1 Pet 1.13-16

hope for holiness (1)

(1 Peter 1.13-16)

Jason Procopio

Our text today is 1 Peter 1.13-16. And if you have your Bibles in front of you, you’ll see that Peter begins v. 13 with the word “Therefore...”

It’s a good rule of Bible reading in general, when we see this kind of word, to ask why it’s there. He’s telling us that there’s a reason why he’s saying what he’s about to say, and we need to know what it is. If we don’t know, we need to go back and find out before continuing. 

So what is that therefore referring to? 

Last week we saw that God is keeping an inheritance for us, and that we are being kept for our inheritance. This is the reason why we can have joy in the face of suffering, in the face of hardship, in the face of every difficulty which comes our way because of our faith in Christ. We have joy in our sufferings because our joy isn’t dependent on our circumstance, but on our hope—and our hope, which is in Christ, never changes or deviates from its course, no matter what happens to us. This is why we can have joy in any and all situations: the gospel of Jesus Christ never changes, and the glory God has revealed in the gospel never fades.

This is what Peter has just spent twelve verses reminding his readers, and it is absolutely vital that we remember it, because everything he’s going to say from here on out is being built on what he said in these first twelve verses. He’s telling us that because we know all of these things are true, we are to respond in very specific ways. If we know these things are true, it will change the way we live.

This is the basic premise of the rest of chapter 1; and it’s important to note that today’s text and next week’s text do go together—there’s just a lot packed into those two passages. So this is part one of a two-part message, which will take us through chapter 2, verse 3 next week.

In these passages Peter is going to give us five distinct imperatives, and he’s going to give several qualifiers along the way. We’ll see two today, and three next week.

Imperative 1: Set your hope on future grace (v. 13).

V. 13:  

13 Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 

Okay, so in the French translations we don’t see it that well, but those first two verbs “preparing your minds for action” and “being sober-minded” are participles: they describe the way we should set our hope on the grace that is waiting for us. So let’s take it step by step: how should we set our hope on the gospel?

Firstly, we prepare our minds for action. Literally, this phrase translates as “girding up the loins of your mind”—it’s a goofy phrase, but it’s significant. In Peter’s day, the men wore long robes that came down to their ankles. You can’t run in robes like that (ladies, am I right? trying to run in an ankle-length skirt is no easy task?). 

So in a battle, or if a man needed to run or do physical work, he would pull up the hem of his robe to about mid-thigh, wrap it around his lower waist and then tie it between his legs: it would give him the freedom he needed to run. 

Peter is saying, essentially, that we need to be ready to run. But he’s not talking physically—he’s talking about the mental equivalent of getting ready to go to work.

The reason why this is so important is because many of us tend to be naturally lazy regarding the life of our minds. We do things, but we don’t think them through. We form opinions, but we don’t think about why we hold those opinions. We say things, but we don’t consider whether or not those things are worth saying. We act, but we don’t consider whether or not those actions are worth taking.

In every moment, in every situation, in every choice which lies before us, we have to be ready to think through what we’re doing and why. How would God have us respond to this? Why do I think God would have me respond in that way? What am I basing that assumption on? What has he already told me in his Word concerning how I should approach this situation, and why? These questions should always be in the back of our minds, so that we can easily bring them to the forefront when they are needed (because they are needed every single day, and many times during the day). 

Secondly, we are called to be sober-minded. This is similar to the first, but it’s subtly different. If preparing your minds for action is a call to anti-laziness, being sober-minded is a call to anti-silliness. He’s calling us to set our minds on things that matter. And it’s not an action he’s calling us to; this is the way we as Christians should be. 

One of the hardest things for us to remember as Christians is just how serious our life in Christ is. It was already difficult in Peter’s day—which is why he needed to give this reminder—but it has become exponentially more difficult in our modern world, because we have been trained to set our minds on things that are of absolutely no consequence. 

When I was in the hospital I had a lot of time on my hands, and I was so exhausted I couldn’t get a lot of work done. So I found myself on YouTube a good deal, and I realized after a couple of days that I had spent significant amounts of time watching videos of a competitive eater trying to see how much he could eat: butter, eggs, steak, spicy foods, jars of mayonnaise… Inevitably he’d eat until he either gave up or got sick.

Now, while it was inarguably fascinating to watch, when I realized how much time I’d spent watching this fool, it struck me that I was now dumber than it was a few days before. Like, if I was this exhausted, it would have been more helpful for me to just take a nap. 

We have trained our minds to be filled up with things which aren’t necessarily dangerous, but which aren’t anything. There’s nothing sinful about watching a guy eat a jar of mayonnaise…but there’s nothing useful about it either. And the problem is that if we have been trained like this—if this is the default mode of our minds—we will have a hard time thinking through serious things. When we finally find ourselves in a situation which requires all of our mental faculties, it’s difficult, because we are no longer used to thinking well.

