Think to Hope
Intro
When I was a student at Nipawin Bible College, I took a class on spiritual disciplines. And one of the very first things that we did was take a personality test, which was meant to point out our strengths and weakness regarding spiritual disciplines. But instead, it quickly became, for myself and for my class, a self-promotional tool that emphasized the strengths of our personalities!
For example, this test revealed that I was 99% extroverted, so I basked in the glory of being this social butterfly. The other revelation was that I was a 75% feeler and 25% thinker, so I prided myself in having a heart and loving people instead of being a logical thinker who didn’t care about people.
But the problem was that I failed to think about the purpose of the test, which was to identify my weakness in reading the Bible on my own and praying privately. Instead, I prided myself in loving God with my heart (because I loved doing stuff with people) rather than my mind (which required alone time in the Word).
Even today, there seems to be a divide within Christianity regarding the “feeling” and “thinking” groups, and someone in the past helped me with my imbalance by telling me this: “Josh, I can’t just be a cold-blooded intellectual—nor can you be a gullible sentimentalist.” In other words, loving God requires loving him with your heart and your mind.
And our passage today focuses on this very idea: thinking. And specifically, thinking about the hope that we have in Jesus. So I hope that we can get our thinking hats on as we look at 1 Peter 1:13.
Therefore
So we begin by looking at the first word in this verse, which is the word “therefore.” Something I learned at Bible college, and something that our grades 7-12 are used to doing on Wednesday nights during Bible study, is asking the question “what is therefore there for?
It’s catchy, and might be a bit cheesy, but it’s very important—and this word “therefore” is especially important in our passage today. In this verse, it basically means “for this reason.” What Peter says in verse 13 is based on everything that he has said up until now.
And that becomes even more important when we understand that verse contains the very first command or instruction in the whole letter. Think of everything that we’ve read in the first 12 verses, which is one big sentence in the original language as we’ve learned. Even though we’ve ended each sermon with some conclusions as to how we are to respond to the text, Peter himself has not explicitly commanded us to do anything. He’s just been proclaiming truth to us.
And now, in light of all of that truth, he gives us a command.
- because we are chosen exiles according to God’s foreknowledge, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus and sprinkling with his blood;
- because God, in His great mercy, has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead;
- because He’s keeping our inheritance perfectly safe in heaven for us;
- because He’s guarding us by His power through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time;
- because we rejoice in this, even though for a time we’re grieved by various trials;
- because the tested genuineness of our faith will result in praise, honour and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ;
- because we love Him and rejoice in Him and believe in Him though we haven’t seen Him;
- because the prophets served us by prophesying about the grace that was to be ours;
- because the angels long to look in to the salvation we’ve been given;
- because of all of this, do this: set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
You can see how this word “therefore” is so important. Specifically, Peter is telling us not to let all of this truth go in one ear and out the other. He’s telling us, in light of all of this truth, to respond to it by setting our hope fully on it.
More broadly, though, we need to notice the important order of truth and then command. Peter tells us what is true of us before he tells us how to respond to that truth. That’s the order of operations of gospel-shaped living. God saves us and gives us a new identity and then trains us how to live out that new identity. He instructs us on how to become what we already are.
In other words, we don’t obey Him because we’re trying to impress Him or prove anything to Him. We’re simply living out the new identity that He has already given us. And so our obedience to the Lord is motivated by grace and empowered by grace and fuelled by grace—past grace, present grace, and future grace.
And if that seems like a given to you, just think about all the followers of various religions in the world who go through their life trying to follow all the rules and just hoping, without any ground for their hope, that maybe they’ll be good enough at the end.
I remember going to a mosque for my 2nd year missions practicum at Nipawin Bible College, and the Muslim scholar said exactly this when I asked him if he can be sure about getting into paradise (heaven as they know it). He said, “I can’t know that, because that’s up to Allah. All I can do in this life is struggle and hope to make it.”
Or maybe some of us this morning know what this is like from your upbringing. Perhaps you were raised in an environment where you were told to follow the rules first, and grace was given only if you performed well enough. Which doesn’t make it grace at all. And you know that trying to live like a Christian apart from being born again, and enjoying the grace of Christ, just doesn’t work.
Instead, Peter opens with 12 verses of glorious truth that just is. And now, in light of this truth, because of this truth, he exhorts us to live in accordance with this truth.
One the flip side, Peter’s words here are also a challenge to those who would just like to enjoy the grace of Jesus and never do anything with it. We can’t miss that Peter is telling us to do something with the truth we’ve been taught. This is not a suggestion or a good idea. As a representative of the risen Lord Jesus, Peter commands us to action, and those who have been born again will gladly respond.
Set Your Hope Fully
And in the verses ahead, Peter is going to spell out for us what it actually looks like to live in accordance with what is true of us. Today, we’re just starting with verse 13, and his first imperative or command that his readers “set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
Now I know there’s some words in verse 13 before the ones I just read, and we’ll get to them. But as far as the grammar of the verse is concerned, this is the main command. This is the first time Peter tells us to do something. And what he tells us to do is to set our hope fully on the grace that will be brought to us when Christ returns.
