1 Pet 1.3-12

The Joy of Our Salvation

(1 Peter 1.3-12)

Jason Procopio

One of the cornerstone concepts in Christianity is that of “salvation.” Whenever we talk about the gospel to other people, whenever we tell people about Jesus Christ, we are hoping and praying that they might come to know him and thus “be saved.” 

But all too often our thoughts about salvation are severely limited—not intentionally, but mostly because we haven’t paid attention to what the Bible says about it. Even for those of us who know better, we often find ourselves thinking about salvation as a kind of life insurance policy: we are “saved,” so we don’t have to worry about going to hell when we die. And while that’s true, living as if that’s all salvation is would be like only eating pasta for the rest of our lives: it’s wonderful, we are thankful for it…but we definitely need more than that if we want to survive.

Last week we looked at the first two verses of this letter, in which we saw that God the Trinity has made us elect exiles, through his sovereign will and action, that we might live in this world but belong to another. Those two verses set the tone for the rest of the letter, as we’ll see. Peter’s going to call us to respond in many ways to the good news of the gospel, but before he does that he’s going to tell us why we should respond in this way. And I love that he does that—it’s not as if he has to. Already, the gospel is good enough to deserve every obedience it could ask of us. And yet, Peter gives us even more reasons why the gospel is better than we think.

He’s going to show us that our salvation is assured; he’s going to tell us what happens when our salvation is tried; and he’s going to remind us why the salvation promised in the Old Testament is of such help for us today.

Salvation Assured (v. 3-5)

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,  4 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 

There is a lot to unpack here. Peter is laying out the foundation of our faith, adding to what he said in the first two verses about God’s work in our salvation. Here he digs deeper. Firstly, he says, According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again...

This phrase alone should dispel a lot of false ideas people have about what it means to be a Christian. We imagine that you become a Christian when you decide to follow the precepts laid out in Christianity. Or you become a Christian when you choose to “accept Jesus Christ into your heart.” Or you become a Christian when you get baptized.

But none of those things make us Christians. We saw this last week—we were dead in our sins. On our own we couldn’t choose God. We can choose to follow the precepts laid out in Christianity; we can choose to pray a certain prayer at the end of a service; we can choose to be baptized. 

But we cannot choose to pass from spiritual death to spiritual life. The dead can’t choose to come alive. That’s something God has to do. And, Peter says, according to his great mercy, that is exactly what he did. He has caused us to be born again. He took the dead things we were and he brought us into new life.

So think about every resurrection story in the gospels. Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead, for example, is a physical picture of a spiritual reality: that is what God did in each of us who have faith in Christ, and what he did in us is no less miraculous than what he did for Lazarus.

So it’s not that we don’t choose to follow Christ; of course we do. We choose to obey him, we choose to follow him, every day. But the new birth is what made us ABLE to choose him. We wouldn’t have chosen God if he hadn’t caused us to be born again first, independently of anything we did or didn’t do. It has nothing to do with us, or any merit in us, but it is entirely according to his great mercy. 

Now, how did he save us? He saved us (v. 3) through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The symbol of Christianity is often seen as the cross, and that is fitting, because it is at the cross that Christ defeated our sin. But it would be just as fitting for the symbol of Christianity to be the empty tomb—for it is at the tomb that Christ defeated death. 

There would be no new birth without the resurrection. There would be no life in God without the resurrection. The new birth is possible because we are united to Christ in his resurrection.

Or, to put it another way, we can pass from death to life because our Savior went before us, and he himself passed from death to life first. His life is our life; we are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ.

Now, to what end did he save us? He caused us to be born again to a living hope (v. 3). What is our hope? Well, that is the second part of the work of the resurrection. The resurrection of Christ obtained new birth for us; but it also obtained for us the hope of another resurrection. 

As good as our new birth is, as good as it is to have passed from spiritual death to spiritual life, that new birth is a foretaste of an even more complete resurrection to come. The hope of Christianity is the hope of our future resurrection. One day, at Christ’s return, he will resurrect us—physically. If we are dead at that time, our bodies will be raised and be made to be like his body: perfect, imperishable, eternal. No more sickness, no more weakness, no more death. The spiritual life he has given us will become a physical life in renewed bodies.

So this idea that we’ll spend eternity floating on clouds and in some kind of ethereal existence goes against everything the Bible teaches. We will be raised again, and live forever as Jesus lives today—in perfected, physical bodies. His resurrection is a foretaste of the resurrection that’s waiting for us.

But our hope doesn’t end there. V. 4: He has caused us to be born again to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you...

What is this inheritance? For the people of Israel, their inheritance was Israel, the promised land. This is what God promised to give them because they were his covenant people, the people of the Old Covenant.

But Jesus said during his ministry that he came to establish a New Covenant with his people. A covenant that wouldn’t be limited by geographical lines. Our inheritance is no longer attached to one solitary country; our inheritance is in heaven—and nothing can challenge our inheritance or take it away. It is being kept for us by God.

Now before answering the question of what our inheritance is—like, is it gold? mansions? buried treasure?—Peter adds something incredible. He says that this inheritance is being kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith (v. 5)… 

Do you see it? Our inheritance is being kept for us…and we are being kept for our inheritance. God guards our reward, and he guards us that we might receive it. 

We are being kept by God’s power—which is complete and perfect and ultimate, so nothing can threaten it. 

We are being kept through faith—the faith he gave us at the new birth. It is by faith that we live our lives with Christ; it is only by faith that we continue, that we obey.

I hope you see how important it is that Peter puts these two together: we are being guarded by God’s power, through faith. There are many ways God shows his power in our lives. But the most fundamental proof of God’s presence and power is the perseverance of our faith.

God works his power in us by sustaining our faith until the end, until the day when we receive the inheritance he has promised us. We, by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. He is guarding us, keeping us, preserving us, so that on the day of Christ’s return our faith will still be intact, we will still be his—and we will see our salvation: no longer by faith, but by sight.

This is our inheritance: the salvation he is keeping for us, and for which he is keeping us. This is our assurance: we are not the ones making sure we “stay saved”; God is the one making sure we stay saved, making sure we persevere until the end. He is keeping our inheritance for us, and he is keeping us for our inheritance.

Now Peter is going to go further, and explain specifically what this salvation entails, and why it is so precious. And he’s going to show us this by explaining what happens when our faith is put to the test.

Salvation Tried (v. 6-9)  

6 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7 so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. 

We all know what it’s like to have our faith tested. Even if you’re not a Christian, you understand what it feels like to go through experiences that seem to go against your convictions, which put your beliefs under pressure. Most of us imagine that when our faith is tested we begin to doubt, and to reevaluate notions and ideas we used to take for granted—and often that is the case. 

But Peter tells us that true faith, when it is tested, doesn’t work that way. The analogy he gives in v. 7 is that of gold being purified in fire. Most of you know how that works (or at least how it used to work in Peter’s time—it’s far more complicated now): you take gold ore, gold mixed with other minerals, impurities, etc., and you heat it up to such a high temperature that the gold liquifies. Gold is a relatively heavy metal, so when it liquifies, the gold sinks to the bottom, and the impurities—called the dross—rise to the top. You remove the dross, let the gold cool, then you heat it again. Whatever dross is left rises to the top, is removed, and you repeat the process until the gold is as pure as it can be. The dross is stripped away; only pure gold remains.

