Hope and Holiness

CHRIST COVENANT CHURCH

Sermon Transcript

Tom Groelsema

1 Peter 1:13-21

Hope and Holiness

Date of Sermon: 07-13-2025 AM

Let’s turn together in our Bibles to 1 Peter chapter 1 verses 13 to 21 is our text this morning.  If you happen to be visiting with us, last Sunday we began a series in 1 Peter and we’re looking at 1 Peter both in the mornings and the evenings and so this is to all of you, ya know you don’t want to have gaps, right, in your study of 1 Peter so you’re gonna wanna be back tonight again at 6 o’clock as Pastor Bruce preaches for us and he’ll take the passage right after the one that we’re studying this morning.  So again, 1 Peter 1:13-21 for our morning study.  As we read this together remember that this is God’s holy and inspired and infallible 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 His 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 ones deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile knowing that you are ransom 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 threw Him, our believers in God, who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory so that your faith and hope are in God. 

Let’s pray together, ask for God to bless our study.

God we are overwhelmed by your kindness in giving to us your Word revealing yourself to us in the holy scriptures.  Father, we turn this morning to a wonderful passage that reminds us of who we are and who we are to be, that we are your children and we are to live holy lives.  And so, Father, we pray that you would take away every distraction, anything that would impede our hearing of your Word and we pray God that we hear the voice of Jesus himself preaching to us, calling us Lord to obedience and to faith and to hope and we pray this in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Well dear people of God, as we move along this morning in our study of 1 Peter just remind you that earlier in the first chapter Peter reminded us that we have a living hope, now that’s what we find in chapter 1:3.  We have a hope that is alive because Jesus is alive.  We have a hope in an inheritance that is to come and how important that was for the suffering Christians that Peter was writing to, that they be reminded of that and it’s important of course equally for us to be reminded of that as well, that we are able to live with hope in the midst of our daily struggles, our troubles, our trials, our uncertainties, the problems that come into our life, they could be overwhelming and so it’s good for us to remember we have hope in Christ.  Hope is vital.  One author put it like this, he said “Our spirits were made for hope the way that our hearts were made to love and our brains were made to think.  Keep hoping and you keep living.  Stop hoping and you die inside.”  I think there’s a lot of truth to that.  And Peter is saying to us this morning, Jesus is alive, and He is coming with a fullness of our salvation and so we have every reason to live with hope.” 

Well, when we come to the passage we’re looking at this morning Peter turns a corner for us and a corner is this, he tells us that hope should lead to holiness.  I’m so grateful for the songs that we’ve been singing this morning, songs that focus us upon Christ, upon His grace, upon His mercy, upon our salvation in Him because the order of how Peter deals with things is really important.  We’ve already said it, hope comes first and then comes holiness.  Holiness in other words comes out of hope, holiness doesn’t create hope.  It is hope, then holiness, not holiness then hope.  One of my old professors, Ed Clowney, put it like this, he said, “The imperatives of Christian living always begin with therefore.”  And did you notice in our text that the word therefore is the first word of our passage?  In other words, Peter has been talking about hope, hope, hope and then he says, therefore and you know already that when you see the word therefore, you’re supposed to ask the question, what’s a therefore, right, why is it there.  And here’s Peter’s answer, he says it’s there because hope transforms.  Not just in the sense that we have hope and therefore we have faith, and we have confidence and we have strength to live, but here Peter is saying hope transforms in terms of our conduct, hope leads to obedience, and you can see this in the structure of things here in this first chapter.  Look at a couple of verses.

Back to verse 3 of chapter 1.  Again, “We have been caused to be born again to a living hope.”  Go to verse 21, the end of our passage.  Peter says, “So your faith and your hope are in God.“  We have hope at the beginning, we have hope at the end but now notice the middle.  Verse 13.  “Set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”  There’s an imperative, a command, something that we are to do, having hope set your hope on God’s grace.  It is a call this morning to decisive action, to drive a stake in the ground, to say because I have hope in Christ this is the way that I am going to go about living, and that way of living is holiness. 

