Be Holy

Hey, good morning, Sacred Mission Church.

We're so glad that you're joining us for our live stream this morning.

We're going to be picking back up in our sermon series, Hold Fast to Faith, where we're looking at the book of First Peter.

And so if you've got a Bible, we'd love for you to go ahead and open it and get ready to be diving into God's Word.

If you don't know where First Peter is, it's in the New Testament, kind of near the end of the Bible itself.

And if you have an app, you can open that as well to your Bible reading.

We're going to be at 1 Peter chapter 1, looking at verses 13 through 16.

1 Peter 1 · chapter mention

And so we're excited to look at what it means to be holy and the call that we have on our life to be holy before God.

And so we're going to begin by just reading the passage and then we'll dive in together.

So hopefully you've had enough time to turn there.

And we're going to be reading again 1 Peter chapter 1, verses 13 through 16.

1 Peter 1:13–16

It says this.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Thanks be to God.

So what we're at is we're looking at this concept of holiness.

And that's kind of the direct line of which this passage is going to go.

But what we're seeing that is Peter, throughout this first section of his letter, is building this case.

And the case is that we are in a family.

We're in a family together, a new family, because we've been caused to be born again by the power and sovereignty of God.

And so now we are in a new family with him as children.

And there's realities to this family that we have to understand and work through.

And so when we look at our lives, we're all a part of a family, right?

We all kind of belong to some family.

And what that brings with it is all kinds of different uh traditions.

Maybe you and your family have specific traditions for specific holidays or events or things in your life that you do.

Maybe you guys have different characteristics about your family that help define who you are and what you're about.

Maybe you have different values or language that you use, right?

Some families have these different phrases or words that they use that's just kind of common to them.

There's all these different attributes that help define you as family and who's in your family and a part of it.

And so what we're looking at is this reality that we belong to a new family.

And that's what Peter has already been laboring through the first part of this opening chapter.

That we've been born again.

And by the power of God, we've been brought into a new family.

And so that family comes with characteristics, values, tradition, all these things that our natural family does, our new family, our eternal family, with God as our Father, has those same things.

And so we've got to work to understand how we're defined as family.

This was God's purposed work in us.

We said earlier in this chapter that it was by his power he caused us to be born again.

And we are born into this family.

And this is what gives us a living hope in Jesus.

To be born again into the family.

The only one, Jesus Himself, who is actually worth putting our hope into.

And we're going to start in creating just a list of do's and don'ts of what it means to be holy.

But Peter's not doing that.

He's not pointing us to the law.

He's not pointing us to God's commands.

He's pointing us to God Himself.

That we've been born again into a new family.

That family has a new identity.

And because we're in this family, we should behave.

Our characteristics, our attributes, our values, all should change to mimic, to line up with the new identity that we have in God's family.

And so, verse 13, if we're looking at this and we're trying to summarize this very short three uh three to four scripture verses that we're working through here, we kind of got to look at verse 13 itself because it really ties back to everything that we've been preaching on uh through this sermon series already, because we have this huge therefore in the beginning of it.

And so when we ask, why is that there for, because it's pointing us back to what Peter has been saying all along about what God has done in our life.

And so if I was to summarize verse 13, the way that I would summarize this is that the process of living out, the identity of our new family begins in the mind.

The process of living out the identity of our new family, it begins in the mind.

Peter stresses this matter by stating it twice.

So he says, therefore, and then he gives us two things to do, right back to back, and both of them have to do with our mind.

So he's stressing the reality that the way that we think, our mindset forms, begins to form and shape the reality of the identity of which we've been brought into by God's sovereign power.

And he says this prepare for action and be sober-minded.

So prepare for action and be sober-minded.

So to prepare our minds for action, that first thing that he calls us to do, it's actually the same language as when the in the Old Testament we would see this calling for men to gird up their loins, right?

