Please be seated, and children, you may exit to children's church. If you want to miss a really good sermon, go ahead and go to children's church. Our scripture text for this morning is found in 1 Peter 2. You can find it in your pubiable on pages 1,014 and 15, or you may read it from your bullet and just notice that the indented paragraph in the bulletin version, or in your bivle, it'll be indented, is a quote from the Old Testament. That's how our translations help us to recognize when the New Testament is quoting the Old Testament, is that they'll indent and set apart those statements. Here the Word of God found in 1 Peter chapter 2, verses 1 through 12. So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men, but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves, like living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in Scripture, behold I am laying in Zionist stone, a cornerstone chosen in precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame. So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, and a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. They stumble because they disobey the Word as they were destined to do, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation of people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies 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 have not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you, as sojourners and exiles, to abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul, keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable so that when they speak against you as evil doers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. The grass withers, the flower fades, let's pray, a holy spirit would you bless the reading of this Word to our hearing so that we might believe these words and live by them and help me, Lord, to know nothing but Christ and crucified and all these things we pray in His name, man. In the late 1980s, I found myself attending a church event in Ottawa, Illinois on the scenic Illinois River.