So, what I want you to see this morning is two things in this passage.  First of all, what is this call to holiness look like? What is a practical mean for our living? And, then secondly, what I want you to see is three motivations that Peter gives us for holiness, things that ought to prompt us and push us toward living holy lives.  So, first of all, this call to holiness, what does it look like.  There are two things that Peter emphasizes here and the first is that holiness means holy thinking.  Start off with holy thinking.  And you see this in the very first verse, verse 13.  Peter says, “Preparing your minds for action and being sober minded set your hope on the grace to come.”  Holy living is built on holy thinking.  Holy living starts with mind renewal.  This ought to be no surprise to us because this is what we find throughout the scriptures.  Remember that famous passage in Romans 12 verses 1 and 2 where Paul gets done talking about all the glories that we have in Christ, our justification, our sanctification, the work of the Holy Spirit, chapter 8 our security, and then you get to chapter 12 in the Book of Romans and Paul turns towards the action, the imperatives, the result, how we go about living and he says to you, “I appeal by the mercies of God to offer your bodies as living sacrifices.  Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed how, by the renewing of your mind.”  You’ve gotta have mind renewal if you’re not gonna be conformed to this world but be transformed. 

He says something similar in Colossians chapter 3, he says, “If you’ve been raised with Christ seek the things that are above, set your minds on things that are above, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ and God.  Set you minds there, our minds are to be upward, things above.”  And so you see how we think determines how we live.  If we’re gonna live holy lives then we need to have our minds changed and the way that Peter puts it here, he says, “Prepare your minds for action.”  You can see a footnote in your Bibles that says in the Greek this is girding up the loins of your mind.  Gird up the loins of your mind.  What does that mean, what’s the image that Peter is having and describing for us here?  Well, its of a runner or a soldier and they take their garments and they pull them up and they tuck them into their waists because when you’re going off to battle or you’re running a race, you can’t have a robe around your legs, you’re not gonna be able to run that way or to fight that way, so gird up your loins, prepare your minds for action.  You need to eliminate the impediments in our thinking, we need to be free from distraction, fixed, focused upon the grace of God.  None of you would of course leave church this morning and say, ya know I’m gonna head right out of church and I’m gonna go run a race like this ya know, in my suit.  No, gird up your loins, you prepare your mind, you strip away things that are gonna get in the way of your mind renewal, things that are distracting or putting your mind in other places.  It’s similar to what he says here when he says, be sober minded.  We can’t let our minds be intoxicated with the world, and our minds are over here on material possessions, our minds are over here on worldly values and Peter is saying, that’s sort of like mind drunkenness.  You have to be sober minded.

One of my sisters went through a painful divorce.  Her husband left her for another woman.  She was in her mid-50s, had to start working, living alone, really a very difficult period in her life.  Now this is the sister I’ve told you about before that passed away suddenly and we knew this before she died, but it was a reminder when she died, we went into her home and all over her home on her bathroom mirror, on her cupboards, in her car, all different kinds of places, were sticky notes, one after another and they were full of scripture.  I think my sister during that period of time said there is one way to be sober minded in this trouble.  Keeping my mind ready for action, I’ve gotta be centered upon the Word of God.  Scripture after scripture after scripture after scripture just being able to read them over and over and over again.  Holy living starts with holy thinking.  And then of course the second thing is it leads into a holy life. 

And Peter puts it in verse 14 like this, he says, “As obedient children do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.”  You know when we think about living holy lives sometimes the whole idea of holiness, even in the church I think, carries the connotation of sort of being a freak, right.  Holy people are, well they’re the super spiritual people.  Ya know, we don’t like to talk about holiness that much, that’s sort of like this upper crust, this elite of people.  Holiness, ya know not something just normal Christians have and people of God of course that is far from the truth.  Book of Hebrews tells us that without holiness no one will see the Lord.  It ought to be run of the mill for us as Christians.  Holiness ought to be normal and when we think about holiness we don’t have to worry, sometimes people do this too, sometimes they worry, oh boy there you go into works and justification by effort and all that kind of stuff, so we diminish our talk about holiness, we ought not to do that.  Holiness means to be set apart.  God is holy, He’s perfect, pure, completely set apart from every vestige of sin and devoted to His own honor and glory.  Think about holy things in the Old Testament, bowls and shovels and priests and curtains and trumpets and lamp stands and all kinds of other things that were set apart from common use and they were devoted to the Lord and to His service, and that’s what our holiness means, it means to be set apart.  If you’re a holy person, which we are in Christ, we are to be set apart from sin and devoted to the Lord, to His ways, to His commands, to His Word, this is how we want to go about living.  This is one of the reasons why the people that Peter was writing to were suffering for their faith, were suffering, were being persecuted.  He says in chapter 4:4 that gentiles are surprised when you don’t join them in the same flood of debauchery and they malign you.  They look at you and they say somehow you are set apart, somehow you are different, you’re weird.  Why aren’t you living the same way we are, why don’t you go to the parties that we go to and they malign you because of it.

