Living in Hope | 1 Peter 1:13-21

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You're listening to audio from Faith Church Indie. If you would like more information about our church, ministry, and upcoming events, you can find it at faithchurchindie.com. Now, here's the teaching. Our scripture reading for today comes from 1 Peter, chapter 1, verses 13 through 21.

1 Peter 1:13–21

If you have the Bibles in the seat in front of you, that's on page 1199. Would you stand with me in honor of the reading of God's word? Therefore, preparing your minds for action and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, you shall be holy, for I am holy.

And if you call on him as father, who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the feudal 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. This is the word of the Lord.

Good morning. We're kind of used to having a little bit of bumper music here, but you're just going to have to put up with me. It's so good to have you here, and I want to thank our worship team once again this morning for that beautiful hymn, starting with holy, holy, holy, ushering us into the throne room of God and then celebrating our wonderful redemption in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Thank you so much for your efforts to lead us in our worship for God. And a special thanks to Jerry as well, ministering to us this morning in this time of grief and loss for his family. Well, we're continuing through the first letter of Peter this morning, our third sermon in the topic.

And Peter, we kind of know him as a man of action. We're used to the apostle Paul and his writings. You get about halfway through the letter before you get to the practical section.

But here in 1 Peter 1, verse 13, Peter issues his therefore. We're entering into the practical section of Peter's letter. The first 12 verses of Peter are characterized by verbs that are in the indicative, and that probably doesn't mean anything to you.

1 Peter 1:13

It just means that Peter is laying out truth and reality. But now Peter takes on verbs in the imperative, and he begins to direct us and command us and point us toward the applications of this beautiful living hope that he laid out in the early verses of his letter. So 1 Peter 1, 13 is Peter's introduction to the practical section of his letter.

So I'm going to use verse 13 as my introduction this morning as well. So if you have a Bible available, I encourage you to turn with us to 1 Peter chapter 1. That's where we'll be for the entire time this morning. We're going to begin reading with 1 Peter 1, verse 13.

1 Peter 1 · chapter mention 1 Peter 1:13

Therefore, preparing your minds for action. Now, I'm no Bible translator, and this is a pretty good translation, prepare your minds for action, but there's a whole lot of imagery behind that in the language that Peter uses. Some of the old translations speak of girding up your loins.

How many of you have been girding your loins this week? It doesn't mean a whole lot to us, so translators in our modern translations settle for this idea of preparing our minds for action. But one of the commentators I was reading suggested that I wear a long tunic, like the tunics people wore in Peter's day, and demonstrate to you what it meant to gird up your loins. I'm not going to do that.

I didn't think Don would take it too kindly if I started cutting holes in our bedsheets and making tunics. So what I have instead is a little chart that just displays what it means to gird up your loins. So you can see on this chart that people typically wore these tunics.

This is true of men and women. They'd hang down around the middle of the calves or the ankles. So if you had some physically intense task that you were going to take on, you girded up your loins to give yourself the freedom to do so.

You'd lift up the hem of that tunic and run it through your legs, bring it around to the front and tie it or tuck it into your belt. So this would be just like us when we're preparing to go out in the yard and work or do some intense physical labor. We put on our work clothes.

We put on our work shoes. When we're getting ready to participate in some kind of sport, we put on the right equipment. We put on the right clothing.

And so this is the picture, the mental image that Peter is putting before us at the beginning of this passage. He's calling us to do this with our minds, not put our minds into relaxation mode or peace mode or sleep mode. Peter is calling us to bring our minds into focus and prepare for some hard work.

So what is the hard work that Peter is calling us to here if we continue reading in verse 13 of 1 Peter 1? Therefore, preparing your minds for action and being sober-minded, set your hope fully. Set your hope fully. When I was reading and thinking about this, it reminded me of my first plowing lesson.

You remember the first field you plowed? No, not so much. No, bear with me. I remember pulling up to the edge of a field that was about a half mile long, and I was going to plow that field.

