1 Pet 1.17-25
Hope for Holiness (2)
(1 Peter 1.16-25)
Jason Procopio
Last week we did part one of a two-part sermon, which I simply entitled, Hope for Holiness. We were in 1 Peter 1.13-16, and today we’re going to be continuing through the rest of the chapter—we’ll be in 1 Peter 1.17-25. So today’s sermon isn’t a separate sermon from last week’s—it’s the second part, the continuation of what we started to see last week. In these verses, Peter gives us four separate imperatives; we saw the first two last week, and we’ll see the next two today.
So just real quickly, here’s what we saw last week.
Peter told us that because of everything he had told us in v. 1-12 about this incredible grace we have received in Christ, and the incredible grace which is promised to us, we are called (v. 13) to set our hope fully on this future grace. We do that by actively and very seriously engaging our minds in thinking about, meditating on, contemplating, this future which has been promised to us. That’s the first imperative.
And he told us (v. 14-16) that setting our hope on the grace which is waiting for us will have a significant impact on our lives—we will live differently; we will not return to the life we lived before we knew God, but we will resist the sinful desires we had before, and we will be holy in all our conduct, because he who saved us is holy in all his conduct. So that’s the second imperative: be holy because God is holy.
Imperative 3: Take your holiness seriously (v. 17-21).
The third imperative is a continuation of the that last one, but it’s subtly different, and it goes further. Let’s read, beginning in v. 17.
17 And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, 18 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. 20 He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you 21 who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.
So like last time, Peter gives us this central imperative: conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile. That’s what he’s telling us to do in these five verses. And we know what he means because of what he said just before, in v. 15-16, which we saw last week. He said, 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.” Be like God in all your conduct, because God is the one who saved you from your sin.
So when Peter tells us to conduct ourselves with fear throughout the time of our exile, what he means is that we must take this holiness to which we are called very, very seriously. Some people, when they think about holiness, take it no more seriously than they would take watching a romantic comedy.
This is going to be hard for some of us to hear and think about, and here’s why. I hope what we saw two weeks ago (particularly in v. 3-5) did you a lot of good. It did me good. Knowing that God caused us to be born again, that he is keeping our inheritance for us in heaven, and he is keeping and preserving us, FOR that inheritance, is incredibly good news. It is on this assurance that we base everything we do as Christians.
The thing is, for a lot of people, this assurance we have in Christ, and this commandment to conduct ourselves with fear, don’t logically go together. They think, we don’t need to conduct ourselves with fear, because our salvation is assured.
If we’re not careful, if we’re not careful in how we think about the gospel, we can unintentionally come to imagine that because we have such a great assurance, it doesn’t matter what we do, or how we live. We’ve been chosen by God, and he has forgiven us…so let’s just do what we want. We’ll see something we want to do, and we’ll think, a) It’s not that big a deal; and b) I’m already saved anyway, so what difference does it make? And so we let ourselves go with it.
Now of course most people wouldn’t say it quite like that, but how often do we live like that? How often do we find ourselves indulging in what we see as harmless sin, because we know God has forgiven us in Christ?
If that is how we think, Peter’s assertion here should be a glass of cold water thrown in our face.
Think of how often we organize our lives in such a way that allows us to sin more easily. We know that if we put ourselves in this situation, in this particular context, it’s going to make resisting temptation more difficult. But there’s something we want in that situation, in that context, that convinces us to accept the risk. (For example, going to your girlfriend’s apartment alone in the evening, when you know you won’t be interrupted. You know the risk of sexual temptation will be harder to fight when you’re alone on the couch for hours on end, but you want to spend time with her.) We are absolute experts at inventing stories in our mind that we can buy into, so that we can keep doing what we want to do.
And the fact that we do this proves how little we take our holiness seriously. Take whatever situation you are willing to put yourself in—if you were convinced that you would catch a deadly illness by doing that, you wouldn’t do it.
I never want to preach to scare people, or to diminish the assurance of those whose faith has taken a beating. But there are some truths we need to hear, even if they are difficult. And this is one of them. Not just despite this wonderful assurance we have in Christ, but precisely because of that assurance, we must conduct ourselves with fear: we must take our holiness seriously.
But as usual, Peter doesn’t just tell us what to do; he tells us why to do it.
He gives us seven reasons why we are to take our holiness seriously.
1. We take our holiness seriously because (v. 17), God judges impartially according to each one’s deeds.
I know this can come as a shock to some of us, because we’re so used to thinking of God’s judgment as something that is reserved for sinners. But it’s not. God judges all of us, impartially, according to our deeds.
