ENGAGE/TENSION
A California driver’s license examiner told about a teenager who had just driven an almost perfect test. “He made his only mistake,” said the examiner, “when he stopped to let me out of the car. After breathing a sigh of relief, the boy exclaimed, ‘I’m sure glad I don’t have to drive like that all the time!’”
That young man is not all that different from a lot of people who call themselves Christians. For an hour or two on Sunday mornings they look, talk and act in a manner that leads others to believe they are genuine disciples of Jesus. But for the other 166 hours in the week, there is really very little in their lives to distinguish them from the unbelieving world around them. It’s almost like when they walk out the doors of the church on Sunday morning they think, “I’m sure glad I don’t have to behave like that all the time.”
I doubt very much that any of you here this morning would go nearly that far. But at the same time, I think all of us would admit that it is really hard to live consistently as a disciple of Jesus in this world, which is exactly why we’re studying 1 Peter together.
TRUTH
As we come to verse 13 of chapter 1, there is a noticeable shift in Peter’s focus. In the first 12 verses of his letter, the verbs are almost all in what is known as the indicative mode. That’s just a fancy way of saying that they state facts. But beginning in verse 13, we’ll see that Peter begins to use a lot of imperative verbs which give us commands. In other words, Peter began his letter by explaining the reality of our salvation. Now he is going to describe the duty of those who have received that salvation.
With that in mind go ahead and open up your Bibles to 1 Peter chapter 1 and follow along as I read beginning in verse 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. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” 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, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, 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. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you 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.
Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for
“All flesh is like grass
and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
and the flower falls,
but the word of the Lord remains forever.”
And this word is the good news that was preached to you.
(1 Peter 1:13-25 ESV)
Once again, there is so much in this passage that all I’m going to be able to do in this message is to barely scratch the surface. That’s why I encourage you to stay for the “Connections” time when we’ll have time to go into some more detail on some aspects of this passage that I won’t be able to cover in the message.
So with the limited time we have, I’m going to concentrate primarily on verses 14-16, which I believe are the heart of Peter’s message in this section. So let’s go ahead and read those verses again:
As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”
Peter quotes from the Old Testament to give credence to the idea that as children of God, we are to be obedient children whose conduct is holy in every single area of our lives. That means that our holiness is not to be limited to a couple hours on Sunday morning. It is not, as we’ll see this morning, even to be limited to only our “religious” life. In fact, this verse, along with many others in the Bible, makes it clear that there is to be no distinction in our lives between the “sacred” and the “secular”. God never intended for us to compartmentalize our lives like that.
I have no problem at all with the idea that our conduct in every area of our lives is to be holy. But I’ll admit that I do struggle with the command that God gave to His people in the book of Leviticus that Peter quotes here:
“You shall be holy, for I am holy.”
Do any of the rest of you look at that command like I do and think that’s an impossible command to obey. I mean, how could I possibly even approach God’s holiness as I live my life? I believe God is holy, but for me to be holy the way He is holy is an impossible standard to attain.
In order to understand what God meant when He gave that command we need to do two things. First, we need to make sure we understand the meaning of the word “holy” and then we also need to understand the context in which God gave that command to His people.
We’ll begin with the definition of “holy”. Although we’ve defined what this word means before, it’s really easy to fall back into some of our preconceived notions about what holiness means. Most people associate holiness with moral purity so they often define holiness by making a legalistic list of all the things a Christian can’t do:
“I don’t drink or smoke or chew or go with girls who do”
So they believe that in order to be holy, you can’t have any fun or enjoy yourself or even smile. We probably know some Christians like that. But “holy” does not mean “sourpuss”.
Both the Hebrew word translated “holy” in the Old Testament and the Greek word translated “holy” in the New Testament mean “set apart”. God is holy, not because He is merely more moral than any of us, but because he is completely set apart from His creation. He is unique and distinct in every way. One of my favorite books is The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer. In that book, he writes these insightful words about God’s holiness:
God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered…Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard.
While that definition doesn’t answer our doubts about how we can possibly live up to that standard, it does reveal that God’s command for us to be holy involves living a life that is “set apart”, unique and distinct.
But in order to gain a fuller understanding of how we are to be holy, we need to go back and look at the context in which God gave that command to His people in the book of Leviticus. The relevant portion of that book is bookended at both ends by the command to be holy because God is holy:
For I am the LORD your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy.
(Leviticus 11:44 ESV)
“Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.
(Leviticus 19:2 ESV)
In between those verses, God prescribes the way that his people are to live and to worship Him in a manner that will set them apart from the pagan nations that surrounded them. Those instructions are not merely directed toward their religious observances, but cover single every area of their lives from what they were to eat to how they were to treat their parents.
