Chosen by God?

It's been a while since my last post, but i haven't felt like i have had much to say, but this is something that i have been thinking about today with the youth groups that i do on Wednesdays. It is based around this verse in 1 Peter.

1 Peter Chapter 2 vs 9-10 (NIV)
"⁹But 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. ¹⁰Once 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."

I was thinking alot about this, about what it means to be the people of God. It's quite hard to put into a blog post but being part of the people of God means so much. Peter lists these in verse 9

• A chosen people -God chose us. Can't be bothered to go into predestination here, but all we need to know is God wants us to follow him. That is why he sent his son to earth. That is why Jesus died in our place.
• A royal priesthood - the priests used to be the people for Israel who taught them about God, who interceded to God for them, who helped them worship. Now we don't need priests for that, because as Gods people we are all priests. We don't need to go to someone to get our sins forgiven, we just go to God. We don't need to pray through anyone else, we can pray directly to God. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have ministers and pastors and youthworkers, but that they are not neccesary for us to have a relationship with God. They are just gifted people who can explain the Bible to us, to help us worship God in our own lives
• A Holy nation - Our ultimate allegience isn't to our earthly country, like the BNP might have you beleive, but we have another nationality (Peter describes us as aliens, or foreigners in the world). Our nationality is as the Holy people of God, and our home is in heaven. Holy just means that we are separated for God, we are special to him.
• Belonging to God - This is my favourite bit, and one of my young people summed it up. He said "When we have belongings we often care for them and look after them because they are special to us, and this is what we are like for God." This really struck home for me. Belonging to God means that he cares for me, he wants to look after me, he wants the best for me, and he will never let me go. I am his. That is an extremely, awesomely, encouraging thing to know.

Why on Earth would God go to all that trouble? Why did he send his son to die in our place?

The end of verse 9 tells us the answer to that. He did it so we can praise him. So we can say how great our God is. He called us out of darkness. That is what we should do as Christians. We should live our lives as praise to him. That means our whole lives, every aspect of it. Everything we say, everything we think and everything we do. We should be thinking "hey i'm a holy nation, am i acting like it?" or "is this thing that i'm thinking about really praising God."
It's not easy, and it wont save us. But it sure is a good thing to do. Praising the God who called us to himself, who made us this special people, who cares for us should be what i want to do with my life.

It is astounding this passage. It really challenges me, but it also encourages me. I belong to God. He cares for me, he will look out for me. Living my life for him is the least i can do!