Now, there is a subtle difference in the way God’s judgment works out for those who have faith in Christ and those who don’t. Those who don’t have faith in Christ are judged according to their works, and they receive the consequence of that judgment—and that’s bad news. All of us have rebelled against God, all of us have sinned and fallen short of his glory. Even our good deeds are far from meeting the standards of God’s perfect righteousness: on our own, even our good deeds are sin, because we are naturally dead in our sin, and dead people can’t do holy things. So if all these people have to fall back on is their own innate goodness, they will find that that’s not enough—not by a long shot. They will be judged for their sins, and receive eternal punishment from God for those sins.
If we have faith in Christ, the same thing happens, but the result is different. God judges us impartially, according to our works—which are also sinful, and also far from the standards of God’s perfect righteousness. The difference is that is we are in Christ, Christ receives the punishment of our sin, instead of us. At the cross, God put all of our sin—past, present and future—on Christ, and punished him in our place. So his judgment is rendered according to our deeds, and the sentence is placed on Christ instead of us.
In the same way, Christ was judged impartially by God, according to his deeds… But all of his deeds were perfectly holy, completely sinless. So God gives him a perfect “not guilty” verdict…and then places Christ’s reward for his holiness on us.
That reality, rather than alleviating the seriousness of the way we live once we are saved, should increase it. And we’ll see why a little later.
2. We take our holiness seriously because (v. 17 again) this God who judges impartially…we call him Father.
In other words, this isn’t just an exchange between a judge and a person being judged. This isn’t merely a legal matter. If we have been saved by faith in Christ, we have a relationship with God: we call him not just Lord or Master or Judge… We call him Father.
When a child’s relationship to his father is a good one, he doesn’t just obey in order to not get in trouble. He obeys because he loves his dad. Because he knows that his dad knows what is best for him. Because he knows that his dad wouldn’t tell him to do something that would steal his joy or cause him harm.
With this word “Father” comes an incredible amount of trust. We take our holiness seriously because the God who calls us to be holy as he is holy is our Father, and we love him, and trust him.
3. We take our holiness seriously (v. 17) because we are in the time of our exile.
You don’t invest in real estate on the edge of an active volcano. You don’t buy a home which you’ll never occupy or profit from. You might visit these places, for a short time; but you won’t put down roots there. You’ll put down roots in a place which will last, and which you love; and you’ll spend your time away from home thinking about your home.
Remember what Peter said all the way at the beginning, in v. 1: we are elect exiles. We are living in this world, but we do not belong to this world. We have been adopted by the kingdom of God. Our time on this earth is not all that we have: our time here is a time of waiting, and anticipation, and preparation—preparation for the day when Christ returns, and this world will be cleansed of sin and renewed, and we will live forever with him—perfectly free from sin, perfectly holy.
So while we are here, in our exile, we begin investing in our true home.
I know it doesn’t often feel this way, but our time on the new heavens and the new earth will be infinitely longer than the time we spend in this life. Ten million years from now, our seventy, eighty, one hundred years on this earth will seem like a bad dream: a blip on the timeline.
Holiness is the distinctive feature of the kingdom of God. Since we know that this is not our home, but that we belong to his kingdom, we will take our holiness seriously.
4. We take our holiness seriously (v. 18) because we have been ransomed from the futile ways inherited from our forefathers.
Remember what we saw last week: Peter is talking primarily to Gentile believers who did not grow up in an environment where God was known. And as a result of that ignorance, they were led astray into sin, into futile ways—into practices and attitudes and ways of thinking that did them no good, but only harm.
And Peter reminds us that now, we have been brought out of that. We are no longer ignorant. We know God now; we know (at least partially) what he expects of us. So we must stop acting as if we didn’t know better, as if we still had to follow in the ways of our forefathers.
5. We take our holiness seriously (v. 18-19) because we were ransomed...not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.
Imagine you buy a car, and somehow you swindle the salesman into accepting Monopoly money in exchange for that car. Your ownership of that car is going to be in jeopardy; you’ll know that sooner or later, someone’s going to come knocking on your door and say, “That isn’t your car; you paid with Monopoly money, and that’s not acceptable currency. Give it back.”
What Peter’s getting at here is that our ransom, our freedom from sin, is sure and solid, because it wasn’t bought with things that won’t last. The certainty of our salvation corresponds to the value of the currency with which it was purchased.
Brothers and sisters, you were purchased at the highest price imaginable—the life of God himself—the Son, the second person of the Trinity, who was beaten and who bled and who suffered and died to set you free: a perfect, spotless, once-for-all sacrifice for our sin. So your salvation is sure. And because the price of your salvation was so infinitely high, the holiness which your salvation brings you into is to be taken seriously.
6. We take our holiness seriously because (v. 20) your salvation, purchased with his blood, was the plan before the creation of the world.