And so if we try to understand what that means, is men were trying to prepare for action, whether it be for battle or for moving uh in a fast, hurried state, uh, they usually had these long kind of dresses on.

And so to be able to run quickly or be able to fight, uh, you didn't really want to fight in a dress.

And so you would actually bring up your clothing and you would put it between your legs and wrap it around you so that you could be ready for action.

You were girding up your loins to be ready for whatever was going to take place.

We also saw this in the Passover.

When the Israelites were being called to be moving out of Egypt, uh, God called them to gird up their loins so that when he gave them the word to go, to be out of the bondage of Egypt, they were ready to do it.

And so he's using this exact same language to prepare for action, to gird up our minds, be ready to make the decisions that need to be made when they need to be made.

So why is he telling us this?

So that we can make the decisions that need to be made when they need to be made.

Another example that I would say is Joseph and Potiphar's wife.

And so if we look back in the Old Testament, Joseph, his mind was prepared for action.

When Potiphar's wife came in to be able to try and seduce him into an adulterous relationship, quickly, Joseph was equipped.

His mind was ready for action to make the decision that he needed to make when he needed to make it.

And immediately as she advanced toward him and grabbed hold of him, he darted out of his own clothes.

He jetted from the scene.

He made the decision that needed to be made when it needed to be made.

See, his mind was ready for action.

Our minds need to be ready.

On guard against the attacks of the enemy, ready for battle at any time.

Many of us walk around with distracted and numb minds.

We're not really ready for action.

And what happens when we aren't ready for action is that we begin to uh kind of court or we begin to fantasize or we begin to uh kind of go along with the unhealthy thoughts that come into our mind.

They might not be our thoughts.

They might be placed there by the devil himself to be able to try and entice us into temptation to sin.

And when we don't have minds that are ready, because we walk around with distracted minds or numb minds, we'll find ourselves uh being enticed by those thoughts more and more.

And so the battle has to begin in our mind.

We have to be prepared for action.

We often find ourselves in sin because our minds weren't prepared for action.

So the second thing that he calls us to is to be sober-minded.

So the first one is be minds prepared for action.

The second one is be sober-minded.

It would be greatly reductionistic if we approach this command that Peter gives us to be sober-minded here, if we just tried to relate it to the consumption of alcohol.

Nowhere in this passage is Peter talking about alcohol at all.

He's not saying that this substance that we partake of is what's the primary agent in creating an unsober mind.

So we don't want to reduce the text to try and make it say something it doesn't say.

Obviously, throughout the scriptures, we can find themes where we're called to live not in state of drunkenness.

We're not to engage in that behavior, and that should be something that is a part of the new identity that we have in God's family, that we're no longer drunkards or partake in drunkenness.

But here, what Peter is saying is to be sober-minded is much more holistic.

It's much more of a reality of how we think and the way that we allow our mind to function.

While we should live with literal soberness and not be drunkards as the scriptures cause us to, this phrase is speaking more holistically to the way that we think.

Living sober-minded is to not get caught up in fantasy or a worldview that is rooted in temporal being the supreme.

So, what I mean by that is that we're not to be caught up in the fantasies of this world where we have these uh false assumptions of what is true and good or what is lasting in this world.

We can often look at the temporal things of this world and live in such a way as if they would last forever.

We kind of all have this reality about us.

We don't think about the finiteness, we don't think about uh the reality that all that is before us will one day be gone.

It'll be destroyed, and the new heavens and new earth will come back, and Christ will set up for us and for his glory the new heavens and new earth that'll last forever.

And so all of this world that we see, everything we try to white knuckle, everything that we try to hold tight to will be burnt up.

It will be gone because it's temporal.

It wasn't made to last forever.

And so sometimes we can get caught up in these fantasies, or we can get caught up in a worldview that treats the temporal as supreme because we put all of our efforts into making the temporal last as long as it can instead of realizing their root purpose that points us to a greater reality of eternity.

You see, we have to live sober-minded.

