David was not a stranger, an alien in the ordinary sense, the political sense, the social sense of the word. He owned property, he had a family, a position in the world; indeed, he was a king for goodness sake. He was a stranger and an alien, and his fathers were, in this sense only: he is confessing in that psalm his own temporality, his own finitude, the brevity of his life and he knows that there is no answer for him in this life and this world, nothing permanent to hold on to, nothing to give lasting meaning, nothing upon which to build his hopes. He must look outside of this world for that!

But here, in 1 Pet. 2:11, Peter uses the idea in a slightly different way. His is an ethical application. Because they are strangers and aliens in this world -- it cannot be their home, not only because it is passing away, but because it does not represent the true place, foundation, context, and meaning of their lives -- I say, because they are strangers here, they are to take their ethics, their way of life, not from this world but from their true culture, their true homeland, heaven itself.

Through the ages and still today we are so ready to mistake the meaning of our pilgrimage. I remember, years ago, being in my office here and being visited by a fellow, in his mid-twenties perhaps, who was dressed in a kind of white robe or toga and sandals. He was following the Lord's command, he said, and going from place to place serving him. But Peter has no interest in placing some kind of public distance between ourselves and the world -- as, for example, in our wearing unusual clothing; nor does any other biblical writer. The Christians may have been strangers and pilgrims, from Jacob to the believers to whom Peter was writing, but there is no evidence that they looked any different or that they could be identified as strangers in the world by their appearance. The apostles themselves dressed like the folk whose home was in this world, even though they themselves belonged to another culture and were citizens of another country.

Indeed, in every way, the Christians were and were to be "worldly" in the best sense of that word. Paul certainly was. He read the world's books, he knew their plays -- he refers to one in one of his addresses in Athens --, their poetry, their business, their politics. He was, after all, a Roman citizen, quite willing to appeal to his rights as a citizen of the empire. He was, in those respects, thoroughly at home in the world. When John Wayne says, "Listen and listen good, Pilgrim!" He uses the term to describe someone who isn't savvy, who doesn't understand the ways of life in the West. But that isn't the idea here at all. It is in a very different way that Christians are strangers and aliens and pilgrims.

Still less is Peter speaking about withdrawal from the world, such as was fostered in some forms of monasticism later on. Quite the contrary. Verse 12 indicates that he fully expects that these strangers and pilgrims will be living their lives in full view of the unbelieving world.

People have sometimes quibbled in this respect about Pilgrim's Progress. Can't Christian be faulted, they wonder, for going off on that long journey to save himself, while leaving his wife and children behind in the city of destruction? Shouldn't he have stayed behind and cried out warning to the doomed citizens of that town? Well, it is an allegory, of course. And the wise and sensitive reader knows that Christian made that entire journey, through the Slough of Despond to the Wicket Gate, past the Interpreter's house and up the hill and on and on through Vanity Fair and Doubting Castle and the Delectable Mountains and all the way to the River -- I say Christian made that journey all the while sitting at his own fireside and working in his own shop and sitting at table with his own family. Being a stranger in this world does not mean that you live less as an inhabitant of this earth.

He is speaking, as v. 12 confirms, of Christians as strangers and aliens in the moral and ethical sense. Their lives are to be drawn from and to be lived in consistency with that place and that world to which they are heading. And there is such a difference between the two worlds that they produce very different lives among those who belong to them, a difference that ought to be distinctly visible and impressive to unbelievers.

He doesn't say here, in this general statement, what such a "good" life or such "good deeds" amount to that bring glory to God, but we know what he means and he will tell us in greater detail in the rest of the letter. It is the life of love, of purity, of self-denial, of kindness and generosity, of humility, courage, honesty, patience, and integrity all of which are given a distinctly Christian cast, are facets of a character dominated by the love of Christ and a commitment to his kingdom. It is a life of bearing witness in word and deed to the love and holiness of that God who has called us out of darkness into his wonderful light.

You can get to this same place in other ways of course and the Bible does. We could talk about the Christian life as a life of response to the grace of God. Paul does this very often. Live as you ought to live who have been saved as you have been saved. Or Peter could perhaps have begun his exhortation by telling us to be holy as God and Christ are holy. That too is a frequent general exhortation in the Bible concerning the living of our lives.

But here it is live as strangers and aliens. Here the accent falls on distinguishing our lives from the life of the world around us. Here the definition of a Christian life, a good life, it that it is not the life that this world teaches us, encourages us, tempts us to live. It is a different, distinct life, a life apart. And that too is a very important way of thinking about our lives, a very good way to examine ourselves to see if we are really being faithful to the Lord in this way or that.

Have we taken in this way, or in that way, our values from the world or are they consistent with the life of our homeland. Are our business ethics those of this world or those of heaven? Is our family organization worldly or heavenly? Our thinking about and use of money, or time, or choice of entertainment? Do we think about other people in the way we are taught here or there? And is our life related to God in the ways this world prefers -- distant, attenuated, irrelevant in most respects -- or as it is in heaven -- where his glory, his purpose, his wonderful love and wisdom dominate everything and preoccupy everyone? Do we speak in a foreign accent that demonstrates to the people of this world that we are from another place?

