Sermon Transcript
We can go ahead and turn to our scripture for this morning. We’re still in the book of 1 Peter. If you’re new here, we, uh, we go through books of the Bible at a time, kind of verse by verse, till we get all the way through. So we are in the book of 1 Peter now and continuing, but don’t worry, it’s not like you’re walking in the middle of a movie and you’ll have no idea what’s going on. You can drop in any week and pick up exactly what we’re talking about.
So 1 Peter chapter 2, We’re going to be looking at verses 4 through 10, and it’ll be up on the screen for you if you want to follow along that way. So, 1 Peter chapter 2, 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, a stone of stumbling, a rock of offense. They stumble because they disobey the Word, which they were destined to do.
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of His own possessions, 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. I had to look up precisely what a cornerstone was. I had some sense that maybe it was the first brick or stone you lay when you’re building a structure, Or, I thought I heard it was the top stone in, like, an archway that kind of holds the whole weight of the archway.
It turns out that’s a keystone, in case anybody asks you in trivia. A cornerstone is a little bit different than that. A cornerstone is the first block that you would lay when building a structure, but more specifically, it is the stone in which all other stones are set in reference. If you’ve ever laid tile in your kitchen or bathroom, you might have encountered this phenomenon. Depending on how close the tiles were to each other.
So let’s say there was no gap in between the tiles. The first tile that you laid determined where every other tile in the room would be. So if that first one was skewed 1 degree, then the next one is skewed 1 degree, and then the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one. And instead of having this nice straight line down your bathroom, you have this curve that you have to deal with. There is no way to unskew the second one without resetting the first one.
You can’t say, well, I know the first one is off, so let me reset the second one back to 0 degrees, because then it would hit the first one, and you can’t have overlapping tile, or at least my wife wouldn’t want to have overlapping tile somewhere. You must go back and change the first one, or just live with the distortion in the room of the curve. Now, if you were a smart person and laid a string across the room, and aligned each tile to the string instead of the tile before it and left a gap in between each tile, then you’re aligning everything to the string and not the tile before it. But in that case, it is the string that is now the functional cornerstone because everything is aligned to that. So whether your cornerstone happens to be a piece of string or if it’s a tile, whatever, every stone or tile finds its position in reference to the cornerstone.
There is no way around it. That is what a cornerstone is. As you might have guessed, buildings and tile floors are not the only things that have cornerstones. Our lives do as well. We all structure our life around something.
Whether we realize it or not, everything we do is done in reference to our cornerstone, whatever our cornerstone happens to be. So, some examples. Before Beth and I had kids, I wanted to get a motorcycle. This is right about the time, about 7 years ago, when gas prices first shot through the roof. And so I thought, hey, a motorcycle would be a great way to save some money, because each of us had pretty long commutes at that point.
So there’s my cornerstone: save money and look cool if possible, right? But primarily save money. At least that’s what I was saying. So then Beth tells me she’s pregnant. And my first reaction— feel free to judge me, always feel free to judge me, that’s fine— my first reaction was, okay, I hugged and celebrated first, but after that, it wasn’t like, hey, let’s call people.
My first reaction was, well, I guess I’m not getting a motorcycle now. Why? Why the instant change? Because suddenly saving money wasn’t nearly as important as make sure I stay alive. No longer would decisions primarily be checked against how much does it cost.
Now decisions would primarily be checked against what is best for the kid, because taking care of the kid had become the cornerstone, and staying alive seemed like it was the best thing I could do for the kid. Before that, you’re like, didn’t you care about staying alive before you had kids? Not really, just, it didn’t really cross my mind that much. It didn’t seem that important. I figured if it’s just Beth and me and I wreck the bike and I become an organ donor, I mean, that’s sad, of course, sure, right?
But she could move on. And let’s face it, she’d probably do better the second time around, right? She would have learned from her mistakes. That’s what you would do. But if I leave my kid without a dad, that’s much more serious.
So basically, in that moment, when Beth said, I’m pregnant, I enthroned a new cornerstone. And I might guess at this point you’re wondering about yourself, what you base your life around. You might be thinking you have multiple cornerstones, like job and family and saving enough for the future and Jesus, of course, if you’re a Christian, and you think, hey, all those things are pretty important, and don’t they just kind of adjust around each other? Maybe by what is most important in the moment, like the kid needs something, so you sacrifice some of the other ones to take care of the kid while the kid needs it, and then the job has an urgent need, so then you make some sacrifices of these other priorities to meet the needs of the job. So you might be wondering, is it possible to have multiple cornerstones instead of just one?