God certainly gave his people these commands for their own good. But it is clear that His greater purpose was so that His people would live in a manner that set them apart from the other nations around them. Because God had chosen them and set them apart to live in a covenant relationship with Him, their lives were to be set apart, unique and distinct. We see that clearly at the end of that section of Leviticus:
You shall be holy to me, for I the LORD am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.
(Leviticus 20:26 ESV)
When God commands us to be holy because He is holy, He is not saying that we need to attain to the standard of who He is, which we all know is impossible. But if we’re going to be God’s children and call Him “Father” like we see in verse 17, then there ought to be a family resemblance. If our Father is set apart, then if we are going to be His children and citizens of His kingdom, we are also to live lives that are set apart, unique and distinct from the world around us. And we are to do that in every area of our lives. And that is possible. So here is how I would summarize what it means to be holy as God is holy:
Being holy as God is holy
means living as a stranger in a strange world
Perhaps I can best illustrate this by asking you to imagine what it would be like if for some reason you had to pick up and move to a country whose customs and cultures were completely different than what you’re used to. The people spoke a different language. They ate different foods. Perhaps their living conditions were much more primitive than what you’re used to. Imagine what it would be like to live in those conditions. Imagine how uncomfortable you would be trying to fit into their world.
The point Peter is making here is that living as a citizen of heaven in this world ought to feel a lot like that to us. As we’ve seen already in Peter’s letter, we are living here on this earth as exiles because our true home is in heaven. And frankly, if that isn’t consistently uncomfortable for us to do, then we probably aren’t being holy in all our conduct because being holy means being set apart and unique and being set apart and unique means we shouldn’t fit into this world and that should be uncomfortable.
If others around me aren’t noticing that there is something different about the way I’m living my life, then perhaps I’ve gotten a little too friendly with the world I’m living in and am no longer living as a stranger in a strange world. James warns us that kind of mindset actually makes us an enemy of God:
You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
(James 4:4 ESV)
So let me ask us all some hard questions this morning to help us evaluate how well we’re living as strangers in a strange world:
• In your job, are you a different kind of employee than the rest of your fellow workers? Do you show up for work on time every day and put in a full day’s work, even when other employees don’t and they get away with it and sometimes even get ahead in spite of their lack of work ethic? Do you treat your employer and other employees with respect even when they don’t treat you fairly?
• Men, in your marriage, do you love your wives as Christ loves the church and put her needs ahead of your own?
• Women, in your marriage do you submit to your husband’s leadership in the family.
• When you hang out with your co-workers, family and friends do you laugh at their crude jokes or join in with their coarse talk? When they gossip or make fun of others, do you join in or do you refuse to participate? I know that’s been a big one for me as an official because the language and subject matter that comes up in meetings or in the locker room is often something that I don’t want to participate in. It’s interesting over the years how many officials now know I’m a Christian and they actually will even apologize to me now when they start to talk like that.
• Do you remain pure sexually in the midst of temptations to do otherwise and in the face of those who call you a “holy roller” or a “prude” or even something much worse?
• Are you honest in your business and financial dealings even when that might cost you? Do you cheat on your taxes by not reporting income or by claiming deductions that you are not entitled to?
• When you go to the grocery store and they give you back too much change do you just keep it or do your return it?
These are just a few areas where the standards of this world are different than the standards that God has laid down for those who are His children. And as these questions point out, it’s often difficult and uncomfortable and even costly to live like a stranger in this strange world.
APPLICATION
Most of the questions I just asked deal with our conduct and behavior. So it seems logical that the way to live as a stranger in a strange land is to focus on changing my behavior. But that’s not the approach that Peter encourages us to take here. That’s because he knew what we see demonstrated around us all the time – that approach just doesn’t work.
I’ve seen that personally every day I’ve gone to the gym since the first of the year. Right now the gym is packed with people who I’ve never seen there before who have decided to change their behavior in order to lose weight or to get in shape. But I also know that based on past experience that won’t last for the majority of those people and the gym will be back to normal in about a month and a half.
So if focusing on my behavior won’t help me live as a stranger in a strange land, what will help me do that? Fortunately, Peter answers that question for us in this passage. Since I don’t have time to do it in detail right now, we’re going to use the “Connections” time to make a rather detailed analysis of the structure of this passage, which is crucial in helping to understand what Peter teaches about how to live like that.
So for now, let me just point out that there are four commands that Peter gives in this section. And for the most part those commands deal with our conduct and behavior. But each of those commands is also supported by some additional teaching by Peter that gives the reason for those commands and/or details the actions that we need to take in order to be able to obey those commands. So that’s where we need to focus our attention if we want to be able to do what God has commanded and be holy by living as strangers in a strange land. And what we learn when we do that is that…
The key to being holy in all my conduct is to…
• discipline my mind
This is the principle we see in verse 13. The command that Peter gives there is to set our hope fully on the grace that will be brought to us at the second coming of Jesus. That certainly reinforces what we learned last week when we found that the way we make our living hope real is to look ahead to our inheritance instead of looking around at our circumstances.