But what is also helpful about this way of speaking about our Christian lives -- that they are to be the lives of strangers, aliens, or pilgrims, and not of the residents of this world -- is that it reminds us how important it is that we carry with us while we are living here a sense of our home, our destination, the country to which we are headed, the city with foundations, whose builder and maker is God. It makes all the difference whether that sense is clear and powerful, producing a living expectation, or whether it is weak and vague and, therefore, incapable of producing a powerful effect on us here, drawing our hearts to heaven, and making us want to live already the life that is lived there.

Peter only mentions the point, he does not elaborate it. It is our task then to stop and ponder and reflect and apply to our hearts this way of describing the Christian and his life as that of a stranger or an alien in the world.

C.S. Lewis said of Rudyard Kipling that Kipling's problem was that he had no doctrine of "ends." But that can be too much the case with you and me as well. The end of our journey does not crowd in upon us while we are on the way nearly often enough to change the way we look at our pilgrimage.

One of the effects of my having spent my summers in Colorado at our mountain cabin since I was a very young boy, is that my times there each year serve to mark the passage of my life. Another year has gone by, I'm another year older, the family has changed over the year, and so on. I can remember my boyhood in the mountains and now see my children having the same experiences I did and changing year by year as I did there. Perhaps because of the so happy associations of the place for our family and because we are there only for a month each year, such things stick in mind and take a special place in my memory.

Two memories especially now intrude whenever I am there and am walking in that lovely valley and looking on that beauty that I have looked on countless times in the same way through the many years. I will never forget watching my father drive away from our cabin for the last time in the summer of 1990. He loved that place, but he was sick and everyone knew that he was not going to live to see another summer and to return to the cabin one more time. I can still see the back of the car as it disappeared from sight for the last time. And then, a few years ago, the same thing in the case of my sister. She loved the place as much as I do and her family does as much as mine. In her case no one was so certain, but we all suspected, and I could hardly think of anything else as she drove away but that she would not return, her Colorado summers were gone.

This world, this life, was over for them. It was as if they were driving away from it. And that is an unspeakably sad thing, unless they were driving into another world, into a far better and more beautiful world than any they had known here. And it is the glory of the Gospel, and it is the great honor of Jesus Christ, and it is the immense privilege of human beings and of Christians especially that such a place exists and that there is a way to it from this world. And there the saints shall live forever and ever in unbroken communion with the Lord and in a world of beauty and joy that even the most perceptive among us but dimly see.

And the Bible is always urging us to anticipate this future, to contemplate it, to set out minds and hearts upon it and, then, to live in a manner consistent with it. "Set your minds on things above, where Christ is, seated at the Right Hand of God." How will we want to have lived and loved when we are there? How ought we to live before God and man when we will so soon be there and everlasting joy break over our heads? Ought we not to live as citizens of that heavenly country? Ought we not to live as patriots of that city? Ought we not to declare her praises by our words and deeds? Ought we not to show the honor we pay to her King? Ought we not to take care not to behave in ways that suggest that we would rather live here than there? That we prefer the ways of this world to the ways of the city above?

Ought we not to have such a sense of heaven as our home that we feel detached from this world and unimpressed by its allurements? We are going home.

Howell Harris, the Welsh evangelist of the Awakening, once wrote:

Some of you young people have now had experiences of this. You have been away and you could not wait to get home -- like a soldier who has been overseas for months or years and cannot think of anything but home and getting home. You think about it from afar, and you count the days, and your anticipation builds. Why? Because you belong there. The ones you love are there. It is where you are your truest self. Your memories swirl around it, your entire life is connected to it. Your home. It is where your heart is.

And heaven is that for Christians and is to be that for Christians. And, frankly, is to become more and more that for Christians the longer they live and the more of themselves -- their loved ones, their hopes for life, their longings -- are found up there and not down here. Live long enough as a Christian and you will lose your hope that what you really long for you can find in this world. Live long enough and you will be disappointed with this world. Heaven becomes more and more the place you want to be, the place you need to be, the place you can't wait to reach, because all that is your life, and all that you have come to hope your life will be, you now know can only be found there.

Peter simply tells you to live as a stranger and an alien. You must ponder what that means. You must turn your heart and mind heavenward. You must contemplate your life there and compare it with your life here. And you must do what the godly have always done, take those steps from time to time to link yourself to that city and world above. Some of you do this already, I know. You go to the cemetery and stand before the graves of those loved ones who are now in heaven among the spirits of just men made perfect and you stare at that stone until you think you can see your own name written there. Alexander Whyte would visit the grave of his son in the Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh and say that there he felt as if he had one foot in this world and one foot in the next. Whatever it takes to remember that these few years here are significant for this one reason, their bearing on everlasting years there!

Whatever it takes, live here so that when you are finally there it will be all the joy and all the satisfaction that can possibly fill the heart of someone who has, after a very long pilgrimage, finally arrived home!

That is Peter's thought and challenge. It is not so many days from now, my brethren that home-coming, that most glorious moment that will throw every other moment of your life into the shade, when you put your foot on the threshold of the gateway to the City of God. How will you want to have lived here, then? Will the world have known that you were all the while coming to this place? That is Peter's challenge in these two brief but indescribably rich verses.

Do you know this poem of Christina Rossetti entitled "Paradise"?

What a wonderful thing to be able to think together this morning of the Heavenly Country. Let us stir one another up to live here so as to demonstrate to all that our home is there. And God grant that it may be said of us, what the great Thomas Ken said of his friend Isaac Walton, the godly biographer of Richard Hooker: