How to Live with Confidence

We've been led to consider the cross and the sacrifice that our Savior made there.

Now Peter is going to lead us from the cross to heaven, where he reigns in all of his glory.

1 Peter chapter 1.

1 Peter 1 · chapter mention

I want to look just at one verse this morning.

This is a transition verse.

It's sort of a hinge.

So everything that comes before this hinges on this verse, and everything that comes after it hinges on this verse too.

It says, 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.

Amen.

I don't consider myself to be much of a techie, but I do enjoy reading about new technology from time to time and trying to keep up on what's out there as much as I'm able.

One of the developments that I've read about over the last, I don't know, year or two years, something like that, is autonomous cars, those contraptions that supposedly drive themselves.

When I first began reading about this technological development, I have to be honest, I was extremely skeptical.

Maybe it's because of my desire for control.

I don't know.

I want to have my hands on the wheel and know exactly where I'm going and not have that ripped away from me.

But I just had a feeling that this technology wasn't going to start out too well.

I don't know why, it's just a feeling that I had.

Naturally, the blame was placed on the human driver of the other vehicle.

One newspaper reported the event.

Here's what they said, and I quote, while driverless vehicles are seen as safer than humans, at least in fair conditions, they have also been seen as overcautious and can move in a robotic fashion.

End quote.

Here is my deduction from that quotation.

Apparently, removing brains and becoming robotic leads to greater safety.

That's my conclusion.

I think you can still consider me a skeptic at this point in time.

Unfortunately, that is how many Christians live out their faith.

Mindless.

For some, it's all about strength.

It's all about what they can do in their own strength.

Their faith is built on activity, on involvement, on doing.

For others, it is about the heart, the inner devotion to Christ that is nurtured and developed through various means.

And for some, it's about the soul, a sort of mystical connection to the spiritual that pervades their Christianity.

You know, it's very common for Christians to carry out some part of that great commandment.

Quoted by Jesus, referring to Deuteronomy: love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.

It's very common for us to carry out some part of that, but what is also common is the neglect of the mind.

To love the Lord your God with all your mind.

Now, the point of that commandment is the law of non-exclusion.

No part of the Christian's life is to be excluded or left out of loving God.

Our entire being is to be committed, to be devoted, to be given over to loving God.

But too often our minds are left out of the equation.

And if we do that, we are in danger of becoming robotic.

R.

C.

Sproull wrote in Christianity Today 35 years ago, we know that the disposition of the heart toward Christ is of supreme importance.

If our doctrine is correct, if our intellectual understanding of theology is impeccable, it is to no avail if our heart is far from him.

If the head is right and the heart is wrong, we perish.

On the other hand, if the head is confused, the understanding muddled, and the doctrine fuzzy, there is still hope for us if our hearts beat with a passion for God.

And then he says, better the empty head than the empty heart.

But then he asks a very important question.

But how can we love what we do not understand?

How can we love what we do not understand?

He says there is content to the Christian faith.

That content is directed by way of order to the mind.

God has made us with a harmony of heart and head, of thought and action.

And God, the Holy Spirit, has superintended a book that is to be read, whose verbal content is to be understood and digested so that our hearts may burn within us.

He ends with this the more we know him, the more we are able to love him.

The more we love him, the more we seek to know him.

To be central in our hearts, he must be foremost in our minds.

End quote.

As the mind goes, so goes the heart.

As the mind goes, so goes the heart.

That's what Paul wrote in Romans chapter 1.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

In describing the sinful lost world, Paul said this: they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Being futile in your thinking leads to darkened hearts.

It begins in the mind and results in the heart being changed.

That's why Paul would later say to the same church, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

John wrote to combat that by saying, there are things that we can know for sure, without a doubt, with great certainty.

And what we know is to drive our faith.

Fourteen times, that's only four.

I can't get fourteen with ten fingers.

Fourteen times in 1 John, the Apostle John uses the words, we know.

We know.

And he ends his book, second to last verse, with this.

We know that the Son of God has come and given us understanding, and then there's a purpose statement, so that we may know him who is true.

God has given us knowledge by coming himself, giving us his word, so that we might know in order to know him.

