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‘Ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.’
1Pe_2:5 (R.V.)
I. A spiritual house built of living stones.—The material fabric of church or temple is made up of various parts, and each part has its special use. Each part, too, has its component elements, some more notable, some less, some in the broad light of day, some in dark and obscure corners. Some of these needed more cutting and hewing than others, but every individual fragment of the building has to be fashioned in order that it may fit into its place in the whole.
II. So each individual in the Church of God has to submit himself to the Master Builder’s hand.—For some He designs notable places in His spiritual house on earth, and still more in the house eternal in the heavens. For others here on earth there are obscurer positions—some, indeed, quite hidden away from the notice of men. The humble, modest, retiring, God-fearing Christian is just as much a stone in the building as the most remarkable bishop or archbishop, or leading layman. And as in the material fabric there are parts that lie quite out of sight, so in the Church of Christ there is many a saint whose life is hidden with Christ in God. But there is one essential difference between the material stones and the spiritual. The material stones are dead, lifeless. The spiritual stones must be living. There must be energy, power, progress about them. The earthly house of God of which they form a part is but temporary, and a place of preparation for the house eternal in the heavens. So we may see sometimes a temporary church erected where a congregation may be collected, trained, and prepared to enter into possession of a beautiful permanent church later on.
III. If there is to be this gradual preparing and fitting into the spiritual fabric of the living stones, how is it to be effected?—Surely by training and discipline. The stone has to be cut, it has to endure ‘many a biting sculpture.’ So the living stone has to go through much. There is more or less to be cut away. Rough parts have to be made smooth, sharp angular points have to be taken off; it has to find its place amongst others; it has to suffer the hard blows, it may be of adversity or pain; and this process has to go on all through life. The earthly Church of Christ is not perfect—nothing human can be—but as a whole and in its individual members it has to endure trouble and hardship. Perhaps such a time of stress may be coming near to us now, who knows? It is only in this way that the earthly living stone can be made fit for its place in the heavenly temple. Just as Christ, the Bridegroom, was made ‘perfect through suffering,’ so the Church, His Bride, must, during the times of her probation, undergo suffering too if she is to be made perfect. What does St. Paul say? ‘Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for it … that He might present the Church to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such things, but that it should be holy and without blemish.’ This is what the house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens, ‘a building from God,’ is to be.
IV. ‘Living stones,’ selected by the Master Builder, and called to high duties and privileges; you are called also to high office. Just as in the Jewish Church there was a priesthood which discharged ministerial offices, whilst at the same time the whole people were ‘a kingdom of priests,’ so it is now. We, too, have a priesthood to whom is committed ministerial office on behalf of the rest, but none the less are we made, all of us, ‘unto our God a kingdom and priests.’ It is for the lay people to exercise their privileges in this respect, and to confirm and ratify what is done in their name by their own participation in it. Ye are a royal priesthood. Carry out to the full your duty, and that in every branch of Church work. It is because the laity have been too much inclined in times past to leave their part of the work undone or to be done by the clergy instead of themselves that Church people have not realised to the full all the privileges and duties to which they were called. There is not one of us that ought to be content unless he or she has something to do in the Kingdom of Christ and for the glory of God. A perfunctory attendance at church on Sundays, perhaps only once, and nothing done or attempted besides, is very far from the ideal which the busiest of us in the affairs of the world ought to aim at. To belong to a holy priesthood, as you do in virtue of your Christian calling, implies also, as the text teaches us, the offering up of spiritual sacrifices.
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Rev. Dr. Redpath.
Illustration‘I think we can very easily understand how St. Peter came to use this language to those to whom he was writing. They were already Christians—that is the meaning of the word “elect” in the first verse of the Epistle—but they were also “sojourners of the Dispersion”; that is, members of the Jewish nation scattered abroad in various parts of the world, “in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.” These were to be the recipients of the letter, and the Apostle had to consider what language would best appeal to them. He would think of them as still in heart Jewish nationalists to the backbone, with their thoughts and affections always reverting to their own country, their own holy city, and in it their own Temple, the centre of their own religious worship, the place which God had chosen to place His name in.’