I don’t want to be alarmist here, but there are few things more problematic for our Christian lives than this problem of mental weakness. In expecting Christians to prepare their minds for action and to be sober-minded, Peter is reminding us that the way we think about the gospel, and the way we respond to the gospel, are deadly serious. We are called to put forward this effort, every single moment of our lives. There is no downtime from this; there is no vacation. As long as we are in this world, we must be alert.

Now it’s not quite enough to say, “Be ready,” because eventually you’ll get exhausted, or you’ll be lulled into a false sense of security, and you’ll let your guard down. We are very easily distracted. So Peter doesn’t merely call us to be ready, to not let ourselves be distracted. He tells us positively what to do; he shows us how to be active in this.

Here’s what he says (v. 13 again):  

13 Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 

So setting our hope on the grace waiting for us is what we are called to do, and having prepared and sober minds is how we are called to do it. Don’t just try to avoid distraction; fill up that mental space with something else. Think about, meditate on, focus on, set your hope on the grace that you will receive when Christ returns. So it’s not the grace that we received when God saved us; it’s a future grace that’s promised to us, which we haven’t yet received.

What is this future grace? It is the grace of being glorified, transformed, to be like him. It is the grace of not just knowing Christ by faith, but by sight. The grace of seeing everything wrong in this world made right. The grace of living for all eternity on a renewed earth, in renewed and glorified bodies, enjoying the presence of our Savior forever.

This is what should be first and foremost in our minds, all the time. We talked about this last week: this is how as Christians we can rejoice in suffering. Our suffering, for whatever reason, does absolutely nothing to take away from the promises we have in Christ. No matter what happens to us here, what will happen to us when Christ returns doesn’t change one bit. 

Now how do we do this? What does Peter mean when he talks about hope? Hope, in the biblical sense, is far bigger than what we usually mean by that word. This isn’t like when we say, “I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow.” Wayne Grudem described it this way: “[Hope in the New Testament] does convey a sense of confident expectation, an expectation strong enough for one to act on the basis of it.” 

I’ve used this example in the past, but biblical hope is more like when you’ve been separated from your family for a long time, and finally you get on an airplane, and you fly a long distance to go back home. The plane lands, and you start to get ready; you gather your things, you make sure your hair isn’t crazy after 12 hours on the plane… And you do it all with excitement, because even if you can’t see your family yet, you know that they’re waiting for you, just on the other side of that wall. 

That is what biblical hope looks like. It is the eager expectation of the things promised to us—an expectation so solid and confident that is moves us to act in a certain way.

This is what Peter expects of us: to think about the grace that has been promised to us, not once, or occasionally, but constantly. This isn’t something we do; it is the default mode of our minds. This hope is always in the foreground, and always in the background; it is the lens through which we see everything else. It is the sun in our mental and spiritual solar system; we can’t look directly at it quite yet, but by it we see everything else clearly.

Concretely, this means that there is a lot we may need to cut out of our habits and routines, which distract us. There are certain activities, certain habits—and they’ll be different for all of us—which either help us keep our hope set on the grace promised to us, or which distract us from setting our hopes on this grace. A good way to figure out which activities or habits are good or bad for you is to consider what your spiritual life is like when you indulge in them, or when you take them away. 

We all have things we enjoy, and we’ll notice after a while that when we do these things, strangely, we find ourselves loving Jesus more afterward. And we all have things that make it harder for us to love Jesus. So we need to think very concretely here. I find that if I get too much sleep (more than 7 hours) or not enough sleep (fewer than six), when I get up in the morning to read my Bible, I have a hard time concentrating on it. I’m exhausted during the day, so I get distracted, and forget to think through the eternal implications of what I’m doing.

The same holds true for what we eat, physical activites, what we do for fun, the books we read, the music we listen to… I find, for example, that certain types of music—and not Christian music, just normal music, in which Jesus is never mentioned—weirdly make me think about him. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is for me. Things that have absolutely nothing to do with spiritual matters have a big impact on our spiritual lives. And we need to know ourselves well enough to know what habits are helpful, and what habits are distracting.

Set your hope fully on the grace you will receive at Christ’s return. That’s the first imperative.

Imperative 2: Be holy, for God is holy (v. 14-16).

The second imperative is, in some ways, even harder than the first. Peter tells us that now that we have this glorious hope in Christ, we must not go back to the things which characterized us before we had it.

V. 14-16: 

14 As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, 15 but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, 16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

OK, so we get the basic gist of this imperative: obey the Word of God, put your sin to death, be holy. We’re not surprised to hear this coming from the Bible; this is what we expect when we come to church—to be told, “Live like this, don’t live like this.”