But the tough thing about plowing a field is you've got to make that initial pass. You've got to cut that initial furrow across the field. And I remember the farmer that was teaching me, training me, trying to beat some sense into me, saying to me, now, the way that you cut that initial furrow across the field is you pick out a landmark on the far side of the field that represents where you want to end up.

You drop your plow, and you absolutely fix your eyes on that landmark. Don't take your eyes off that landmark. Keep the nose of the tractor pointed at that landmark and drive across the field.

I went, well, that's easy enough. So I remember distinctly driving, starting across that field, pulling that plow. And I got a little way in, and I started wondering what was going on behind me.

And sure enough, I couldn't resist. I had to make a quick check to be sure everything was going well. So sure enough, no problem, I turned back around and kept my nose pointed to the landmark.

And I went a little further, and the same niggling doubts started plaguing me, and I looked back. Four or five times across that field, I just couldn't resist looking back. And when I got to the end and looked back at my furrow, guess what? Things looked pretty straight most of the way.

But every now and then, there was a little bubble, a little wave in that furrow where I had taken my eyes off of that landmark that I was supposed to be focused on. And that's the picture, the kind of picture that Peter is painting for us in this passage. He is calling us to fix our hope on its goal, on that landmark, and not waver from it.

It's pretty interesting that Peter doesn't say fix 90% of your attention on it, or 99%, or some of your, do the best you can. Peter is calling us to fix 100% of our hope, our full hope. Set your hope fully on something.

What is the landmark? What is the hope that we cling to as believers, as followers of our Lord Jesus Christ? Well, let's read on. 1 Timothy 1, 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 Timothy 1:13

What is it that our lives are focused on? What is it that we're so disciplining our minds, controlling our minds, keeping our minds from becoming undistracted? What is it that we're focusing on? The grace that will be brought us at the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. As Jerry prayed earlier this morning. What is this grace that Peter is speaking of? So, look back up into verse 7. Peter's talking here about the tested genuineness of our faith.

More precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Peter is talking about this day that we long for as followers of Christ. The day when every tear is wiped away, no more sickness, no more death.

Where we glorify Jesus Christ fully in all his beauty. And the one who sits upon the throne says, behold, I make all things new. That's what Peter is calling us to fix our eyes on.

It's a beautiful thought. The problem is, like me pulling a plow, how often we get distracted from that hope. I think the human mind is a bit of a hope generating machine.

We have this notion. We're going to see it later on in this passage from Peter. We have this notion that the good life, the fulfilling life, the happy life, the joyful life is the life where we're in control.

We're passion generating. We're desire generating machines. And that desire, unfortunately though, never seems to satisfy.

We keep looking for the next thing, our next hope, the next thing that's going to fill the emptiness and the aching in our souls. Dawn and I took a trip, one of these river cruises a few years ago to celebrate our 40th anniversary. I know it's surprising to you that we've been married 40 years.

I appreciate that shock. We took this trip, and one of the interesting things on this trip was when we started talking to our shipmates, the most common topic of conversation was not this trip. It was the next trip.

It was the next event. It was the next hope that was going to come and fill that emptiness and void in our lives. Just starting this trip, we had already shifted.

We realized this one wasn't going to do it. We needed something else. And so that hope shifted, that longing for what was going to satisfy and complete us shifted to yet another object.

And this is what Peter is calling us from. This is what he's encouraging us to leave behind, to fix our hope not on these desires that come out of our own thinking, but upon this future that we have, this promise that we have in our Lord Jesus Christ, that indeed there is a glory, there is honor, there is praise to be achieved, to be granted, to be given to us by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. I find it interesting that we typically talk about this kind of hope when we're in tough times, when the tragedy strikes, when things are falling apart.

We tend to think, well, you know, this hope has very little meaning when we're in the midst of a good life. But the reality here I want you to see from Peter's writing is not that this is the hope when we're in the bad times of life. Peter is putting this hope as being the hope, the only hope, the only true hope, the only satisfying hope that we have in our life is through this blessing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Why is that true? Look back up into verse 4. Peter is talking about this inheritance we have in our Lord Jesus Christ and says it is imperishable, it is undefiled, it is unfading, it is kept in heaven for you. Why do we claim to this hope? This isn't some great call that Peter's making for us to sacrifice for the sake of the glory of God. Peter's not calling us to make some great sacrifice here.

