What it Means to be Holy
1 Peter 1:13–16
Opening
Prayer
“Our
Father we’re thankful we can come together this evening. We’re thankful for
Your grace and Your goodness to us. We’re thankful that we have Your Word to
open the eyes of our souls to truth and that we can understand truth and that
truth is the benchmark of our lives.
It’s
the lodestone that guides and directs us. It’s that which gives us freedom, not
in some mystical sense but it is that which is reality which you have created
and we can align our thinking with reality and therefore, walk in wisdom and
not as fools.
Father,
we pray for our nation. As we look around we see horrible decisions being made
at every level of government and business. We have slipped our anchor to any
sense of morality and ethics. As a result this nation is headed to a terrible
collapse.
No
nation in history has ever survived moral relativism. Once you get into moral
relativism it just destroys any sense of the ability to communicate or to think
or to even conduct legal business. Father, the only solution is to get back to
Your Word.
Father,
we know that a collapse is what’s necessary in order to get people to turn back
to Your Word. Often as we look at the history of Israel we see that didn’t
happen. And if it did, it took decades. Father we pray for this nation. We pray
for godly leaders. We pray for attentive listeners that would be able to
influence others from the foundation of Your Word. We pray this in Christ’s
name. Amen.”
This
morning I took a little time or maybe it was at lunch I was looking and
perusing on the Internet and looked at a number of different articles on a
number of different sites as I hopped around. I was just astounded. If I wasn’t
a believer I don’t know if I could survive.
There
is no hope in this country. It is just deadly. We think, “Oh, if the
Republicans win, there’s going to be some sort of turning around.” No, there’s
not.
The
blackmail that’s being conducted on this nation from different ethnic groups
who are blackmailing different people, to businesses and corporations who are
blackmailing governors and legislatures in states to do evil things, perverted
things, is astounding if you think about it.
What
got me going this morning was to look at the fact that in Georgia, the state
legislature passed a really watered down and diluted religious protection bill.
It initially started off trying to protect private owners of businesses from
being sued if someone from the homosexual, perverted community came in to
enlist them in baking a cake or any other kind of service. If they had a
religious, moral, freedom of expression, first amendment objection, then this
law was going to protect them.
They
got rid of all of that to where basically it was just going to protect
religious institutions from being forced to hire homosexuals and other sexual
deviants that would violate the institution’s doctrinal position and their
historically held religious positions. So it was a much reduced and diluted
bill.
The
Republican governor of Georgia vetoed it. The same thing happened in South
Dakota. In North Carolina a few months ago the Charlotte city council passed a
worse form of the bathroom bill than we had here in Houston. Then the state
legislature in North Carolina passed a state law prohibiting any such bills
being passed by any municipalities. Now those municipalities are all up in
arms.
What’s
happening in the background is that major corporations are coming in and they
are blackmailing and putting pressure on these governments saying they’re going
to take their offices out. Bank of America has threatened Charlotte that
they’re going to move out of state and leave. All of these different businesses
are putting pressure on the governments that if they don’t allow full freedom
of expression in all homosexual deviancy, then they’re going to pull their
freight and leave those states.
Where
that comes home to roost is that if you’re working for those companies and you
aren’t making an exit plan to go work and make money on your own, you are
running a great risk. I’ve said this since I taught school back in the ’70s.
Corporations and state governments and even the national government have
adopted so many policies, especially through human resources which say how you
have to treat one another in the corporate environment that run contrary to the
Word of God that most Christians have compromised their ethics and their morals
by even maintaining and having to enforce these policies at work.
Now
what’s going to happen, I was joking with Alan about it before class, what’s
going to happen now is that anyone who’s really teaching the Word and trying to
hold people to a standard are going to watch more and more people leave their
church because they’re not going to be able to withstand the pressure.
If
you’re working for Exxon or if you’re working for General Motors or Apple or
Microsoft or any number of these companies, the pressure on you as a Christian
to conform your ethics to the post-modern ethics and the sexual ethics of those
corporations is going to be intense. So you’ve got a choice. You can either
walk the walk and be a disciple of Christ and suffer, which is what we’ve been
studying about in Matthew and also in Peter, or you’re going to have to find a
job somewhere else.
What
will probably happen with most Christians is they’ll drift to one of the larger
churches that teach very superficial Christianity and then they’ll end up at
one of the mega-churches that doesn’t teach anything that even vaguely
resembles Christianity because they’re not going to be able to live with the
moral tension created in their life just so they can survive.
That
really is a lot of the background we have in 1 Peter. Peter is writing to this
group of Messianic Jews who were living in Asia Minor and they are facing
ostracism from the Jewish community. They’re facing opposition from the pagan
community and they are under a lot of pressure.
Their
ability to do business is compromised, especially in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t
quite like that in the 1st century but still this is a very tight
group of people who are doing business with one another. If someone became a
believer in Jesus as Messiah, then they would be ostracized. They would lose
those business connections and those business opportunities.
And
other things would happen. Maybe their children wouldn’t be able to be friends
with other Jewish kids and things of that nature. There was social ostracism as
well as economic ostracism because they had become believers in Jesus as
Messiah.