So the question Peter is trying to ask by giving us this analogy is: What is left when our faith is tried? You go through situations in which every external support is taken away—things you didn’t even know you depended on. Your comfort and security and the predictability of your life and entertainment and pleasure… We will all go through situations in which these things are removed from us. And we will all be forced to face this stark reality—when all these things are stripped away, what do we have left? 

Peter says at the end of v. 7 that when our faith is put to the fire, if it is true faith, what is left is praise and glory and honor given to Christ, and our own joy in Christ. That is his main thesis in v. 6-9.

He told us before that God caused us to be born again to a living hope, to the inheritance God is keeping for us, and for which God is keeping us. And he says (v. 6), In this you rejoice. Of course! How could we not rejoice in these things? 

But if that’s the case—if it’s so obvious to us that this is a reason for joy—why does he need to say it? Why do the biblical authors need to remind us to rejoice?

Because we suffer. And a great number Christians don’t rejoice in these glorious truths because they are suffering. We live in a broken world in which we will suffer, and when we do, our joy goes out the window. We see suffering as the enemy of our joy.

But it isn’t.

It’s like lifting weights. It seems surprising—at least to me—that the best way to make your muscles grow stronger is to utterly exhaust them a couple times a week. You wouldn’t think that that pain, that fatigue, is actually building more strength. But it is.

Our suffering makes our joy more difficult, for sure; but it actually procures for us an even greater joy further down the line.

Peter says that we rejoice in the work of God for us, even though now, for a little while, we are grieved by various trials. That’s the first important thing to see here: suffering is not at odds with Christian joy. Suffering is not an excuse to stop fighting for joy. Suffering is not an excuse to let ourselves stop rejoicing. We rejoice in our suffering, because we know these trials have come for a reason. 

And he tells us what that reason is (v. 7):  

so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

When our faith is tested, the result is praise and glory and honor to Christ, and this proves our faith is genuine. And we’ve already seen why this makes sense: when our faith is tested, all of our external supports, the things we usually depend on, are taken away; and in those moments, all we have left is Christ. And when all we have left is Christ, we find that he is in fact enough.

Now, this knowledge will always be imperfect in this life—that’s why we suffer more than once during our lives, and that’s why Peter talks about our faith resulting in prase and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. When he returns, and we see him, we will have the ultimate proof of his faithfulness, and all that will remain for us is praise and glory and honor to him.

So it’s not complete today, but it definitely begins today, and grows over the course of our lives. If our faith is genuine, every time our suffering becomes unbearable to us, all we have left is Christ, and we will find that he is enough.

And the result of such a discovery is joy in Christ. V. 8:  

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. 

Let me say this another way, and in a way that we may have a hard time believing: despite our suffering, in our suffering, and even because of our suffering, we can rejoice—even more joy should be the norm for us.

We cannot miss this: Peter is taking it as a given that the Christians to whom he is writing live like this. In the midst of their sufferings, they have a love for Jesus which is all-consuming, and they are rejoicing with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory. He’s not encouraging them to live that way, he’s not asking or hoping they live that way—he is assuming they live that way, because that love for Jesus and that joy in him are the norm for faithful Christians.

The question is, why? 

If you think about what Peter’s saying here in light of what we saw last week, it doesn’t seem logical. He said we were exiles—foreigners living in a world which is not our own. A world which is hostile towards our God, towards what we believe. A world in which we aren’t truly at home. That doesn’t seem like an enviable position to be in. 

And most Christians don’t actually react to this situation as if it’s a good thing. Daniel Liechti—who spearheads the church planting initiatives of the CNEF—rightly said on social media this week that he had made a disquieting observation: that “what counts these days is belonging to the right group of victims.” And his counter-call to Christians was to urgently testify to “the true freedom of the gospel”—to show that we are not victims, but now entirely and completely free in Jesus Christ.

He is absolutely right. 

Peter can call us to joy in suffering, joy in our situation as elect exiles, because Christian joy is fundamentally different from ordinary happiness. Christian joy is not found in the potential resolution of our suffering. We don’t rejoice because God answers our prayers that our suffering will stop. He often does, but that is not the foundation of our joy. It can’t be, because as often as God answers our prayers the way we want him to, he often answers our prayers in ways we find counterintuitive. 

And if our joy depends on God’s answering our prayers the way we want him to, our joy will be very fickle indeed. We’ll be like kids whose parents won’t give them the candy they want, and who complain about having to eat their broccoli, even though the parent is loving them by not giving them the candy.

Our joy is found in the praise and honor and glory which will be revealed at the return of Christ. 

Please hear me, brothers and sisters—if you’re young, you need to be ready to face this, because you will face it sooner or later. If your joy is not in Christ alone, then it is not the joy of your salvation. It’s happiness, and it’s not bad, but it is not the joy on which you can depend when trials come.

Being saved does not mean escaping suffering. Being saved means finding Christ. Finding Christ means loving Christ. Loving Christ means rejoicing with inexpressible and glorious joy. 

Why? Because when every other support is removed from us, Christ is still there, and he is still enough. Even more: he is better than escaping our suffering. Having Christ is better than having our prayers answered. He is the inheritance for which we are kept, for which we have been saved. He is the glory given to us, and the glory waiting for us. 

And we have him. We always have him. In every trial, in every moment of suffering, in every period of pain so intense we can’t think straight, we still have him, and he is better.

Now at this point Peter sort of circles back on himself. He has told us the goodness of God to us in Christ in the present; but he doesn’t want his Gentile readers to forget that these promises are not new. He wants them to remember that their salvation is anchored in a bigger story, and that even if they are not Jews, they have indeed been brought into that story.

Salvation Vindicated (v. 10-12)

10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, 11 inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. 12 It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.

So Peter takes his readers back to the prophets—the prophets of the Old Testament, of the people of Israel, long before Jesus ever came. He reminds them that the gospel he preaches was foretold and promised long before by the prophets. 

Now it’s important to understand that when God spoke through the Old Testament prophets, they didn’t necessarily understand everything he was telling them to say. Peter says they searched and inquired carefully concerning the grace about which they themselves had prophecied. They knew what God had told them to say, but they didn’t necessarily know how or when God was going to bring them about. The Spirit inspired them to predict the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories, but they didn’t know exactly how it would all come about.

So in some respects, you can imagine, it must have been a little frustrating to be a prophet sometimes (we don’t need to imagine—just read Lamentations). They had bits of information, but not the whole story. And that is because, as Peter says it was revealed to them in v. 12, they were serving not themselves but you. That is, the predictions of the prophets weren’t necessarily meant to make the people see what would happen (and we see very few people understood the prophecies they read), but rather to prove the validity of what they saw after the fact.

Simply put: the goal of the prophecies of the Messiah wasn’t that people might be ready and waiting for Jesus to come (“Okay, he’s going to be born in this town on this day in this context, so let’s get ready”); but rather, that once they saw him, they might look back and realize—Wait a minute, everything he has said and done fits with what the prophets said would happen. 

This is exactly the work the Christians of Peter’s day had to do. This is the work we are meant to do. To listen to the things that have now been announced to us through those who preached the good news to us by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, to go back into Scripture and see just how fully this good news fits perfectly with the promises God had given through his prophets. 

And these promises are so precious that, Peter says, the angels long to look into them. The angels had no more information on how this would all play out than the prophets did. And they waited, longing to see what God would do. And when he did it, they longed to experience it, though they never would. 

Angels never had to receive grace. Those angels who rebelled were cast into hell with no second chance for salvation. Those angels who faithfully served God had no sin to be forgiven of. You’d think that is a really good place to be. And yet, Peter says, they long to look into these things.

Think about that for a minute, because it’s huge. Experiencing grace is, apparently, better than not needing grace in the first place. Do we ever come close to realizing the gift we have received? Just how good we have it? We have rebelled against God, and instead of receiving the condemnation we deserve, we receive his grace. The goodness of his gift is immeasurable, so much so that the angels wish they could experience it. 

And we complain about our trials.

The Bottom Line

And that’s the bottom line of this text. The suffering of the Christian who has true faith in Christ will have a very different result than for anyone else. One of the primary questions of this letter is, How are we as the people of God distinctive compared to the rest of the world? We are elect exiles, Peter told us in v. 1—marching in this world to the beat of a different drum. What will that look like? In this context, what will that look like in the midst of suffering?

Let’s take two scenarios. Scenario A—you have an unbeliever, let’s call him John. Just a normal guy like anyone else. Intense and unmanageable suffering comes; trial upon trial upon trial, to the point where he just feels it will never end. Unless something happens to change his situation, he’ll probably react like most people do—with sadness, anger, frustration, desperation, depression (and I’m not talking chronic depression, not chemical imbalance, but depression in response to a hard situation). That’s the way normal people react to an onslaught of suffering.

Now, scenario B—you have a Christian, let’s call her Anne. Imagine she goes though the same suffering, the same trials as John. They are just as painful for her, just as incomprehensible, and just as unmanageable. How will she respond differently than John, and why?

She’s not surprised at her suffering, because she knows we’re foreigners living in a hostile world.

She’s not afraid of our suffering: she knows that whatever came to her has passed through the hands of her sovereign God, who is using all things for his glory and our good.

She’s not robbed of her joy: no matter how bad things get, her joy is in Christ, and Christ hasn’t gone anywhere; God’s promises to her are still sure.

Can you see how radically different that is from simply gritting your teeth and bearing it on your own? How different that is from saying, “Alright, take a deep breath, tough it out—it’ll get better eventually.” Can you see how different it feels to go through it if you have these sure and proven promises? 

Can you see how differently other people will see us when we respond like this? This text isn’t primarily about our Christian witness, but the implication is definitely there… Imagine that John and Anne from these two scenarios know each other, go through similar things at similar times. (It’s not that hard to believe, it happens all the time.) Let’s say they meet in the hospital, for a treatment of chemotherapy, and they start comparing notes.

What will John think about what he sees in Anne? What will the Anne’s reaction to her suffering make John want? Who doesn’t want an unshakeable joy? Who doesn’t want to know the source of unshakeable joy?

This is our testimony. This is our witness. This is one of the primary ways God brings his gospel to bear on people’s hearts: through the testimony of the joy of his faithful servants in the midst of suffering

But even more fundamentally, this is our anchor. This is our joy. This is the rock on which we stand firm in the storm. No matter what life takes away from us, we know the inheritance which God is keeping for us, and we know we are being kept for that inheritance. No matter what life takes away from us, we know the promises of the Bible, and how perfectly those promises were fulfilled in Christ. No matter what life takes away from us, we know we still have Christ, and he is enough. 

So brothers and sisters, don’t be afraid when trials come. Let them test your faith, let them put your faith under the fire, that it might result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Christ. Though you haven’t seen him yet, love him. Believe in him. Rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, because you know that you are obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

And if you don’t know Christ today, here’s the good news for you—there is nothing you have to do to make it happen. It is God who causes us to be born again. It is God who draws us to Christ, who opens our eyes to see the truth of the gospel. So if you want to know him, ask him. If you want to know him, trust that he’s doing this work in you. Repent of your sin, and place your faith in Christ, and follow him. If you want to know him, chances are he’s already been working in you to give you that desire. Ask him. And trust that if you place your faith in him, you have the same inheritance, and the same Savior.

1 Pet 2.1-10

christ the stone

(1 Peter 2.1-10)

Jason Procopio

1 Peter chapter 1 is a grand, sweeping exposition of the Christian life: the grace we have received in Christ, the grace that is promised to us when Christ returns, the effect that this should have on us in our day-to-day lives—that if we have received this grace, we will grow to be holy, because God is holy, and he has saved us.

At the beginning of 1 Peter 2, he’s actually in this same zone. In 1.13-25, Peter gave us four imperatives—four commandments in response to the grace we have received:

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

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

3. Take your holiness seriously (v. 17-21).

4. Let that holiness work itself out in love for one another (v. 22-25).

In the first three verses of chapter 2, Peter actually continues in this vein. I almost included 2.1-3 in last week’s sermon—he basically gives a fifth imperative here. The reason I didn’t do that is because this imperative serves as a kind of summary of everything we saw in chapter 1, as well as a transition for the next part of the letter.

Introductory imperative: Grow up (2.1-3)

And this transitional imperative is incredibly simple: Grow up. Since we have this great hope, since we have this perfect assurance, we are called to grow up into salvation.  

2.1 So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— 3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. 

In v. 1, Peter is unapologetic in his commandment: he doesn’t say, “Try to avoid sin,” or “Do your best,” or “Really, it’d be good if you didn’t act this way…” He gives examples of sins which are common amongst believers, and he very unambiguously says, “Put these things away.” Have nothing to do with them.

Now what is interesting is that he doesn’t give an exhaustive list of all sin here—he lists a handful of sins which are directly related to our life together (because that’s where he’s going). 

Malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander… He tells us to put these things away, and then he tells us what to pursue (v. 2): Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk. This can be an off-putting image if you don’t have kids. Everyone knows that the best nourishment a mother can give her baby is breast milk: milk that is pure, and naturally made for that baby. 

There is one nourishment that we need above all others, and likely, he’s saying that this “pure spiritual milk” is the Word of God. We know this because the word “spiritual” here comes from a word in Greek that echoes the word “word”; and we know this because just before, in 1.23-25, that’s exactly what he’s talking about—the living and abiding word of God that was preached to us in the good news of the gospel.

So Peter tells his readers to put away sin, to long for the pure nourishment of the gospel, like a baby who absolutely will not stop crying until he is put on the breast. Do we long for the Word of God like that? There is only one thing we need, and only one thing which will satisfy. 

We put away sin, and we long for the Word, the gospel that was preached to us, because it is by the gospel that we grow up into salvation. If we try to do one without the other, we’ll be sidelined, every time. If we try to put away sin without the gospel, we’ll just trade one form of sin for another (it’s only by the gospel that we are freed from sin); and if we long for the gospel without putting away sin, we’ll never be able to see the gospel clearly, because we’ll be blinded by our sin.

Now as I said before, he gives this imperative as a transition between his talk of holiness which leads to love (1.13-25) and his call on us as a church, as a people. Here he has one foot in both subjects. And that’s important because Peter’s about to talk about what God is doing on a large scale in the salvation of his people, and what type of people we are to be if we are going to be a part of what he’s doing.

He uses a lot of imagery to get there, but the main image he uses at the beginning is that of a house. God is building a house, and he is using very specific raw materials to do it.

