May 22, 2011 John 14:1-14 1 Peter 2:2-10

“A Royal Priesthood”
Dr. Ted H. Sandberg

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may
proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you
were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have
received mercy.” This has always been one of my favorite verses. “Once you were not a people, but
now you are God’s people.”
If there’s any passage in the Bible that has given we Baptists our identity, this is it. Naturally, our
Baptist identity is affirmed by the verses we believe show the importance of baptism by immersion,
such as Matthew 3:16: “And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water,
suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and
alighting on him.” Even more importantly, our Baptist identity is affirmed by the verses we believe
show the importance of the baptism of those who’ve come to believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and
Savior by their own decision, such as Acts 2:38: “Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every
one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift
of the Holy Spirit.’”
These baptism passages are naturally important to we Baptists. But historically, it’s also been true that
we Baptists have believed in other principles. As I’ve just implied, we’re a Bible believing people,
and even more, we believe that each person has the right to interpret the Bible for him or herself. We
believe that each person comes to Jesus Christ personally and freely; the experience of “Jesus in my
heart” is more important than “dogma in my head.” We believe that each church functions as a
democracy. In the fellowship of churches, each church is autonomous, meaning it’s free to determine
its own mission and ministry, as well as free to call and ordain its own ministers. We believe in what
we call “Soul Freedom,” the Baptist affirmation of the inalienable right and responsibility of every
person to deal with God without imposition of creed, the interference of clergy, or the intervention of
civil government. Soul Freedom affirms the sacredness of individual choice.
This doesn’t mean that we can save ourselves. Baptists have never come close to saying that
individuals are capable or competent to save themselves. Basic to the Baptist understanding of the
gospel of Jesus Christ is the grace of God, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is
not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” 1 We
can’t boast that we’ve accepted Jesus Christ as our personal Savior. That’s not something we can brag
about, like so many of the athletes on the scene today. We can’t stand up and shout, “I am the
Greatest.” We can’t save ourselves.
What we can say is that we were blessed enough by God’s Spirit to answer “Yes” when God’s Spirit
came knocking on the door of our heart. We can pat ourselves on the back just a little bit, because
we’ve said “yes” to God’s grace. God’s grace, after all, is always personally gained. Someone else
can’t fetch God’s grace for us. We’re saved one by one, person by person, and individual by
individual. I grew up hearing that each of us must have our own faith. We aren’t saved by the faith of

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2. Ephesians 2:8-9

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our Grandmother, or our father, or our spouse. We’re saved only by accepting Jesus Christ into our
own hearts.
This is not, however, an effort to minimize the importance of the community. Baptists, while
affirming soul freedom, individual competency, also affirm the individual in community. We
worship together. We learn together. We grow together. We need to be with one another. The
great defender of Baptist principles and former head of the Baptist Joint Committee, James Dunn once
said, “Does soul freedom destroy all chances for community? No! In fact, the possibility of real
community comes only with the competence of the individual before God. Without personal
autonomy there can be no authentic community. Vitality in religion comes only when faith is not
forced but voluntary. What may look like community may be only a collection or collective if persons
are linked as Emil Brunner said, ‘...like so many pulverized briquettes” of humanity.’” 2
Further, Baptists – at least American Baptists – value diversity in our community, all kinds of
diversity. We value racial diversity and cultural diversity. We like to have groups of old and young,
men and women, city people and country people, those who like rap music and those who like country
music and even those of us who like the rock and roll music of the ‘50's and ‘60's.
This doesn’t mean that we always get along. If there’s only one CD player in the room, choosing what
music is going to be played can be a big problem. Each of us likes our own music, but even more, we
don’t like certain other kinds of music. I like rock and roll. I’m ok with some country. I don’t like
rap. If you want to play rap on the CD, that’s a problem.
Being a diverse body isn’t easy. Being all the same is much easier. Lot’s of growing churches, even
Baptist churches, want to grow so much that they seek only those who have the same color of skin,
belong to the same social class, have the same politics. They ignore people who are different from
them. But when the king saw that the wedding hall was empty, he didn’t tell his servants to go out
onto the streets and invite all the other kings in the neighborhood to come to his feast. After all, they’d
already been invited, and hadn’t come. Who’d he invite but all those diverse people out there in the
world: the poor and the homeless, the sick and the lame, the radical and the slave. Yes, we’re to invite
our friends to come to know Jesus Christ, and it’s also true that our friends are going to be similar to
us, because that’s who most of us a comfortable with, those who are like us. But we aren’t to stop
there. We aren’t to limit our sharing of the Gospel message to our friends. We’re to invite all people
to come eat and drink at God’s banquet. We’re to invite all people to be a part of the people of God,
the community of Jesus Christ.
At the same time, personal experience lies behind the Baptist understanding of conversion and all the
other tenants of our faith. For me, both the strong Baptist belief in Soul Freedom and our need for
community is summed up in this wonderful passage from Peter, “But you are a chosen race, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him
who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are
God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
Baptists don’t believe in priests. We don’t believe we need someone to represent us before God. We