You
had other situations which occurred within the
pagan community, the Greco-Roman community. This is what these believers were
going through. Not the kind of overt persecution which later characterized the
Roman Empire not too much later, such as the persecution under Nero.
This
precedes that. This is earlier. Peter is really giving us extremely practical
guidance as to how to face life living life in a world that is completely
hostile to what we believe. I want you to think about something. In the last
twenty years from 1996 to now could you have conceived of a presidential
election with the options that we have? Half the Democratic Party are voting
and in huge vocal support of an out-and-out Marxist Communist.
On
the Republican side the frontrunner is someone as ignorant of international
affairs and governing as Trump. He’s said a lot of things people agree with and
also a lot of inane and stupid things that reveal his lack of experience in
government and his lack of understanding of how the world works outside of
business in the world of government.
In
many cases he is just a Democrat-lite. He is a lot like what we used to have in
the South as a Southern Democrat. They were somewhat conservative but they were
liberal in a lot of other areas. As we’ve sort of progressed over the last
twenty years with the Democrat Party moving more and more into the liberal
far-left socialist extreme, your moderates have either gone independent or
they’re drifting more towards the Republican Party.
They
don’t have a philosophical conservatism that backs up their thinking. We’ve
just fragmented as a nation. It gets worse every month looking at things in
terms of this presidential election. It gets worse and worse and worse. There
is no hope in this next presidential election.
The
choices are all between really bad and a whole lot worse. It’s not going to get
any better. The only hope is to change the internal thinking structure of the
American people which can only been done through a turn back to God.
I
almost feel like it’s time to start teaching Judges again because that’s
exactly what we’re headed into. Another period where we just see a nation go
through these cycles of self-destruction because they’ve rejected the God who
created the heavens, the earth, and the seas.
Oh
yes, marriage between one man and one woman.
And
nations. God set the boundaries of nations. Once you reject that you’re just
living in a fantasy world that ultimately dooms us to self-destruction.
With
that lovely upbeat, positive optimistic introduction, let’s move forward in our
study in 1 Peter.
In 1
Peter 1:13–16 we see an introduction. There’s a transition that occurs between
verses 12 and 13 as we move from the introduction to the epistle into the main
body of the epistle. These first four verses introduce themes that run through
this epistle and sort of summarize it and set the stage for what will come in
the first major division.
The
focal point is in the command that we have in 1 Peter 1:15–16 that we are to be
holy. It is repeated twice for emphasis. That’s a word that really confuses a
lot of people. It’s a word that’s been used so frequently and so much in so
many circles by so many people who don’t have a clue what it means that it’s
come to mean nothing. It’s a feel-good, emotionally connotated word that has
these religious connotations that people like to use.
They
don’t really know what it means. We need to understand what it means to be
holy. In fact, everything that we see in these four verses relates to what it
means to be holy.
Most
people think that holy means to be morally pure. Sometimes that’s also packaged
with certain ideas of asceticism, that a holy person is someone who somehow
lives above the plain of everyday existence, like that old saying that “they’re
so heavenly-minded that they’re no earthly good.”
That’s
the idea that a holy person is so caught up in something, like Buddhist monks
and monks of the early church in the 4th and 5th
centuries, so they would go out and live by themselves in the desert or the
pillar monks that would sit on a pillar for a couple of years or four years or
five years. People thought they were so holy because they had given up so much.
They would go through so much suffering, self-imposed suffering, so it was
assumed that must make them holy.
These
ideas that entered into the mainstream of medieval theology continue to show up
along the way. After the Reformation, in the post-Reformation period, as some
of the churches and denominations and Calvinism and Lutheranism would become
fairly creedal and just go through the forms of liturgy with very little
genuine belief or passion to follow the Lord or be true disciples, you had the
rise of different groups like the Pietists movement. And the Moravians, which
was a missionary group.
The
Anabaptists could be part of that at different stages. There are always these
kinds of reform movements back to some kind of spirituality. Often it is
confused with asceticism, which is just a product of the sin nature. That’s not
what holy means at all.
Holy,
as I’ve taught you many times, means to be set apart to the service of God.
What exactly does that mean? How do we do that? That’s where we get some good
practice guidance in terms of what Peter is saying here.
Now
I just want to give you a little reminder that it’s very important to
understand in Peter that when Peter talks about salvation, he’s not talking
about Phase One justification. There are three stages or phases [Earl Radmacher
often referred to this as “the three Tenses of Salvation”] of salvation.
Phase
One, past tense, we are saved when we trust in Christ as Savior, we are saved
from the penalty of sin. It takes place in an instant when we believe Jesus
died on the cross for our sins.
Following
that we have our spiritual life or spiritual growth [Phase Two]. Because we are
regenerated, we become a new creature in Christ. That new creature has to grow.
We grow as believers and we’re saved from the power of sin.
Not
everyone grows. Some people are born [spiritually] and they almost starve to
death for lack of nutrition, whether it’s due to their own negative volition or
the negative volition of their pastors.
