Resident Aliens

Scripture Reading:

1 Peter 2:11–12 ESV

11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. 12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

Last night we left you with a question. Tonight Peter picks it up.

Remember where we left Thursday. A letter. To exiles. Telling them to plant gardens in a place that wasn’t home.

To build, to marry, to pray for the very city that had burned theirs. Not a rescue. An assignment.

Now open the letter Peter wrote. Six hundred years later. Different empire. Different people. But listen to how he opens it.

In the very first line, Peter calls them exiles scattered across five Roman provinces — places most of them didn’t choose.

And he’s writing because their neighbors are turning on them. They’re being slandered. Their homes are tense. Their workplaces are harder. The empire is starting to wonder whether Christians might be a threat.

Peter writes to all of them. And by chapter 2 he reaches a pivot point.

I want to spend the night in those two verses.

Because Peter does something in verse 11 that most American Christians have never really let the Bible do to them.

He names us. He calls us what we are.

1 Peter 2:11 ESV

11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.

Two words. Beloved.And exiles.

Those two words don’t usually land in the same sentence.

One of them is tender.

The other sounds like a political status.

One feels like a pet name.

The other feels like a sentence you serve.

And Peter sticks them next to each other on purpose. Because he knows something about us that we keep forgetting.

Beloved, You Don’t Belong Here

1 Peter 2:11 ESV

11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.

Peter isn’t writing a policy memo.

He’s writing a pastoral letter to people who are hurting.

Their friends are whispering. Their jobs are getting harder. Their homes are tense.

And the first word out of his mouth is beloved.

Don’t miss that. That’s not filler.

This is Peter reaching into an empire that’s starting to hate these Christians and saying — before anything else — the God of heaven knows your name, and He loves you.

Before the challenge comes the reassurance.

Before the correction comes the address.

Peter is shepherding these people before he’s instructing them.

Tonight, I want you to hear me the way Peter wanted them to hear him.

You are beloved.

1 Peter 2:11 ESV

11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.

And you are exiles.

The word there — parepidēmos — literally means “alongside-dweller.”

Somebody who lives his life right next to a community without ever fully being of it.

Pays his taxes here. Raises his kids here. But his true belonging is somewhere else. His passport says one country and his heart says another.

Peter pairs that word with another one in chapter one — diaspora.

Scattered. People who got pulled out of where they belonged and planted in soil that doesn’t claim them.

Peter is saying, that’s what you are. Not metaphorically. Not “kind of.” Actually.

You live here. You work here. You vote here. You raise your kids here. You pay your taxes here. You obey the laws here. You love your neighbors here.

But your real citizenship — the one your soul answers to — is somewhere else.

Now, do we really think of ourselves this way?

We thought of ourselves as hosts. Not as guests.

For a long time in this country, being a Christian and being an American felt like more or less the same project. The laws looked like our values. The holidays looked like our calendar. The neighbors looked like us.

And we got comfortable thinking we owned the place.

That Christianity was the host. And everything else was a guest in our house.

Then the ground shifted. You know the story. We talked about it last night.

And when the ground shifts out from under a host, what does the host feel?

He feels displaced. He feels cheated. He feels like something that was rightfully his got taken away.

He feels like a stranger in his own home. And strangers-in-their-own-home get angry.

That anger — that grievance — that feeling that we have to take it back — it only makes sense if you thought you were the host in the first place.

Peter says: you were never the host.

You were always the sojourner.

Christianity was always foreign.

The gospel was always strange.

The church, from its first breath, by its very nature, was a colony of heaven planted in a world that wasn’t heaven.

Paul says the same thing differently over in Philippians :

Philippians 3:20 CSB

20 Our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Not a backup citizenship. Not a secondary one. The real one.

The feeling that we’ve lost something is partly true.

The country has changed. The culture has changed.

But the bigger, harder truth is that we were never supposed to have it the way we thought we had it.

If you hear nothing else from me tonight, hear this.

You are not a displaced host. You are a beloved exile.

When we accept that, the whole conversation about “taking the country back” starts to sound a little different.

