Going into chapter two, Peter does some comparing and contrasting: to put on love there are things we must take off, to be living stones we must recognize how useless lifeless stones are, believing makes Christ the cornerstone of our lives but disbelief makes Christ the stone our lives stumble over. In all these things Peter points to Jesus before He points to us, His desire is for us to look to Jesus as we seek to see ourselves, that He is not only the One who created us but He is the embodiment of everything we were created to be. Peter won’t let us be “only human” and settle for lives that have a mixture of pure and impure, holy and unholy or clean and unclean, he pushes us to see, that if we have been saved then we must seek to become like the Savior. Tonight’s text is familiar in many ways, we quote parts of it often, we are “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people”. The questions we raise tonight are chosen, royal, holy and special how and for what? What makes us these things and for what purpose are we these things? How do we live in a manner worthy of Peter’s description? Most importantly, how do we reconcile that these descriptions do not describe what we are to God until they can rightly describe what Jesus is to us?