1 Peter: How to Live Out Our Hope in Jesus Christ (1:13-25)

Hi, I'm Pastor Creighton, and thank you for tuning into Newsong Churches Podcast.

We're a biblically faithful, gospel-centered Anglican church in Port Perry, Ontario, proclaiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.

You can learn more about us at Newsongportperry.ca.

May God bless you today through his life-giving word.

Hello, I'm Pastor Creighton.

Welcome to Newsong Church.

We're here proclaiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.

Due to some unfortunate technical difficulties, our live stream on March the 1st didn't work properly, but we did want to put our sermon out there on YouTube and through our podcast so that you could follow along with our series on 1 Peter from home.

It's to 1 Peter will turn now.

I'll read our passage, 1 Peter 1, 13 to 25, and then we'll dive in together.

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 are 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, through him, 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.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

We began our Lenten journey as a church family, looking at the book of First Peter and considering the question of what it means to live as Christians in today's world.

What does it mean to live as faithful exiles, strangers in a strange land, in the world, yet uh, but not of the world, and yet for the world?

In the first 12 verses, we discover that Christians who live as faithful exiles live as those who are born again with a living hope in the resurrection of Jesus.

And we live with refining trials, and we live with a biblical confidence.

But the spiritual life is not theory, it's put into practice, it's put into action.

And that's what Peter wants to remind us in today's passage.

Verse 13, Peter 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.

Prepare your minds for action, is what Peter is telling us.

So, how do we do that?

How do we live out our hope in Jesus Christ?

How do we put into action what it means to live as faithful exiles?

Peter has three things to tell us, three actions we can take.

Be holy, be reverent, and be loving.

That's how we live out our hope in Jesus Christ.

We are holy, we are reverent, and we are loving.

As individual Christians and as a corporate church family as well.

This is how we put our hope into action.

So turn with me, if you will, to 1 Peter if you haven't already, and let's explore, let's learn how we live out our hope in Jesus Christ together.

First and foremost, Peter says, Be holy.

Verse 14 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.

So Peter gives us a clear gospel imperative, doesn't he?

Don't be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.

The former ignorance he has in view here is his reader's pre-Christian pagan life, marked by religious rituals meant to placate these distant gods.

Pagan religion required no moral transformation.

And it also allowed for indulgence in all kinds of lustful and self-directed passions while offering no real spiritual assurance.

So long as you performed the right rituals and you kept the gods satisfied, you were free to live as you pleased.

But to be a Christian, Peter insists, is a different thing altogether.

We are not ignorantly trying to appease distant deities.

We are rather God's well-loved and therefore obedient children.

Did you see that in verse 14?

See, pagans might claim the favor of the gods for a time or in a particular way, but they could not claim a personal, deepening, conscious relationship with the one true creator God, not in theory, but as Father, as their loving Heavenly Father.

See, in Christ, that's precisely who Christians, what Christians can claim for themselves.

We know God, not just in theory, but we know him as Father.

And knowing that our Father loves us supremely, we come to Him and we love Him above everything else.

And we demonstrate that love through willing obedience, which includes a refusal to return to the sinful passions that once defined us.

So what do we do instead?

That's what we want to ask Peter, and Peter answers us As he who calls you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct.

To be holy is to be set apart, it's to be consecrated, to be devoted to God.

Why?

Well, verse 16, he quotes from Leviticus 11, You shall be holy.

Why?

Because I am holy.

See, Peter grounds the command in God's own essential character.

One of the most important and formative verses in the Old Testament.

God is holy.

He is the set apart one, the radiantly pure one.

And if we are his children, we're called to bear that family likeness.

And that likeness includes holiness.

So how does that sound?

Our friend Karen Stiller observes that holiness has a public relations problem.

She writes in her book, Holiness Here, it has a public relations problem even within the church.

Being holy, she writes, is deeply associated in our culture with being a pain in the butt rather than a balm to the soul.

Do you think that's true?

Attach the word holy to a person, and even at our very best moments, we are more likely to imagine them as insufferable.