But because it’s not surprising, often we skip over it too quickly when reading—it’s so obvious, we imagine we don’t really need to give it much thought. Peter actually gives us a lot of details here that are helpful in our fight against sin—in our fight against our rebellion against God (that’s what sin is). 

First of all, he reminds us of why this is difficult. He doesn’t just say, “Don’t sin.” He says, “Do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.” That is very different. The word translated as “passions” here is a strong word: it means a longing for something, a craving. 

Every once in a while, the American in me starts to come out, and I get a craving for American junk food. Now thankfully, I don’t always have access to it. But when that craving comes on, nothing in the world can make it go away, except getting what I crave. (And until I do, even if I eat something else so I’m not hungry anymore, I’m not entirely satisfied—I still want what I was craving.)

This is what it feels like when our passions take hold of us—whether it’s sexual sin, or anger, or whatever. Our minds shut down, and we are led by our guts. Our guts are not trustworthy, because they never take into account what is true, but only what we feel. And the scary thing is, we can’t really do anything, on our own, to stop it. We can decide to do something, or to not do it; but we can’t decide to want something we don’t want, or to stop wanting something we do want. We can’t make our desires, our passions, go away on our own.

I say all that to underline the fact that seeing this word “passions” in the Bible should be a relief to us—the Holy Spirit, who is inspiring Peter to write this, knows that this isn’t just a question of deciding to do some things and to not do other things. He knows that there are desires involved, and he knows that we can’t just make our desires go away on our own; he knows we need help.

So that’s why he doesn’t tell us to not desire, to not have passions, but rather to not be CONFORMED to these passions. We can’t do anything about having our sinful desires—we can’t decide to not be tempted to sin—but with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can resist the sinful desires we have, while God does the work in us to change our hearts and give us new desires, as he promised in Ezekiel 36. 

So there’s the commandment. Don’t be conformed to the sinful desires you’re still carrying with you, the leftovers from before you knew God. Resist those sinful desires. Don’t let them determine your obedience. 

And Peter gives us two foundations for this commandment—two reasons why this commandment should be followed. The first is that our sinful desires are (v. 14) the passions of our former ignorance. 

By the way, this is the first indication in the letter that Peter is speaking mainly to Gentiles. A Jewish person, just through their culture and upbringing, would not have been ignorant of what God expected of them. They could reject what they know, obviously; they could choose to rebel. But at least they wouldn’t have been ignorant of what God called them to be and do.

A Gentile wouldn’t have had that advantage. He or she would probably have grown up never hearing of the one true God, never understanding the story of the Bible, never knowing that certain attitudes and actions, which to us seem normal, are actually abhorrent to God. Gentiles are naturally ignorant of these things. 

And Peter’s saying that this is the state his readers were in before—and us, too (most of us aren’t didn’t grow up in Jewish families). He says, “Before, you didn’t know God; you didn’t know his ways. And your ignorance of God led you down paths, toward desires which, unbeknownst to you, were killing you—were taking you further and further away from what God created you to be.”

And the gist of his argument here is, basically, “You know better now! Now that you have met Christ, now that he has saved you, you have grown in your knowledge of who he is and of what he has called you to. It’s not perfect knowledge yet, but it’s definitely better: you’re no longer ignorant.

“So don’t act as if you still were. Don’t act as if you didn’t know any better. Don’t be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. Let the truth you now know determine how you live.”

The second foundation he gives for this commandment is simple: God is holy, so we should be holy. V. 15:  

15 but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, 16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

This is significant, and we’ll see it again multiple times in this letter. Peter, like Paul, is constantly referencing the Old Testament in his writings. In v. 16, he calls back to one of the most fundamental commandments God gave his people in the desert after the Exodus (we find it in Leviticus 11.44): God tells his people, be holy, for I am holy.

When we say that God is holy, it means that he is completely separated from sin, and dedicated to glorifying himself. And because he is the one who called us from death to life, who caused us to be born again, we should be as he is. 

Now, can I just state the obvious? This commandment to be holy because God is holy is one of the scariest commandments in the whole Bible. (Second only to Matthew 5.48, in which Jesus says, You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.) And to illustrate why it’s scary: raise your hand if you have ever managed to be holy as God is holy. If you raised your hand, you’re either a self-deluded optimist or an actual liar.

None of us are holy; not a person on planet earth, besides Jesus, has ever obeyed this commandment, or can obey this commandment. So then why would God give it?

He gives us this commandment because he knows it will be impossible for us; that’s the point. God wants to make it crystal clear that everything he calls us to do and to be once he saves us depends entirely on who he is and what he has done. That he is both the source and the power of the Christian life.

Look at what he says in v. 16: You shall be holy, FOR I am holy. His holiness is the basis for our holiness. 

There are two really important things that Peter helps us see here, by quoting the Old Testament the way he does.