And what that means is that we have to live with a worldview that has eternity in mind.

It's a mind that contends to see the reality of this world in the light of the reality of God.

That's what being sober-minded does.

Here's some poor examples of being not sober-minded.

And this is some of the things that I've seen, even in the midst of all of this uh pandemic, in the midst of all of these issues that we're facing as a culture, I'm being able to navigate and see where our worldview really is.

And it's so subtle.

That's the dangerous thing about this call to be sober-minded, is that a lot of what we encounter and engage with, it's so subtle and it appears to be good and it appears to have high value.

But when you really try to push in, it starts to crumble and fall apart.

Some things that I've been seeing in the midst of this pandemic is this push that together we can do this.

Together as humanity, as we join forces and we put all of our strength and all of our efforts together, we can beat this.

Maybe.

Or maybe God won't allow us to.

You see, what we're doing is we're putting human ingenuity, human effort, human strength in the forefront of our hope.

Together we can do this.

And it's so inspirational, right?

You can see it on sidewalk chalk on the street, or you can see it on a banner outside of a company or wherever you might see this, this togetherness, we can fight and beat this.

But ultimately, what we're really doing is we're putting hope in the temporal.

We're putting hope in something that will really be burnt up and gone at some point in time, whether it's through this situation or one to come in the second coming of Christ Himself, all of that will fade.

And so when we try to put our strength in human ingenuity and human strength, we're not being sober-minded.

We're putting ourselves into a fantasy world that's not real, that's not true.

When we put our hope in science, a lot of that we've been seeing even with some of the statements that have been made publicly by some of our leaders, that it wasn't God who did this.

It was us and our scientific ingenuity.

And we're putting a lot of trust.

Maybe you're sitting at home and you're just waiting, right, for the day when the vaccine will be made for this whole situation and we'll be able to finally be back to normal again.

Well, maybe we don't get a vaccine, or maybe the vaccine really isn't the answer.

But the reality of either situation is how much of our hope are we putting in something that's not God?

Now, see, God doesn't cause us to be living in such a way that's not pragmatic, and we believe in common grace in a way that, of course, God can use these things by his power and by his sovereignty to be good for his people.

But if we're not cautious, if we're not aware, we can often get unsober in our thinking and put our hope and energy and effort and striving into that which is fantasy, which is temporal.

Maybe some of us are just waiting for America to rise up and be this glorious power that we know it to be, and we're waiting for that.

When is America gonna stand up and do what we know that they can do?

Again, it's so easy for us to get caught up in the temporal.

America will fade.

Whatever we hold on to with our constitution or whatever we hold on to with our government policies or whatever we hold on to so tightly, one day it will all be destroyed.

It'll all be gone because it's not about the kingdoms that we build, it's about the kingdom that God builds.

And that is where we have to set our gaze.

That is where we have to set our focus.

Everything that we try to put our hope in now, in the temporal, causes us to be unsober-minded.

Then we move on.

So if we were looking at 14, or if we see the last part of verse 13, what we see is that when our minds aren't prepared for action or sober, we cast our hopes on faulty, worthless saviors.

So look at what Peter's saying.

He's saying, prepare your mind for action, be sober-minded, so that our hope can be on the grace that has been given to us.

Set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

And so when we aren't prepared for action in our thinking, when we aren't sober-minded in the way that we approach our life in reality, what we do is we cast our hopes on faulty, worthless saviors, not on Jesus, not on the only one who is worth putting all of our hope into.

But when we are, when we are prepared for action, when we are sober-minded, we'll be able to set our hope fully on the rich grace of Jesus.

Peter continues to set our gaze beyond the here and now to the coming of Jesus.

This is this, this is a push that he's been doing from the very beginning.

He's talking to a people who are experiencing all these various trials in their life.

We we've mentioned this in previous sermons, whether it be on trials of uh of socioeconomic trials, religious trials and sufferings, uh, relational trials and sufferings, political, whatever it might be.