Then
Phase Three is glorification, the end game. We need to begin with the end in
mind. Glorification means we’re saved from the presence of sin.
The
focal point here is how we can experience salvation and deliverance from trials
in our present tense spiritual life but that is heavily influenced by an
understanding of where we’re headed in the end game.
So
we come to this new section. Peter says, “Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober,
and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the
revelation of Jesus Christ.” If you just read that in the English you can
get some good points out of it, but it’s a bad translation.
We
have to rewrite it to understand how to apply it.
1
Peter 1:14–16, “As
obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your
ignorance; but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your
conduct, because it is written, ‘Be holy for I am holy.’ ”
What
we have is four uses of the word “holy” in two short verses. That tells us
right away that the target, the linguistic target, the thematic target, that we
have in these four verses is to be holy because God is holy and understanding
how we do that, the mechanics of how we do that.
How
do we do that? It’s very, very practical here. One of the things that’s
important in any kind of Bible study or exegesis is to be able to figure out
what your main thought is. What we have here, and it’s punctuated fairly well,
is that we really have one sentence in these four verses.
We
have one sentence but it’s broken into a couple of independent clauses and it
also includes a quotation from the Old Testament.
When
we look at this we have to figure out what the main thought is. The way I teach
pastors to do this is that they have to find the main verb. It looks in the
English like “gird
up the loins of your mind” is a main verb. That’s an imperative.
In
the Greek it’s a participle. It’s an adverbial participle, which means it
modifies a verb. Although there are imperatival participles, this isn’t one of
them, although there’s a lot of debate over that. I don’t think this is one of
them at all.
That’s
not the main idea. The main verb is expressed as I’ve underlined here in the
phrase “rest
your hope”. Once we understand that’s the main command here, then we
understand that the participles surrounding it are telling us how to rest our
hope in something.
That’s
where the practicality comes in and that where we can get good guidance from
Peter on how we can rest our hope.
So
the main thought here is to therefore rest your hope not conforming yourselves
to the former lusts but you also be holy for God is holy. That’s what these
four verses are about. It’s a challenge to hope in God.
Now
how do we hope in God? We hope in God by not being conformed to the former
lusts that characterized our thinking and our lives as unbelievers but by being
holy and set apart to God. Once you understand that’s the thought, that’s the
idea to hope in God, not rest in hope because it’s a much cleaner, more
efficient command.
Peter
is saying y’all hope in God. Have your confidence in God’s plan for your life.
That involves doing two things: don’t conform to your former lusts on the one
hand but be holy, live a life set apart to God, on the other hand. Now if
you’ve got that, you’ve got what Peter is saying here.
He’s
telling us to focus on the future. He’s telling us that when we understand the
end game, then we have a confident expectation of where God is taking us
through life no matter what trials and tests and difficulties may come up along
the way, and we can have confidence that God does know what He’s talking about.
He’s omniscient. He does know what He’s doing taking us through these
circumstances and situations and He is working out His will in our life.
Let’s
start breaking this down a little bit into some of the details. First of all as
we look at this we look at the first word and it’s DIO in the Greek, which is not
your normal word which is translated therefore or wherefore. Technically it’s
called an inferential particle.
What
that means is something has been said previously and he is inferring a result
which should follow from what has been said before. This is a conjunction that
is used to introduce a result clause. The result is living a holy life, serving
God, being set apart to Him.
That
result is what should flow from understanding what we’ve studied in 1 Peter 1:3
and following. He’s writing to an audience who are primarily Messianic Jews. He
is telling them how to live in the midst of these fiery trials that they are
going run into.
They’re
going to be tested by fire according to 1 Peter 1:7. This conjunction tells us
something. As I often say in Bible Study Methods class, when you see a
“therefore” you need to see what it’s there for. It’s drawing a conclusion from
what’s been said before. So we need to just take a quick review of what has
been said previously.
If
you have your Bible open, you should just look back to 1 Peter 1:3. We read, “Blessed be the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” I pointed out the word “blessed”
means praise, to express praise or thanks to God for certain things that He has
done.
What
has He done? The first thing he mentions is “that according to His mercy, He regenerated
us.” This regeneration gives us an eternal life, but not only an eternal
life; but also it is a life that is directed toward something that Peter says
is a “living hope”, not a dead hope. It’s a living hope.
Have
you ever noticed when you read through the Old Testament and to some degree in
the New Testament, you’ll see the emphasis on worshipping God who is the living
God? Again and again it says God is a living God. That’s in contrast to
worshipping idols that are made of wood and stone and metal.
You
also have passages like we have seen in Isaiah where you have the people who
were seeking guidance from the dead, the necromancers who were going down and
trying to speak to the dead and call them up and going through all these
various things. They’re looking for hope from the dead but we have hope in a
living God.
He
is alive and He is actively involved in human history and bringing it to its
ultimate conclusion. That is a certain conclusion. It is a living hope. The
word “hope” like we’ve seen in the past is a word that means confident
expectation.
We
use it in English or everyday language when we say, “I hope it rains tomorrow.
Crops are dry. Foundations need to be watered. We haven’t had enough rain this
spring. I hope we get a really good, soaking rain for the next couple of days.”