This is the essence of 1 Peter 1.13.

When Peter uses the phrase at the end here, the revelation of Jesus Christ, it's the same phrase used by John in Revelation 1.1.

John saw Christ in all of his glory, and he was given an order to write what he saw, to write the revelation of Jesus Christ, that unveiling of Jesus so that he might be seen and fully known.

Both Peter and John want us to see Jesus fully revealed in all of his glory so that we might know him as he is.

You can't help but think that Peter was imagining, as he wrote this, that day probably decades earlier, when he and James and John were up on top of that mountain with Jesus.

Just the four of them, and Jesus was revealed in his glory.

That was a transformative event for Peter.

And although we are not there, we're not there with him, Peter desires that we see that experience that he had on the mountaintop through his eyes.

He wants us to see what he saw in our minds so that we can look forward to the day when we will see an even greater event when we will see Jesus revealed in all of his glory, where he dwells in heaven.

There will be a more glorious revealing of Christ still ahead of us.

What those three disciples saw was but a glimpse of the complete unveiling of Jesus Christ.

What Peter tells us here in this verse is that God the Father will reveal the fullness of his son in the future.

But he has already begun that revelation.

He began it when Christ was on earth.

He continues it through the revelation of his son in the scriptures.

But there will come a day when we will experience the fullness of Christ's revelation.

That is certain.

And certainty is the essence of biblical hope.

Of course, it's certainty is based on the unchanging character of an unchanging God, on his power, on his ability to fulfill his purpose, on his faithfulness and his trustworthiness to keep his word.

So when Peter commands us here to set our hope on the grace that comes at the revelation of Jesus, he calls on us to trust what God has said, to believe his promises, to believe that he is faithful.

We don't have time this morning to really go into depth about that, but perhaps we could touch on some mountaintop thoughts.

What does that mean to trust that God is faithful to his promise?

Well, in Genesis 3.15, we see that God promised to send a crusher, someone who had crushed the head of Satan.

A little bit later, he promised to send a priest like Melchizedek.

He promised to send a prophet like Moses and a king like David.

He even promised to send himself Emmanuel, God with us.

And when we turn the pages from Malachi in the Old Testament to Matthew in the New Testament, what is it that we begin to see?

You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

And this is Emmanuel, God with us.

God begins to fulfill his promises.

He is faithful to do what he has said.

God promised to send his own son, and then God promised to reveal him in all of his glory.

And throughout the New Testament, we see an image of that.

In the Lord's earthly ministry, we get a beginning, a seed, if you will, a preview of the Lord Jesus' glory.

You go through the pages of the Gospels and into the epistles of the New Testament, and you arrive at Revelation where John is given this unveiling of Christ and all of his glory as a preview, as if to say, this is a preview of the mountaintop experience that all of God's people will experience.

And since God has been faithful in the past to fulfill his promises, this is certain to occur as well.

Peter was certain of a future moment when the Lord Jesus Christ would be revealed.

It will be a time when all who are born again to a living hope will fully experience the grace given to them in Christ.

Though we have not seen him, he calls us to believe and to rest in the certainty of that promise.

Now we tend to elevate the apostles and the prophets almost to a divine sort of standard.

But we need to remember that they were fallible human beings.

Peter himself was anything but perfect, even as an apostle.

Peter experienced moments of weakness, just like we all do.

Peter understood what it was like to have times of drifting along in your faith.

He understood the circumstances that we all experience that motivate us to take our eyes off of Christ.

Why then would he tell us to set our hope fully on Jesus?

Did you catch that word?

Fully.

Why would Peter write that?

He wrote it because he knew that sometimes our hope is not fully set in Christ.

There are times when our hope is partially on Christ.

And there are times when our hope is not on Christ.

Aren't there?

Why did Peter get out of the boat to walk on the water?

Do you remember?

Saw this being walking on the water in the midst of the storm, and they were all afraid, and Jesus said, Don't be afraid, it's me, it's Jesus.

Peter wanted proof.

That's why.

He wanted proof.

He said, Lord, if it's you, command me to come out on the water and walk with you.

So he did.

Peter was fine while he kept his eyes on Jesus, wasn't he?

