1 Peter 1:13-25 (NASB)
Therefore, prepare your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, set your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 14 As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance, 15 but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; 16 because it is written: “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”
17 If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth; 18 knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, 19 but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ. 20 For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you 21 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.
22 Since you have purified your souls in obedience to the truth for a sincere love of the brothers and sisters, fervently love one another from the heart, 23 for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable, but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God. 24 For,
‘All flesh is like grass,
And all its glory is like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
And the flower falls off,
25 But the word of the Lord endures forever.’
And this is the word which was preached to you.”
Today’s passage is the second half of 1 Peter, chapter 1. Peter is writing to Christians scattered around Asia Minor, to encourage them to stand firm as they face persecution for their faith. The first 12 verses start with a greeting and a brief statement of praise to God, then he states his purpose of writing them. In verses 6-8, it says that they should rejoice in their trials, for trials prove their faith. Verse 9 adds, for the “outcome of your faith, [is] the salvation of your souls.”
This salvation is so magnificent, “therefore,” Peter declares, in verse 13, “Therefore, prepare your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, set your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
How do we prepare our minds? By being sober-minded, keeping our minds on the fact that Jesus will one day return. We must keep our minds on the prize that is awaiting us. Verses 14-16 say, “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance, but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written: ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’”
Here, the use of the word children does not mean young people, but children of God, which is what all believers are in Christ. We are adopted into God’s family when we are born again. I also think Peter is using this term to make a point. That just as children should obey their parents, believers should obey God. We are to be holy in all our behavior, just as God is holy.
In Ellicott’s Commentary, he quotes from a scholar named ‘Leighton’ who says, “He hath severed you from the mass of the profane world, and picked you out to be jewels for Himself; He hath set you apart for this end; that you may be holy to Him, as the Hebrew word that signifies ‘holiness’ imports ‘setting apart,’ or fitting for a peculiar use; be not then untrue to His design. It is sacrilege for you to dispose of yourselves after the impure manner of the world, and to apply yourself to any profane use, whom God hath consecrated to Himself.”
If we have answered God’s call and have become born again, then we must not behave like the rest of the world. God has redeemed us and washed us in Jesus’ blood, cleansing us from sin. Should we then purposely dirty ourselves again? Or shouldn’t we strive to live holy lives, conscious of the gift of holiness that He has imparted to us? As Leighton wrote, “it is sacrilege” to behave as the impure world behaves. Sacrilege is defined as a violation or misuse of something sacred. It is irreverence, disrespectful, or blasphemous behavior. When Christians behave in unholy manners, we are breaking God’s command to “Be holy,” as He is holy, which is given multiple times in the Book of Leviticus, which is probably what Peter is quoting.
Then Peter goes on to say in verse 17, “If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth.” God will judge us according to our work. So we should be careful how we are behaving. Peter is quoting from Jesus when he writes this. Matthew 16:27 records Jesus saying, “For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and will then repay every person according to his deeds.” That is why Peter says, “conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth.” I love that wording, for it speaks to how important our conduct is, and how temporary our time here on earth is. This time on earth is just a temporary stay. This is such an important perspective to have, isn’t it? I think if we have that perspective of the temporariness of now, then it is easier to behave with holy conduct.
Why should we conduct ourselves carefully? Not just because Jesus says He will repay us for our deeds, but because of what Jesus has done for us. Verses 18-21 say, “knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ. For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these 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.”
Jesus, our Savior, has redeemed us with His precious blood. When we consider all that He has suffered for us, should we not respond with thanksgiving and praise? We owe Him our very lives.
Peter continues, in verses 22-25, which say, “Since you have purified your souls in obedience to the truth for a sincere love of the brothers and sisters, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable, but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God. For,
‘All flesh is like grass,
And all its glory is like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
And the flower falls off,
But the word of the Lord endures forever.’
And this is the word which was preached to you.”
As believers, our response to what Jesus has done for us should be that we live purified lives in obedience to Him, loving one another as Jesus has loved us. For we have “been born again not of seed…but…through the living and enduring word of God.” I think Peter is referencing Jesus’ parable of the Sower. Matthew 13:3-9 tells us Jesus’ parable of seed that is sown on different kinds of soil. That seed is the Word of God. It says, “And He told them many things in parables, saying, ‘Behold, the sower went out to sow; and as he sowed, some seeds fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate them up.Others fell on the rocky places, where they did not have much soil; and they sprang up immediately, because they had no depth of soil. But after the sun rose, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out. But others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some a hundred, some sixty, and some thirty times as much. The one who has ears, let him hear.’”
It is by hearing the enduring Word of God that we become born again.
We cannot come to saving faith in Jesus through any means other than the Word of God. For it is God’s Word which tells us the Gospel message. As Romans 10:17 says, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.” Also, 1 Corinthians 15:1-2 says, “Now I make known to you, brothers and sisters, the gospel which I preached to you, which you also received, in which you also stand, by which you also are saved, if you hold firmly to the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.” The Greek word for “word” in that passage is logos, and it is the same word here in 1 Peter 1:23.
Last week, I asked the rhetorical question, “why do so few Christians read the Bible?” I think I found the answer. Rather than preaching from the Bible, telling people the Logos, there are pastors who are telling Christians that reading and believing the Bible is not necessary for salvation. My family and I visited a church this past weekend. The pastor was ending an 8 weeklong series that was written by a famous pastor of a mega-church who has been spreading a false idea that won’t seem to die out in Christian circles. It goes like this: ‘In order to be a Christian, a person does not need to believe in the Bible. A person only needs to believe Jesus is the Son of God. Therefore, we don’t need to believe the Bible is true; we can believe it is myth or illustration.’