Let’s break this statement down one piece at a time, starting with the end. The verse ends by talking about the “revelation of Jesus Christ.” That’s familiar territory for us after the last few weeks. Jesus is coming back. Right now He is veiled from our eyes but He will be revealed. Verse 7 used this very same phrase to describe His return and appearing.
And at the appearing of Jesus, grace will be brought to us. Because when Jesus is revealed, our salvation will be revealed, like verse 5 spoke of.
This reminds us of the full and final salvation we’re waiting for—the resurrection of our bodies, freedom from sin, dwelling with Christ in a new world forever. Seeing Him and being with Him. This is all grace we don’t deserve, and it’s grace that Jesus is bringing with him to us when He’s revealed. Isn’t that good news?
Yet, the return of Christ will not be an experience of grace for so many. 1 Thessalonians speaks about the day “when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (2 Thessalonians 1:7–8). To those who have rejected the Lord, His return will mean the end of all hope of grace.
But to those who, through His great mercy, have been born again to a living hope, His return will be grace. Jesus took the judgement we deserve onto Himself on the cross and when He returns He’ll being grace for the people who knew Him and loved Him without seeing Him; those who, with fire-tested faith, longed for the praise and honour and glory of His revelation.
This is all truth we’ve heard much about in the recent weeks. But things escalate when we consider what we’re supposed to do with this truth.
What are we to do in regard to this grace that’s going to be brought to us? And the answer is that we are to set our hope fully on it. We aren’t just supposed to hear about these truths and think “oh, that will be nice someday.” We are to “fix our hope completely” on this grace, as the NASB translates these words. We are to hope in the grace that will be given us at the return of Christ in such a way that we don’t hope in anything else alongside of this.
As Sam Storms wrote, “We are to devote every ounce of mental and spiritual and emotional energy to contemplating and concentrating on the grace that is to come.” [Sam Storms, “1 Peter,” in Hebrews–Revelation, ed. Iain M. Duguid, James M. Hamilton Jr., and Jay Sklar, vol. XII, ESV Expository Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 309.]
This is a striking command, and it’s all the more striking when we think about the kinds of things we tend to set our hopes on. If you’re a young kid in school, you might hope for their next break from school, or maybe getting something nice for Christmas. If you’re a little older, whether it’s high school or college, you might hope for a boyfriend or a girlfriend (for Bible college students, you might hope for that bridal college experience—I was a victim of that). Then eventually you hope to graduate and get a “better” job or buy a house to “upgrade” into the next level of home ownership (at least in our North American culture’s mind).
If you have kids, you might hope to raise good kids. Or you might have your hope set on getting out of debt or getting financially stable. Or you might hope to retire at a certain age, and maybe hope to do or buy all kinds of things in retirement. If you’re in that stage, you might hope in having your family all together again.
None of these things I’ve mentioned are bad things, in and of themselves, to ask God for—or even to look forward to. But they are terrible places to fix our hope. If we fix our hope on them we’re bound to be disappointed and let down.
But even more so, they are terrible places to fix our hope because Peter has told us there’s only one place to fix our hope, and that’s on the grace that will be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus—not your friends, spouse, child, house or job. We are to fix our hope so completely on the grace that will be ours at the return of Jesus Christ that there is nothing else sharing that hope.
A couple of years ago we walked through 2 Timothy and we heard Paul talk about loving the appearing of Jesus (2 Timothy 4:8), and how that was contrasted with loving this present age (4:10).
Our passage today is telling us the same thing: the revelation of Jesus is not one thing we hope for among many. We are to hope completely, totally, and only in His return and share that hope with nothing else.
And that’s a challenge, to say the least. How can we do this? This might even feel impossible. It’s one thing to hope in Christ’s return when you’re here on Sundays, but even here it can be hard. And what about all of the days in between, days where you’re pressured with so many challenges and so many ideas and so many places to set your hope. How is it even possible to do this?
Well, one thing is certain: it’s not going to happen by itself. Setting your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ is going to take deliberation and intention and careful attention.
And that’s exactly what Peter tells us in the first part of this verse. Before he even gets to “set your hope fully,” he gives us two phrases that tell us how or in what manner we are to set our hope on the return of Christ. Here’s how it’s done.
By Preparing Your Minds for Action
The first phrase is “preparing your minds for action.” It start with getting our minds, our thinking, ready for action.
The phrase here literally is “gird up the loins of your mind,” which is how the trusty King James Version translates it. It’s a picture that comes from how men dressed back in this day. Their basic garment was a long robe that hung to their knees or lower. And it was great until you had to engage in any kind of serious work that required any kind of speed or movement in your legs.
