Well, thank you so much for welcoming us to your country and to your city and to this church.

This is a remarkable room. My, my, my, what God has wrought here. I am I am I. I am delighted.

What a privilege to be here, to be in this, and to be with fellow exiles and refugees

and sojourners on the planet.

This book, First Peter, is addressed to exiles, strangers on the earth.

So if you feel totally at home here,

this book will go by you,

or either awaken you to your alien status here. And it, among all the books of the

New Testament is the one that is most focused on suffering.

Suffering is everywhere in the New Testament.

The Bible is not a naive unrealistic book. This book is predominantly about

suffering, how to live under it and in it. about suffering brought about

about by the hostilities of an alien culture in which we are exiles.

So that's where we are going to find ourselves now for the next

five hours or so together.

And if you have a Bible or you just want to use the book here, this is great.

You can just follow along listening to the E. S. V. in here.

And we will be looking at as much of it as we can. I have no idea how much we're going to get

covered. If I had to guess, I would say half of it maybe. But we will be jumping around so it won't be as though chapters 4 and 5 don't get any

attention at all. But I know I cannot teach all five chapters to the measure that I would like.

And so heavy, heavy, on chapter one,

a little less on two, and then light on three, four, and five,

...