Christ’s coming to earth—his life, death and resurrection, through which we are saved—was God’s plan before he ever said, “Let there be light.” This isn’t just a personal matter. This isn’t just about me, and what is good for me. When God saved us, he brought us into a plan which is much bigger than ourselves—a plan by which he has glorified himself through the salvation of not just individual people, but of his family. We take our holiness seriously because it’s not just about us, but about a plan which is an eternity old.
7. And lastly, we take our holiness seriously because (v. 21) our faith and hope are now in God.
In other words, our holiness validates everything we now believe. You say your faith and your hope are in God? Great. How do you know? It’s definitely not because of what you think, because we all know how easy it is to intellectually affirm one thing and to do the opposite.
How do you know your faith and your hope are in God? It’s not just because of something you feel—it’s not some deep feeling of conviction about spiritual things, even if that feeling of conviction is important. It can’t be just about what we feel, because (as we saw two weeks ago) those feelings will be tested. Those convictions will be put to the test when we suffer. That feeling of conviction is how God often draws us to himself and convinces us of the truth at the beginning, and thank God for it—but there will be moments when you don’t feel it the same way anymore.
So how do you know? You know that your faith and your hope are in God when they change you. When you remember what he has taken you out of, and where he’s brought you now, that through Christ he has made you believers in himself, and that in the light of his gift to you and his glory, you grow to be like him. You know your faith and your hope are in God when you remember those truths, and they change you. They drive you to stop doing and thinking certain things and to start thinking and doing other things: they drive you to become more like Christ. Imperfectly—absolutely. Slowly—definitely.
But surely. Conduct yourselves with fear during the time of your exile, because you have been ransomed from the sin which was holding you prisoner. Take your holiness seriously.
Imperative 4: Love those who share your new birth (v. 22-25)
Now at this point, after unpacking all that in a very short amount of time, Peter turns to his next imperative. Imperative 4 is that we love those who share this salvation with us.
V. 22:
22 Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, 23 since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; 24 for
“All flesh is like grass
and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
and the flower falls,
25 but the word of the Lord remains forever.”
And this word is the good news that was preached to you.
Peter calls us to remember what God has done for us in Christ, and to be holy in response to his grace. And what is the ultimate manifestation of holiness? It’s love. If you have no love for your brothers and sisters—no matter how unlovable they actually are—then you have not embraced the gospel.
Now I want to be careful here. People who have a certain type of disposition will hear me say that, and be tempted to think that love is holiness. That is, they’ll live in a way which assumes that love is more important than not sinning. And that is not what Peter is saying here.
He’s just spent several verses insisting on the importance of being holy because God is holy—of putting our sin to death. And he says that when we live like this, when we put our sin to death and become holy, as we purify our souls and obey the truth, as we obey God in every tiny and seemingly insignificant way he calls us to obey him, we will love people we never would have loved before.
We see this because once again he uses the participle in v. 22—a past participle this time. HAVING PURIFIED your souls…BY obedience to the truth…FOR a sincere brotherly love…love one another earnestly. The imperative is that we love one another, and the way we get there is by purifying our souls by being obedient to the truth.
What is this truth? Peter tells us in v. 23-25: he says that we have been born again, not the imperishable, living and abiding word of God, which was preached to us. God saved us through the proclamation of his Word—of the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This Word is living, it is active, it is perfect and it is permanent.
And he says that our salvation through this Word, and our obedience to this Word, will produce in us love for one another.
Now the question is, why does this follow? Why would holiness produce love in us?
I’ve thought long and hard about why that is, and it’s not easy to articulate—in some ways, it’s the kind of thing you have to experience to really believe.
The closest I can come to explaining it is to think of soldiers. I went on a big World War II kick at the end of summer, read several books on the subject. And one of the things that constantly comes out of testimonies of soldiers in almost any war is the incredible closeness that comes out of fighting the same battles together. They become like brothers, even if they had nothing in common before, because they've been through the war together.
This is what obedience to the gospel does in the church. We realize that we have been born again; we realize that God’s Word brought us to life in Christ. We remember how little we had to do with it: that everything we have is of grace.
And so, knowing what we have been brought into, we start to fight our sin…and as we do this, as we grow in obedience to the Word, we look around and begin to realize that we aren’t the only ones waging this war. Our brothers and sisters in the church are waging the same war, pursuing the same obedience, putting the same sin to death. And we realize that God calls us to do it together, to fight together, to be a family in our fight.
When you are in the war against sin together, you grow to love your fellow soldiers. You look around and start to realize that your brothers and sisters are just as weak and frail as you are; that they need the same help you do. And you want to be for them what you need them to be for you.