He's writing to a very diverse group of people and suffering and undergoing various trials.

And his work is to not have their eyes, their gaze, fixed on the temporal, fixed on what they're experiencing, fixed on the encounterings of their life.

He's working relentlessly to lift up their heads so that their gaze is fixed on Jesus alone.

Peter is exhibiting a sober mind and one ready for action.

We don't get caught up in fantasy of what will not be eternal, what will be burnt up and destroyed.

We set our gaze upward, placing the fullness of our hope on him who is worthy.

So as we move down to 14 through 16, the way that I summarize this passage of scripture is that we're to live holy lives as children of the Father.

We're to live holy lives as children of the Father.

When we, right when we get out of this, right?

So be ready in action, be sober-minded, set your hope on Christ.

What he does is he points us directly to our identity, our relationship as children of God the Father, not on rules, not on law.

He points us to relationship.

You see, obedient children is our identity.

If we were trying to really boil down and distill what is this new identity that we have in God, it's that we are obedient children, brought into the family of God by the power of God Himself, born again, but this time born into an eternal family.

We now live as children who are not in rebellion to our Father, but are joyfully obedient to him.

And see, for a lot of us, this is really hard because we didn't have fathers that we joyfully were obedient to.

We didn't have fathers that created a relationship with us that caused us to be joyfully obedient to them.

And so when we approach God in this new identity as father, we project onto him a lot of the things that we bring with us from our past.

And so if maybe our fathers were manipulative, or maybe our fathers were verbally abusive, or maybe our fathers were uh absent emotionally or even physically in our lives when we feel like we can't trust or we can't uh with joy approach them because we think that there's always an interior motive in the back of their mind.

All of us, in some form or fashion, have had bad dads.

Even if you've had an amazing dad, he's failed you.

And that's just the reality of our human nature.

But that sin, that failure, brings about with us an inability to fully and joyfully obey God.

Because with that we don't trust him.

We really don't trust he's good, we really don't trust that he's good for us, we really don't trust that in obedience to him is the fullness of joy and life that we've always longed for.

But what God is working to do in our hearts, be but first and foremost, by causing us to being born again, is to demonstrate and show to us that his law is perfect, that his being is perfect, and that for us to obey is for us to find life and joy and peace and comfort, everything we've ever longed and looked for that we can find in him.

And so we as children of the Father should long to be joyfully obedient to him.

We're obedient to a Father who always is for our good.

Always.

A father who knows perfectly.

Perfectly where joy, peace, and comfort are found.

Because they're found in him and in him alone.

We once were not in God's family.

We once were ignorant to his grace.

We were once ignorant to his love and his holiness.

And in that ignorance, we failed to live sober-minded.

We failed to have minds ready for action.

We lived to gratify ourselves and had our minds captivated by the fleeting fantasies and pleasures that this world has to offer us.

But this all needs to change now.

Because our minds, if we have been born again, if we are people who have trusted in the finished work of Christ, in his perfect life, his substitutionary death, burial and glorious resurrection, then we are a new creation.

And when we were once blinded to God's love, to God's grace, to God's holiness, now our eyes and minds have been caused to be open to the reality of those things.

And when we've been brought into a new family as children of God the Father, then we need to forsake those things of the past.

And we need to cling tightly to who we are as his children.

This needs to change the pursuit of the fleeting fantasies and pleasures that the world has to offer us.

Not because we're striving to earn a place in the family of God, but because he has sovereignly caused us to be born again into his family.

You see, we don't want to, again, Peter's not working to make a long list of do's and don'ts for us to follow or not follow so that we can earn a place at the table of God's family.

No, what he's doing in laboring to show us is that you have been sovereignly brought in by the power of God into this new family, and you need to behave in such a way.

And so we need to work to find our satisfaction, our gratification, our pleasure, our joy all in our relationship with our new Father.

We can't think, act, or behave in the ways that we once did.