So the command itself certainly has more to do with our mind than our actions. But then Peter uses two participles that reveal what we need to do in order to obey that command:
• preparing your minds for action
If you’re using the ESV, you’ll see that there is a footnote that indicates that the underlying Greek here actually reads “girding up the loins of your mind.” To be honest, I wish the translators would have translated it that way because it actually paints a much more vivid picture of what Peter is calling us to do here.
In Peter’s day, the men usually wore long, flowing robes. So if they had to work, or run, or carry a burden, or fight in a war, they had to gird up their loins by tucking their robes into their belts in order to remove any hindrances. So the idea of girding the loins of our minds is the idea of removing any hindrances that might distract us from focusing our minds on the things of God.
• being sober-minded
Peter is going to come back to this idea of being sober-minded a couple more times in his letter. Literally this verb means not to get drunk. But by applying it to the mind, Peter is picturing the idea of keeping control over one’s mind and not being intoxicated by the mindset of the world.
Taken together, these two verbs show us the need to have a disciplined mind in which we control what goes into it. Paul captured the same idea:
We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,
(2 Corinthians 10:5 ESV)
We talked about this idea some last week when we discussed the need to constantly be making choices that will determine what we allow into our minds. The things we see and read and watch and hear are all going to put things into our minds. So we have to have the discipline to actively manage what we are allowing to enter our minds because what goes into our minds will eventually determine our conduct.
There are two important ways that we need to discipline our minds according to this passage:
o Close my mind to the thinking of this world
Peter gives us several reminders of what our lives were like before we became God’s children and became citizens of His kingdom and he reminds us that we are not to dwell on that former way of life:
• In verse 14, he instructs us not to be conforming to the passions of our former ignorance. Before we became disciples of Jesus, we were all enslaved to our earthly passions. Paul put it this way:
…among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind...
(Ephesians 2:3 ESV)
• In verse 18, Peter reminds us that Jesus ransomed us from our former way of life, which was characterized by futility.
• In verse 22, we are reminded that our souls have been purified by obedience to the truth.
The consistent idea here is that there is a mindset that we all once had when we were citizens of this world. But we need to take practical steps in our life to make sure that we don’t allow that old way of thinking back into our minds.
o Open my mind to the thinking of God’s world
Peter reminds us here of what God has done in order to make me His child and a citizen of His kingdom:
• He ransomed me at a great price
We see this in verses 18-21. Peter reminds us here of the great price that God paid to ransom us from our former, futile way of life. He didn’t pay that ransom with perishable things like silver or gold, but rather with the precious blood of Jesus. That was God’s plan from before the foundation of the world. Even though Jesus was perfect, without spot or blemish, He willingly gave His life on the cross and then God raised Him from the dead so that God could receive glory and so that we could have faith and hope.
• He gave me a new birth
In verse 23, Peter picks up again on the idea we saw last week in verse 3. God has caused us to be born again. He has given us new life and called us to live in a new world and be citizens of heaven while simultaneously living here for a time on earth. It is that new birth that provides the only possibility of being able to be holy in all our conduct.
• He sustains me with His Word
In verse 23, Peter primarily writes about how God’s living and abiding word is the agent of our being born again. But because His Word remains forever, it sustains us in our everyday lives. It is there where God reveals Himself and His purposes, plans and ways. So the more time we spend saturating our minds with His Word, the more our ways will become His ways.
INSPIRATION
Being holy as God is holy
requires me to live as a stranger in a strange world
When my mind is constantly focused on all that God has done for me in choosing me to be His child and making me a citizen of his kingdom, then over time my conduct will naturally end up being consistent with the principles of God’s kingdom. And the good news is that when the changed behavior occurs as a result of disciplining my mind rather than trying to change my behavior, I am much more likely to be able to continue to live that strange life in a strange land.
ACTION
As we close I want to encourage all of us to take two simple, practical steps that will help us to apply what we’ve learned this morning.
PRACTICAL STEPS TO TAKE
1. Evaluate what I am watching, reading, seeing and listening to and identify those things that are filling my mind with the thinking of this world and then take concrete steps to remove those things from my life.
2. Fill my mind with the thinking of God’s kingdom by reading the Bible and spending time in prayer every day.
If we would all do just those two things then we’ll be well on the road to making sure that we are holy in all our conduct, not just on Sunday mornings, but every day of our lives.