But Karen's point is this: this need not be so.

Holiness is simply how we live out our hope in Jesus Christ, refusing lesser passions that mislead us, and growing in personal devotion to the one who has first and foremost devoted himself completely to us.

So, how do we begin to live this life of holiness that Peter is calling us to?

Well, first, we have to refuse to conform to the passions of our former ignorance.

See, many of us know something of that moral transformation for ourselves.

Coming to faith in Christ meant reordering our disordered relationships, our disordered sex lives, our disordered uh work habits, our disordered ambitions or unforgivenesses.

We begin to recognize actions and attitudes that we once overlooked completely, or we excused as inconsistent, uh, or we excused as inconsistent with our new identity as God's children.

Lesser loves, displacing our love for Him, we set those aside and we devoted ourselves to the one who wholly loves us.

Some of us learn painfully that there is an unsustainable moral and spiritual dissonance in claiming to be God's obedient children while still conforming to our former passions.

We refuse and we set aside those passions of our former ignorance, and we begin to endeavor by grace to cultivate a holiness by getting to know the Holy One.

The good Bishop J.C.

Ryle writes in his book Holiness, he writes, holiness is the habit of being of one mind with God, according as we find his mind described in Scripture.

It is the habit of agreeing in God's judgment, hating what he hates, loving what he loves, and measuring everything in this world by the standard of his word.

What's Ryle trying to tell us about cultivating holiness?

It's a matter of integrating our knowledge of who God is with our practice, our actions in real life.

When those two things agree with one another, when we know who God is as he's revealed in Scripture, and our actions, uh our actions are coherent with that knowledge, well then we're cultivating holiness.

And friends, that's why we here at New Song make so much of proclaiming God's true and life-giving word, because this is our practice in holiness.

We cultivate holiness as we make his word known, as it plants itself deep in our hearts and transforms our actions.

How do we live out our hope in Jesus Christ?

Well, Peter first tells us we are holy as God Himself is holy.

But Peter goes on, we cultivate, pardon me, we live out our hope in Jesus Christ by being holy and by being reverent.

Let's look at verse 17.

And if you call on him as Father, who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, 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.

Peter writes, Conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile.

So just like we saw last Sunday, Christians are called to live as faithful exiles.

We are pilgrims journeying from the world as it is now to the world as it will be, renewed at the glorious return of our Lord Jesus.

Maybe this explains why we both feel at home and not quite at home in the world as it is today.

We long for its fullness when Jesus returns.

And it's on that return that verse 13 tells us Christians set their hope.

So Peter gives a second imperative to us, hope-filled exiles.

Conduct yourselves with fear.

Fear of our Holy God, our Heavenly Father, who judges each person's conduct impartially.

Verse 17.

But wait, some of us probably want to ask.

A spiritual posture of awe before the radiance and justice, an unfathomable love and beauty and purity of our holy God.

That's why Hilary of Poitiere in the fourth century can say, for us, that is, for Christians, the fear of God consists wholly in love.

And perfect love of God brings our fear to him to its perfection.

Our love for God is entrusted with its own responsibility, to observe his counsels, to obey his laws, and to trust his promises.

So for Hilary of Praty, our fear of God and our love of God are not contradictory.

They don't cancel one another out.

Actually, they work together to draw us closer and closer to this holy, reverent, and loving God that Peter knows.

This is why Peter grounds Christian reverence not simply in a dread of God's judgment, but a loving wonder of our redemption.

Be reverent, he says, verses 18-19, knowing that you were ransomed with the precious blood of Christ, he goes on to write.

See, godly reverence is not appeasing an otherwise angry God with our moralism.

Godly reverence is an awestruck wonder and heartfelt worship before a God who withholds nothing from us, not even his own blood, shed on the cross to rescue us from sin and from death.

And so amazingly, this is always God's plan.

Verse 20, Christ was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but was made manifest in the last times for your sake.

The cross was no afterthought, no accident, no last ditch effort on God's part.

