Sometimes our hope is invisible. The last words of dying people have always fascinated me. They are so revealing of a person's heart and soul. John Wilkes Booth who assassinated President Lincoln said only two words at his death: “Useless. Useless.” These are words of hopelessness.
Fox News has reported this past Wednesday (August 20, 2008) Yemeni police have detained at least nine people this year for converting from Islam to Christianity, a security official said Tuesday. The nine were arrested between May and early August and remain in police custody, said the official. Converting from Islam to any other religion is illegal in Yemen and can be punishable by death. But in previous cases, those arrested are usually released after they revoke their new faith and pledge to return to Islam.
Our focus is on only on verse today: “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.” (1 Peter 1:13)
For the first time in this letter Peter gives his readers a command It’s a command: “Hope fully.” Or: “Fix your hope completely.” So the first command in this letter is an action you do with your mind and your heart. It’s a command to hope.Hope is not an action of the body. It is an experience of the soul.
1. Hope Is Powerful
When tragedy comes our way, we fix our hope on something in order to get through the difficult times. On April 16, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King writes “A Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The letter was written to clergy who had called on King to be patient and stop his nonviolent protests. Writing from a jail cell in Birmingham, King would inspire many as well as enrage others: “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policeman curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she’s told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “Nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears an outer resentments; when you are for ever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” (M. L. King, Letter from Birmingham Jail)
King wrote with profound insight as he called on people to end the injustice of segregation. In front of the Lincoln Memorial, King spoke just four months after his writing (August 28, 1963) where he more pointedly about where his hope was placed: “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. …I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. …I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Do you see where Martin Luther King Jr. places his hope? His dream and his hope is placed upon the day when slave owners children and sons of slaves can sit down to eat together at one table. His dream is that one day children will not judged on the color of their skin but rather the content of the character.
Tacitus, a Roman historian, writes of the persecution of the Christians during the same time Peter tells the Christians where to place their hope: “Yet no human effort, no princely largess nor offerings to the gods could make that infamous rumor disappear that Nero had somehow ordered the fire. Therefore, in order to abolish that rumor, Nero falsely accused and executed with the most exquisite punishments those people called Christians, who were infamous for their abominations. …Therefore, first those were seized who admitted their faith, and then, using the information they provided, a vast multitude were convicted, not so much for the crime of burning the city, but for hatred of the human race. And perishing they were additionally made into sports: they were killed by dogs by having the hides of beasts attached to them, or they were nailed to crosses or set aflame, and, when the daylight passed away, they were used as nighttime lamps. Nero gave his own gardens for this spectacle and performed a Circus game, in the habit of a charioteer mixing with the plebs or driving about the race-course.”
Peter calls on the Christians in his day to have hope much like Martin Luther King Jr. did in his day. Peter says, “I command you to be hopeful though you are suffering greatly.”
2. Hope Doesn’t Float, it’s Fixed
Peter’s command for Christians to Hope was a hope that floated around. Peter, unlike King, didn’t command Christians to fix their hope on day when Christians could look around and see religious freedom. Instead, he commands Christians to fix their hope on the return of Jesus Christ: “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” (1 Peter 1:13).
Peter tell us to fix our hope on Christ’s return. The majority of Americans don’t find that very practical. In a USA Today poll only a decade old, those who were surveyed did not find Christ’s Second Coming all that believable: On the likelihood that the world will come to an end because of Judgment Day or another religious event in the next century, the percentage who believe it is:
Very likely 23
Somewhat likely 16
Somewhat unlikely 16
Very unlikely 41
No opinion 4
In the recent autobiography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir, Thomas states that he had been raised as a Roman Catholic and attended Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. But while there, he parted ways with the church, though not forever. Here is what he said: “During my second week on campus, I went to Mass for the first and last time at Holy Cross. I don’t know why I bothered—probably habit, or guilt—but whatever the reasons, I got up and walked out midway through the homily. It was all about Church dogma, not the social problems with which I was obsessed, and seemed to me hopelessly irrelevant.”
So in any given service—like this one—a dozen young, idealistic Clarence Thomases might be present, full of anger about racism, or global warming, or abortion, or limited health care for children, or homelessness, or poverty, or the war in Iraq, or human trafficking, or the global AIDS crisis, or rampant fatherlessness, or the greed behind the sub prime mortgage crisis, or the treatment of illegal aliens, or the plight of Christians just coming out of prison. And then they hear me announce that today we are going to talk about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. And they might react like Clarence Thomas did and simply walk out and say, “That has nothing to do with the real problems this world is facing.” They would be wrong—doubly wrong They would be wrong, in the first place, in failing to see that what Peter meant by Christ’s return is supremely relevant for racism and global warming and abortion and health care and all the other issues of our day. We will see in the coming weeks what the necessary fruit of the new birth looks like. And they would be wrong, secondly, in thinking that those issues are the most important issues in life. They aren’t. They are life-and-death issues. But they are not the most important, because they deal with the relief of suffering during this brief earthly life, not the relief of suffering during the eternity that follows.
