Cause we kind of don’t fit in…
As a young mom trying to instill godly principles and purity of thought into our children, I felt like a fanatical Puritan sometimes….at church…of all places.
I was commiserating with the wife a pastor of another church who seemed to share my passion for children to be trained up in the teachings of the Lord.
I thought she would join me on my tirade…back me up…make me feel better about how right I was and how wrong they were and maybe give me insight on how I could change their thinking.
Instead she looked at me with blue/gray eyes that seem to have a direct line from her heart to the heart of whoever she is speaking to. She smiled happily and said,with enthusiasm, “We ARE a peculiar people.”
Only she said it all southern and drawn like……peeee-kYOUL-yaar PAY-puhuhll…
And I just looked back at her with eyes that possibly glazed over because this is definitely NOT what I was going for.
But 1 Peter 2:9 in the King James Version calls us that precisely.
Right in the midst of telling us all about how we are chosen, royal, holy…because the word peculiar means we are His possession. We belong to Him, not the world.
And my friend wanted me to make sure that I knew…THIS is a good thing.
We will be different. And we will look and act accordingly, if we follow the teachings of Christ and try to live them out.
And thus; PECULIAR…. the way we understand it…kind of works…
Because, we will find that often…even in places where we expect to “fit in”…we won’t…we will seem odd, and different.
And we will have the courage to remind those who have forgotten that we are….peeee-KYOUL-yaar….and thus our choices and our principles and our standards are going to line up with the other descriptions in this passage of who we are….
But you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do His work and speak out for Him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference He made for you-from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted. The MSG 1 Peter 2:9
Be blessed. Be bold. Be different <3