We have to begin embodying the new identity that He has given to us.

The core of that identity is God's holiness.

That's the core of that identity.

The call isn't to be good, the call isn't to be kind, the call isn't to be loving.

If we were going to try and understand how we would make God out to be, if he was calling us to be something, many of us would use attributes like loving or kind or good.

But no, what God calls us to be is holy.

To be holy means to be completely other.

To be completely set apart.

And so us being a reformed church, we have a high view of God's sovereignty and his holiness.

That's how we would try to define and summarize what it means for us to be reformed.

And when we say that God is holy, what we're saying is that he is completely other.

He is completely set apart from the rest of all creation.

We might try to work and labor in understanding God through what he has made, and by his grace, he has allowed for us to do that to some measure, but it all falls short in fully understanding him because his holiness dictates that he is completely set apart.

You see, all of creation could not even exist if God ceased to exist, because it is in him that we have our complete being.

All things hold together and are suspended by him who created us.

And so his holiness dictates that he is completely other from us.

And so we can't fully know him through what he has created because he is so completely set apart from his creation.

God is completely set apart, he alone is completely other, for everything is wholly dependent upon him.

It is this holiness that both identifies God and it establishes his authority to establish what is truth.

So what I mean by that is that when we try to approach, well, what is it that God has called us to do?

What is it or how has God called us to live?

What is true and what is not?

The fact that God is holy, the fact that he is completely other and set apart establishes the authority for him to dictate what is truth.

In the fact that he created all things, he himself also created truth.

And so what we need to realize is that when we try to work to understand God, we have to work to understand him in the way that he has revealed himself to us.

And so because we believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, what we do is we submit to that revelation where God has said, By my grace, by my mercy, what I am going to do is show you who I am through my word.

I am so completely other that you can't really fully know me, but I am going to be gracious to you and give you my word and show you who I am to some measure through this revelation we call the Bible.

And then the most supreme reality of God revealing his otherness, his completely set apartness to us is in Jesus.

And this is the miracle of the gospel.

This is the miracle of the incarnation that God himself, the Holy One, took on flesh and became man.

And so the Bible says that when we look at Jesus, we're able to see the glory of the Father.

Jesus Himself in His ministry says, If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.

Jesus was the exact imprint, the exact image of the Father.

And so God in his grace and his mercy, though he is completely holy and other, has revealed and shown himself to us through his word, and most supremely through the person and work of Jesus.

And what this does is this establishes for us what it means to be like him.

You want to know what it means to be like God when he says that you should be holy like I am holy, then we have to work to know him through the ways of which he has sovereignly revealed his holiness to us through his word and through the person and work of Jesus.

To pursue being holy as he is will cause us to both remove ourselves from our former identity and submit to what he has declared as truth.

And so everything that we thought was true has to now be submitted to what God has declared is true.

And God's truth always trumps our truth.

And we have to work tirelessly to submit our lives to that in this pursuit to the calling to be holy.

The main idea out of this passage of scripture is this we're called to live out the holiness of our Father.

We are called to live out the holiness of our Father.

You see, as obedient children, as Peter puts it, this is our endeavor to be holy like our Father is holy.

I love how Peter roots this in relationship because you and I have this strong tendency to try and make a list of do's and don'ts, to be able to be accepted by God, loved by God, but that's not how it works.

You see, God loves us in spite of our ability to either fulfill or fail at the do's and don'ts.

God and his sovereign power, before we could even accomplish a do, caused us to be born again in his love and grace and brought us into the family.

He said, Now that you're here, now that you're a part of this family that I've brought you into, be like me.

Be like me.

And so we have to understand who we are in light of God, our relationship with him, and how he's revealed himself to be, so that we can work in joy to be those obedient children.

But many of us we fail to do this.

And it's it's a struggle for so many of us.

Some of that is because there's some of us who over-realize our call to be holy.

We overrealize our call to be holy.

I think we do this in a few different ways.