And I’d say yes, that works fine until it doesn’t. It works fine until you are either going to be at the kid’s birthday party or the work presentation, and you can’t do both. And which stone is going to adjust and which stone is going to stay fixed? Or, or maybe you have a big plan to get out of debt and you’re on a very strict budget, and everything that you eat and even how far you drive the car, all of this was planned into the budget. All of it is aligned to how it will get— serve your goal to get out of debt.
But all of a sudden, you need to buy a last-minute plane flight to somewhere. Maybe a loved one is sick on the other side of the country, and you’ve got to choose. Am I buying the flight, or am I saving the money? And you can’t do both. Those moments are what we might call a cornerstone conflict.
One is going to win out. Both cornerstones were coexisting just fine until they came into conflict. Contact, like starting to build a house at 2 different corners. This is probably not a good idea. And you think this stone and this stone don’t really have much to do with each other, but as you continue to build the house, those 2 cornerstones will eventually intersect, and then what do you do?
You have to go back and change one of them to align to the other. One must win out. Okay, all of that was intro. I hope you enjoyed it. And now that we all know something, a little something about cornerstones, let’s look at our text again.
We have 4 points for today. Don’t stress to try to write them all down real quick. As we go through them one by one, they will come up on the screen. But all of them, to begin with, are 1, Jesus is the true cornerstone. 2, we’ve rejected the cornerstone.
3, how do we then accept the cornerstone since we have rejected him? And finally, the result of accepting the cornerstone. So first, Jesus is the true cornerstone. Peter, the author of this little letter, quotes Isaiah when God said, verse 6, behold, I am laying a stone in Zion, a cornerstone chosen and precious. And whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.
Listen to that. Whoever believes in Jesus will not be put to shame. The word there could also mean crushed or embarrassed. The one who believes in him will not be crushed, will not be embarrassed, which means this is making quite a bold claim. Saying, if you center your life on Jesus, you will never experience shame or be crushed.
That’s a bold claim. It also implies what we will prove in a second, that if we base our lives around anything else, if we base our lives around anything other than Jesus, we will come to shame, ruin, collapse. So here’s why. Everything we can base our lives on other than Jesus has the potential to let us down. Anything else is not a stable foundation because anything else can move on us right when we want to count on it the most.
Did you catch this little phrase in our passage? It’s kind of odd. Verse 4 says, Jesus is a living stone. Which means He can move. But then throughout the passage, this is the odd part, throughout the passage He is called the cornerstone.
Now, I have never taken a whole lot of building classes. You don’t want to hire me as your general contractor at all. But I would imagine, it is my guess, if you are laying a foundation, you want that foundation to be about as far away from living as possible. If you’re laying tile in your kitchen and you work hard to get that first one in the exact right position, you want that tile to be completely inanimate, right? The last thing you want is for it to have the potential to get up and move on you, for it to be living, because if it moved, it would mess everything up, right?
It would throw off everything. This is what can make life so scary, isn’t it? Our only options, and I’ll give you some examples, our only options of cornerstones for our lives are all living, and they can all move. For instance, many of us center our lives around being liked. We don’t want to say anything offensive.
Why? Because being liked has become our cornerstone. Everything we do is checked with, aligned with, how will people react to it if we do it? And if we decide that people don’t like what we’re thinking about doing, we either don’t do it or we don’t tell them about it. We’re keeping it a secret, basically.
Likability is an incredibly shaky foundation. But we know this, right? It gets exhausting managing people’s perceptions of you. And when the inevitable eventually comes and someone rejects you, they don’t even have to reject you, maybe they just don’t like you, or maybe it’s not even that, you just get the sense that they don’t like you, you think they don’t like you, as soon as that happens, it’s all over, right? You find shame, collapse, ruin.
You’re internally crushed. And it was always guaranteed to happen because you based your life on a living stone that got up and moved on you. So, second example, comfort. I’m just telling you mine, and maybe you relate to me. Comfort, we align all our actions around the idea of being comfortable.
Will this job, will this move, will this relationship, will this decision add to or take away from my comfort? So, here’s the problem there, centering our lives around trying to achieve comfort will actually accomplish the opposite. The more we try to achieve comfort, the less comfortable we will be. All I have to do to prove that to you is ask a question: How’s it going?
You who want to align everything to comfort, you think things like, if it makes me uncomfortable, I’m not going to do it. Okay, that’s how you know you align everything to comfort. If that’s you, do you feel comfortable? Has it been successful? Do you feel content in all areas of your life?