The reasoning behind this idea, these pastors who believe this give, is because they say that for the first 300 hundred years of Christianity, people didn’t have the Bible because the Bible as we know it wasn’t assembled yet. While it is true that the early Christians did not have all the books of the Bible bound together into one book, they certainly had the Old Testament and the collective letters of the Apostles. These pastors also cite that after the cannon was formed into the Bible as we know it, for a thousand years until the Reformation, no one but a select few had access to that Bible. They conclude that, therefore, reading or even believing the Bible is not necessary for salvation.
While I agree a person does not have to read the whole Bible to be born again, if we have access to the Bible, why would we not read it? It is through the Word of God that we know who God is and what He desires. That for a thousand years people had no access to the Bible should not be a prescription for us to follow. Where is the logic in that? People didn’t have the Bible and so we shouldn’t find the Bible necessary? That is not logic, that is folly. All one needs to do is look at the state of humanity during those centuries to see how the lack of access to God’s Word caused untold suffering and human casualties.
Luke 24:44-49 (ESV) records one of the last things Jesus says to His disciples, after He had been resurrected and appeared to them. It says, “Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.’”
That text tells us that Jesus “opened their mind to understand the Scriptures,” because Jesus wanted them to read the Old Testament with new understanding. He was not dismissing or diminishing the importance of the Word. If anything, He elevated its importance by opening their minds to actually understand it now. And as Luke 24:53 says, after Jesus ascended into heaven, they returned to Jerusalem “and were continually in the temple blessing God.” They wanted to hear God’s Word.
We see all throughout the New Testament, the writers echoing the idea that we must learn and know God’s Word. Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” It is assumed by Paul, who is the author of Colossians, that a believer is going to be reading God’s Word. Families of believers are supposed to be teaching scripture to their children, and those children are to teach God’s word to their children. It is as Deuteronomy 6:4-9 describes, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
It was understood that the task of teaching God’s Word was the responsibility of the family. We see in Nehemiah how it was the head of the household who met to learn the Word from the priest. They memorized it and were to pass it on. That is why in the New Testament, when Jesus would talk with people, they would say, “doesn’t God’s law say this” or “scripture says” when He would talk with people. Even people who were not of the Jewish faith seemed to know what Scripture said. An example of this is the Canaanite woman who asked Jesus to heal her daughter. She calls out to Jesus, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely demon-possessed.” She knew that Jesus was regarded as the prophesied Messiah and His ancestor was king David. This is how prevalent God’s Word was in society.
All throughout the New Testament, the writers reference the Old Testament. According to the website Creation.com, there are over 100 references to the book of Genesis alone. The lack of scholarship behind this false claim about not needing the Bible is astounding to me. This same mega-church pastor who seems to have propelled this idea to widespread acceptance says in one of his sermons that ‘Peter didn’t make decisions or follow Jesus because of the Bible, he followed Jesus because he knew Him personally.’ While Peter did know Jesus personally, he knew that Jesus was the Son of God because everything that Jesus did and said lined up with Scripture, and Peter knew what Scripture said. In Acts 2, after the Holy Spirit falls on the believers and they speak in tongues, Peter recites the Old Testament prophecy of Joel. He only knew what was happening because he knew the writings of the prophets. He knew what they were witnessing was a fulfillment of Scripture, the same way he knew Jesus was who He said He was, because Jesus was the fulfillment of Scripture.
In the classic book, The Canon of the Bible, by Samuel Davidson, he says this, “The first Christians relied on the Old Testament as their chief religious book. To them it was of divine origin and authority. The New Testament writings came into gradual use, by the side of the older Jewish documents, according to the times in which they appeared and the names of their reputed authors.” The early Christians passed those early letters around. They recopied them, memorized them. The early Christians were not flying blind. They knew God’s Word and studied it. They treasured it and they certainly did not take it for granted, the way that so many people do today.
If we don’t know what God’s Word says, then we can be duped by false teachings. Whereas, if we know God’s Word, and we have the Holy Spirit inside of us, Who helps open our minds to understand it, then when we hear false teachings like the one by that mega pastor, we can reject it.
Not only do we need to know Scripture to know truth, but we must know Scripture in order to know God’s standard of how we are to live. Back to what Peter says in verse 15, we are not to be like the world, “but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior.” The only way we can know what that looks like in practice is if we know how the Holy One acted. The only way we can know that is by reading Jesus’ Words and studying His behavior. The Bible spells it out very clearly what a Christian’s actions should be like.
The behaviors and standard that the Bible gives us for how we are to live has not changed. As Peter writes in verse 25, “But the word of the Lord endures forever.’ And this is the word which was preached to you.” God’s Word will not change or fade away. Peter knew Jesus. He was one of His original disciples. Yet, he did not stop reading God’s Word even though he heard Jesus speak firsthand. Instead, by the power of the Holy Spirit, he wrote down what Jesus said and added it to the growing Word of God, now having understood how Jesus was the fulfillment of all that the Old Testament had prophesied.
So, let us do as Peter instructs these early believers to do: let us prepare our minds for action, keep sober in spirit, and set our hope completely on the grace to be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Let us read the Word of God so we are not led astray. For His Word is unchanging, and we must know it in order to know God.
Pray: Heavenly Father, we pray that You would open our minds, by the power of Your Holy Spirit, to understand Your Word. Please help us to value Your Word so we are careful to follow it. Thank You for loving us and sending us Jesus to die on the cross for us so we can know You as You reveal Yourself to us through Your Word. It is in His holy name we pray, amen.
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