One of the ways that we do this, I believe, is that we often are kind of like the Pharisees in the scriptures.

You see, what the Pharisees were notorious for doing was living in such a way that the law of God wasn't sufficient enough to keep.

And so they were notorious to adding to the law of God what was not really there.

Or they would expound upon the laws in such a way to make them so oppressive to God's people that they could never fully fulfill them.

And a lot of us over-realize our call to be holy by doing the exact same thing.

We switch it from relationship to a laws and uh to a list of do's and don'ts, and then we start adding to what God has declared.

We start creating our own laws or we start expounding things into commands of God that were never there.

And so we get all these different fractions within our faith where we believe that, oh, well, you have to dress this way or look this way or listen to this type of music or watch these type of TV shows, or you have to live up to these standards that are actually nowhere in the Bible.

Where the Bible was silent, we tried to be authoritatively voices for it.

And we can't do that.

That's an overrealizing of the holiness of what we're called to do.

And what that will do for us is it will build upon us these oppressive yokes that we can't fully carry.

And we'll find ourselves in our lives continually trying to work for the very love that God has so freely already given to us.

So some of us overrealize our call to be holy that way.

Others of us overrealize our call to be holy in the false assumption that in this life we will be completely free of sin.

It's not true.

It's not until glory will we be fully free of sin.

You and I are going to struggle and battle with sin for the rest of our lives.

Now, what that doesn't mean is that we don't fight to put sin to death.

And we're going to get to that in this next part.

What we have to do is we have to be sober-minded in the reality that we will constantly be putting sin to death in our lives.

And that's what we're called to do.

But we won't get to a place where we're free of sin.

You see, we still have to trust in Christ as our righteousness.

He is the measure of holiness that we so desperately have to have.

And he freely gives it to us in our faith in him.

And so when we try to overrealize by saying that we could potentially live perfect lives here and now, well, you're never going to accomplish that.

And so you're striving for something that will never come to you here in this life.

Now, it doesn't mean, again, that we don't put sin to death in our lives, but what it means is that we constantly have to realize that we're going to be humbled by the presence of sin in our lives, but we continue to work with the power of the Holy Spirit to see it lessened and put to death more and more as we work to be holy as He has called us to be holy.

So we don't want to overrealize this call to holiness.

We want to put it into frame of what the truth of the scriptures reveal to us.

We don't have to add to God's law, and we're not going to reach perfection in this life.

But some of us, some of us underrealize our call to be holy.

And so we are the complete opposite of those who might say that they could be holy completely and without sin here and now.

And what they do is they say, well, I'll never be without sin.

So I might as well just not try because doesn't grace abound?

Isn't God's grace a permission slip for me to be able to have sin continue reigning in my life?

And I say, no, not by any means, because this call to be holy, for I am holy, is this reality where we are actively working with the Holy Spirit to put sin to death in our lives so that we can be more conformed to the identity of the family that we've been brought into by God's sovereign power.

And so when we have this cheapened view of grace, that it wasn't costly in any form, what we do is we say, well, let's just let sin abound so that grace can abound even more.

And that's the wrong perspective to have.

You undervalue or underrealize the call to be holy that's on your life.

You see, we are to be obedient children.

And a reality that we have been brought into that family that God and His sovereign power has brought us into.

A reality, an evidence of that in our lives is that sin would not reign, is that we would not continue to be agents of sin willfully and joyfully, but we would turn away from the former ignorance and passions of our old life, and we'd start living out actively the holiness of which God has called us to.

How could we, how could we as Christians look at what our sin cost heaven and continue to find pleasure in it any longer?

When we look at the cross, it should cause us to have hatred and disgust for the sin of which caused it.

When we look at what Jesus had to endure, you see, that's the reality of this whole thing is Jesus didn't have to just come and be nice.

He didn't have to just come and love everybody and be super kind.

When we look at the story of Jesus, they didn't kill him and put him on a cross and call for his crucifixion uh because he was so kind to everyone.