Or are you constantly chasing down more and more and more and more aspects of your life to try to get them to align to comfort, only to realize you need to chase down more and more and more aspects of your life on top of those? All cornerstones on which we can build our lives are living. Which means they all have the potential to move, which means when they move, we will find ruin, collapse, and shame. We will be disappointed. We will end up feeling empty when we thought banking everything on likability or comfort or success or love, we thought all of that was pretty safe.
It’s not. It’s not safe. At all. Jesus is the living stone that won’t move on you. The more we align everything to him, the richer and fuller life will be.
The more we count on him for our internal sense of worth, for our internal sense of meaning, the more of those that we will experience. The more we count on him liking us, the more we will feel liked. The more we look to him to be our comfort apart from our circumstances, the more comfortable that we will feel. How do we know that? How do we know that he will never let us down?
How can we be sure he won’t move like anything else? How can I say so confidently that we know that he’s going to be there for us? Because he died for us.
Because he was rejected for us. Nothing else vying for cornerstone status in your heart has sacrificed for you like Jesus did. You know he’s not going anywhere because the price he paid to be in your life to begin with— nothing else has done that. Believe in him as the cornerstone and you will never be put to shame or emptiness or ridicule. Okay, that was point 1.
Jesus is the true cornerstone. Point 2: We have rejected the cornerstone. We have all rejected Jesus as the true cornerstone. That should be fairly obvious already by bringing up counterfeit cornerstones like likability and comfort. And that’s actually not a bad definition of sin.
If you’re like, hey, I’m not a Christian, what does sin mean? Centering life around something other than Jesus is sin. Looking to a different cornerstone is is sin. Sin isn’t only what we would traditionally think of as wickedness, because for the most part, we don’t center our lives around bad things, right? Pursuing career, trying to please people, find comfort, wanting our kids to love us, nothing wrong with those things necessarily.
But if they become the thing we use to decide other things in our lives, then that’s a big problem, and that’s sin. If Jesus is our cornerstone, it means in some sense he is the reason that we do everything. We don’t simply try to please people in order to please people. We don’t try to get comfort to have comfort. We don’t try to just advance our career.
We ask, why do I even want to advance my career? What’s behind that? What will I gain? Status? Is it for comfort?
Is that why I’m trying to advance my career? Or is it for Jesus. If it’s not for Jesus, it means something else is our cornerstone. It means we have rejected him as the cornerstone and will find, like we said, ruin, collapse, shame. And we’ve all done that.
Can we just admit together we’ve all done that? We’ve all rejected him. I have some group therapy here. We’re all guilty. Verse 7 states, the stone the builders rejected has become the the cornerstone.
Well, what rejection is that talking about? Who rejected Jesus and sent him to the cross? Was it the religious and political leaders of the day? Okay, yes, of course, but it’s more than that. Jesus didn’t go to the cross only because he was rejected by religious and political leaders of the day.
Jesus wasn’t some helpless victim who offended the power structures of his time and wound up executed. That’s not what happened. Jesus says, no one takes my life from me. I lay it down. I pick it up again.
So why did he go to the cross? Whose rejection sent him to the cross? Ours.
He went there for us. It was my sin that held him there until it was accomplished. He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquity. Our rejection sent him to the cross. We have all rejected the true cornerstone, which leads to point 3.
If we’ve all rejected him, how do we end up accepting him? How do we end up receiving mercy? How do we end up becoming God’s people when once we weren’t? That was verse 10. Once you were not a people.
Now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Well, how did we go from one to the other? How did that happen? Verse 9, God calls us out of darkness.
Which song we just sang was, You Call My Name, I Run Out of the Grave, right? God speaks into our hearts through Scripture, or God speaks to our hearts through a friend, or God speaks to our hearts through a pastor or a song, and suddenly Jesus changes in our minds from being unimportant or maybe even stupid, and He changes into being beautiful. Suddenly, we understand how futile it is to center our lives around anything else in the world and only want to center our lives around Him. We see what this world has to offer— success, fame, popularity, comfort. We see all those things as darkness, compared to the light, which is Jesus.
That switch usually happens through seeing what Jesus has done for us. So for that, let’s look back here at verse 7. The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This means even though we rejected him, he still set himself up as the one to save us. He still became the cornerstone.
Even though we pushed Him away, He still pursued us. His patience with us to endure our rejection and win us back is unmatched. I’m sure that the verse, the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, I’m sure that had special significance to Peter who wrote this letter. And who famously rejected Jesus. Think about Jesus when he realized this moment dawned on Peter at some point.
Peter thinks, the stone I rejected has become my cornerstone. Peter, who rejected Christ 3 times. Peter, who said, no, I don’t know that guy. No, I’m not with him. No, I don’t have anything to do with him.