Christ: The Cornerstone (v. 4-6) 

4 As you come to him [Christ], a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, 5 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. 6 For it stands in Scripture: 

“Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, 

a cornerstone chosen and precious, 

and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” 

So we have a couple of pictures here. Peter says that God is building a spiritual house—this is what he’s doing, and he’ll explain what that means in a minute. He says that we are like living stones—the raw materials God is using to build that house. And he says that Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of that house: he is the first, foundational stone that allows all others to stay standing.

And Peter says that as we come to him, as we come to Christ by faith, as we grow to be like him through obedience to God’s commands, God isn’t just doing something for us; he’s doing something with us. In other words, God isn’t bringing us into a structure he has already constructed, solely for our own benefit. He is still building something, and he’s using US as the raw materials. He’s building his house, and we are the bricks he is laying to build it.

Now, what is the house? This is where it can get a little fuzzy, because Peter goes back and forth between the picture and the reality. The picture is this house that God is building. The reality that the picture represents is a holy priesthood, to offer sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. So if we had to define what kind of “house” God is building with us, it would be a temple—because it is in the temple that priests made sacrifices to God.

Now there were lots of different kinds of sacrifices. There were sacrifices that are offered to atone for sin—that’s not the kind of sacrifice we offer, because Jesus Christ was that sacrifice for us: he died on the cross as a once-for-all sacrifice for our sin.

But there were also sacrifices of worship; of consecration; of lament. Peter’s not trying to get into the theology of sacrifice here; he’s trying to show us that what the priests once did—coming into the presence of God to worship and pray and serve him—is something that we all do now. There is no longer a middleman—in Christ, we all have perfect access to God now. We can all come into his presence and serve him and receive from him and worship him.

God is building a temple on this earth; and that temple—the place where God and man meet—is no longer a physical building in a physical city somewhere on earth. It is us: the church, the body of Christ, the family of God, all over the world. We are the metaphorical “living stones” God uses to build this temple, and Christ is the cornerstone. Wherever the church of Christ is, there the presence of God is with them, in a particular way.

So just think for a moment what an amazing thing this is. (The Bible Project guys explain this beautifully on their video on the temple, if you ever have time to check it out.) When God created the world, his glorious presence was everywhere, and his presence meant nothing but good things for the world. But then man rebelled against God, and sin entered the picture—and this space which was wholly God’s becomes tainted. Now, suddenly, there are two spaces—our space and God’s space. God’s space is perfectly holy, no sin present; our space is completely broken by sin. God’s presence is still everywhere, but where there is sin, God’s presence means judgment and punishment—not blessing.

So God gave his people his law, and the tabernacle, and the temple; he gave them rituals they could perform to be forgiven for their sin. So in the tabernacle first, and in the temple after that, there was finally a place where God’s space and our space overlapped. Man could come into God’s presence once again, and not fear punishment from him. Man could come into God’s presence and receive blessing and grace.

Then Jesus came, and he paid the penalty for the sins of his people once and for all. And then he established the church, saved by his grace, and declared righteous before God. So in the church, there is now a permanent place where God’s space and our space overlap—where our sin has been punished, and we have received grace, and we can serve God without fear. And one day, when Christ returns, this place of “overlap” will fill the whole earth: purified of sin, the entire earth will be both God’s space and man’s space, together—as the voice says in Revelation 21.3: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.”

If we have grown up in the church, it may be hard for us to understand how incredible this news is for us. This is not the way it should go. We shouldn’t be able to come into God’s presence without fear. But because of Christ’s sacrifice for us, we can.

This is why, in v. 6, Peter quotes the book of Isaiah (Isaiah 28.16): to show that this cornerstone which Isaiah prophesied so long before was not just a picture. God is building his church—he is building his temple—and the cornerstone of this temple is Jesus Christ. The cornerstone was the first stone laid, at the point of pressure in the foundation—the stone which allowed all others to stand. If the cornerstone was strong, the house would stand; if the cornerstone was weak, the house would fall. Jesus Christ, Peter reminds us, is the foundation of our faith, without whom the church cannot stand and does not exist, but by whom it will remain strong for eternity.

Christ: The Builders’ Obstacle (v. 7-8)

But at the same time, Peter is under no illusions. He knows that while this is wonderful news for us, not everyone will see it that way. He says (v. 7-8):  

7 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,” 

8 and 

“A stone of stumbling, 

and a rock of offense.” 

They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. 

Now we see the tricky nature of this passage from this point on. Peter uses the same image—Jesus Christ as a stone—to display two very different realities. 

God is building his house, and Jesus Christ is the “cornerstone” of this house. He is the foundation, the basis on which and through whom God’s entire plan of salvation for his church is built. 

But for others, who reject Christ, he is (v. 8) “a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” So it’s clear here that when Peter talks about “stumbling,” he’s not just talking about sinning. He’s not referring to the kind of stumbling (i.e. “making mistakes” or sinning) that Christians can still do from time to time. He’s talking about stumbling over Christ—hearing what Christ says and who he is, and being unable or unwilling to accept him. 

Peter uses two Old Testament texts (Psalm 118.22 in v. 7 and Isaiah 8.14 in v. 8) to show that while Christ is the foundation of all our faith, he is clearly and inevitably offensive to those who don’t believe. The question is, why?

Peter gives us two answers—one suggested, and one very clear.

These people who reject Christ, the cornerstone, are called “the builders” in v. 7. What are they building? Peter doesn’t directly answer the question, because he doesn’t really need to—the building in question is a very common picture which shows up throughout much of the Old Testament, and has echoes in the New. 

During Jesus’s life and ministry, by far the most common clash we see is that of Jesus versus the religious establishment in Israel. The Jews had spent centuries “building their house”: upon God’s instruction, they built the tabernacle and then the temple…and then they built an entire system of religious practices in and around the temple, which often had much more to do with their own desire for power and reputation than the law God had given them. (We can see this pretty clearly in the often hypocritical practices and attitudes of the Pharisees, for example.)

And when Jesus comes proclaiming the kingdom of God, a kingdom which supercedes their religious ideals and fulfills not only the letter of the law but the heart of the law, how do they react? They reject him. They call him a blasphemer and a liar. And ultimately, he is so offensive to them that they crucify him.

Jesus Christ is the cornerstone on which the church is built. But he is inevitably offensive to those who do not believe. 

This is one thing that so many Christians instinctively understand, but refuse to accept. They spend so much time and effort trying to make Jesus less offensive. And this leads us into all kinds of craziness in the church. We’ll try to turn church services into a rock concert. We’ll hold conversations with unbelievers in which we try to lay out logical arguments which explain why Jesus isn’t the big bad wolf everyone thinks he is; he’s actually really great! Now of course that’s true, and of course Christ is absolutely worthy of the biggest blow-out concert event any human being could imagine, and more.

The problem is that none of these things will convince anyone. Jesus Christ was rejected in the past, and he will continue to be rejected in the future. He is a stone of stumbling, a rock of offense. To put it simply: You will never make Jesus cool enough. You will never make Jesus easier to swallow. And you shouldn’t want to, because if you do manage to make Jesus cool enough to be acceptable, you’re not proclaiming Jesus at all, but a fiction you’ve created.

