As a Gospel Advancing leader, you often spend more time pouring into students than getting poured into yourself. To refuel your soul, dive into part 3 of a Gospel Advancing devotional series exploring the apostle Peter’s first letter to the early Church. (Click to read part 1 and part 2.)
It’s 2 o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday, and I wake up in a cold sweat. My mind is foggy, my hands are shaky, and I can think only one thing: sugar.
This isn’t the first time, and it likely won’t be the last. I’m diabetic, and I frequently wake up to my blood sugar levels at half what they should be. Even without normal blood sugar regulation, my body still knows that if I don’t get my blood sugar up, I’ll die. So, it hits me with some adrenaline and drives me to the pantry to stuff my face with food.
Craving Bread
Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.
The craving Peter is talking about here is similar to my body’s craving for sugar. Except here, it’s a craving for the things of God. It’s more than just a preference; it’s an inability to survive apart from Jesus—mind, body, and spirit working together to get our “spiritual blood sugar” up. But we can’t do that on our own. We need the Bread of Life.
Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’
Jesus promises that if we trust in Him and seek His presence, we’ll never go hungry.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about managing my diabetes, it’s how important it is to build my day around the right food. If I don’t, I’ll wake up at 2 a.m. and need a snack before returning to bed. In the same way, when we don’t build our lives around the right thing, we eventually end up in a diminished, even desperate, state.
Hollowed Out
As you come to Him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to Him—you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says:
‘See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a chosen and precious cornerstone,
and the one who trusts in Him
will never be put to shame.’
Interestingly, most historical cornerstones were hollowed out and had objects of significance placed inside them.
The practice began as an offering made to the pagan gods. Then it morphed into a Christian practice used to dedicate a church to God. Whether religious or secular, the idea is that the contents of the cornerstone must be relevant to what the building was created to do. Otherwise, the structure lacks purpose.
If we extend the hollowed-out analogy, what ought to be inside our cornerstone? Something that’s worthy of being dedicated to the Lord. The problem is, because of sin and death, nothing we have is worthy of God.
That’s why the cornerstone—and what’s inside—must be Jesus. Because only He is worthy.
Curtains and Cornerstones
In construction, the cornerstone was laid first because it set the shape and direction for the rest of the building. This meant that if the cornerstone was the wrong shape or placed at the wrong angle, it would throw off the entire structure.
Most of us know how easy it is to build our lives and ministries on the wrong thing. There are so many stones that go into building a student ministry. Stones like popular worship music, hilarious sermons, and colorful T-shirts. Those are all good stones to have, but they make for terrible cornerstones.
If Jesus and what He’s done for us isn’t what we build around, the structure of our lives and churches will be misshapen. We can still do fun things, but we must build everything we do around the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe,
‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone,’ and,‘A stone that causes people to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall.’They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for.
Speaking of another building, let’s talk about the Jewish tabernacle. In its central room, the Holy of Holies, there was a curtain separating the presence of God from the people. Only a purified priest could enter the Holy of Holies because of the splendor of God’s holiness.
But when Jesus died, the temple veil was torn in two (reference). The separation between sinners and God’s presence was removed. Because of the worthiness Christ bestowed on us through trusting in Him, the curtain is no longer needed.
Worthy Offering
If Jesus had stayed dead, then our cornerstone would crumble. Paul puts it this way:
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
But praise God that Jesus didn’t stay dead! Because Jesus Christ rose from the dead, He can now become our cornerstone, through faith.
Likewise, because our cornerstone is worthy of dedication to God, the entire structure becomes a worthy offering. Our lives and ministries are now worthy to offer to God, because our cornerstone is the righteous son of God.
Bring the Church
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Now, because of our faith in Christ, we’ve become God’s chosen people. No more curtain separating people from the presence of God. We get to carry the presence of God with us, because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
This means that what Peter’s calling believers to is to bring the presence of God and the Gospel of grace outside the church walls. The Gospel isn’t constrained by a curtain or even the physical walls of the church. We as believers—and particularly as Gospel Advancing leaders—are called to bring the church with us wherever we go.
This is why it’s so important to model sharing the Gospel personally for your students. Bringing the same mercy to other people that we’ve received is an imperative. And it’s vital that we teach students to do the same.
Consider these questions this week:
- Do you feel like you can’t live without Jesus? Do your students?
- Is your ministry built with Christ and the Gospel as the cornerstone? Can people tell?
- What’s one way you can model Gospel Advancing to your students this week?