Or because he was so loved.

Hey, you know what?

This guy is so nice and kind and loving, we're gonna kill him.

That's not what happened.

They hated him, they reviled him because of the hard truth of which he came to declare.

One of those hard truths was that he was God in the flesh, and that he came for the forgiveness of sin for God's people.

And how was that forgiveness of sin accomplished?

How was that mercy extended to God's image bearers through the crushing of Jesus our Lord?

That's how it was accomplished.

It wasn't accomplished by him being kind, it wasn't accomplished by him being loving, it was accomplished by him being crushed instead of us being crushed for it.

So when we underrealize our call to be holiness, it's almost as if we make a mockery of the cost of heaven to extend to us that very grace of which in our lives we try to abuse so that we can find joy and passion and pleasure in the former ignorance of the lives we once lived.

But the beauty of the gospel is this that Jesus suffered the judgment of our former passions so that we might be holy before the Father.

Jesus suffered the judgment of our former passions so that we might be holy before the Father.

That's the gospel.

That's what cost to be able to extend that grace to us, of which we so value and love.

It cost Jesus being crushed.

It costs Jesus suffering the judgment of our former passions, of which Peter in this passage is calling us to turn away from, to no longer imbibe in, to no longer find pleasure and joy in any longer.

When we look to the cross, when we look to Jesus, oh, how much it should remind us of what it cost to get us out of those former lives, to get us out and away from those former passions, because they always left us empty, even though we continually ran to them and tried to consume them as much as we could, and we devoured and ate up even one another in the pursuit of these pleasures.

They left us empty.

It left us void, it left us miserable without joy.

No matter what you've tried to do in your life, as you tried to find joys, you find a tried to find satisfaction and gratification in sin, you always wound up the next day empty.

And that was a reality that you have to constantly wrestle with.

And Christ came.

Christ came and he suffered the judgment of our pursuits under that former ignorance.

See, it required judgment, it required for sin to be dealt with because a holy God cannot reside with sin.

He cannot live with sin.

And so in his holiness, in his separateness, he has to be separated from sin.

And our sin caused us to be separated from him.

And it demanded judgment upon us so that God could restore all of which he created, so that he could bring back into harmony in the which the created order of which he sovereignly intended, sin had to be dealt with.

And it was in mercy and it was in grace that he dealt with it through Jesus instead of dealing with it through us.

And so Christ suffered the judgment of our former passions.

Why?

So that we might be holy before the Father.

So whether you overrealize your call to be holy or you underrealize your call to be holy, the reality is we never will be holy in this life.

So all of us are going to have to face the judgment of God.

That's just the reality.

If we are sober-minded and we're prepared for action, we will have to realize that we will face the judgment of God.

And for those of us who have put their faith and trust in the finished work of Jesus, in his life, death, burial, and resurrection, our hope that we set our eyes on, our hope that we put all of our effort into is that Christ will stand before us as our holiness.

So we don't have to fear anymore.

We don't have to fear that we've overrealized or that we've underrealized.

We don't have to fear the judgment of which our sin demands because Christ in his holiness stands before us.

And God judged him instead of judging us.

And we can have confidence in that as people, children of the Father.

So if we were going to live this out, there's three ways in which I think that we could actively live out the gospel in our lives.

Here's the first one that we would begin to fight for holiness in our minds.

So when we look personally at this, what Peter's calling us to is to live holy.

And a lot of us need to fight for holiness in our minds.

This is the battleground of where all of sin begins as a thought.

Now, you might have bad thoughts.

That's not sin.

You see, one of the unique things about the life and ministry of Jesus is that he never worked to downplay or to lessen the standards of God in his law.

In fact, Jesus comes and he says, I'm going to raise the bar.

Where you thought that to actually have a relationship with another woman was adultery, I'm going to say to desire another relationship with the woman is adultery.

Where you say to kill a person is murder, where I'm going to say to desire to kill a person is murder.