Because exiles don’t take countries back. Beloved exiles plant gardens and they keep their conduct honorable.

They live in such a way that the people who were slandering them end up asking where the light is coming from.

Engage the culture as a displaced host and you’ll engage it with grievance, with outrage, with the defensiveness of somebody protecting turf.

Engage it as a beloved exile and you’ll engage it with hope — as somebody who knows where home actually is and can afford to love this place without needing it to love you back.

Same actions, maybe. Completely different witness.

Who are you?

Beloved. And exile.

Get those two words settled tonight. Everything else we do this weekend depends on it.

The War You’re Losing Isn’t the One You Think

Go back to the text.

1 Peter 2:11 ESV

11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.

Peter has just called these people beloved exiles.

He has named their identity.

And the very next word — the first instruction he gives them — is abstain.

Abstain from what?

From the Gentiles? From the empire?

From the neighbors who are slandering them?

From the culture that doesn’t share their values?

No.

Abstain from the passions of the flesh.

Peter turns the exile inward.

Before he says one word about how to handle the Gentiles out there, he says: handle yourself in here.

The first battle a resident alien fights is not with the culture. It’s with his own cravings. And if he loses that one, nothing else matters.

Let me put this as plainly as I can.

A lot of us have spent the last decade convinced that the enemy of our faith is out there. I

t’s the Supreme Court. It’s Hollywood. It’s the school board. It’s the other party. It’s the progressives. It’s the atheists. It’s big tech.

It’s whoever you’ve been assigned to be mad at this month.

Peter says the enemy is a lot closer than that.

He says the war against your soul is being waged by the passions of the flesh. Not by the Babylonians out there, but by the Babylon in here.

By the appetites you feed.

By the desires you indulge.

By the craving for comfort, and status, and affirmation, and entertainment, and revenge, and being right, and being seen.

A lot of us are losing to Netflix. We’re not losing to the Supreme Court.

I mean it.

The Supreme Court has never once reached into my life and made me a worse husband.

It’s never reached into my life and made me a lazier father.

It’s never made me a weaker man of prayer or a more distracted brother or a bitter and easily-offended Christian.

My phone has done all of those things to me.

My appetites have done all of those things to me.

My own laziness has done all of those things to me.

The Supreme Court has done none of them.

For some of you, the war on your soul is being fought over Fox News or MSNBC.

You cannot stop watching. You wake up in the morning angry at people you will never meet.

You go to bed at night ruminating about what they said today.

Your blood pressure is controlled by people who do not know your name.

For some of you, it’s the phone. The endless scroll. You sit down for ten minutes and lose an hour.

You’ve forgotten what it feels like to be bored.

You’ve forgotten what it feels like to pray for more than ninety seconds without reaching for it.

For some of you, it’s food. Or it’s drink.

For some of you, it’s grievance. You have nursed the same resentment for fifteen years and it has become its own pet. You feed it. You walk it. You love it.

For some of you, it’s the opposite of any of that. It’s respectability.

It’s the need to be admired. It’s the need for your family and your friends and your church to think you have it all together, and you have built a quiet little kingdom out of looking good.

Whatever yours is — and I promise you have one — Peter says it is waging war on your soul.

That’s the word he uses.

Military language. Campaign language.

Something out there is maneuvering against you.

Something is laying siege to the part of you that matters most. And it is not, I promise you, the Supreme Court.

Now here’s why this matters for a sermon about being a resident alien in a hostile culture.

Because an exile who has lost the war inside cannot bear witness to anything outside.

Matthew 5:13 CSB

13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? It’s no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.

You can’t be salt if you’ve lost your saltiness (Matthew 5:13).

You cannot call a culture to Christ while you yourself are being quietly eaten alive by the same things the culture is eaten alive by.

You cannot say the gospel offers something better if the gospel hasn’t actually delivered something better in you.

You cannot be a city on a hill if the foundations of your own life are compromised by the same stuff every secular neighbor on your street is compromised by.

And I think — if we’re honest — this is one of the quieter failures of the American church right now.

We have a lot of people who are loud about the culture war out there, and losing the culture war inside.