Peter's calling us to do what's sensible. Every other hope and goal that we have in life is destined to disappoint us. Peter is calling us to the one place where we find satisfaction, meaning, and peace, our hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, our hope that one day he will indeed restore us to what he intended us to be as human beings and we will experience the grace of God at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

What do you think of Peter's introduction? Yeah, it's a pretty rich word picture. I appreciate it. Now, what I would like to do with that introduction is do what Peter does with it here initially.

He develops three ways in which this kind of focused hope comes in and impacts our life. So I would like to look first of all to Peter's call to holiness, secondly to Peter's call for us to have reverence for God, and then finally Peter's call for us to have appreciation for the precious blood that Jesus Christ shed for us. First of all, then, this call to obedience.

Look at verse 14, 1 Peter chapter 1, 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.

1 Peter 1:14

Since it is written, you shall be holy for I am holy, a quotation from Leviticus. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. We talk about holiness, we sang about holiness this morning, but it's one of those Christian words that I think gets a little fuzzy in our minds.

So I picked out one quotation from Ben Witherington here I would like to share with you at this point, where he drives home the root meaning of holiness. This is from his commentary on 1 Peter. The root meaning of holy, hageos, is to be separated out for something or someone, so to be set apart.

The idea of separation is separation to God, rather than separation from the world. Naturally, separation to God means separation from sin, because God and sin have no common meeting point. We tend, maybe you don't, but I tend to think of holiness as somehow living by a certain standard where I avoid the sins that are just over the line for my community being set apart from that sinful behavior.

But what Witherington is pointing out here is indeed holiness has the idea of separation, but the main point is not what we've separated ourselves from, our sinful past, but what we've been separated to, our allegiance, our rebirth into a new family, the family of God. It's separation to our Heavenly Father that we've been called to. Peter uses another word picture in this section.

He talks about being conformed. How does he put it? Conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. And that word conformed is this notion of a form or a mold.

I think of the sand toys our kids played with at the beach this past. I will admit that we played with them a little bit, too, when we visited the beach. You're probably familiar with these in some form.

You have these molds and you take some damp sand and you stuff it into the mold and then you plop it out on the beach and you can make things. And the funny thing is the shape of the mold always impacts the shape of the sand when you dump it out. You don't get a round or cylindrical form of sand out of a square or a box mold.

It's pretty obvious. What Peter is saying in this passage is that we, too, as we go through life, we, too, are using molds that shape the outcome, the behavior, the results of our life. Peter's putting an option before us and he's saying you could be shaping your life, you can continue to be shaping your life by the mold of your former ignorance that's driven by your own passions and desires, or you can be shaped as obedient children conforming to your new father, the new family that you have been born into.

And Peter is calling us to shape our lives on the pattern, on the character of God rather than on our own personal passions and desires. When I look back over my week, I'd invite you to do the same, but when I look back over my life for the past week and ask which mold seems to be shaping my behavior, I just have to admit that over and over and over, I fall into the trap of molding my life after me being at the center and patterned on my own desires and longings rather than recognizing that it's the character, it's the loving graciousness and purity of my heavenly father that's the pattern, not the desires and the longings that are coming from my twisted heart. Peter calls us to holiness.

Our loving heavenly father calls us to be separated to him. Be holy as I am holy. Peter moves on to a second point after this call to holiness.

He calls us to the fear of the Lord, 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 exiles. What does it mean to you when you hear that phrase, fear of the Lord? When you read something like this, it calls us to fear God.

I kind of vacillate between two extremes, I think. On one hand, when I hear fear of the Lord, I almost think of terror. I think of those Old Testament stories like Korah who rebelled against God and wanted to make himself high priest, thought God made a mistake with Aaron and the ground opens up and swallows him and his family.