So Jesus only raised the bar.

And in his death and crucifixion, he was nailed to the very bar of which he raised.

And so what we have to do as we navigate this is that we have to realize that there's a battle to be holy.

And we will not, all of the thoughts that come into our mind aren't necessarily our thoughts.

The devil will try to tempt us and entice us because they start here and then they work down to desire.

We uh kind of court those thoughts, or we try to uh engage with those thoughts, or we allow them and we're not prepared for action, we're not sober-minded, those thoughts can become desires.

And that's where it's sin.

That's where it's against God's holiness.

When we actually live those things out, while they might have relational realities or different consequences depending on what the sin is, uh the reality is it was sin before we acted on it because we desired it, because we didn't start with the battle here.

The Bible tells us to put on the mind of Christ, to take every thought captive, to wash your minds in the water of the word.

And so if we're gonna live this out, we have to realize that the battleground is going to start in our minds.

And we have to try to put on the mind of Christ by submitting ourselves and by immersing ourselves into the way of which he's revealed what his mind is like.

And how has he done that?

Through his word.

Through his word, he has sovereignly and graciously revealed this is what my mind is like when it comes to sin, when it comes to grace, when it comes to love, when it comes to justice, when it comes to all things concerning us and him.

This is how we begin to put on the mind of Christ.

So personally, we begin to fight for holiness in our minds.

Communally, as a community, we would encourage one another in holiness.

This is something that I would love to see our community and mission groups do for one another, is to be able to encourage holiness in one another.

Build up and exhort one another to live holy.

Right?

We should be encouraging one another to live holy.

When we see people living holy, we should spur that on and champion and cheerlead that.

Man, you are living so holy.

I see the way that you're changing and being conformed more to the image of Jesus.

And I want to cheerlead that.

I want to champion that in your life because I want to continue to see holiness reign in your life.

Where sin once reigned, let holiness reign now.

And that should cause us as a group and a community of people to rebuke in love and truth lives that follow our former passions.

So when we see a brother or sister that are going back to that ignorance, going back to those former passions in truth and love, we should rebuke that in gracious tenderness.

We should come alongside them to show them.

Look, that was when you were ignorant.

That was when you didn't see the glory and majesty of God and the relationship that we have with Him come back to this.

This is what God has called us to as obedient children to live holy.

And so we have to get in the mess of each other's lives.

We have to be able to be vulnerable and honest.

And when we are rebuked by a brother or sister, we can't just be prideful and put our guard up and try to justify our actions.

Know that they do this.

It took a lot of courage for them to do this, and they do it because they love you.

And so we should be people who are humble and ready to receive correction so that we can have minds that are prepared for action and sober.

Thirdly, when it comes to the way that we engage culture, we should live lives, holy lives before the world around us.

We should live holy lives before the world around us.

The Bible constantly calls us to do this, and we see in different places where actually it's the lives that we live have a missional dynamic in culture.

It actually causes people to ask, what makes you live in such a way?

What is this about you?

What where do you have your hope?

Where do you have your faith that causes you to live this way?

You see, the world should look on from the outside to see the way that we live our lives, and it should spark curiosity within them.

Jesus even says, Let your light shine before men so that.

So why do we let our light shine before men so that we can get glory, so that we can get praise, so that people will like us better because we're nicer?

No, Jesus says, Let your light shine before men so that they may glorify your Father who is in heaven.

Peter in another passage says the same thing.

Our lives have missional implication.

And so if you're wondering, maybe why are not neighbors, co-workers, friends, and family not more intrigued, more interested, more curious about the faith that you proclaim, maybe it's because the life you're living isn't as holy as the message that you speak.

Maybe they don't see something different.

Maybe they don't see what's setting you apart or pushing you to the otherness of who God is.

So my prayer for us is that we would strive to be holy, we'd encourage one another to be holy, and we'd live holy before the culture around us.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you.