We have Christians who can tell you every outrage on the evening news and could not tell you what they read in their Bibles this morning because they didn’t.

We have households where the adults argue politics over dinner and have not prayed together in a year.

We have men who will fight anybody online about biblical manhood while their own wives have felt invisible for a decade.

We have women who will post about the state of the country and have not spoken to their estranged sister since 2019.

I’m not scolding. I’m describing.

I have been some version of every one of those people at some point in my life, and so have you.

And Peter says — because you are beloved, because you are exiles, because you belong to another country and another King — abstain.

1 Peter 2:11 ESV

11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.

Step back. Step away. Deny the craving. Starve the appetite. Quit feeding the thing that’s eating you.

That word abstainis a strong word. It’s not “balance.” It’s not “moderate.”

It’s not “be more mindful.” It’s put it down. It’s walk away.

It’s what you do when something is trying to kill you.

You will not bear witness to a world you have not first refused to be conformed to.

Romans 12:2 ESV

2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

So before we say one more word about being seen by the culture, let’s ask the harder question.

What in your life, right now, is actually waging war on your soul?

It’s probably not what you’ve been telling yourself it is.

It’s probably not out there. It’s probably closer than that. I

t’s probably in your pocket. Or on your screen. Or in your grudge. Or in your pride.

Whatever it is. Peter says abstain.

Because beloved exiles travel light.

You cannot carry the weight of those appetites and carry the gospel at the same time.

One of them will fall. Peter is telling you which one has to.

The Question Isn’t Whether They’re Watching

Back to the text.

1 Peter 2:12 ESV

12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

Two assumptions baked right into the sentence.

I want you to see both of them before we go anywhere else.

The first assumption is this: they are watching.

The Gentiles out there — the neighbors, the coworkers, the extended family who thinks your faith is weird — they are paying attention to how you live.

Peter doesn’t argue the point. He just assumes it. The exile does not have the option of an anonymous life. Your conduct is being observed.

The second assumption is darker.

1 Peter 2:12 ESV

12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

Peter assumes hostility.

He does not write, “so that your charming conduct will win everybody over.”

He writes, “when they speak against you as evildoers.”

Peter expects the slander.

He expects the false accusations.

He expects these Christians to be misrepresented.

So the question Peter is answering in verse 12 is not “how do we keep the world from watching us?” — they’re watching.

Not “how do we keep them from talking about us?” — they’re talking.

The question is: what will they see when they look, and what will they end up saying after they’ve watched us long enough?

That’s where tonight’s big idea lives.

The goal is not to win the culture. The goal is to be seen by it.

Winning is an argument. Being seen is a life.

Winning is something you do in a debate, in a courtroom, at a ballot box, in a comment section.

Being seen is something that happens over years.

In a neighborhood. At a job. Across a kitchen table.

In the space where people have watched you long enough to know what you’re actually like.

You can win arguments and lose neighbors.

You can win elections and lose your children.

You can win the round and lose the witness.

Peter is not telling these exiles to win.

He is telling them to live in such a way that when they are inevitably slandered — and they will be — the slander will wear thin against the weight of what their neighbors have actually seen.

Notice this:

1 Peter 2:12 ESV

12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

The word Peter uses for “honorable” — kalos — means beautiful.

Attractive. Winsome in the old sense.

Peter isn’t just saying, be morally upright.

He’s saying, be beautiful. Be a life that draws the eye.

Be someone whose very ordinary existence, held up against the slander, makes the slander look silly.

Now tie this back to something Jesus said.

Matthew 5:16 ESV

16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Peter was there the day Jesus said that.

And now, writing to exiles scattered across five Roman provinces, he is reaching for the same words.

Good works. See them. Glorify the Father.

That is not an accident. That is a disciple remembering his teacher.

But look carefully.

Jesus doesn’t say “argue your light before others.”

Peter doesn’t say “make your conduct persuasive.”

Both of them use the verb see.

Both assume watching.

The apostle and his Lord both expect that the faithful life, lived in plain view, does the work that arguments cannot do.

Here’s the comfort I want you to hear tonight.

You don’t have to be sharper than the culture to be faithful.