No matter how hard we try to reason with unbelievers, no matter how faithfully we share the gospel with them, the gospel will always be the stench of death to some. They will hear the gospel, and they will stumble.

Now again, the question is, why? Peter gave us part of an answer by referring to the “builders” who rejected Jesus: they stumbled because Jesus was offending their religious ideas. But he gives a much more explicit answer at the end of verse 8, and this is the part some of you will not accept, no matter how clearly you see it written there:

They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. 

Two reasons why people stumble over Christ. They stumble because they disobey the word. They don’t want to submit to Christ the cornerstone, and they don’t want to obey the word.

And they stumble over Christ because ultimately, they were destined to do so. There is only one person who can keep someone from stumbling over Christ, who can make someone see Christ as the Savior and not as an offense: and that is God himself. 

Now of course that’s a sobering thought. And it should drive us to prayer that God might intervene on the behalf of people we know who don’t know him. But we mustn’t stop there. 

Christ: Our Salvation (v. 9-10)

Peter is trying to help us see why so many reject Christ. But that’s not all. He’s also—and, I believe, most especially—trying to help us see how incredible it is that we DIDN’T reject him. Because outside of the free grace and mercy of God, there is absolutely no reason why we should have reacted any differently to the gospel than the builders who rejected him. “But,” Peter says in v. 9—

9 But 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. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 

So what makes us different from everyone else who rejects Christ? 

Firstly, we are a chosen race. People can get bent out of shape when you start talking about race; but he doesn’t mean it in terms of ethnicity. He means simply that in his grace, God has made us into a different type of people. We are no longer defined by our background or our nationality or our ethnicity. We are his people. We have been transformed on a fundamental level. 

And it is only because of God’s free choice that this happened. We didn’t choose him; he chose us. Why? I have no idea. It’s like that old Woody Allen joke, where he said, “I wouldn’t want to be part of a club which would have someone like me as a member.” For the life of me, I don’t understand why God chose to save me, or any of us here. But he did.

Secondly, we are a royal priesthood. This is what we were talking about earlier. God is building his temple, and he has set us apart  for a divine calling: to serve the holy God with faithfulness, and to proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. 

The question we often ask ourselves, though, is who exactly is this referring to? Who in God’s kingdom gets to be the priests? That the question Peter answers next.

Thirdly, we are a holy nation. Now this is what boggles my mind when I think of God’s plan. I would understand God choosing a handful of people to serve as the “holy men”, so to speak, in his kingdom. (You would think these would be pastors or priests.) But God doesn’t merely designate only certain people in his kingdom to serve this function. He sets the entire nation, all the people of God, apart for holiness. He calls everyone—regardless of our job, our age, our maturity, our background, our talents—to represent him to the world, and to serve as priests in his temple.

Fourthly, we are a people of his own possession. This flies in the face of so much of modern Christianity. So many of us think of our faith almost exclusively in terms of what God has done for us. But God doesn’t belong to us; we belong to him. Our desires, our dreams, our goals—all of these things fall to the bottom of our list of priorities when we become Christians, because it’s no longer about what we want; it’s about what he wants for us. We belong to him; it’s not the other way around.

All of this serves to underline that the only difference between us and those who reject Christ is the initiative of God himself to save us, and to set us apart, and to make us holy. This is why spiritual and moral pride should be absolutely and completely foreign to our way of thinking if we’re in Christ. We’re not in him because we’re good, or because we understood something that someone else didn’t understand, or because we achieved a level of morality other people couldn’t attain to. We are in him because he brought us in. And that’s all.

The question is, again, why? Why did he do it? Why did he set us apart in this way? 

V. 9 again:  

9 But 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. 

There’s the answer. He set us apart that we might be his ambassadors on this earth—that we might proclaim his excellencies to all who would listen. There’s a difference between saying, “Turn to Jesus so you don’t go to hell” and proclaiming the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. 

We always think of evangelism as a rescue mission. We share the gospel because we want to see people come to know Christ and escape the wrath of God. There is precedent to this—Paul speaks in similar terms in Romans 9—but this was far from the predominant way the apostles spoke about the gospel, or about sharing the gospel with others.

But without meaning to, when we go about evangelism in this way, for this reason, we adopt a subtle change of tone that can have ripple effects on our whole Christian life. When we make sharing the gospel all about escaping the wrath of God, we inadvertently make him into the bad guy. He’s the one who’s out to get us, and we need to come to Jesus to escape God. 

But the authors of the Bible consistently frame the sharing of the gospel very differently. Rather than talking about God as someone to escape from, they speak of him as someone to escape to. Now, make no mistake: hell is real, and the wrath of God against sin is real. This is a real, legitimate threat. But over and above the threat of God’s wrath is a much greater threat. 

The greatest threat which hangs over every human being who rejects God is the prospect of not knowing him—hell, as horrible as it is, is just the logical conclusion of what they’re living already, and they don’t even know how much better it can be.

We are called to proclaim, not mainly his anger, but his excellencies. His goodness and his mercy and his compassion and his glory and his power and his might and his righteousness. Even his wrath is excellent, because it shows exactly how just he is: God hates what is truly hateful, and loves what is truly good. 

Peter gives us three prime examples of this excellency. Firstly, God shows his excellency in that he called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. Again, this is not how people always share the gospel. Rather than just speaking about escaping judgment, not often do people say, “Because of what God did for me, I can see now." 

It’s no accident that one of the dominant miracles Jesus performs in the gospels is the healing of the blind. Every blind man healed is a picture—a picture of what God did for us when he saved us. He gives us new eyes to see, and then he shines the light of the gospel, so that we see everything else rightly.

We can see who we are, and who he is. We can see what we need, and what he gives. We can see what God deserves, and how we are called to respond. He calls us out of darkness into light.

Secondly, Peter says in v. 10: 

10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people… 

Remember: he’s speaking to Gentile believers. Now of course, these believers all belonged to some ethnic or national group before. But these believers weren’t united to one another. There were dividing lines of race and background and nation and language and culture… But now, through God’s grace, they had been brought together, united by the gospel, made to be a people when before they weren’t one.

It can be difficult for us to see how wonderful this news is, because we live in a time and in a culture which encourages individual freedom to a greater and greater extent. In our minds, the idea of freedom is inextricably linked to the idea of self—I’m free when I can do whatever I want to do.

But this instinct to lean in toward personal freedom is a relatively new thing. For as long as people have been on this earth, people have recognized the profound need in all of us for community. This is a deep need in every human being, which many of you felt particularly during the confinement. If you’re single, and you live alone, the confinement was likely very hard on you, because you know you need your people. Even those of us who are natural introverts know it.

I felt this particularly, not during the confinement, but in the two weeks after I was discharged from the hospital, after my accident. I had spent two weeks in the hospital, cut off from nearly everyone because of Covid, then I had to spend two weeks in confinement, for the same reason, when I got out. 

Now, I was freer during that time than I usually am. I had no constraints, other than those imposed by my healing body. I didn’t have to do the things I usually have to do when I’m at home with my family. I was “free”. But I noticed that in that time of relative “freedom”, besides the fact that I missed my family, I didn’t like what I saw in myself. We let ourselves go when we’re cut off from other people, and turn into less appealing versions of ourselves. Having a community gives us the framework we need to be the best versions of ourselves.

