God’s chosen people will be alienated from the priorities and values of the culture around them. Though this will inevitably result in suffering, that suffering produces joy.

By virtue of being elect to respond in faith to the gospel, we are at the same time necessarily alienated from the priorities and values of the culture around us. This will inevitably result in suffering.

Few verses are as pregnant with the gospel as 1 Peter 1:3-5. For Week 2 in our Series, ‘Stand Firm,’ we explored the robust idea of our inheritance, our living hope, and our new birth in Christ.

Peter sets up his weighty excursus with an equally weighty greeting, calling his audience “elect exiles of the dispersion.” Give the sermon a listen and dive into this new series with us.

We’re starting a new Sermon Series this week called ‘Stand Firm.’ We’ll be diving into the Book of 1 & 2 Peter and we’d love to encourage to get a head start by watching this 8 minute overview by Bible Project on 1 Peter.

Psalm 12, like many of the Psalms we’ve covered this Summer, is a lament and it teaches us “even when wickedness seems to prevail, God will guard the poor and needy.”

Membership is an amazing opportunity to say, “I’m all in” to joining the family of The Parish Church and partake in the vision and mission we’ve been called to.

Psalm 11 is short but intense. Read carefully, it can teach us that our confidence in the face of evil is solely in who God is, what he has done, and who that makes us. Check it out.

This week we jumped into Psalm 10 and talked about how God’s people lament that this world does not look like the Kingdom of God and yet trust in His promises that it one day will.