We
have no idea what we’re going to get. The weather forecast may say it’s an 80%
chance of rain but that 80% involves 10% of the people somewhere on the other
side of town. When we say we hope it rains, we have no clue whether it will or
not. It’s just wishful optimism.
That’s
not how the Bible uses the word hope. It uses it as confident expectation, a
certainty. It is so certain that it borderlines on the idea of trust. We trust
in God to bring about what He says and that’s our hope. Those two words come
really close together. I’m making a point out of that because of a verse I’m
going to point out in just a minute.
What
we see in terms of the “wherefore” His mercy has provided us with regeneration.
That regeneration directs us toward a goal, a living hope, an endgame that we
need to understand. In fact, this concept of hope is significant all through 1
Peter.
The
noun which is used in 1 Peter 1:3 is used two more times in 1 Peter 1:21 which
isn’t far from where we are right now. It says, “Who through Him believe in God …” That
is through Jesus Christ. “Who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and
hope are in God.” Notice the close connection between faith and hope. We
believe God, therefore it gives us confident expectation so we can live in the
midst of the muck and the mire of fiery trials today because we know there’s a
reason for it.
Then
we get to 1 Peter 3:15, “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a
defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you.” As
I read that verse I wonder how many people have ever asked me because I seem so
optimistic and hopeful.
Is
your hope in the Lord obvious to the unbeliever around you? Often we talk about
the fact that we have the witness of the life and the witness of the lips. A
lot of people use the witness of the life to bail out so they don’t have to
ever use the witness of the lips.
The
witness of the life means that your life tells people that you are hopeful.
You’re a cross-eyed optimist, if any of you remember what that song alludes to.
Your optimism isn’t just wishful thinking. It’s grounded in that certainty with
God.
How
many people ask us, “How come you’re so positive? When you look at the bad
things that could happen why are you different in the way you respond?” That’s
what Peter is talking about.
Then
the verbiage is used one more time in 1 Peter 3:5 in the context where Peter is
talking about women living in submission to their husbands. He says, “In this way in
former times [the Old Testament] the holy women …” These are the women who were
living in a set-apart way, according to the standard of God and grace in their
marriage. They hoped in God. The New King James Version says they trusted in
God. That’s where it blurs the distinction between those two words.
I
used the New American Standard Version here and put in the literal translation
because the verb there is the same verb we have in 1 Peter 1:13. It’s ELPIZO. So they hoped in God, being
submissive to their own husbands.
This
is what happens. We’re going back. Why is he saying “therefore”? He’s saying
therefore because we have a life that is directed toward this living hope. Also
if we look at 1 Peter 1:4 there’s a certainty of a future inheritance for those
who pass the test for faith in the test of adversity.
We
see that in this focus on hope. For example in 1 Peter 1:6 we understand that
there will be a salvation to be revealed in the last time. That’s Phase Three
salvation. That’s not talking about justification or sanctification. That’s
talking about the end game because we know it’s revealed at the last times, at
the Judgment Seat of Christ.
Then
we see how in verse 6 that we can rejoice in various trials because ultimately
we know that our faith is being tested and this is ultimately going to be
revealed at the revelation of Jesus Christ at the end of verse 7. Then if you
look at 1 Peter 1:11 it talks about the fact that as we realize deliverance in
time, this relates to what Christ went through. He suffered at the First Advent
and He will have glory at the Second Advent.
We,
too, suffer in this life but there will be glory to come. We also see that
“therefore” goes back to the fact that we are kept by the power of God through
faith for that Phase Three glorification. That is back in verse 5, “Who are kept by
the power of God”.
What
Peter is saying is that all of these are true and in light of this we are
compelled to do something. That’s indicated grammatically. In verses 3–12 there
are no imperative moods. They are all indicative moods. The significance of
that is that an indicative mood in the Greek is like a declarative sentence in
English.
You
remember when you were taught the four different kinds of sentences in English.
The first one is the most common. It’s a declarative statement, a statement of
fact, a statement of reality. At least this is from the speaker’s viewpoint. It
may not be reality but from his viewpoint it is reality. That’s the indicative
mood.
Paul
does this in all of his epistles. Like in the epistle of Ephesians it’s all
indicative moods in the first three chapters, then it’s mostly imperative moods
after that. He first wants you to understand the realities of who we are in
Christ [Ephesians 1–3] and then because that’s true, this is how we’re supposed
to live. Then he just starts slamming us with all these imperatives and
prohibitions in the last half of Ephesians.
Peter
is doing that here. It’s all indicatives in the first twelve verses. This is
who we are and what we have in Christ and what our destiny is. And now, this is
what you should do about it. We have the imperatives coming up in verses 1
Peter 1:13–16 and then into the rest of this epistle.
The
main command is this verb ELPIZO that is translated in the New King James Version as “rest your hope”.
In other versions it’s translated “fix your hope”, “rest your hope”, “set your
hope”, and “put all your hope”. Basically what it means is a confident
expectation. It should be translated, because it’s a second person imperative,
“y’all hope” or “y’all have a confident expectation in God’s plan and purpose
for your life taking you into glory”.