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2. Dunn, James, “Baptist Principles,” July 2001, “Address by James Dunn, Providence, RI,
June 24, 2001,” p. 2.

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have Jesus Christ to do that for us. We don’t have to have someone make sacrifices for us. Again,
Jesus did that for us. We also believe this means that every believer is on equal footing with every
other believer in the Baptist church. One of the strongest Baptists I know is Dick Ice, a layman from
the Bay Area, former Vice-President of the ABC-USA, and recipient of the ABC National Religious
Freedom award which was presented to him at the PCBA conference a couple of weeks ago. No
pastor, no priest, has official or constituted authority to “rule over” anybody in a Baptist congregation,
because all Christians are priests before God already. As such, all Christians have the freedom and the
responsibility to minister in the name of Christ.
There sometimes is a problem here, however. As with our citizenship in this great nation in which we
live, sometimes we place all the emphasis on our freedoms, and little or no emphasis on our
responsibilities. In America, we have the freedom to worship, but we sometimes have trouble
accepting the responsibility of allowing others to worship as they choose. We don’t always push to
protect the rights of the minority, unless we’re in the minority. We have the freedom to bear arms, but
we’re to do so responsibly, mindful that any gun can be used wisely or foolishly. We have freedom of
the press, but the press has responsibilities in return. Our companies have great freedoms to seek
profit, but they have responsibilities – I believe – not only to their shareholders, but to their workers
and to the communities in which they are located. We are free, but with freedom comes responsibility.
So too, we Baptists are God’s royal priesthood, free to go directly to God in prayer and free to search
for God’s truth. I, as minister, would not, nor can not, tell you what to believe or what to do. We are
free. At the same time, however, we have the responsibility to minister in the name of Jesus Christ.
The responsibility to minister means that we are not to say, “Let someone else do that. Let someone
else learn the Bible. I’m content with what I learned as a kid in Sunday School. Let someone else
support the church financially. Things are a little tight for me right now. Let someone else pray for
the church and for those people who don’t know Jesus Christ as Lord. I don’t have the time. Let
someone else share the Gospel of Christ with the lost. I’m too shy. Let someone else bring visitors
into the church. I don’t want to risk getting my neighbors mad at me by inviting them to church. Let
someone else be the minister. I only want the freedom God gives to me as God’s priest, I don’t want
the responsibilities that go along with being a priest.”
As minister, I have been called by God to serve you, to lead you, to do some of the things that you
haven’t been trained to do. I have not been called to do for you what you can do for yourselves. God
has called me to preach and teach His word. God has not called me to speak to God on your behalf.
God has called me to proclaim a vision of First Baptist Church as a loving community, reaching out
into our city with God’s word. God has not called me to do your work, your ministry for you. I have
all I can do to do what I’m called to do. God has called all of us to be God’s priests, “in order that we
may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
It’s great to be a member of the chosen race, a part of the royal priesthood, one of God's own people.
May we also remember the second portion of this verse. We are a part of the royal priesthood in order
that we may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.
May we accept the responsibility of being a royal priesthood along with the gift of being one of God’s
own people. Amen.