But then he realized how rough the waves were around him.

Worry, doubt, and uncertainty entered his mind, and hope began to waver.

If we use our sanctified imaginations, maybe he began to move more quickly as the water came up around his ankles and even more quickly as it got to his knees.

Who knows?

On the night he betrayed Jesus, we see that his hope wasn't on Jesus at all.

See, Peter spoke from experience when he commanded us to fix our hope fully on the certain coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Remember that this was first written to those people who had their world turned upside down.

They were exiles, they were outcasts.

They were people without homes, driven away from their communities and their families, driven away from comfort and security.

It's most likely that many of them were experiencing hopelessness.

Hopelessness is a reality at some point in life for all of us in this sin-cursed world.

We need the reminder, we need the command to set our hope to be deliberate in focusing on the certainty of the future revelation of Christ and the complete revelation and reception of God's grace.

That's the main point of this verse.

The only way to have your confidence in an uncertain world is to set your hope fully on the grace that will be revealed to you.

You receive that grace in part when you come to Christ in faith.

That grace is continually given to you as you walk with Christ, and ultimately it will be given to you when Christ is revealed.

Now, if you're anything like me, you want to know how to do that.

Just telling you to set your hope fully on Christ is about as helpful as telling you to walk on water.

That's why Peter helps us.

He says, prepare your minds for action and be sober-minded.

The key to having your hope fully set in the right place is not by making sure your heart is in the right place.

In fact, we can make an argument that that's the absolute worst place to start, since Jeremiah tells us that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.

The place to begin is not by loving the Lord your God with all of your strength.

We must not start by putting out more effort towards obedience.

The place to begin is not spirituality of some kind.

No, don't get me wrong.

We are to love the Lord our God with all of our heart.

We are to love him with all of our soul, with all of our strength.

Those are true.

But Peter commands us to begin with our minds.

The key to living with confidence in an uncertain world is found in preparing your mind.

If your mind is not set, is not focused with laser-like intensity on the grace being given to you today, the grace that will be given to you tomorrow and will be fully poured out at the revelation of Jesus, you will falter in your hope.

Adam and Eve faltered when the command of God was not their hope.

You might remember the disciples on the road to Emmaus after the resurrection.

They were all downcast and feeling hopeless.

They faltered after the crucifixion.

But then the Lord Himself met them on the way in order to strengthen their hope.

And how did he strengthen their hope?

By expounding the scriptures to them, by helping them know the Word of God more clearly, and as they came to know the Word of God more clearly, their hearts began to burn within them.

Now, preparing your minds for action is an appropriate translation.

But we miss the intended visual image.

The Old King James Version translated it very, very literally.

Gird up the loins of your mind.

Some of us are thinking, thank God for new translations.

We don't speak that way anymore.

But it is helpful to understand what Peter wrote, and Peter did actually write, gird up the loins of your mind.

To gird up was a common phrase in times when people wore long flowing garments.

So think about a Roman soldier, for example.

A Roman soldier would wear a long outer garment that would go down almost to his ankles.

That was common.

That was normal dress.

But that was not very advantageous for working, even much less advantageous for fighting in a battle.

Very cumbersome if you want to move about.

So the Roman soldier would take the ends of that garment down by his ankles and pull them up and tuck them into his belt, freeing up his legs from movement.

That was girding up the loins.

In our time, we might use the phrase, roll up your shirt sleeves.

But that's why our modern translations use the phrase, prepare your minds for action.

That's exactly, that's precisely the intent of girding up the loins, except in this case it's directed to the mind.

For you to have your hope set on the grace that will be given to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ, you must have a prepared mind.

A prepared mind is essential to living with confidence in this uncertain world.

Now we know that faith ultimately rests in the character and the promises and the actions of God.

But where do we see those actions and those promises and that character most clearly?

We see them in God's saving work, and that's what Peter's been speaking about.

This letter begins with the electing work of God before the foundation of the world.

But then he moves into lifting up the grace of God seen in his work of causing us to be born again.

God the Father not only raised his son from the dead that we might have a living hope, but he guaranteed that each of his own would actually receive his promised grace.

