And so to our third exposition from 1 Peter.

At last you say, he’s about to talk about witness that works. Well I hope you’re not really saying that, because I hope that you’ve seen clearly that everything we’ve seen in Peter’s letter is a formative element of our Christian witness. Our beliefs and assurance. Our private holiness. Our interaction with other believers. Our church participation. These are all blocks that build who we are, and if there is one thing our world needs it is authentic whole life Christianity seen in the lives of ordinary believers and acting as a signpost to Jesus.

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Let me remind you of my road sign model that we looked at yesterday. Effective Christian witness both of the church and of its individual members requires three things: words, a supportive structure for those words and a secure foundation.

Yesterday we looked at Peter’s assurance of the church’s identity, as given by God, and the assurance of our salvation, as given by God. And we described these twin assurances as the foundation upon which both our faith in Jesus and our witness in the world are based.

What follows in the rest of the letter is mainly concerned with the structure... the authenticity of our lives as God’s people.

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Let me start by telling you a little bit about my work. I work for IFES the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, which helps to facilitate Christian student groups in universities in over 150 countries around the world. UCCF is the UK part of IFES. I work with young Christians as they make the move out of university into the working world, helping them to know how to connect their faith to the post-university world, and primarily to their places of work. The region I cover runs from Iceland to the far end of Siberia and down as far as Israel. In this region there are 47 countries and IFES currently operates in 44 of them.

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