And that is precisely what God has given us, with one notable exception: the community he has brought us into is an eternal community, characterized and defined by his grace and goodness. He has brought us into a people, united not by blood or by nationality or by culture, but by the shared grace we have all received, and which we will receive for all eternity. 

And that’s the third example of God’s excellency: 

once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 

Once, we were under God’s just wrath, deserving of his just judgment against us. But God took that judgment on himself, in the person of Christ. He took what we deserve, and gave us what he deserves. He took our punishment, and gave us his reward.

Can you see how different this is than the way we often share the gospel? It’s not: turn to Christ in order to escape hell. It’s: turn to Christ BECAUSE HE IS THAT EXCELLENT. He has brought us out of darkness into his marvellous light; once we weren’t a people, but he has made us a people; once we had no mercy, but now he has given us mercy.

So, Peter says, GO TALK ABOUT THAT. Tell others just how good he is. Proclaim his excellencies to the world.

Conclusion

Peter calls us to three immediate responses to everything he’s laid down in these verses. The first is in v. 4-5: he tells us that we, like living stones, are built up as a spiritual house as we come to him—as we come to Christ, the cornerstone.

So this is an opportunity for those of you today who don’t know Christ: come to him. Don’t reject him. Don’t let yourselves remain among those who stumble over him. See that Christ is the Savior, the cornerstone of God’s plan of salvation, and come to him in faith. Repent of your rebellion against him and accept the free gift of salvation he gives. Put your faith in him and trust him. 

And as you come to him—as we all come to him—let yourselves be used by God as living stones to build his house. Obey his Word. Put away malice and deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander. Realize that you are not just saved for yourselves, but as a people. Belong to God’s family, invest in God’s family, enjoy and love God’s family.

And lastly, proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Proclaim his excellencies to the world in which we are sojourners and exiles. 

This is our calling.

Starting next week, in v. 11, Peter is going to begin showing us what that looks like in practice—not just for us as individuals, but for us as the church. But for now, let’s pray.

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.

1 Pet 1.1-2

The Trinity Saves

(1 Peter 1.1-12)

Jason Procopio

First of all I just want to thank everyone who’s been praying for me, I had a bike accident almost three weeks ago that left me with three broken ribs and aneurisms in my spleen. They almost had to take the spleen out—it was touch and go, that’s why they kept me in the hospital for so long—but in the end they operated and managed to stop the bleeding. So I’m still hurting, and I can’t do much, but I’m here. (And just to let you know, I’ll be keeping a very good distance from everyone today—Covid is a slightly more seriously threat to me during recovery, since a strong cough could cause my spleen to rupture. So if I stay away, it’s nothing personal; it’s doctor’s orders.)

But I really appreciate all of your prayers and support, and I’m really happy to be able to be here with you today. It’s been a long time.

Church took on a weird life during the confinement, as it did for every aspect of life. So much of the way we thought about ourselves as a church was wrapped up in the faces of other people—and that’s not wrong. It’s right that a church’s life should be in part defined by the people in that church. It’s right that we should miss one another. It’s right that we should feel a little lost when we can’t see each other.

But in our sense of loss, I’m afraid it became all too easy to forget what that life was all about in the first place. We knew it wasn’t this—this isolation from other believers, this living alone in our homes or apartments for weeks on end. We knew it wasn’t that…but it may have been easy, during this time, to have focused so hard on what church isn’t that we forget what it is. 

The other strange reality we need to face is that we don’t know what the future holds. We know the virus is on the rise again, and so even if we’re thrilled to be back here, we don’t know how long we’ll get to stay here. We don’t know how long this place will remain open to us, if we’ll have to go back into confinement… We just have no idea what the future holds.

So the question we have to ask ourselves is, in this context of an uncertain present and an uncertain future, what is the church meant to be? It can’t be just the sum total of our activities, or the time we spend together, or even the people we love. If our activities are pared down, and the time we spend together is now drastically limited, and we don’t get to see the people we love as often as we’d like…what are we? What else is left? What makes the church the church in a time like this?

That is why today we are going to begin digging deep into the letters of Peter. I’ve been thinking of it as “Connexion Reboot”—after the dizzy spell that the first confinement was, we need to be firmly anchored in who we are, and what we are meant to do here. And Peter does a masterful job of telling us these things in his letters. So we’re going to be here for the next few months. (I promise we won’t take as long as we did with Luke, we’re talking eight chapters in total. But those chapters are very rich.)

Before we get into Peter’s first letter, let’s get situated. V. 1 of chapter 1 reads:  

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia...

So if you’re new to this, this can look a little strange. Back in Peter’s day they had the habit of putting the “Love, so-and-so” at the beginning of the letter, before the “Dear so-and-so.” It makes sense—back then there was no postal service, no return address written on an envelope. Letters were brought by courier or someone who volunteered to bring it. So when the letter was read aloud to a group of people (as it would have been here), they’d want to be clear on who had written the letter.

So we see that this letter was written by “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ.” Peter was one of Jesus’s closest disciples during his ministry. This is the guy we all identify with. He was well-meaning but impulsive, wanting to do well but never quite grasping the nature of what needed to happen at any given time. He was the one who suggested they build tents for Elijah and Moses during the transfiguration. He was the one who cut off a guard’s ear at Jesus’s arrest. He was the one who walked out on the water with Jesus. And he was the one who denied him three times, before being forgiven by Christ and sent out (the word “apostle” means “sent”) to proclaim the good news of the gospel and establish the church.

Now to whom is he writing? V. 1 again: 

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia...

Peter is writing to Christians “of the Dispersion”. The term “dispersion” in the Bible is typically used to describe the scattering of Jews throughout the world. But the term is used in a broader way here, since elsewhere in his letter Peter makes it fairly clear that he’s writing to primarily non-Jewish (Gentile) churches. He’s writing to churches in cities which are all found in what is modern-day Turkey. These cities were all quite diverse, but heavily influenced by Greco-Roman culture and still under Roman control. So there would have been some Jews among them, but Peter makes it clear later on that his primary focus in his letter is Gentiles.

Now, why is he writing? Peter frequently mentions persecution in his letter: this was probably the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Nero. Christians were persecuted by Nero because Roman culture was profoundly polytheistic—there were many possible gods you could choose from—but also heavily under the thumb of the emperor. And here come these Christians who say there is only one God, and that their principle allegiance is to him. Christian belief was a threat to not only Roman culture and worship, but to Roman power itself.

So essentially—and we’ll see this many times in the coming weeks—Peter is writing to Christians who are finding themselves increasingly at odds with the pagan culture around them, less and less at home in a world which does not recognize their God.

And honestly—what could be more timely than that?

So that’s the context—that’s what’s prompting Peter to write this letter. Since we don’t have a lot of time left, we’re going to go easy this morning and only look at the first two verses of the letter. (Don’t worry, we won’t go two verses at a time throughout the whole letter.) But these first two verses are absolutely packed. 

We’re going to see, very simply, who we are; who God is; and how and why he has saved us.

God Naturalizes (v. 1a)

Let’s start again at v. 1. In his introduction to this letter, Peter says very clearly some important things about whom he is speaking to—particularly about how he sees them, and how they should see themselves.

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia...

So there are two words you want to hang your hat on in this verse, and those words are “elect exiles.”