The first is that this commandment from the Old Testament, from the Mosaic Covenant, is still necessary and applicable for the people of God. He’s just spent the first twelve verses of this letter detailing the amazing grace God has given us. And then in v. 16 he affirms an Old Testament commandment in light of this grace we have received.

That’s surprising for many Christians, because often we don’t see the Old Testament as being particularly gracious. How many times have we heard it? The Old Testament is about the law; the New Testament is about the gospel. The Old Covenant that God established with the people of Israel is a covenant of works; the New Covenant that Christ established with the church is a covenant of grace.

But clearly Peter doesn’t agree. He tells us to set our hope fully on the grace that we will receive at Christ’s return…and then calls back to one of the most fundamental commandments of the Old Covenant: be holy, for God is holy.

This should change the way we see the Old Testament, and the Old (Mosaic) Covenant. The Old Covenant was also a covenant of grace. God showed the people of Israel the grace of knowing him; the grace of knowing his will, which he revealed in the law; the grace of receiving the means to be made right with him (through the sacrifices and the worship in the tabernacle). Way back in Moses’s time, in Leviticus 11.44, God’s own holiness overflowed in grace to his people; his holiness was already the basis for the holiness of the people.

So if we see that the Old Covenant is actually a covenant of grace, we can more easily see how Jesus Christ didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. 

He fulfilled this commandment for us: he was holy because his Father was holy. He was perfect because his Father was perfect.

Christ essentially took the grace God showed the people in the Old Covenant, and he made it complete. He offered himself as the perfect, once-for-all sacrifice for his people. He lived a sinless life, perfectly holy in every way. And then he took this perfection, this holy life, and he exchanged it for our sin. He took our sin, and gave us his holiness. He received our punishment; we receive his reward. He took his perfect, sinless, holy life, and put it on us, like a jacket which covers us.

Think of it this way. When you move to a foreign country, and you want to remain in that country indefinitely, your goal will be to integrate that country—you’ll want to learn the language, learn the culture, participate in society. And you can do some of those things informally. But there will be a certain number of things you can’t do yet. You won’t be able to vote. You won’t have all the rights afforded to a citizen. If you want to fully integrate your new country, you’ll need to be naturalized; you’ll need to become not just a resident, but a citizen of that country.

This is what happened to us—this is what we saw two weeks ago, in v. 1-2. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have been made citizens of the kingdom of God. His life became our life, and his death became our death. God no longer sees us as foreigners; we are citizens of his kingdom, made holy through the life and death and resurrection of his Son. 

Now, when God looks at us, he doesn’t consider our multiple daily sins; he considers and sees and rejoices in the holiness of his Son, given to us. He looks at us, and he sees holiness—the holiness of Christ. Because of that, we are brought into his family, into his kingdom, into his presence. We are given his Spirit. And in his presence, by his Spirit, we grow to be like him.

The only reason any of us can make any strides toward holiness is because Christ was holy for us. We can become holy, for he is holy. His holiness is the basis and the source and the motor for our holiness.

Peter is reminding us of all of this by connecting the grace we have received in v. 1-12, the grace we will receive in v. 13, and the holiness to which God calls us in v. 15-16. He reminds us that God is the one who caused us to be born again (as he said in v. 3), he is the one who called us—who called us with power and efficacy, bringing us from death to life. And so because the one who called us to life is holy, we too should be holy in the everyday conduct of our lives.

Our Hope in His Grace

We’ll dive into this more deeply next week, when we continue with this passage. But as we leave this place and go about the coming week, we need to remember what Peter is doing in these four short verses.

Peter is calling us to hope. He’s calling us to hope on the basis of the work of the Trinity (as we saw in v. 2): the new birth given to us by the Holy Spirit, the inheritance obtained for us by the Son, and the perseverance which the Father predestined for us. And if we have such a great hope, we will see a definite change in our lives—we will become more and more like Christ, holy as he is holy.

So this week, as you go about your lives and prepare to continue in this text, put your hope in God’s holiness. It is only because God was holy for us that we can be holy like him. It is because Christ was holy that we are declared holy, and that we can become holy. 

Like we saw, this is an impossible task for us. So put your hope in the Spirit’s power to make you holy. In his ability to work this miracle in us, to bring this impossible commandment to fruition in our lives.

And lastly, put your hope in the future grace you will receive. If you have faith in Christ, you have already received God’s grace in the past: you have already experienced his faithfulness to do what he promised. This past grace we have received is a foretaste of the future grace still waiting for us. When Christ returns, we will see God’s grace overflowing for us, and continuing to overflow for us, for all eternity.

If your hope is not in God, and his holiness, and his power, and his grace, you will not be able to live for him. You will inevitably lean on your own severely limited power, and you’ll fail—because he commands something we can’t do on our own. Hope in him, brothers and sisters; and on the basis of that hope, be holy as he is holy.