Peter is very practical here, isn’t he about what holiness looks like, holy living, when he says, “Don’t be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.”  To conform is to take the same shape as something.  In a number of months a bunch of us will make Christmas cookies, right, we’ll get out our little stamp and all the cookies look the same.  When I was in college I worked for Keebler.  I made Pop-Tarts, thousands of them, going by on the assembly line and every single Pop-Tart looked the same, in fact if it didn’t look the same you get it out, scrap, throw it away.  Peter is saying that should not be true for Christians.  Where we are just conformed, stamped, looking the same as the world.  We’re to be different, set apart.  Are we strange, I guess we are, right, we’re supposed to, strange to the world but holiness ought not to be strange to us, our church, our school, our homes, they ought to be characterized by all kinds of things, love and grace, and compassion, and joy, and hope, but don’t forget to add holiness to that.  Is this a holy place, is this a holy campus with holy people.  God’s calling us here this morning to holy thinking and to holy living. 

Now what are the motivations.  I said there’s three of them.  Three ways that Peter challenges us, motivates us, pushes us toward desiring this holy life.  Here’s the first.  He reminds us that God is our Father and so imitate Him.  God is our Father so we must imitate Him.  Do you notice the call for holiness is explicit in verses 15 and 16. As the one 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.  The holiness of God is our impetus for holiness and is also our pattern for holiness.  The quote of course here is from Leviticus 11.  We read that passage already in our service and by Peter quoting from the Old Testament it’s clear that this of course is not just Peter’s advice, holiness is not just Pastor Peter’s suggestion, it’s a Biblical command right and it’s as old as Leviticus, as old as the Old Testament.  God’s people receiving the law from God, the lord reminds him that there are to be a holy people and what set them apart as a holy people is that God was living in their midst.  Here comes this holy God and He’s dwelling among them, in the tabernacle, later on in the temple, in the holy of holies, here God is dwelling with them, and that made them holy, they were a holy people, and they were to be holy.  Did you know that you can be both at the same time.  You can be holy and yet be called to be holy.  That’s what Israel was, we’re called to be and Peter reminds us here that holiness is our calling.  He says, “As he who called you is holy so you should be holy.”  We’re not just called to salvation in other words, we’re not just called to be saved and then we can stop.  You know our calling is to live a set apart life.  When God saves you he calls you to be set apart unto His glory and to obedience. 

But friends what I want you to see here is all of the language that is familial language.  You look at verse 17.  Peter says, “If you call on Him as Father”, or you go a bit later in verse 18, “You have been ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers.”  And then go back verse 14, verse opens, “As obedient children do not be conformed.”  Friends, why is there all this familial language and Peter’s urge for us to be holy?  I think the reason is this, because he wants to remind us that we should be like our Father.  God is our Father, and it ought to be our passion to imitate Him.  That’s what children do, right, they imitate their parents.  Like father like son.  Like mother like daughter.  You often can see that in our own children, they wanna be like us.  Maybe it’s the same job or the same profession or we see characteristics in our children for better or worse that we see in ourselves, right?  Why do they act like that? Well, that’s what they’ve seen or that’s what I do.  They might be slow in making a decision, they might be disciplined, emotional, quiet, all kinds of things that are passed down from parents to children.  Parents have a favorite team, the children follow that team.  And children don’t often even have to try to do these things.  It’s like they’re wired this way.  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. 

Peter is urging us this morning, and the motivation is this, God your Father, don’t you wanna live like Him, don’t you wanna be holy as He is holy?  It may seem like an impossibility this morning to do that and in many respects it is, right, because the striving for holiness, seeking to be holy is something that we are going to be doing our entire life.  We’re gonna be at it until we get to glory, but we have to remember that if we are in Christ we have been born again by the spirit of God.  We have a new life, we have a new heart, we have been born of God, we are image bearers, yes everyone is an image bearer, but saints particularly we bear His image and we are those who are to put on true righteousness and holiness because we reflect God and so He is our father, imitate Him.