That’s
what he’s saying. The main idea comes after that phrase which we’ll look at in
a minute [gird
up the loins of your mind and be sober] so the command is rest your hope.
It’s not just rest your hope because it’s followed by an adverb, TELEIOS, meaning
completely, wholly [not partially in some sort of wimpy, waffling fashion] but
completely, totally, fully investing yourself in God’s plan for your life.
If
you don’t, you’re not going to realize the benefit of it. You have to fully
hope in God’s plan and purpose.
That’s
indicated by the next phrase, which is translated fairly well, “Upon the grace that
is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ”. That tells you
right away that’s a future sense because it has this phrase “at the revelation
of Jesus”. That is going to be at the 2nd Advent.
It’s
not now. We realize the benefits and the training of the fiery trials only when
we are face-to-face with the Lord and we see the production in terms of rewards
at the Judgment Seat of Christ. We won’t understand it until we get there.
Peter
says this is the grace that is to be brought to you. It’s grace because we’re
delivered from this life. We get a resurrection body. We’re no longer going to
be plagued by sin. There’s no longer corruption in the body. We’re going to see
Jesus as He is. We’re going to be face-to-face with the Lord and we’re going to
be rewarded in terms of our obedience in this life and our spiritual growth and
our spiritual advance.
This
takes place at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Now this is interesting. This is
about the third time in these opening verses that Peter has taken us outside of
time into the 2nd Advent and the future. For example in 1 Peter 1:7
he says that this testing of our faith, going through these fiery trials “may be found to
result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ”.
That’s
the same phrase. This is when He returns for the church at the Rapture. In 1
Peter 4:13 at the end of this epistle he says, “But to the degree you share the sufferings
of Christ [the degree to which you’ve grown and matured], keep on
rejoicing, so that also at the revelation of His glory you may rejoice with
exultation.” That’s at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
What
we have here is a verse that’s translated somewhat awkwardly where the main
command is at the end of the verse. We have this phrase as if it’s a command
preceding it. That’s the phrase to gird up your minds and be sober. Both of
those phrases grammatically are participles.
Participles
modify a main verb. It makes much more sense and comes across as very practical
advice if we understand how this works.
1
Peter 1:13 should be read like this as a sort of reworking and paraphrasing: “Therefore [in
light of everything said in verses 3–12] rest your hope [or y’all hope or have confident
expectation] fully
upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
How do I do that?
That’s
the question. How do I hope, how do I practically hope? Well, we’re going to
get two ways to do this.
They’re
expressed through these participles. In the Greek it’s pretty simple. In the
Greek you can have a participle that has an article in front of it which we’ll
see in the next verse. If it has an article in front of it, it’s probably going
to function like a noun so it’s either an adjective or used like a substantive
like a noun.
Other
times when that participle doesn’t have an article in front of it that tells
you that it’s probably being used to modify a verb. It’s telling you something
about the verb. So the verb is a command to do something and it’s surrounded by
these adverbial participles, then those adverbial participles often tell us how
to do the command. Or what we should be doing in fulfilling the command. In
other words, they’re participles of means or instrumental participles telling
us how to do that.
Like
walk by means of the Spirit. That’s an instrumental idea there. The first
participle we have is girding up which is a literal translation, girding up the
loins of your minds which is obviously a figure of speech. It’s an aorist
middle participle. Going back a little bit to our basic command, what do we
have? An aorist active imperative.
If
your verb is an aorist tense verb and you have an aorist tense participle
that’s telling you that the action of the participle either precedes or is at
the same time as the action of the verb. It makes it very clear that this is
telling us how we are to rest or hope in God.
We
hope by girding up the loins of our mind. In other words, if you don’t gird up
the loins of your mind you’re not going to ever develop hope. No one’s ever
going to say, “Can you explain to me this hope that you have?”
So
you have a two-step procedure. Step one you have to gird up the loins of your
mind. Well, what in the world does that mean?
This
is a time-honored phrase in the Scripture. We find it in a couple of different
places in the Old Testament. Elijah is going to go on a little footrace with
Ahab. Ahab was king of the Northern Kingdom and he’s just been defeated by
Elijah and all the prophets of Baal and the Asherah are all killed up on Mount
Carmel. So Ahab heads back to his capital city of Jezreel. Elijah is going to
outrun him.
If
any of you have ever run you know that you can’t wear a long, flowing robe and
expect to get any speed because that robe is going to get in your way. So you have
to figure out how to take it off or tie it off so it’s no longer restricting
your movement. That’s the idea of girding up your loins. We’ll see an
illustration of this in just a minute.
In
Job 38 we have the exhortation by God to Job. Job’s been wanting to have a
conversation with God about whether or not this suffering that God allowed in
his life is really just and fair. So God says basically, “You want to have a
conversation, Job? Come on out and gird up your loins [of your mind].” In other
words, “Get ready. We’re going to have a conversation but I’m going to be the
one to do all the talking.”
The
idea of girding up is an idiom for being prepared for some task, getting ready.