The word “exiles” here isn’t literal, like in the Old Testament. Literally it means “sojourners,” or “temporary residents.” If you are an “exile”, in Peter’s meaning, you are there, wherever you are, but you don’t belong there. You belong somewhere else.

Anyone who is an expat understands what this feels like. You grow up in one country, you inherit the customs and language and ways of thinking of your home country. There are things about you which are part of you, but which don’t come from you—they come from outside you, from the culture in which you were raised. 

And then you move to a different country—let’s say, for a temporary assignment for your job. You know you’re not going to spend the rest of your life here, you’re going to be returning home eventually. So you’re not going to try and integrate into the culture—there’s no point, you’ll be gone in a few months. Instead, you’re just there, surrounded by this foreign place, with a different language, a different culture, different ways of thinking. And at least for a while you feel like a fish out of water: you’re here, but you’ve still got one foot in your home country. The customs and ways of thinking, the food and the language, are discernible and visible, but you don’t understand them. It doesn’t feel like home. And you don’t want it to feel like home, because you know you’re going back to your real home very soon.

Now the analogy isn’t perfect, because most of us love to travel, and love to experience different cultures. But how would we feel if the culture in which we found ourselves was actively hostile toward everything we are as people—everything we hold dear, every conviction, and every love?

That’s what it’s like to be an exile, taking the word the way Peter is using it. It’s being somewhere, but still belonging to somewhere else.

Now what’s interesting is that Peter is addressing people in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia. And the people to whom he’s speaking, we have every reason to believe, come from those places. They’re Galatians, they’re Bithynians, they’re Cappadocians. So he’s not speaking to foreigners who have been exiled there, but to natives. 

If that’s the case, why does he call them exiles?

He calls them exiles because he knows something has happened in them to fundamentally change their identity. Something has happened to them which has so radically transformed everything about them that they are no longer truly Galatians or Bithynians or Cappadocians at all. That’s where they’re from, but they belong to another country. 

And I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying that their new country, their adopted country, is not a country on this earth at all, but rather the kingdom of God. God has taken these people, citizens of their earthly country, and he has effectively naturalized them into his world, making them citizens of heaven. They are living in their earthly countries, but they belong to a different place altogether. Something happened in them to shift them from one homeland to another.

The question is, what changed them?

God Elects (v. 1b)

And that is where the word “elect” comes in. This is a very loaded word in the Bible, so I’m going to pack a lot of information into a very short time.

The Bible says very clearly that human beings are born with a sinful nature. That means that we are all naturally inclined to sin—to rebel against God—and that is exactly what we do. That’s all we do if left on our own, even if we don’t realize it. Paul says in Ephesians 2.1 that we are all spiritually dead: that is, we have no natural inclination towards the life that is in God alone. So there is no possible way any of us would choose God by ourselves: dead people can’t choose to come alive.

But it’s worse than that: dead people can only choose dead things, but we do choose those dead things—our death is an active death. We live our lives and we want what we want, and the things we naturally want have nothing to do with the life of God, have nothing to do with the glory of God. So it’s not just that we’re dead—it’s that we love our death. We love the sin that is killing us. 

And our love of sin is the root of our problem. God is holy and perfect and good, and sin is an absolute horror to him—it goes against everything he is and everything he created us for. So when we love sin, that means we hate God, because by definition sin is everything God isn’t. I hope you can see that sin is much more than simply “doing bad things”; it is not living for God’s glory, in our thoughts, actions and attitudes. And because of our sin, every one of us deserves and sits under God’s wrath against our sin.

And that’s where we remain…unless God himself does something to change it. He’s the only one who could change it—and in his grace, he does.

In his own sovereign will, for no reason that any one of us will ever discern, God chooses to save his children. Ephesians 1.4 says that the Father chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. Before the world was formed, before he did anything else on this earth, God chose us. 

We’ll get into this a little more in a minute, but just think about this. If you are a Christian—if you have faith in Christ; if you have placed your faith in Christ for your salvation—then that is because before God created the world, he looked across time and said, “I choose to save ________.” If one day you chose to follow Christ, it is only because an eternity ago God chose to save you. And not in a general way: YOU. Specifically, you. He chose you.

Peter is writing to “exiles”, people who are living in one world but belong to another, and who are exiles because God chose to make them citizens of his kingdom. These people have been adopted by a new country, by a new Father, who reached across time and said, “I choose to adopt you. Now as you live in this world for a short time, remember where you really belong. Remember your true home.”

The result of this, we’ll see more and more as the weeks go by. Peter will show us that to live as elect exiles means being increasingly at odds with the world around us. Not in a confrontational way—we’re not going to go out in the street and start demanding people live like us. But as we grow in our faith, we’ll slowly but steadily see our loves changing. We’ll look at the world around us, and the things people love and the way they live their lives and the things they pursue…and we’ll find that we’re no longer motivated by the same things. We no longer have the same foundational convictions, and we no longer have the same objectives.

And all of this means that the way we respond to the trials we will face living in this foreign land will be very particular and specific to our true home: the kingdom of God.

But that’s for next week. For now, we are elect exiles, living in a world not our own through the sovereign choice of God. 

After establishing this, Peter goes further into God’s involvement in our lives and salvation, and he does it by displaying the work of the Trinity. (You may not be able to see it, but I am beyond excited to be in these two verses this morning.)

The Trinity Saves (v. 2)

So before we get into it, let’s read it again.  

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, 

To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, 2 according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood: 

May grace and peace be multiplied to you. 

So Peter mentions a few things that God does for Christians here, and we’ll see them all, but it’s important to note that his list isn’t chronological. He’s not talking about what’s called the “order of salvation” (ordo salutis). There are many things that happen in and for our salvation, and Peter’s hitting some of the highlights.

His point isn’t to give his readers an exhaustive summary of what it is to be saved, but rather to show that salvation is the work of the God who is Three-in-One. That’s why I called this last point “The Trinity Saves”, rather than just “God Saves,” like in the first two. I just as easily could have called the first points “The Trinity Naturalizes,” and “The Trinity Elects,” because that is Peter’s point. He wants us to clearly see that our salvation doesn’t come through only the work of the Father, or the Son, or the Spirit, but all three.

Now if you’re new to the Christian faith and you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s what I mean by the Trinity (and I’m sorry, it may not be any clearer after I’m done than it does right now). The Bible teaches that there is one true God, who created and sustains all things, and that this one true God exists eternally in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In Christianity we call these three persons of God “the Trinity”. Each member of the Trinity is distinct from the others—the Father isn’t the Son, the Son isn’t the Spirit, the Spirit isn’t the Son or the Father. But at the same time, each member of the Trinity is God—the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God.

People have tried for centuries to explain how this is possible—they’ve come up with illustrations and symbols to help us imagine how God could be three in one. Some of them are helpful, most of them are even more confusing than the simple explanation I just give. None of them gets it quite right.

If you’re confused, that’s okay—all of us are. The nature of God is, by definition, mysterious—above what we as human beings can comprehend. We all have had the experience of accepting certain things we don’t understand (the theory of relativity; or guys, if you’re married, how this beautiful woman could possibly want to be with me): this is one of those things we accept on faith.