Or to put it positively, they deal with how to maximize well-being now for eighty years or so, but not with how to maximize well-being in the presence of God for eighty trillion years or so.
I want you to see the order of grace first, and hope second in the verses of 1 Peter. Notice the word “therefore” at the beginning of 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” (1 Peter 1:13). “Therefore . . . fix your hope completely.” “Therefore . . . hope fully.” This word makes Peter’s first command dependent on all the grace that he has spent twelve verses exulting in.
Let’s sum it up: verse 1: since God has chosen you,
verse 3: since God has caused you to be born again to a living hope,
verse 4: since God is keeping an inheritance for you imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,
verse 5: since God is protecting you through faith so that you won't lose that inheritance,
verses 6–7: since God is refining your faith by fire so that it will receive praise and glory and honor,
verse 8: since you are swimming with the strokes of love and faith and joy in Christ,
verses 10–13: since prophets and angels are on tiptoe to see all that God's grace is going to do in your life,
Peter is commanding us to experience hope.
Paul said it this way: “Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:8).
You see if Hope Floats instead of being fixed on Christ, then you run the risk of running into things that have no solution in this earth. On May 17, 2008, Christian recording artist Steven Curtis Chapman and his family suffered a devastating loss. Five-year-old adopted daughter, Maria, was struck and killed when Chapman's seventeen-year-old son was backing his SUV out of the family’s driveway. After much prayer and counsel, Chapman recently returned to touring in promotion for his newest album. Chapman opened the concert with “Blessed Be Your Name” just two months after the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Maria Sue, in a tragic accident at the family's home. “Blessed Be Your Name” was also the first song Chapman sang May 21, the day of Maria’s death, when he wasn’t sure he'd ever be able to sing again. Inspired by the story of Job, at one point the lyrics repeat, “He gives and takes away.” "As I sang this song … it wasn’t a song, it was a cry, a scream, a prayer,” Chapman explained to the audience of nearly 5,000. “I found an amazing comfort and peace that surpasses all understanding.”
The great concern of God in this passage of his Word is that we not be moderate hopers. That we not be satisfied with half-hoping hearts. But instead, that we engage our minds with the hope-producing truth of Scripture, and that we guard our minds from the hope-diminishing causes in the world.
3. Prepare Now
Jesus said this about His Second Coming: “Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning, 36 and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks” (Luke 12:35-36).
Let’s hear Peter’s words again: “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” (1 Peter 1:13). Peter could have said, you are being persecuted now, but I hope one day that you will be granted religious freedom. Peter could have said, your spouse or your family cannot comprehend what you are going thorough, but I hope one day you will be given empathy. Being confident in Christ’s coming and not in a thousand other desirable things, Peter tells us to PREPARE NOW. Peter tells us two ways we can prepare right not for Christ’s appearance. This confident hope in Jesus Christ causes us to act in two ways. “…preparing your minds for action...” (1 Peter 1:13). There are so many various translations out there, let me give you a literal rendering of this verse so you can see more clearly the relationship between the words. Peter says, “Therefore, having girded up the loins of your mind” — it’s an image of a person wearing flowing garments tucking the garments into his belt so that he can run and move about freely and quickly without tripping over his clothes. And the part of you that is to be freed by this girding up is your mind — “the loins of your mind.” Today, we might say, “Roll up the sleeves of your mind.” Turn the robes of your mind into running shorts. Pull them up between your legs and tuck them into your belt.
During his 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy often closed his speeches with the story of Colonel Davenport, the Speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives. One day in 1789, the sky of Hartford darkened ominously, and some of the representatives, glancing out the windows, feared the end was at hand. Quelling a clamor for immediate adjournment, Davenport rose and said: “The Day of Judgment is either approaching or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. Therefore, I wish that candles be brought.”
Peter tells us to be alert and eliminate distractions. “…and being sober-minded...” (1 Peter 1:13). Then he goes on: “And being sober” — it’s image of not being drunk when it comes to spiritual things. It implies alertness, and evaluating things correctly, because you see clearly, and your mind isn’t numb with intoxicating influences. If you really want to obey the command to hope fully in God’s grace, don’t let your mind drink in things that numb the mind (and heart) to the value of God’s grace. The great problem with drunkenness is that it distorts reality by making the mind insensitive to what is true and real and valuable. Sex can be a drug that intoxicates and numbs the mind to spiritual reality. If I allow myself to drink it in through my eyes for long or to return to it often, my passion for the truth and the intensity and fullness of my hope in the glory of God’s grace diminishes. The same can be true of money and career and power and romance novels and soap operas and TV advertisements and fishing and coin collecting and computer games and rehabbing and gardening. The point is: know what numbs your mind to God and avoid it. Stay sober for the sake of full and passionate hope in God's grace.
Jesus will return with a shout from the angels. What does say when he shouts? “Enough,” I said. “He will shout ‘Enough!’ when He returns.” A look of surprise crossed the face of the student. “Enough. Enough sin. Enough evil. Enough Suffering. Enough starvation. Enough terror. Enough death. Enough indignity. Enough lives trapped in hopelessness. Enough sickness and disease.”