Jeremiah
1:17, “Thou
therefore gird up thy loins and arise, and speak unto them all that I command
thee.” God is speaking and He’s telling Jeremiah to get ready. These
phrases are translated idiomatically in various translations as “Tuck in your
robes” [a more literal translation] or “Get ready” or “Get prepared.”
We
have a New Testament example in Ephesians 6:14 where we’re told, “Stand therefore,
having your loins girt about with truth.” Now if you know the context which
I didn’t want to get into there, it’s describing the panoply of God. A great
word and the next time we sing it in a hymn you’ll know that “panoply” means
the full armor of God. It talks about the breastplate of righteousness, the
helmet of salvation, and it talks about the sword of the Spirit, the shield of
faith, and the belt of truth.”
On
this slide we see a picture of the Roman belt. The Roman belt was the anchor
for everything else because the breastplate tied off and hooked to the belt to
keep it in place. You hung your sword from the belt and the belt was how you
would tie it off so it wouldn’t get in your way. You would hang some other
things from your belt so you’d all be prepared.
The
belt in the analogy of the armor is truth. Truth is the Word of God. Jesus
prayed to the Father, “Sanctify them in truth. Thy Word is truth.” Truth is what binds and
hold everything together. Without truth you don’t have anything.
In
the ancient world you have a situation where you have to gird up your loins. I
ran across this on the Internet today, just trying to find if there was a good
illustration to see if this would work. In the first panel you have your
ancient Israelite standing there wearing his full-length robe and tunic and it
wouldn’t do to go out in the fields and work with that long robe on. It would
get in the way. You couldn’t fight any battles. You’d have to gird your loins.
In
the second panel, the first thing you would do is pull the tunic up until all
the fabric is above your knees. That’s going to get rid of the distractions.
Then you pull it all forward so it all bunches together. In the next panel you
take it down, run it back between your knees, grab it from behind and pull it
up so it’s tight. It’s no longer loose so it could get in the way. You pull
each side up [in the second panel on slide 20], pull it up and tie it off so it
is secure. That is how they would gird up their loins. Now you have a much
better understanding of what this means.
This
becomes the image and basically has the idea of removing anything that is a
hindrance to your endeavor. If your endeavor is to go work in the fields you
don’t want to constantly be bending over to pull out the weeds or to plant and
to trip over the robe and fall down. You’ve got to get it out of the way. It’s
real simple.
The
trouble is in the spiritual life there are all kinds of things that get in our
way. And we love them too much! We don’t want to get rid of those distractions.
The
same thing happens in combat. You don’t want to go in to combat where you might
have to run and you need to have a high degree of maneuverability and have your
robes keep getting in your way so you can trip over them. All kinds of terrible
things could happen including losing your life. This is the idea in girding up
your loins.
If
you were a football player this would mean you’re going to go put on your pads
and uniform and your helmet and you’re going to make sure you have those right
kind of Nike shoes or Puma shoes or whatever you’re going to wear so
everything’s going to be right. You’ve got the slickest, tightest, whatever you’re
going to wear for your pants and jersey so that you are going to be able to
play to your maximum ability.
If
you’re in track you’re going to get one of those really great suits they make
now that almost make you run faster because of the way they let the wind slip
around you. That’s the idea. A soldier in the ancient world is going to put on
his armor, his shield, and his helmet. He’s going to get ready.
Spiritually
we have another image of this in Hebrews 12:1–2. The writer of Hebrews says, “Therefore we also
[that is we as believers] because we’re surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses [these
witnesses from the Old Testament who have gone before us] let us lay aside every weight and the sin
which so easily ensnares us …” We all know what those sins are in our
lives.
Too
often we make excuses for them and rationalize them. The writer of Hebrews is
saying we have to completely cut out the situations and circumstances that give
rise to that.
“Lay aside every
weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us and let us run with endurance
the race that is set before us.” That’s the same idea, girding up your
loins. We do that how in Hebrews? Verse 2, “Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our
faith, who for the joy that was set before Him …” That’s a problem-solving
device, inner happiness, and the joy of a job well done. The joy of rejoicing
at the Judgment Seat of Christ for us.
“He [Christ] endured the cross
…” The cross wasn’t joyful. He was miserable the night before He went to the
cross in anticipation of the cross. But there was something greater. There was
the joy of accomplishing what God intended and that’s what He focused on and
that’s what we’re to focus on, the end game which is the Judgment Seat of
Christ.
So
Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame and then He’s glorified. He sits
down at the right hand of the Throne of God. That’s the idea that Peter is
presenting. We suffer now. We endure it. We focus on the end game for the glory
that will be ours and the Lord for all eternity.
In 1
Peter 1:13 Peter says that y’all are able to have hope by girding up the loins
of your mind. He mixes up his metaphors there a little bit. You have to get rid
of all those mental distractions. This calls for mental attitude dynamics. You
have to learn to think correctly and to discipline your mind to keep from
thinking the thoughts you shouldn’t be thinking. You should be focusing only on
what you should be focusing on.