You don’t have to have all the answers.

You don’t have to win every argument at Thanksgiving.

You don’t have to be the best debater in your family group text.

You don’t have to post the cleverest thing.

You have to be seen.

And that is a thing you can actually do.

You can love your spouse in plain view, over a long time.

You can do your job in plain view, with integrity.

You can keep showing up at the church when it’s costly.

You can be reliably kind in an era of outrage.

None of that is glamorous. None of that gets you a platform. None of it makes you famous. And none of it requires you to win anything.

All of it counts as being seen.

That is Peter’s expectation for all of us.

Not that we’ll win the culture.

But that we’ll be the kind of people the culture keeps looking at, and eventually asks about.

So before we go one step further this weekend — and we will talk about conversations on Saturday and convictions on Sunday — settle this tonight.

Your job this week is not to win. Your job is to be seen.

And if the war inside is being fought honestly, and the life outside is being lived honorably, the seeing takes care of itself.

Peter said to these exiles: let them watch. Let them watch long enough.

Because when they do, something surprising happens in verse 12.

That’s where we’re going next.

The Surprise at the End of the Verse

Now, back to v. 12:

1 Peter 2:12 ESV

12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

Now — who is Peter saying is going to glorify God?

The same they who were slandering the Christians.

The same they who were calling them evildoers.

The same they whose hostility Peter took as a given.

Peter says: those people may end up glorifying God.

The very neighbors who are whispering about you.

The coworkers who roll their eyes at your faith.

The cousin who posts things about Christians that make your stomach turn.

The people who have decided in advance that your beliefs are the problem with society.

Peter says — some of them — are going to see your life, and at some point, glorify God for it.

That is an astonishing sentence. And we walk right past it.

He doesn’t say the slander is going to stop.

He doesn’t say the relationship will be fixed next week.

He doesn’t promise these exiles that the cultural heat will cool off in their lifetime.

What he promises is something bigger, further out, harder to see — that the life they live under hostility is the life God may use to turn the hostiles themselves.

One last time, back to v. 12:

1 Peter 2:12 ESV

12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

The phrase Peter uses — the day of visitation — is held open on purpose.

The day God shows up.

Whether that’s at the end of history, or at a quiet kitchen table on a Tuesday when something finally clicks. God visits.

And when He does, the people who watched you long enough may be drawn into the same light.

Some of the people in your life right now who are hostile to your faith —will, someday, glorify God.

They will see what you have been quietly living all these years.

They will remember how you treated them when they were at their worst.

They will turn it over in their minds long after you’ve forgotten the conversation.

And one day, when God visits them, the witness you were not even sure was working will be the thing that bends their knees.

You are not playing for this week’s news cycle.

You are not playing for this election.

You are not playing for the applause or approval of anybody who’s watching now.

You are playing for the day of visitation.

And on that day, the account gets settled, the slander evaporates, and some of the people you have been praying for will be standing next to you.

That is the comfort I want you to carry home tonight.

Peter is not promising you’ll see the results. He’s promising God will bring them in.

Thursday night we said some of you are planting in soil you will not harvest.

Tonight I’ll say it a different way.

Some of you are witnessing to people who will not come home in your lifetime.

That does not mean the witness isn’t working. It means the visitation hasn’t happened yet.

Keep the conduct honorable. Keep the war inside honest. And trust the God who visits to do the work only He can do.

As We Close...

So tonight has been about identity before instruction.

Beloved exiles, not displaced hosts.

A war inside before a war outside. A life seen, not an argument won.

And a God who visits.

Tomorrow we take all of that and bring it to the kitchen table.

Paul in Colossians 4. What your speech does when the conversation gets hard — the adult child, the sibling, the friend who’s been hurt by the church.

Saturday is about how we talk to them.

Tonight was about whether we’re ready to be watched by them.

Here’s the question I want you to carry out of this building tonight.

Not how do I win my culture.

Peter never asked that. Neither should we.

The question is — who’s been watching you? For how long? What have they been seeing?

And are you ready — tonight, this week, starting tomorrow — to let them see Jesus in you?

Let’s pray.