And just as he was faithful to raise his son from the dead, he will also be faithful to reveal his son and complete what he has promised to give us.

Because of that, even though we have not seen him, we love him.

We do not now see him, but we believe with joy that cannot be expressed with words.

In fact, God's saving work is so magnificent that even angels long to see it carried out.

Think about all that God has done from beginning to the end that He has promised.

Wrap your brain around that revelation.

And because of that, therefore, prepare your mind.

Prepare your mind for life in a sin-cursed world that opposes God.

Prepare your mind to face a world that is continually deteriorating because of God's curse on its sin.

Prepare your mind for the appearance, continual appearance, that evil succeeds.

Our minds must be prepared.

So, how do we do that?

Well, I would suggest four ways to you.

The first way is by realizing the grace that is yours.

Infuse your mind with the revelation of God found in the scriptures.

Expressed all throughout this first chapter is the truth that those who belong to Christ possess extraordinary grace.

Not only saving grace, but an electing grace.

Not only an electing grace, but a protecting grace.

Not just a protecting grace, but a providing grace.

Not just a providing grace, but a precious grace, an astounding grace.

It's yours in part now and will be yours fully because of God's promise in Christ.

We must grasp this in every part of our minds because to have hope is to know, to be knowing, and to be growing in the knowledge of who God is and what he has done.

We must come to know what God has revealed of himself and who he is.

And we can spend a lifetime doing that and continually be knowing new things.

We must also then be relishing in the grace that God has given us.

Back in verse 3, where it refers to being born again to a living hope, that implies that there's something different.

Because before there was a living hope, the only thing that exists before a living hope is a dead hope.

That's not much hope.

So there's something new, right?

It's living.

There is a new characteristic, a new quality to this life that is obtained in Christ.

There's something about it that is now unique.

And because of that, in verse 8, we can rejoice with great rejoicing.

I love tacos.

Maybe I'm hungry.

I love tacos, but I don't generally rejoice in tacos.

Now don't get me wrong, if if it's a really good taco, and I'm really enjoying that taco, I can begin to relish in that taco.

And if I begin to relish in that taco, I can begin to rejoice in that taco.

Right?

Do you regularly rejoice in the Father's great mercy?

Do you regularly rejoice in his giving you an inheritance with his son?

Do you regularly rejoice in his power protecting you, keeping you for himself for eternity?

In order to fulfill that command to rejoice with great joy, we must relish in him first.

We must understand all that he has said here.

Bring that into our minds so that it begins to permeate everything that we are, and we look at that and we say, I love this and I am going to rejoice in it.

Do you know God's grace to you in that kind of way, where you relish in it, and that relishing moves you to rejoice with joy that cannot be expressed with words.

You love Him, even though you've not seen Him.

You rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory.

Beloved, that comes from relishing in what God has said about Himself.

And once we have realized and come to understand, as much as we are able at that point, the grace that has been given to us, and we begin to relish in it so that it moves us to rejoicing, that then enables us to rest in that grace.

The sovereign grace of God gives new birth to a living hope that will carry us even through the trials of life.

It will sustain us even when the fire tests our faith.

Some of you may really attach to this quote by evangelist G.

D.

Watson from the late 1800s.

He said, You must make up your mind that God is an infinite sovereign and he has a right to do whatever he pleases with his own.

But he may not explain to you a thousand things that puzzle your reason in the way in which he deals with you.

You may go a lifetime with never fully grasping why God does what he does with you.

We may not understand why God takes us through the fire or through the trial or why this day is good and this day is bad.

God may not explain to us a thousand things, but as Peter says here, even in the midst of that kind of uncertainty, we can be assured of the Father's care for us.

Even in trial, we can have hope in the full bestowal of his grace when we see Christ.

That's why Isaiah could write in Isaiah 26, 3, you keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you.

It's a place to rest.

But that's not enough.

That's not enough because there's more that comes and assails us day in and day out.

That's why I would suggest to you that we need to prepare our minds by seeking to resist the drift.

I'm often amazed that I made it through as much schooling as I have.

Because my mind wanders.

To be honest, this is this is this is just open honesty, okay?

I struggle at listening to sermons.