I’m not sticking up for him right now. Peter at some point realizes, His rejection of Christ didn’t get him rejected from Christ. Jesus loved Peter so much that he used Peter’s rejection to save Peter. Peter’s rejection sent Jesus to the cross, and Jesus on the cross saved Peter. At some point, that dawns on Peter.
At some point, Peter realizes even though he pushed Jesus away, Jesus loved Peter enough to pay for Peter’s sin on the cross and win him back. That dawned on Peter. Has it dawned on you?
Has it clicked just how much God wants you?
If so, God has called or is calling you out of darkness.
When God calls us, suddenly all the Jesus died for me language makes sense. Suddenly we realize he is the only cornerstone on which we can depend. We realize everything else to which we try to align our lives will end up in collapse and catastrophe and shame. But on him, on him we can rely. Because let’s face it, if somebody’s gonna stick with us through our rejection of him and stick with us to such an extent that he dies to save us from the fact that we rejected him, If somebody does that, He’s not going anywhere.
That is someone on whom we can count always.
Now, some of us hear that and the light bulb comes on and we think like Peter did, that’s amazing. I want that. I want Him.
Others of us can hear the same thing and stumble over it or in some way find it offensive. Some of us can hear how much Jesus loves us and the extent he went through to be with us, even overcoming our rejection of him, and we still say, no thanks. Here’s what the rest of verse 8 says about someone in that position: they stumble because they disobey the word as they were destined to do. Our immediate question should So, let’s just ask it when we see something like that, when we see something like, they stumbled because they disobeyed the Word which they were destined to do. We want to ask, so they didn’t have a choice?
It was just their fate? They were helpless victims in their rejection of Jesus? To which I would say, not quite. The verse said, they disobeyed the Word which they were destined to do. So, part 1, they disobeyed the Word.
So they had a real choice in it. They were not some kind of robot. Part 2, which they were destined to do, meaning God is in control of the whole thing. Christianity— and this is all over the place in Scripture— maintains 2 positions simultaneously. If you want a good explanation of this and you like to read, I’d suggest J.I.
Packer’s Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. Relatively short little book. You can get through it if you want this discussed at length. But Christianity maintains 2 positions. One, people are responsible for their actions.
And 2, God is sovereign over all things.
Always God is in control. One, people make real choices and are held accountable for those choices by God. And 2, God was in control. Of all those choices. If we let either one of those slip, okay, we’ve lost the Christian position.
And sometimes the Bible will put, like this verse, it will put both of those in one verse. They disobeyed the Word, which they were destined to do. You could think about, work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you. Think about Proverbs, in the heart a man plans his steps, but the Lord directs the path. It’ll put both in one verse.
My favorite one is at the end of Acts when they’re about to be in a shipwreck. They’re in this terrible storm, and Paul gets some kind of vision, and the vision says, hey, you’re going to make it through the storm just fine. And so he goes and tells the other people on the ship. He’s like, hey, I got a vision from God, like, word of God. This is definitely true, right?
We’re going to be fine. And then, like, the next word out of his mouth is, nevertheless, we’ve got to throw some stuff overboard. And you’re like, well, which one is it? Are we going to be fine, or do we actually have some kind of responsibility here? And it’s both.
You have to hold on to both. As far as I know, there’s no other religion or philosophy that is as nuanced and balanced as Scripture is on this. Now, we as humans desperately want to resolve this intellectual tension and make one idea submit to the other. We’re like, which one is it? Do I make decisions or does God control everything?
And Scripture says you hang on to both of those at the same time. You don’t let either one slip. Don’t subordinate one to the other. Let them both stand for exactly what they are. It’s not like sometimes God lets us decide on our own and sometimes He’s in control.
It’s not 50/50. It’s 100% of the time we are responsible for our choices and 100% of the time God is in control, which if you think about it is actually the only way to get through life. Let’s say it was exclusively one or the other, and let’s just examine one type of instance where we actually need to believe both of these in order to kind of get through our day. Let’s imagine that someone has really wronged you, has really taken you out at your knees somehow. To get through that kind of thing with balance and poise, to get over bitterness, you need to believe 2 things.
One, it was really wrong. You need to be able to say that it was really wrong. What happened was not okay. That person needs to be held accountable for what was done. You need to be able to say that.
And 2, you need to believe that you’re going to be okay somehow. This isn’t going to sink you. This isn’t going to mess up your life forever. If you can’t believe that, you really can’t move forward. So, now let’s imagine that you believe in fatalism.
Everyone is tied to their destiny. We have no personal choice. We are robots following somebody else’s program. If that’s the case, how are you able to call anything that somebody does wrong? You can’t.