I think of, I like this, you'll see why, I like this story particularly. But you remember after Elisha watched Elijah go into heaven, he was walking down the road and there was 24 young men that started making fun of him for being bald. I don't know why I resonate with this story, but two bears come out and maul these 24 young men.

I kind of feel when I hear that term, fear of the Lord, I kind of feel like that terror and dread is what's hanging over me, that I could at any moment once again step over the line and God might strike me with lightning. But then all my life I've heard the corrective, no, no, no, that's not what we mean by fear of the Lord. We simply mean respect, respect like we have for an automobile.

I remember my driver's ed teacher spoke of the automobile as a 2,000 pound killing machine. He was trying to impress upon us that we needed to have respect for the automobile and treat it with that respect so that we maintained it, we drove it safely. And used it as it was intended to.

And we tend to sometimes boil the fear of the Lord down to just that kind of respect for something that's powerful and potentially dangerous. I found another quotation from Timothy Miller's commentary that was helpful, very helpful to me in understanding what Peter's referring to here as fear for God. I love this first phrase.

True fear of God is true love for God defined. How do we know we fear God? It shows in our life in the way that we love God. It is the right response to God's full-orbed revelation of himself in all his grace and glory.

Such a knowledge leads to trembling in the presence of such glory and results in a transformed life. That's the key phrase, I think. True fear of the Lord results in a love for God and a transformed life.

It is for this reason that the scriptures say this fear is the beginning of knowledge and the foundation of wisdom. A couple of years ago, my boss was staying with us for a few days. He lives in Seattle.

And it happened to be his 40th or 50th birthday coming up. And he had this idea that a pretty good birthday present to himself would be to purchase an old car that was made the year that he was born, which was 1973. You remember it? It was a good year, I'm sure.

So he knew that I had an MGB in my high school days. It wasn't a real dependable car, but it was a lot of fun. And because he had that background, he thought that would be a pretty good 1973 vehicle to buy because it wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.

So he invited me to go with him to a couple of vintage automobile dealers while he was here. We went into one dealership, and my boss was always very kind to me. He was always very deferential to me.

And I appreciated it. A kind man. But he was kind of treating me.

I honestly think he was afraid I was going to keel over at some point. He was a little bit confused that someone my age would still be working. But anyway, he was treating me with that kind of deference when we went into this car dealership.

And the salesperson that kindly joined himself to us made the assumption in seeing how he was behaving that it must be me that was looking for a car. And he spent the next 5 or 10 minutes. They didn't have the car we were looking for, but he spent the next 5 or 10 minutes trying to convince me that what I really wanted was that car that they had over there.

And I remember the sudden change that took place when I finally told him it's not me that's looking for the car. It's my boss over here. It was like I suddenly disappeared from the room.

It was an amazing situation. When we talk about the fear of the Lord, what we're talking about is recognizing that the primary audience for our life is not ourselves. It's not our family.

It's not the people we work for and with. It's not any other human being in our lives. Because the primary audience for our lives as a follower of Jesus Christ is God himself.

It's God who will impartially judge every single human being that has ever lived. He is the one before whom we stand. And this is what the Scriptures mean by the fear of the Lord.

It's God who is the primary, the most significant audience for our lives and thus the response of love and appreciation, a response of obedience is what makes sense. Peter calls us to holiness. Peter calls us to reverence.

Finally, notice how Peter calls us to appreciation. In verse 18 of 1 Peter chapter 1. 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, that like of a lamb without blemish or spot, he was foreknown before the foundation of the world but made manifest in this last times. Why? 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.

1 Peter 1 · chapter mention

Peter's using another word picture here when he speaks of us being ransomed. The picture, the situation, the historic situation that Peter is drawing from here is that of a slave being ransomed out of slavery, a particular Greek form of that. In this form of ransom from slavery, a slave would collect money or someone on the slave's behalf would gather enough money to buy the slave's freedom.

But instead of that money being paid directly to the master or the owner of the slave, that money would be deposited in the temple of a god or a goddess. And then the fiction was that after a slight commission was taken, of course, the fiction was that the god would then purchase the slave from the human owner and set the slave free.

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