Sermon Tone Analysis

“Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.

As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance.

But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written:

‘Be holy, because I am holy.’

Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear.

For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.

He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.

Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.

Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.

For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.

For, ‘All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.’

And this is the word that was preached to you.

Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.

Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

Remember we have introduced this series in Peter by saying that Peter is giving help for struggling Christians.

First Peter 4:12 tells us that the persons to whom Peter is writing are suffering a painful or a fiery trial.

Peter is giving counsel to those who are going through trial.

Thus far, in the opening twelve verses of the letter, he has pointed to our privilege rather than our persecution.

To our possessions in Christ, rather than our pain.

That’s good therapy for persons who are suffering, to have a reminder first as to who we really are and what our salvation involves.

Today’s passage involves five therapies for developing spiritual strength.

The reason I’ve selected five therapies is because Peter, writing in the Greek language, has five imperatives or five commands in this passage.

The English doesn’t exactly convey the precision of the language that’s being employed.

The five imperatives are verse 13, “Set your hope fully on the grace to be given to you when Christ is revealed”; verse 14, “Become holy in all that you do”; verse 17, “Live your lives here as strangers in reverent fear”; verse 22, “Love one another deeply”; and verse 2 of chapter 2, “Crave pure spiritual milk.”

For a person that is struggling and identifying with pain and loneliness and anxiety and heartbreak, I can’t think of any more valuable therapy to give than these five.

I. Set your hope fully on the grace to be given to you

The first of which is hope.

“Therefore prepare your minds for action.

Be self controlled, set your hope fully on the grace to be given to you when Jesus Christ is revealed” 1 Peter 1:13.

Everything may be stripped away from a Christian, as what’s happening with Peter’s recipients of the letter.

But one thing can never be stripped from the Christian, and that is hope.

All we have to do is compare the hope we have as Christians with the hopelessness in the world to get a measure of the importance of the word “hope.”

Jean Paul Sartre, perhaps more than any other person in the twentieth century, projected to us a vision of what it is like to live without hope in the play No Exit, as a kind of blankness.

Life is described in terms of the imagery of hell.

Only hell, for Sartre, is not fire and brimstone or where the devil tortures.

Hell is other people and hell is this life.

In the opening scene one of the three lead players is ushered into a room, decorated in an old way, by a valet.

It is one room among thousands in a kind of hell hotel.

There are no mirrors, no windows, nothing breakable.

A light burns continually.

Thinking he is in hell, he expects torturers to quickly move in on him, and he is surprised when two women are ushered in and their past begins to come out.

For Sartre these are the kind of people that populate the hell of this life.

The recognition slowly begins to dawn on them that the room is their eternal abode.

One says, “We’re in hell and no one can come here.

We’ll stay in this room together, the three of us for ever and ever.”

They have been placed in the room to be one another’s torturers.

No outside torturers are to arrive.

They are one another’s psychological torturers.

For Sartre that is life, because the people we’ve been placed with we didn’t have a choice to be with, and it turns out that we wind up destroying one another with our words, with our body actions, with our tasks, with our meaninglessness.

We torment one another throughout our lifetime.

Sartre is saying there is no exit to the human predicament.

Hell is but the lengthening of this life.

The world is a room, the room is hell, the people of this world are the citizens of hell.

There is no exit.

There are no doors.

There are no windows.

There are no mirrors.

If, in the Bible, hell is the one place where human hope is gone, then, for Sartre, life is the one place where human hope is gone.

In contrast to this hopelessness that is in the world, Peter reminds us when we get ourselves in shut-in situations and think there is no exit, think there are no windows and no doors, he reminds us that we are not shut up.

But we have a hope.

And we should be reminded that Jesus is the carpenter and He makes excellent doors and windows!

Peter literally says in this passage, “Therefore.”

And the word “therefore” is the turning point word.

It means in light of all that’s been shared thus far in the first twelve verses about salvation.

“Therefore having girded up your mind” (verse 13).

And the word “girded up” or “prepared your mind for action” involved the idea of a person’s loosely flowing robe.

Taking the girdle or the sash or the belt and cinching it up.

Peter is saying,

“Cinching up the belt of your mind.”

Or cinching up your trousers or rolling up your sleeves.

Or, when you’re in a difficult situation, don’t let your mind get into neutral but get it in biblical gear.

Hitching up your mind and being sober, which is the exact opposite of being drunk or out of your senses or being lost in self-pity about your situation or turning to alcohol or turning to drugs or turning to any one of the kinds of release that might be a sinful sort of release.

Instead, be sober and perfectly or completely gird your hope or settle your hope in the grace that’s being brought to you at the revelation or coming of Jesus Christ.

There are some situations that are so hopeless that there is no other hope.

Things aren’t going to get better.

The only thing that’s going to get better is Jesus Christ is going to come.

I don’t know if that is the hopelessness of your situation, but whenever other hope is dim—when health hope is dim, when financial hope is dim, when friendship hope is dim, when marriage hope is dim—when all other hopes have died, this hope has not.

The revelation of Jesus Christ from heaven.

Hope.

That’s the word that Peter holds out as the first therapy when we’re hard pressed.

II.

Do not conform to the evil desires you had

The second word that he holds out is the word “holy.”

“As obedient children or “children of obedience,” that is, the characteristic of our lifestyle is that we seek to walk in obedience, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance” (verse 14, NIV).

There are many people who think of holiness as something awful.

Some people think holiness is kind of a hair shirt.

You put it on to torture yourself.

To be a holy Christian is to be a miserable Christian.

To be holy is not to be isolated.

To be holy is to separate ourselves from that which is in our former ignorance, unto the healthiness that is in God.

If I were using a synonym for the word “holy,” I’d call it “healthy.”

God is healthy.

If you want to know what perfect character and personality is that distinguishes God from us, just look at the nature of His being.

He is wholesome, healthy.

“Be holy, not fashioning yourselves in the desires of your former ignorance.”

What were those former desires?

Paul tells us in Ephesians: “Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body.

‘In your anger do not sin’: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.

He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need” (Ephesians 4:25–28, NIV).

As a Christian we ought to have automatically laid aside profanity.