How could they be responsible for it? They were just doing what they were programmed to do. So, you lose all sense of justice if it’s fatalism, and we need Justice. When something is wrong, we need to be able to call it wrong. If something was a big deal, it’s almost impossible to pretend that it wasn’t a big deal.
And what a relief it always is to be able to say, hey, what you did hurt, and you shouldn’t have done it. If it’s fatalism, there’s no point in saying that, because there is no should and shouldn’t. There is only what is. Now, what about if it’s false self-determination? Everyone is completely autonomous, right?
There is no guiding hand in the universe. If that’s the case, of course you can say that what you— you believe the person was wrong, even though you have no objective standard to like say the person’s wrong. So all you really have is your feelings, and you’re like, my feelings say you’re wrong. The other person’s like, well, my feelings say I’m right. So that doesn’t get you very far, but at least you can say what you did was wrong.
But you have no assurance that anything is going to be okay. There is no greater plan that injustice fits into. You cannot look yourself in the mirror and say anything like, I know I’m going to make it. I know this didn’t wreck the plan for my life. You can’t say that because no one is in control.
Your life might be irreparably damaged, maybe. There is no captain at the wheel of the ship, and who even knows where the ship is going or how many rocks there are on the way there? Try getting through life like that. Try getting through life believing that. If you do, you’re going to have a terrible time with a number of things, one being forgiving the person who wronged you and letting go of bitterness.
Every time you think about what happened and every time something new happens that you believe is the result of that first thing, that happened, you’ll be filled with resentment and anger all over again. For the rest of your life, you might look back on that event and draw plot lines out to how that person ruined you forever, and that person might have ruined you forever if it’s all self-determination. That is no way to get through life. And what’s a therapist going to tell you? Make the best out of what you have left because that’s all there is?
Get over it. If you feel ruined by what someone did to you or what you’ve done to yourself— you made some terrible decision and now financially everything’s a wreck, right?
You need to have confidence that God will use even your worst tragedies to add beauty to your life in the end.
If you can believe that, You can look at the person who wronged you, even if it’s yourself, and you say, what you did was wrong, but without vengeance or bitterness, you’ll be able to say, but I know I’m gonna be okay because God is in charge, and you can let go. And every time that event pops back up in your mind, instead of it leading to resentment and anger, you can say, that was part of God’s goodness to me, and instead of rage, you’ll have peace. You can walk through life with poise and confidence, still being able to call wrong wrong, but with no vengeance in it. See, you need to be able to hold on to both at the same time, okay? I’m responsible for my decisions 100% of the time, and God is in control 100% of the time.
So, now back to you, if you’re on the fence about accepting Jesus. You are freely choosing to reject Jesus currently, and you will be held accountable for that choice. There will be no, oh, God made me do it, so I couldn’t help it defense. No, you are choosing to run away and align your life around something else. So repent of rejecting him and aligning your life around lesser things and put Him at the center of your life.
As soon as you do, you’ll realize it wasn’t by your wisdom or intellect that you made that decision, but it was by a sheer act of grace on God’s part, because it was God’s call that brought you out of darkness, not your brilliance to accept it. Throughout this passage, if you noticed, if you’re an English language person, God is the subject of the sentences. He is the one doing the actions to us. We are spoken of in passive language. We have received mercy.
We have been called out of darkness. We are being built into a spiritual house. Who’s doing the actions? Who’s doing the work? It’s God.
We just receive. How do we get out of darkness? How do we become God’s people? How do we receive mercy? God reaches into our lives and saves us.
That’s how it happens.
So, 4th and final point, which will be rather quick because it’s the entire sermon next week. Come on back. What do our lives look like after we see Christ for who he really is? What is the result of being called? What is the result of accepting the true cornerstone?
What does that look like? We give him everything. That’s what we do when we see how far he went to accept us back after we rejected him. Of course we put him at the center of our lives. Of course we do.
Of course, bit by bit, we align more and more of who we are around him. Our lives, brick by brick, are being built in reference to him. As we become an entire house built around him. That was verse 5. And the more we do that, the stranger we will look to those around us who do not know Christ.
The more we will look like God’s world and the less we will look like this world. We will be, verse 9, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, and And that doesn’t look anything close to what’s around us. Specifically what that looks like, you come back next week and really hang around for the rest of our series in 1 Peter, because that’s what 1 Peter is about, living between these 2 worlds as we become God’s world. Let’s pray together. Father, thank you for giving us a true cornerstone on which we can rely, which we can trust.
Lord, forgive us for centering our lives around lesser things and help us to turn to Christ in everything that we do. Let him be the real foundation for everything in our lives, Lord. We ask those things in his name. Amen.