Because of his great love for us, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit purposed our redemption before creation even began, and it was agreed that their preferred method of our rescue was the cross.

Before we were created, our judge purposed to die to secure our acquittal.

If this is the case, Peter asks us, how can we be indifferent or irreverent towards this God who withholds nothing to ransom from us?

How can we be careless towards the God who loves us so much that he laid down his life for us, his friends?

See, only in light of Christ's cross can we see that fear of God, this awe and reverence towards God is how we ought to live out our hope in Christ.

So how do we begin doing that?

How do we live a life of reverence?

Well, verse 17 reminds us we're always, as Christians, mindful of God's judgment.

We will be called to account.

And we remember that with fear and trembling.

I remember when I was in college, I had a professor who finished just about every theology class he taught with this single tagline.

It was a tagline he said probably a few times during his lecture as well.

He'd always conclude by saying, And for this I shall be judged.

And I thought he was, it was kind of a kooky eccentricity at first until I got to know him.

And I got to know how this man just wells up with prayer and tears in his eyes as he prays.

As he comes to know the beauty and holiness and his reverence for God, it he's always mindful that he will be answerable for his actions to his heavenly father.

And because of his great love for his heavenly father, he desires not to displease him, but to do his will.

So we're always mindful that we will be answerable before God for our actions.

But just as we're mindful of God's judgment, so too are we mindful of God's great love for us in our ransom.

Being mindful of God's great love for us can help us from uh can help uh guard against a terror against God's judgment.

Being mindful of God's great love for us means we call to mind always that God was the one to take initiative towards us, to rescue us and ransom us and redeem us with nothing less than the precious blood of Christ.

Friends, every time we come to the Lord's table together, we are being offered a gift from God, a gift of great assurance.

We hear the words, this is my body broken for you and my blood shed for you.

And that's not hypothetical.

That is God who dies to redeem us.

Such is our assurance of his great love for us in his precious blood.

And friends, that's what faithful liturgy like ours is trying to cultivate.

Good preaching tries to cultivate that same mindfulness of our judgment under God's law, but God's great love for us revealed in the gospel.

We uphold both when we confess the Ten Commandments together, or the summary of the law, when we make confession of our sins together as a church family.

Or when we hear the gospel, when we hear words of absolution and forgiveness, or when we come to the Lord's table together, we are paying mind both to the reality of God's judgment and to the reality of God's great love for us and our hope in Christ.

This is how we live out our hope in Christ.

We live out a life of reverence towards God.

How do we live out our hope in Christ?

Well, first be holy.

Second, be reverent.

And finally, Peter wants to tell us, be loving.

Verse 22.

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 the grass, the glat the grass withers, the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.

And this word is the good news that was preached to you.

So here's Peter's final gospel imperative for us.

Verse 22 Love one another earnestly from a pure heart.

Press into the very center of our Christian faith, and this is what you're going to find: love.

There is no Christian life without it.

We read in the Gospel, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.

And this reminds us that Christianity begins not with our love for God, but with God's great love for us, which invites our loving response toward God and towards others for whom Christ died.

The love that Christians are called to show one another is more than a warm feeling or affection.

That's lovely when we feel it, but it's more than that.

It's a deliberate, costly commitment to seek the good of the other.

Peter says that love must be earnest.

And this word can carry the sense of being stretched or being strained.

This is not a bare minimum or a or a merely transactional kind of love.

It's a love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.

It's a love that's sincere and generous and self-giving.

And this love that Christians are called to show one towards another flows, Peter says, from a pure heart, which is a heart renewed by the gospel, the good news of Jesus in the power of the Spirit.

That's why Peter grounds this command to love one another in a prior spiritual reality that we read about last Sunday.

Verse 23, Peter says, You have been born again.

Christians love because Christians have been made new.

We've been made new in Christ.

And last Sunday we read that God is.

Cause us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Christians participate in, and we anticipate the fullness of God's new creation, which is inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus on that first Easter Sunday.