The
word for “mind” is the Greek word DIANOIA. DIA is the preposition and NOIA comes from the Greek word for
mind, NOUS. It has the idea
of girding up the thoughts of your mind, your thinking, your thought process,
your intellectual ability, or your understanding of those things.
We
see this emphasis in Scripture that the spiritual life is not a life of
emotion. The other day someone sent me a link to Facebook. If you know what the
Onion is on the Internet which is sort of a sarcastic approach to different
contemporary issues. This was a tongue-in-cheek sarcastic approach about this
contemporary church. It went through worship “collapse” on Sunday morning
because one of their ten fog machines that they used during prayer time so
everyone will feel closer to God broke down. Okay? See that’s contemporary
spirituality, which is about emotion and feeling.
I’ve
heard of churches where when it’s time to pray the music goes real soft. You
have a certain kind of music. The lights dim and sometimes they use these fog
machines. They really do. They’re manipulating emotions because emotion is how
you evaluate how to worship, in their minds.
In
Scripture, the spiritual life is a life of thought. It’s a life of thinking,
intellectual activity. It’s not a life of emotion. The word mind is used
positively in Scripture. In Matthew 23:37 Jesus is quoting from Deuteronomy. “You shall love
the Lord Your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your emotions.”
Right? No, “with
all your mind,” your thinking.
Heart
isn’t emotion here. These terms heart, soul, and mind are used synonymously for
everything inside you. It’s controlled by your thinking.
2
Peter 3:1, “Beloved,
I now write to you this second epistle (in both of which I stir up your pure
minds by way of reminder),” Notice he doesn’t say he’s stirring up your
emotions. He’s stirring up the mind. I want you to think about this.
It’s
used negatively in passages like Luke 1:51 talking about “the proud in the imagination of their hearts.”
In Ephesians 4:18 believers have their understanding darkened. In Colossians
1:21 Paul says that in their unbelieving state they were alienated and enemies
in their thinking to God, but now they have been reconciled.
We
see critical passages like Romans 12:2–3, “Do not be conformed to this world [same word
used in 1 Peter 1:14] but be transformed by the renewing of your mind [not the renewing
of your emotions] that you may prove [or demonstrate] what is that good and acceptable and perfect
will of God.”
Paul
goes on to say, “For
I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to
think [different word for thinking but a synonym] of himself more highly than he ought to
think …” Notice he doesn’t say not to feel about yourself more highly than
you ought to feel. That’s how our idiom is now. God doesn’t care how people
feel. He wants to know how they think.
Then
we have to think soberly which is a synonym we’re going to see in a moment
here. This is the word SOPHRONEO which means to think objectively. It’s not talking
the absence of alcohol. It’s talking about the fact that when a person is under
the influence of alcohol they don’t think as clearly. So the idea here isn’t
the exclusion of alcohol. It’s clear thinking, objective thinking, wise
thinking.
2
Corinthians 10:5, we’re to “Cast down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the
knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of
Christ.” Christianity is about thinking.
Romans
8:5–7. We’re carnally minded or we’re spiritually minded. The word “minded”
there comes from the verb PHRONEO, which means to think.
We’re
to be renewed in the spirit of our mind. That’s the content of our mind or our
thinking in Ephesians 4:23.
So
in 1 Peter 1:13 we’re told that we’re to have a confident expectation upon the
grace that is to be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ by first of
all, girding up the loins of our mind [being prepared mentally]. How do you get
prepared mentally? You get prepared mentally by studying the Word of God.
How
often do I have to study the Word of God? Well, let’s see. 24/7 and that’s not
enough. We have such a low level of expectation among evangelical Christians.
We think someone is doing really well if they’re twenty years old and they can
recite all 66 books of the Bible and if they can give us three salvation
verses.
How
about having whole chapters memorized like John 3 or Romans 8 or Ephesians 1 or
Ephesians 2 or 5 or Galatians 5 or half of Galatians 2? We should have these
things memorized. We should have whole books of the Bible memorized. Lots of
times when you get past a certain age it’s a lot harder.
This
is one of the things that you should be drilling into little kids. By the time
they learn to read they should have half the New Testament memorized. They can
do it. There’s nothing else in those little minds. Let them soak up the Word of
God. Challenge them. They can do it.
We
do this by girding up the loins of our mind and by thinking objectively. That’s
the result of getting rid of the distractions in your thinking. Have clear,
self-controlled thinking.
Now
in 1 Peter 1:14 Peter is going to add to that, “As obedient children …” We’re all in the
family of God now. As children we should be obedient to our Father. What does
that mean? Negatively it means we’re not to conform ourselves to the former
lusts. We’re not to be put into the mold [SUSCHEMATIZO] and again, it’s an
instrumental participle. The question here is how do we hope.
We hope
by not conforming ourselves to former lusts. If you’re letting lusts, any of
the different categories of lust, sexual lust, approbation lust, power lust, or
whether it’s some kind of chemical lust or monetary lust, any of the different
kinds of lust, control you, that is what’s motivating your life. You’re never
going to be able to rest your hope in God. You’re never going to be able to
hope in God because you’ve got a major distraction. You’re wearing three or
four robes and you’re just tripping all over yourself day-in-and-day-out and
you’re never going to get anywhere in the race that is set before us.
