Pastor Nick Gatzke

I love the Olympic Games. Every four years, athletes step onto a track or a platform representing something bigger than themselves. They are not just running for a personal best or diving for a personal medal. They carry a flag, an anthem, and a people on their shoulders. Win or lose, they feel it—not only for themselves, but for those they represent.

That instinct, to belong to a people and to feel what they feel, is not incidental to being human. It is woven into who we are. If you have put your faith in Jesus, you belong to a people too—one with a story that stretches from Genesis to your own life today.

God Forms a People for Himself

The story begins in Genesis 17, where God makes a covenant with Abraham, saying, “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you… and I will be their God” (Genesis 17:7–8). Out of one man, God promised to form a nation, give them a land, and above all, be their God while they became his people.

That promise unfolded slowly. Abraham had Isaac. Isaac had Jacob. Jacob, renamed Israel, had twelve sons who became twelve tribes. They endured 400 years of slavery in Egypt, received deliverance through Moses, and over time God’s people grew from one family into a nation of over two million, shaped by both his faithfulness and their unfaithfulness. Kingdoms rose, split, and fell. Exile came and mercy followed. Through it all, God never let them go. He was jealous for them the way a husband is jealous for a wife who is unfaithful. They were his people, and he refused to release his claim on them.

Chosen, Redeemed, and Given a Purpose

What made Israel God’s people was never their strength or their goodness. Moses told them, “The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7:6). They did not choose God. He chose them. And having chosen them, he redeemed them. Isaiah records the Lord’s tender words, “I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1).

Chosen and redeemed for what? Isaiah answers that too. God’s people existed, first, to be blessed by him, and second, and even more significantly, to display his glory to the watching world. God did not simply want to bless a people privately. He wanted the whole earth to see his glory reflected in them.

A Door Thrown Wide Open

When Jesus arrived, he came first to his own people, the Jews, and John tells us plainly that “his own people did not receive him” (John 1:11). But something remarkable happened alongside that rejection: “to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). The door that had been marked by ethnicity was now marked by faith and open to anyone. Paul puts it simply, “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” (Galatians 3:26).

The purpose never changed. Titus 2:14 says Jesus, “gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession.” God is still blessing a people and still displaying his glory through them, only now that people includes Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, every tribe and tongue, gathered together in what the New Testament calls the “church”.

Your New Address

This is where the story becomes yours. You were not meant to live out your faith alone in a bedroom with your Bible open. You were formed into a people, and that people gathers locally, imperfect and ordinary as it may look, to display the People of God. Jesus says in Matthew 16:18: “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Peter gathers up this whole story in a single sweeping sentence: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a 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” (1 Peter 2:9–10).

Once you were not a people. Now you are.

That changes everything about how you see your identity, your struggles, and your church. Being known by God as one of his own is worth more than any job title, family name, or nationality you carry. Your calling to display his glory does not happen in isolation—it happens as you live, worship, and serve alongside the rest of his people. The story that started with Abraham has made its way to you. You belong to an ancient, chosen, and redeemed people whose story is still being written.

“A Word From Pastor Nick” is based on Pastor Nick Gatzke’s teaching series: Beyond Repair, message: Certain Death