament echoing the shadow of chosenness in the Old Testament where was the chosen people who were chosen not because Israel, the people were not chosen because they were more special. They were not chosen because they had more merit. In fact, the whole story of the Old Testament is how much they failed, right, over and over. They were chosen as God's sovereign grace to pour favor into a people so that they could be a light unto the world. So that's the old covenant, but then when you come in the New Testament, there's just so much that is affirming this image of being chosen in Christ as Ephesians 1 says. Like Paul in Romans 8 is just so clear in what is maybe one of the most powerful beautiful chapters in the Bible, Romans 8, verse 29, those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son. And those whom he predestined he also called. And those whom he called he also justified. And those whom he justified he also glorified. So I'm talking about a mystery, but there's a way in which the only reason that you're a Christian is because of the predestining, choosing, gracious power of God. And yet at the same time, the Bible says that we choose God.

Romans 10, 9, the same Paul who just wrote that in Romans 8 says in Romans 10, 9, if you confess with your mouth, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved. So this is a mystery as how both things are true at the same time. But I want to talk to you about this salutation of Peter's to the elect exiles with the intent of letting you see the purpose, power, and beauty of this notion of being the elect. Because if you're a superhero who also has an alter ego, who is just an ordinary citizen, you really need to embrace the fullness of what it means to be the elect.

That's what he's saying here. And the first thing that I want to highlight is that to be in the elect means to be the recipient of perfect grace. His power is greater than your stubbornness. His wisdom is greater than your folly. Hallelujah. I'm glad for a father like that. The power of his call is greater than your rebellion. If my son Bennett when he was little were in the front yard and started heading to go into the street to get the soccer ball that had rolled out there and a car was coming and I said, Bennett stop.

Bennett come here. And the toddler stopped, turned around, and came to me. We would not criticize the father for being over controlling. We would laud him for his love and be so thankful that his words carried authority.

That his call was effective. After all, how much willpower does a blind person have to just start seeing? How much willpower does a dead person have to become alive again? Jesus did not come to make bad people better. He came to make dead people alive. And that requires sometimes standing outside of a tomb of a decomposing body and saying, Lazarus come forth.

Thank God that his voice carries power to be effective in what he calls out. If he says, let there be light, then darkness will flee. And you've been born again to a living hope because of this perfect deep grace that in the mystery of God's goodness has made it possible for you to actually choose him. We are born in sin so we are born spiritually blind and we need a miracle in order to be able to see. To be the elect means not that you have been chosen in a capricious manner randomly by some fatalistic God. What it means is that God wants you to trace grace back to its earliest source in its most radical expression and that is that you are not responsible for your salvation in the least. But instead you acknowledge you were born in sin with no real capacity to even make the proper choices.

You don't have to teach a child to sin. My daughter-in-law Amy, when they lived in Washington last year for a year, she nannied for a first grader, you know, during COVID, help educate her and just spend that time, you know, and all that. And so she did everything, you know, to play with her. And she said that they played Candyland one time, you know, the game, board game. And the little girl just looked at Amy. She said, you might want to close your eyes because one of us is going to cheat. I love that.

It's like, you're so childlike. You don't even know how to cover up your sin yet. It's just there.

It's just there. Get Alan Wright's daily blessing. It's free and just a click away at pastoralan.org. With so much worry about yesterday's failures and so much hurry getting ready for tomorrow's tasks, sometimes it's hard to focus on the moment that matters most right now in a hurried, worried season. God invites you into the present.

Modern day life coaches call it mindfulness, but it isn't a new psychological program and it isn't rooted in Eastern religion. Mindfulness living in the present is God's idea and the Bible unveils the way pastor Alan Wright invites you to savor life each day. When you make your gift today, we'll send you pastor Alan's eight messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Make your gift today and learn how to savor the textures and flavors of God's grace each moment in the moment every day of your life. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support. When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860 or come to our website pastoralan.org.

Thank you. Now with pastor Alan, as we kick off a new series, this one is called the Elect Exiles and this was the very first one of this series so excited to present it. Really excited for listeners to join us on a journey through the Epistle of First Peter and we're going to go through it pretty much passage by passage, section by section. And today and tomorrow we really don't get further than verse one where Peter writes, to those who are elect exiles.

What an interesting phrase. You're the elect. You're the co-heirs. You're the children of God. You are the ones that are seated with Christ and destined to reign with Him forever. And you're exiles. You're like aliens in the world. You're like misfits. You are in that sense like a superhero.

Nobody knows it. You're Clark Kent during the day and they think that you're kind of a nerd and you don't quite fit in but you actually are destined for a part in the blessing and saving of the world. So that's what First Peter's about. How do we live in this crazy mixed up world knowing who we are in Christ and yet every day having to live with the reality that others may not know who we are and don't treat us that as if we're special at all in fact may ostracize or even revile us. And Peter's got a lot to say about that. I can't think of anything more timely than a study of First Peter. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.