How
do we do it? We’ve got to not conform our thinking to the former lusts, as in
your ignorance. Notice that ignorance is contrasted to thinking. Knowing
something. We have to know the Word of God. Ignorance is the opposite. That’s
the same word that is used, by the way, in Romans 12:2, not to be conformed to
this world, to be pressed into the mold of this world.
We
need to look differently, act differently, and think differently. Corporate
America is forcing its employees to think like pagans. That goes back to my
opening bad news. That is what’s happening. It’s happened for fifty years or
more but it’s really bad now. If you want to hold fast to the absolutes of
Scripture, if you’re down in the Bible belt, you’re fortunate.
Georgia
is in the Bible belt. North Carolina is in the Bible belt, or South Carolina. I
don’t know what belt that’s in. Grain belt or something. These other places are
where there should be biblical truth. Charlotte, North Carolina passed a
bathroom bill, the home of Billy Graham and Franklin Graham. Let’s put that
into perspective a little bit. There’s some truth there. Southeastern Seminary
is there founded by Norm Geisler. Okay? This is a major problem.
Peter
also talks about this in 1 Peter 2:11–12, “… abstain from fleshly lusts which war against
the soul.”
In 1
Peter 4:2–3 he says, “That we should no longer live the rest of the time in the flesh for the
lusts of men, but for the will of God.” He talks about our former life when
we “walked in
lewdness, lusts, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties, and abominable
idolatries.”
What
characterizes the believer in the Church Age is going to be completely
different from the unbeliever.
Now
I’ll tell you a quick story. The first church I ever candidated in got this all
wrong. This was over in the heart of Cajun Louisiana. Opelousas, Louisiana, the
home of Jim Bowie. I got invited to come over there and candidate for this
church. I think the first question was on my philosophy of ministry. The second
question was would I preach against smoking, drinking, and dancing.
These
people were all saved out of an intensely hypocritical Roman Catholic culture.
Now I’m not saying all Roman Catholics are that way. They so badly wanted to
distinguish themselves from the hypocritical Roman Catholics who were not
living any differently from the world that they had slipped into this
superficial legalism. They didn’t want anyone who was a Christian going to
their church to do anything a Roman Catholic did. You had to be different.
This
is not a superficial command here but we should think differently so we’ll live
differently.
Then
we get to the thrust of this opening section where Peter says the real issue is
to be different. That’s what it means to be holy, not necessarily to be morally
pure and perfectly righteous. 1 Peter 1:15, “But as He who called you is holy, you also
be holy in all your conduct.”
Now
the word holy, the Greek word HAGIOS, is based on the Hebrew word qadosh and it means to be separated unto God
when it’s applied to us. When it’s applied to God it has the idea of being
distinct and unique.
It’s
the Creator/creature distinction. God is distinct and unique from everything He
created. We are to live unto Him. It doesn’t have the idea of moral purity
because the masculine and feminine forms of that word applied to the priests in
the fertility cults who were basically cultic prostitutes. There’s nothing
morally pure or ethically pure about that. But they were set apart to the
service of their God. That’s the idea.
What
Peter is saying to paraphrase it is like this. “But as to He who called you is
distinct and set apart from His creation, you also be set apart in all your
conduct, because it is written, ‘Be distinct and set apart, because I am set
apart’.”
I
think that will give you a little different slant on what it means to be holy.
So how do we achieve the holy life as we close? I think we need to think as God
thinks. We need to align our thinking with the Creator God of the universe who
is distinct from His creation.
Again
and again and again, this is what sets God apart in the Old Testament. He’s a
living God. He’s not a God of metal, stone, and wood. We need to think like He
thinks.
Second,
we need to quit thinking like Satan and the world think. We need to not be
conformed to the world. The world is Satan’s system. We need to think like God
wants us to think.
The
more we go down this toilet of paganism in this country, the more we are going
to be at odds with everyone and everything around us. The old life we had where
we could live in a comfort zone as a Christian because we had a culture that
was still heavily influenced by Christianity is over with.
That
realization started in 1963 and it came to fruition last June in that horrible
Supreme Court decision that legitimized homosexual marriage. We used to be able
to talk about the LGBT community. Now
it’s the LGBT-q-q-xyz, I don’t
know. I’ve summarized it. One word covers all those alphabets: pervert.
We
need to quit thinking like Satan and the world thinks. Finally, we need to
focus on the end game. The end game is what gets us through now. We understand
that we’re headed somewhere. There’s a purpose and a plan and there is going to
be joy and glory at the end. If we fail in the meantime, there won’t be much
joy and glory at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
Closing
Prayer
“Father,
thank You for this opportunity to study these things and be challenged by Your
Word. To recognize that we have a vital role to play in the angelic conflict,
witnesses in a pagan culture. We are to live in a way that distinguishes us
from the pagans around us. We live differently because we think differently. We
think differently because we are different at the core of our being.
Father,
we pray that we would have the spiritual courage and the spiritual strength to
fulfill the mission. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”