But it’s important that we know that this is what the Bible teaches, because we want to know God as accurately as possible, even if we don’t understand everything about him. And verses like v. 2 help us enormously. Peter tells us, first of all, that his readers are elect exiles…according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

Now, many people have used this as a way to get out of what I said earlier about God electing us. And I understand why they do—it’s a troublesome idea that God would choose to save some but not others. So people say that because God knows all things, he foreknew who would choose him, and he chose those people. The problem is that a) that doesn’t make any logical sense; if God’s only saving those who would have chosen to follow him on their own, he’s not choosing anything, but merely responding to our choice; and b) the Bible clearly tells us the opposite. We saw this earlier—we were dead in our sins, and unable to choose God on our own, and he chose us in him before the foundation of the world.

So that’s not what Peter means when he talks about the foreknowledge of the Father—he’s not merely saying that God knew ahead of time what we would do. When the Bible speaks of knowing someone, it is nearly always referring to an intimate relationship—that is, it is not just about information. When God knows his people, that means he sets his affections on them. It means he pours his love into them. It means he sets them apart to be his own. 

The foreknowledge of the Father is this type of knowledge. Before the world existed, before any of his children were here, the Father knew us. He set his affections on us. And because he loved us, he chose to save us.

I’ve given this illustration before, but it’s the best I can do. My wife and I waited nine years before we had our son, and another six before we had our daughter. In both cases, our waiting wasn’t entirely intentional; it took a long time to have both of our kids. So before they got here, we had been praying for them, and thinking of them, and dreaming of them, for a long time. And for both of my kids, I had the same experience. When they finally came out, and I looked at their little faces for the first time, my first thought was, I know you. I’d just seen them for the first time, but I knew them; and I knew them because they were mine.

The Father’s foreknowledge is that kind of foreknowledge. An eternity before he created us, he set his love and affection on every one of his children, and because his heart was set on us, he chose to save us.

Secondly, we are elect exiles…in the sanctification of the Holy Spirit. 

The Holy Spirit does a lot of things in us. He gives us faith to believe; he opens our eyes to see the truth in the Word of God; he gives us power for the life he calls us to live. And one of the most fundamental things that he does is that he sanctifies us. That is, he changes us, from the inside out, so that we might be like Jesus Christ. Not just live like Jesus Christ, but be like Jesus Christ.

God described this sanctification through the prophet Ezekiel, by saying he would remove from our flesh the heart of stone, and give us a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36.26-27). He’s talking about a complete rewiring of everything we are. When we become citizens of heaven, we begin to take on the characteristics of heaven.

It’s a progressive thing—it doesn’t happen all at once—but it does happen: we grow into it. I grew up in the United States, and I’ve been in France for sixteen years now—more than a third of my life. There’s still a lot about me that’s very much American. But over sixteen years I’ve adopted a lot of characteristics that are definitely more French. You can’t help it: when you are adopted by a new country, you begin to take on the characteristics of your new country.

That is what happens in us when we become citizens of heaven, but far more completely, through the work of the Spirit. He takes what was spiritually dead in us and brings it to life. He reorients our desires and our thoughts and our attitudes, so that we might love what God loves. He changes us. And the change he works in us brings us into step with the Son, which is what Peter says next.

We are elect exiles…for obedience to the Son. 

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became a man, lived a perfect, sinless life. And during his life and ministry, he taught his disciples, not just how they ought to live, but how he himself lived. Every single teaching of Jesus is a description of how he himself lived, what was precious to him, what was essential to him. 

I have two younger brothers. When we were kids, they obviously looked up to me, imitated me, wanted to be like me—for better or for worse. That’s how it is with all siblings who have a good relationship: the little brother imitates the big brother.

Paul tells us that through Christ’s work, God has made him the firstborn among many brothers (Romans 8.29). You see what I’m getting at: our big brother Christ teaches us how we ought to live, by showing us how he lives. The Father set us apart as elect exiles in order that his Spirit might make us like Christ, that he might help us live as he lives.

But all of that is only possible through what Christ accomplished after his ministry was finished. That is why Peter adds, finally, that we are elect exiles…for sprinkling with his blood. 

Under the Jewish sacrificial system, a pure animal was sacrificed in place of the people, for their sins; and the animal’s blood was sprinkled on the altar, as a sign before God that the people’s sin had been punished. These sacrifices had to be offered on multiple occasions, over and over, because no animal is sufficient to pay for the rebellion of God’s people.

Jesus Christ is the perfect sacrifice an animal could never be. The Son—God made man—lived a perfect life,  took our sins upon himself, and was punished for those sins. His punishment was brutal, and it was bloody. His blood, figuratively sprinkled like the blood of a sacrifice, satisfied the wrath of God once and for all. Because Christ absorbed God’s wrath for us, there is no longer any wrath against us. 

And in exchange for our sin, Christ gave us his perfect life, that we might be reconciled to God. When he was raised from the dead, he applied this finished work to us—and God adopted us as his own, brought us into his family, into his nation, into his kingdom.

Our salvation is not owing to anything in us; it is only and completely the work of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit for us.

Conclusion: Grace and Peace

Peter ends his salutation with this phrase which we so often take for granted:  

May grace and peace be multiplied to you. 

This is the most fundamental blessing one human being could wish upon another. And it is anything but generic. It is Peter’s prayer that God might multiply his grace, and his peace to his children.

It is not a small thing to realize that the grace of God for us is not merely a past event. Many of us think we received God’s grace—past tense—when we received Christ. And that is absolutely true. But so many Christians assume (often without even realizing it) that once they have received God’s grace in salvation, the rest is up to them. They see the gospel as the good news of what God did for them in Christ, and not the good news of what God is still doing for them.

But every moment of every day, God is constantly working in us, to bring us into conformity to his Son. He is constantly sanctifying us. He is constantly renewing our hearts and drawing us to him and changing us that we might obey and love him. God’s grace is on display every day of our lives, if we belong to Christ.

And the result of realizing this truth is peace. When we know that God’s grace for us is neverending, we know that we don’t have to be good enough to finish our race—we can’t. When we know that God’s grace for us is multiplied day after day, we know that it’s not up to us to get the job done. God is working in us to bring us where we need to be. 

That simple truth is the antidote to most of the things that worry us. When we know that God’s grace is working not despite our trials, but in them and even through them, we don’t see those trials the same way, do we? The last three weeks rank among the worst weeks of my life. I had a bike accident that left me in the hospital, three broken ribs, I had to have an operation to repair my injured spleen, I was in more pain than I can remember feeling. While I was in the hospital, Loanne discovered bedbugs in our home for the fifth time (and she’s allergic), so she and the kids had to get out of there. Then the day before I got out, Jack started coming down with some Covid-like symptoms, so I’ve been ordered to stay quarantined from them—after two weeks spent apart.

I have rarely prayed more than I did these last few weeks. Because everything about our situation was—is—painful and worrisome. I worried about my wife and how heavy all of this was weighing on her, I worried about my family’s health, I worried about my own health, I worried about the church… But every time I prayed, I came back to the truth that the God who elected us, the God who adopted us into his kingdom, the God who saved us, is the same God who preserves us in his grace day after day after day. He is just as sovereign over my family’s situation as he was over my own salvation.

What worry can stand in the face of such assurance? Knowing these things doesn’t take away the struggle…but it does bring peace into the struggle. 

We are elect exiles, brothers and sisters, saved by the finished work of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, so that he might multiply his grace and peace to us throughout all eternity. And we’ll be spending the next few months digging deep into that reality.

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.