Building Blocks for Christ – 1 Peter 2

This is the second talk of five in 1 Peter at Lee Abbey 2026

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Peter hands us three building blocks in this chapter: a precious Saviour, a privileged position, and a practical commission. Get the first one wrong and the rest collapses.

A precious Saviour. Jesus is the cornerstone, the one everything else in the house lines up against. In the ancient world the cornerstone had to be cut with total precision, because if it was even slightly off, the whole building went off with it. Sometimes it cost as much as the rest of the house put together. That’s Jesus. Come to him, Peter says, and you’ll never be put to shame.

I know what that stone cost. I was preaching in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, two weeks before my wedding, in 2003, when word came through that rebels had taken our office in Burundi and were using it to launch RPGs on the military base next door. Three hundred people died in that attack, most of them children forced into fighting by cowards who should have known better. I broke down mid-sermon trying to work out which of my colleagues were among them.

One of those children I’ll call Busy, to protect who he really was. Ten years old, kidnapped from home, mocked and beaten for his faith by grown men who should have protected him. When a gun went missing from the camp, the commander lined everyone up and swore that whoever confessed would take ten lashes, and the rest would go free. No one moved. Busy stepped forward. “You gave your word, sir,” he said. “I’ll take the punishment.” They tied him up and started whipping him. Three lashes in, the man who’d actually taken the gun broke from the back of the line, screaming for them to stop, that it was him. Busy wouldn’t let him take it back. “The commander gave his word,” he said. “He has to finish me.” He died that night. Before he did, he told the man whose crime he’d carried, “I did it so you could be free. But when Jesus died on the cross, he died for everything you’ve ever done wrong. He loves you.” That soldier’s life was never the same again. Neither, if I’m honest, is mine every time I tell it.

A privileged position. Once you were not a people, Peter writes, but now you are the people of God. A chosen people, a royal priesthood, God’s own possession. A museum can hang an ordinary old hat or a plain dress and call it priceless, not because of what it is but because of who wore it. We’re worth more than any auction lot, not for anything we’ve done, but because of whose we are.

A practical commission. Rid yourselves of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander. Strong words. Peter isn’t asking us to manage these things, he’s telling us to get rid of them. My own great-grandfather is buried in Burundi. On his gravestone it says, in Kirundi, “slave of Christ.” Only the language has drifted since 1951, and that same word now means duck. So there he lies. Duck of Christ. Language moves on. The calling doesn’t.

Live such good lives, Peter says, that even your critics end up glorifying God. Henry Morton Stanley spent four months with David Livingstone in the African bush expecting to find nothing but an old missionary talking to himself. He later wrote that it wasn’t Livingstone’s preaching that converted him. It was Livingstone’s living.

A boy once slept in a packing crate down an alley, selling newspapers to strangers who never looked at him twice. A policeman sent him to a house and told him to say three words at the door: John 3:16. The woman who opened it took him in, fed him, bathed him, put him to bed in clean sheets, and the next morning read him the verse itself. He didn’t understand the theology. He just knew it made a cold boy warm, a hungry boy full, a lost boy safe.

That’s what we’re offering people. Not an argument. A door that opens.