Second motivation.  God is our judge so we must serve Him.  God is our judge, serve Him.  That’s where Peter takes us in verse 17 from father to judge.  It might feel like a radical swing, but Peter wants to remind us that we are going to appear before God one day.  Did you catch that in some of the songs we’ve been singing, thinking about eternity, thinking about the last day.  We’re gonna appear before God one day and he will judge, as Peter says, impartially according to each one’s deeds.  God is impartial.  It means He doesn’t play favorites.  God will not judge some people one way and other people another way so that ya know we have a fickle God.  You never know what you’re gonna get with God, just one day you may get one thing, another day you may get something else, who knows what it’s going to be like on that final day.  And friends, this ought to comfort us because God is steady, God is true, God is reliable, He is impartial, but it’s also something that ought to keep us from being presumptuous because we ought never to be the kind of people who say, well I am a child of God and therefore it doesn’t matter how I live because ya know, I’m gonna stand before God one day, he’s impartial, but he’s gonna favor me.  No, the coming of Jesus ought to prompt us to live holy lives.  He is the one who judges impartially and Peter says according to the deeds of each one, our works they have a part to play, not the basis for acceptance, not the basis for our justification as if God is gonna look at us one day and says, well ya know, let’s throw everything on the scales and Larry, you, you, you did enough, okay come on in, Andrew, you came up a little short.  Our works do not serve as the basis for acceptance before God.  The Bible is clear all across it’s pages of course that we are saved by Grace and yet the Bible tells us that God is going to take into account our works in determining the proportion of our heavenly reward, our deeds are the evidence of our faith, the reality of our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  And Peter’s all point here you see is simply that thinking about the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and thinking about standing before God one day ought to drive us to be holy people.  He says it that way, doesn’t he? 

As you think about him who judges impartially notice another imperative, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exiled, He is reminding us that we don’t belong.  Already at the very beginning of this letter in chapter I:20, he called his readers elect exiles.  He reminds them of that, reminds us of that right here.  We don’t belong, we were meant for eternity, the world is not our home, this is not where we settle in, we were meant for another place and because of that we are meant to live a different kind of life, we are to conduct ourselves with fear.  Some of us hear that and say, I guess well I ought to be terrified at the coming of Christ.  I don’t think that’s what Peter means.  He’s not saying when you think about the coming of Jesus you suddenly, ya know just start shaking and trembling in your boots like, ahhhh no.  When he’s talking about fear here, he’s talking about this blend of reverence and awe and respect and love all packaged together when we think about who God is and all that He has done for us in Christ.  There’s sort of a trembling, but a trembling in awe at the greatness of God.  I think it’s clear that that’s how Peter is describing things here with that word fear because he will go on later in this book, chapter 2 verse 18 and say, “Servants be subject to your masters with all respect or in fear.”  That telling servants to just be terrified is telling them no, you know who your master is, live accordingly.

He says the same in chapter 3:2. “Wives be subject to your husbands so that they may be won over without a word by your conduct when they see your respectful conduct or when they see you living in fear.  Not a call to wives to be terrified of their husbands, but rather to see their role as head of the home and to live their lives accordingly.  That’s what Peter is saying to us here about the coming of Jesus, “Conduct yourself with fear.”  When you think about the coming of Christ does it change how you go about living now.  Again, not because you’re terrified of God, because you realize you’re gonna stand before Him one day and He’s your God and you love Him, and you respect Him and you reverence Him and you stand in awe of Him.  You know if you’re not a Christian here this morning then it does need to be said that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.  You do not wanna stand before God one day apart from Christ Jesus.  This would be a call this morning to come in faith and trust in Him.  Peter of course is writing to a church; he’s writing to Christians.  Friends we are not to forget that the judge is our savior. And we are to lift up our eyes for our redemption is drawing near.  I’m excited about Christ coming back, wanting to see Him.  

John reminds us, we read this text too in our service already.  Everyone who has this hope purifies himself as he is pure.  You want to be like Him, I know that He is coming, I want to live a life that praises and honors and glorifies Him as I think about standing before Him one day.  So, God is our Father, we should imitate Him, God is our judge, we should serve Him, and the last motivation Peter gives us is this that Christ is our ransom, we should love Him.  Perhaps this is the sweetest part of our text, meant to woo us with affection toward holiness.  Peter puts it like this, verse 18 and 19, “Knowing you know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with a precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.”  The word ransom there is a glorious word, it’s a great word, refers to a payment that is made to obtain the release of something. 