We read in Romans 6, we Christians were buried with Christ in our baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we too might walk in newness of life.

This new life that we enjoy as Christians is imperishable, Peter says, precisely because we've been born again through the living and abiding word of God which lasts forever.

Peter quotes from Isaiah 40, which was originally written to Jewish exiles in Babylon, and now he quotes this to address Christians like us, living as faithful exiles in the present world.

We're reminded that human life as we know it is like grass that withers and flowers that fall, but the word of the Lord remains forever.

In a changing world, what a reassurance it is to know that this is something that will never change, God's word for us.

So when we love one another earnestly, we make manifest our new life in Jesus.

We receive and participate in God's love for us, and we anticipate a greater, unending, and imperishable resurrection life in which we will enjoy God's love forever in the world to come.

To set our hope on Jesus is to be shaped by his love and therefore show forth that love in earnest, pure-hearted devotion to one another.

So how do we begin?

First, we always pay mind to God's action towards us.

Love does not begin by trying to whip it up or pull up our bootstraps, it begins by being called forth by the great love shown to us by God in Christ.

We've been born again through the living and abiding Word of God.

And so therefore, as we dig into God's word, we will uncover more and more of God's love for us.

That will incite our love.

And then we put that love into action.

And love can be a hard thing sometimes.

It's not hard when we feel warm and affectionate towards another, but love is a hard thing when we when we lack those feelings, or when it's just not something we're inclined towards.

And sometimes that can feel fake or false, and we struggle with that as Christians.

But I'm always really heartened by the very practical advice that C.S.

Lewis gives to Christians like me who struggle to show practical love sometimes to my brothers and sisters.

C.S.

Lewis says to Christians like me, do not waste time bothering whether you love your neighbor.

Act as if you did.

As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets, he writes.

Love is a deliberate and costly choice for us to show one towards another.

It's bearing with one another.

Friends, as new song, love means we are obedient to the truth.

That's what Peter writes in verse 22.

Love toward one another means choosing to obey Jesus always in our conduct towards one another, whether that means showing hospitality to someone today, or refusing sin that otherwise be tempting, or forgiving someone their sin against you, or bearing one another's burdens, when we show that kind of love towards one another, we are showing forth the hope that we have set on Jesus together.

So, friends, here we are, endeavoring to live as faithful exiles, living out this hope we have in Jesus Christ as we are called to by being holy, by being reverent, and by being loving.

See, holiness, reverence, and love, we need to remember is not our way to Christ, as if these are prerequisites to enjoy in Christ.

Rather, these things, holiness and reverence and love, are the result of a life in Christ.

We are born again, and therefore we grow in who we are, in our holiness, reverence, and love.

See, your Christian life is not a theory, it's a pilgrimage.

It calls for sober-minded, clear thoughts and action.

Is there sin we have to ask ourselves in my life that I have not repented of, that I need to turn away from, sin which displaces the holiness of God at work in my life?

Perhaps we need to ask ourselves in the place of true reverence for our just and loving God, is there instead a terror that causes me to run away from God or a carelessness that leaves me indifferent to the love that He's shown me on the cross?

Perhaps this is our opportunity to turn once again to the cross and see our judge's great love for us on display as he bears our sins away.

Perhaps we need to ask if there's someone today who we need to show earnest love to by forgiving them as we've been forgiven, or by bearing their burdens as we've had our burdens borne away by Christ, or by welcoming them as we have been welcomed.

As we do so, we will be showing forth the holiness and reverence and love that goes with setting our hope wholly on Jesus.

As new song, friends, let's set our hope on Jesus.

Let's live out this life of holiness, reverence, and love, anticipating, participating in the fullness of that grace which will be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

We hope that you've been blessed by God's word today.

If you live in the area, we hope that you'll come and worship with us in person on Sunday at ten AM.

If you'd like to learn more about Newsong Church, we'd love to connect with you.

Please find our contact information at Newsongportperry.ca and reach out to us.

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Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.