Not only that, you look around at your brothers and sisters in Christ, and you realize that we’ll be with each other—we’ll be part of this family—forever. The Word which saved us, the Word which preserves us, is not a temporary Word for a temporary time—it is the perfect and imperishable Word of God—
The grass withers,
and the flower falls,
but the word of the Lord remains forever.
This is what the gospel does in us, brothers and sisters. It causes us to see ourselves rightly, and to see one another rightly. And thus, it produces in us love for one another. It pushes us to surround one another, and help one another obey the truth we now know.
Conclusion
Peter’s going to speak more about this holiness working itself out in community next time. But for now, let’s go back over what we’ve seen these last two weeks.
In 1.13-25, Peter gives us four distinct imperatives:
1. Set your hope on future grace.
2. Be holy, for God is holy.
3. Take your holiness seriously.
4. Let your holiness work itself out in love for the family of God.
Now I may be weaker than many of you (I almost definitely am); and I know I can be pessimistic. So if I’m honest, when I look at this list of imperatives, my initial, gut instinct is fear. Any talk of holiness is frightening to me, because it’s not just something we can think about or contemplate. Holiness is, necessarily, incredibly practical. It’s something we are, yes—but what we are necessarily bleeds over into what we do, in the way we live.
Holiness is not a condition for salvation, but it absolutely is a result of salvation. If we have been saved, WE WILL BECOME HOLY. And if we are making no progress in this regard; if we still love the same things and follow the same passions as we did before we were saved, we should not have any assurance that our salvation is actually genuine.
Now, of course my goal here isn’t to discourage you. We must remember that our salvation is progressive. It doesn’t happen all at once. And often it happens so slowly that we can become downtrodden. John Piper said once that the thing that makes him doubt the most is the horrible slowness of his own growth in holiness. It happens far more slowly than we want it to.
But it should be happening.
Among Christians there are two types of people. There are those who are trying to live for God, but having a hard time with it—they’re struggling with their sin, they’re fighting their sin, waging war on their sin, to put it to death. This is the way Christians should be living. If you’re fighting your sin, then you’re doing what God calls you to do. So if you’re struggling with your sin, don’t worry—putting our sin to death is always a struggle. At least you’re fighting.
Then there are people who don’t struggle at all. And these are the ones who should be worried. They live with no healthy fear of God’s holiness; they don’t struggle at all with sin, because they let themselves go with it: they allow themselves to be conformed to the passions of their former ignorance. These Christians shouldn’t be able to call themselves Christians without a good dose of worry, because no matter what they say, there is zero evidence in their life that they have true, saving faith.
And Peter is assuming here that the Christians to whom he is writing aren’t doing that. His warning isn’t a threat, but a reminder of how serious our holiness is.
So through this text, it is very possible that the Holy Spirit is singling you out this morning. It’s very possible he’s dragging your eyes down to the text and pointing, saying, “You see that? You’re not doing this.” It’s very possible he’s calling you to realize that the gospel you claim to love is not working itself out in holiness in your life.
Now the good news is, of course, that you don’t have to do this alone. The Holy Spirit works in us to will and to do.
But as he works in us, he expects us to work—to do what he has called us to do, and to put aside the sin he calls us to put aside.
So let this text lovingly—but firmly—ask your soul some questions today.
In what are you placing your hope? What are you counting on to make it in your walk with Christ? Are you waiting on a kind of supernatural surge of power that doesn’t ever seem to come? Are you—maybe without even realizing it—counting on your own strength and your own willpower to resist sin? Peter is clear—if you are putting your hope in anything but the grace that will be brought to us, you won’t make it. Your sin will get the better of you.
So, brothers and sisters,
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 (v. 13).
Why are you working to be holy? If you are, that’s a good thing. But why are you doing it? Are you trying to live in obedience to the Word of God because you’re afraid of punishment? Are you doing it because you’re worried about what others will think about you if you don’t? Are you doing it because you’ve been going to church so long that you don’t really know any other way to live? If you are pursuing holiness for any of those reasons, there will come a day when those reasons aren’t good enough.
So, brothers and sisters, look to the holiness of the God who saved you as motivation and fuel for your holiness.
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.”
Are you taking your holiness seriously? Is this something you even think about? When you do think about it, do you think light-hearted thoughts? Do you wake up in the morning ready to engage in war against your sin? If not, then your sin will get the better of you every single time. You’ll be the weak gladiator in the ring ready to be eaten by the lion. Do you realize the price at which you were bought?
Brothers and sisters, take your holiness seriously.
If you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, 18 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.
And lastly, is your holiness working itself out in love for your brothers and sisters? When you think about holiness, and attempt to live for God, is it a purely personal matter—just between you and him? To what extent do your brothers and sisters factor into your thinking? Do you realize that you’re not in this alone? That you need your brothers and sisters, and that they need you?
Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart.