In biblical times, most often that was the release of a slave, a slave was ransomed, the price was paid, and you were set free, you’re no longer a slave anymore, you became a free person.  Well Peter says, our release was from another kind of slavery, from the futile ways inherited from our forefathers.  He says we inherited something from our parents, from our forefathers, from our ancestors and that is a futile way of life, a futile way of living, but he says Jesus has ransomed us from that.  Praise God, a price has been paid so that we have been set free from this and notice what Peter is saying here, Peters is saying we have not just been freed from the penalty of sin.  We can read this passage and that could be our conclusion that we have been ransomed, ya know, from death to life, we’ve been saved.  What Peter is really getting at is this, yes not only have we been saved, but we have been redeemed or ransomed from a futile way of living.  Jesus has paid the price so that we can live a different way.  We are not under the power of sin any longer, we can be holy, we can obey.  Peter wants us to see as precious the price, the cost for this freedom.  It’s not silver or gold.  Of course, from an earthly standpoint these are the most precious things that Peter could have brought up.  I mean if anything could be valuable, if there’s any price that would be so high as to make us stand in awe it would be silver or gold and yet Peter says it’s not that, it is the blood of Christ, the precious blood of Christ.

Friends, what greater price could be paid to set us apart so that we can live a holy life then that, the blood of Jesus.  He is the perfect lamb without blemish Peter says, without spot, sinless.  Of course, that drives us back to think about the Passover lamb in Exodus 12 when God is telling His people you’re about to be set free, you’re about to be ransomed, you’re about to enter a new way of life.  You won’t be slaves anymore, you’ll be free.  Now go find that lamb and you’re to spread its blood all over the doorpost on the top and the bottom and the sides and that lamb is to be a lamb without blemish or without spot.  Peter is saying Jesus is that Passover lamb for us who has come to take away the sin of the world.  You see it’s only a sinless savior that can set people free from a sinful way of life and Jesus is the lamb that can do it.  And if all this is not enough Peter reminds us, he was foreknown before the foundation of the world.  Before the worlds were made God entered a covenant with Christ, a covenant of redemption the father pledged to send the son and the son pledged to fulfill the mission of the father, but now he has been made manifest in the last times and people of God notice the next five words, they’re worth underlining in your Bible, for the sake of you.  This is all for us, Peter’s not wanting us to forget that all for us, for known before the foundations of the earth now made manifest. 

Just in case we’re wondering if all this could be true, the validation of it all is that God also raised him from the dead, verse 21, and “Gave Him glory.”  He has ascended, he sits at the right hand of the father and Peter says the result of all of this is that there really is only one place for your faith and your hope and it’s in God.  Where else could you put it, where else would you wanna put it?  The death, the resurrection, the ascension, the reign of Christ for us and what Peter is getting at is simply this, friends, could there be any greater motivation for living a life of holiness than the fact that Christ laid down His life for you.  Christ was raised for you, Christ has ascended and reigns for you.  That is your savior, all of it for your sake.  How could we then go living for ourselves, how could we say I wanna do what I wanna do and Christ has done all of this for us. 

I find it interesting that in the last part of our text Peter gets kind of wordy, right, there’s a lot here.  I’m kinda scratching my head, why is that?  I think the reason is because he personally experienced all of this in Christ.  He was introduced to Christ by his brother Andrew you remember, and the way that Andrew was introduced to Jesus was by John the Baptist and as John is passing by, John says in earshot of Andrew, “Behold the lamb of God.”  And I kind of wonder if Andrew raced to Peter and said we have the lamb, the lamb that we’ve been waiting for century after century and century the lamb is here and so he writes about Jesus as a lamb and we know that Peter heard Jesus preach and in fact Mark’s Gospel is based on Peter’s preaching.  Peter hears Jesus and Peter begins to preach and Mark scribbles it down, and it’s Mark who records for us the Words of Christ that Peter preached.  I did not come to be served, but to serve and to give my life as what, a ransom.  Here it is, a ransom for many and of course it was Peter’s experience with Jesus that changed him.  Impulsive, resistant to the idea of Christ’s death, denying Jesus three times, and then Jesus meets him after the resurrection and Peter is set free and his life has changed, and he lives a holy life apostle to the Jews, meeting Christ that crucified and resurrected Jesus changed him forever.  People of God we are to be holy in our thinking, holy in our living, God is our Father, do you wanna be like Him?  God is our judge, do you wanna serve Him?  Christ Jesus is our sweet ransom, don’t you wanna love Him.  Be holy says the Lord as I am holy.  Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, we thank you for these precious words that remind us of all that Christ has accomplished for us and the fact that you’re a father, you’re a coming judge, you are a ransom, help us Father to be holy in our thinking, holy in our living.  May we indeed be a bit strange, strange to this world because our hope is in Christ, we want to live for him.  We ask this in Jesus’ name.  Amen.