I have to work hard at listening to sermons because my mind wanders, and it wanders in such a way as that when I'm listening to somebody speak, my mind is going to all of the other parallel passages that relate to it, and I'm thinking about those, and then I find that I'm way off course, and I have to come back and try to catch up with what the speaker's saying.

I have to work at remaining focused.

As we go through our days, whatever they may entail, we must resist the urge to look at the height of the waves.

We must resist the urge to fear the whipping of the wind.

We must resist caring more about what others think than about what God thinks.

We must resist the drifting and the wandering of our minds.

That's why it is so important for Paul to say to the Corinthian church, take every thought captive to obedience to Christ.

Do you realize that Satan's first win over Eve was a victory over her mind?

Did God really say that?

That was a battle for her mind.

Was she going to see God's command as righteous and holy?

Was she going to see it as truthful, as good, as precious, or would she begin to question it?

But isn't the grace of God something wonderful?

As we begin to relish in his grace, a transformation takes place.

As we relish in his grace, we begin to desire more of his word.

We begin to thirst and hunger for it, and we begin to understand Jesus' words that we must live on every word of God.

It must be our food.

But God doesn't stop there.

As we begin to take in the word of God, he begins to write it on our minds, Hebrews said.

It's as if he's taking a pen and inscribing it in our brains.

And then he uses his word that's inscribed in our brains to renew our minds so that we have the mind of Christ.

One final detail, included by Peter, is this being sober-minded.

What may be the preeminent Greek lexicon says that this is, and I quote, the self-evidenced antithesis to all kinds of mental fuzziness.

Now, I don't know about you, but any any definition that includes fuzziness has got to be a good definition.

It's the kind of word my teachers would have never let me put into a definition.

But you get it.

Being sober-minded means the opposite of any fuzziness in your brain, in your mind.

Now, Peter uses this word three times.

Paul uses it twice in his letter to the Thessalonians and once in a letter to Timothy.

But the context of all of those uses is the reality of life and service to God in a world that is suffering from sinfulness.

The context of living in a world that is raging with anger, that is overcome by pain and suffering and driven by uncertainty.

And when we look around us, if we take our eyes off of Jesus and we look at the wind and the waves around us, those realities can, let's be honest, they can temper our hope, can't they?

They can distract our thinking, they can make our minds fuzzy.

But keeping his word at the center of our thinking, at the center of our minds, brings clarity and sobriety to our minds.

Only the truth of God brings light to dark minds.

It's his word that clears the cobwebs.

I mentioned that we are at a transition point here.

Peter has focused up to here on the grandeur of the truth of God's revelation.

But now he begins to tell us what that means for our lives.

Those first readers of this letter needed encouragement and confidence, and we do too.

We need it because we have an enemy who targets the mind.

He seeks to distract, he seeks to confuse, even to convince that something is true when it's not.

There is a battle for your mind.

Satan wants to rob you of peace.

Instead of certainty, he wants you to live with the anxiety of uncertainty.

He works to instill in your mind fear and anxiety in place of rest in God's sovereign care for you.

Instead of clearly seeing Christ in the light of the gospel of grace, he wants your mind filled with clouds and darkness and cobwebs.

He loves the dust-covered Bible.

You are in a fight for your mind.

And through your mind to your heart.

So prepare your minds for action.

Remain focused and set your hope on the revelation of Jesus Christ in which you will experience the full grace of the living God.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, we come and bow before you, confessing that we get distracted.

So easy for us to not keep our focus where it needs to be.

But thank you for this reminder, for this command.

I pray that your Spirit would come and indwell us and begin to change us by your word.

Write your word on our minds and on our hearts so that we might be people who are focused on the revelation of Jesus Christ.

We look forward to that day.

We celebrate that day even now because it's as good as done.

May you come soon, Lord Jesus.

Amen.

Please stand as we sing together of that day.

Be assured that His grace will lead us safely home, but there is a road to travel in the meantime.

It's why it's good to take in what the Apostle Paul says in Romans chapter eight.

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the spirit set their minds on the things of the spirit.

For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace.

May the Lord bless you with life and peace this week as you set your mind on him.

Amen.