Set Apart by God

For about a year or so now, I have been subscribed to a website that sends me a "daily Bible verse" every day. This morning, the verse was 1 Peter 2:9-10.

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, 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.

It is a very familiar verse to me, and I have often heard it read in church and read it in my own private devotions. Today, however, it seemed to strike me as it had not before. It gave me the feeling of being part of a chosen people who are set apart for a special purpose - "a people belonging to God" whose goal is to "declare the praises of him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light". There is so much talk these days about becoming "relevant" to present culture and of kids trying to "fit in" at school. Yet that is not what we are supposed to do; we are not the same as the masses of unbelievers. Our goals in life should not be the same. We are a royal priesthood, a holy nation - a people set apart. We have the indescribable privilege of being children of God!! And this is not because of something we have done to cause God to choose us:

For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

(Deuteronomy 7:6-8) It was His will to choose us and not others. When we think of this awesome and incredible gift - that we are some of the chosen, how else can we respond but to fall down in worship and praise and thanksgiving? Why would we want to "fit in" with the culture of this finite world when we can be children of the infinite and all-powerful and all-loving God?