And so what the men would do is pull the bottom part of their robe up between their legs and tuck it into their belt, basically turning their robe into a pair of shorts. And now they could run or fight or do whatever they needed to do. It was the ancient equivalent of rolling up your sleeves. It was getting ready for action.
Not only was this a common picture, it was a common picture with quite a biblical background. In Exodus 12:11, when God was giving His people instruction on their first Passover before the exodus from Egypt, he said to eat it “with your belt fastened.” In the Greek Old Testament, that phrase is “with your loins girded up,” in very similar wording to today’s passage. They were to be ready to move. Ready for action as they waited for their deliverance.
In Luke 12:35, when Jesus gave instruction on how to be ready for His return, what did He say? “Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning” (Luke 12:35). “Stay dressed for action.” Guess what that is in Greek? The King James Version again helps us: “Let your loins be girded about.” Jesus tells us to be in a place of readiness for action, like the Israelites waiting for the exodus, as we wait for His return.
Paul picks up on this idea when he describes the armour of God. He said to “Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth” (Ephesians 6:14). King James? “Having your loins girt about with truth.” Same thing. Similar wording. Girded loins, pointing to a readiness for action through the truth.
Peter brings all of this together and says that the way we are to set our hope fully on the return of Christ is to have our minds prepared for action. To have the sleeves of our minds rolled up, so to speak.
In other words, we are disciplining our thinking in order to set our hope on the return of Christ. Our brains are not lazing back in a recliner, watching the world go by passively. We are actively engaging our minds in order to deliberately set our hope on the grace that will come when Christ returns.
Being Sober-Minded
The second phrase Peter uses in verse 13, showing us how to set our hope fully on the grace that will be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ, is to be sober-minded. “And being sober-minded” he writes.
The literal word he uses here is just “sober,” which, just like in English, often had the meaning of careful, self-controlled judgement and alert, disciplined thinking. Peter Davids write that this word refers to “complete clarity of mind and its resulting good judgment.” [Peter H. Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990), 66.]
Once again we think about the words of Jesus: “Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning, and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes” (Luke 12:35–37).
Staying awake when it’s late and you’re waiting for someone takes careful, disciplined thought. You need to work to keep alert.
And if you’re trying to stay awake and alert, I think we all know that alcohol isn’t going to help—which is why Peter’s word-picture of “sober-minded” works so well.
Setting our hope on the return of Jesus will require sharp senses and alert thinking. We will want to avoid anything that dulls our senses and makes it harder to think carefully. And we will want to be careful lest even the unavoidable things in life have this effect on us.
Peter Davids wrote that “For Peter the cares of this life and the pressure of persecution can ‘intoxicate’ the Christian and distract his or her focus just as easily as wine might… the need of the hour is clear judgement and a mind and will prepared to resist anything that would deflect them from a hope set on Jesus’ appearing.” (Davids, 67).
Summary: The Christian’s Mind & the Christian’s Hope
And so it is by having our minds prepared for action, and being sober-minded, that we will be able to set our hope fully on the grace that will be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ. And I don’t think we can miss the connection between the use of our minds and the exercise of our hope. What will it take to hope fully in Christ’s return? Our minds, not sprawled out on the couch with a beer in our hands, but alert and active and clear.
As Thomas Schreiner wrote, “Hope will not become a reality without disciplined thinking. Thinking in a new way does not happen automatically; it requires effort, concentration, and intentionality.” [Thomas R. Schreiner, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, vol. 37, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2003), 78.]
Christians must think if we’re going to hope.
Thinking is a core part of being a Christian. Ephesians 4:17-18 says, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart” (Ephesians 4:17–18).
Hard hearts make for futile, darkened, ignorant thinking. But made new in Christ, God’s people are to love the Lord with all of our minds (Luke 10:27). And setting our hopes on the return of Christ calls for careful, active engagement of our renewed minds.
And we need to understand that Peter makes this statement to all of his readers. Not just to the scholars or the students or the people who got A’s in school.
Which means that using your mind does not have anything to do with being an intellectual or being counted as “smart” as our world often defines it. Some of the best Christian minds I have known have been people who did not think of themselves as very smart. They didn’t have degrees or know other languages or read big books for fun. But they used their minds to think in an active and careful way. They didn’t believe everything they were told. They read the Bible as deeply and carefully as they could and thought about what they read. And they engaged their minds in a way that cultivated and deepened their hope in the return of Christ.
And in fact, some of the laziest minds that I’ve known have been from academics and intellectuals who loved big words and big ideas and even had advanced degrees and yet were sloppy and lazy in the way that they applied their minds to their walk with God and their hope in Christ’s return.
So this isn’t about your IQ or how well you do in school. This is about how active and careful your mind is as you go through life setting your hope on the return of Christ. It’s about making sure that your mind, however powerful or not powerful you think it is, is always ready for action. It’s about not switching off our thinking or letting it get dulled with intoxicating influences.
The Christian’s mind and the Christian’s hope are intertwined and inseparable. We think in order to hope.
Application: Getting Your Mind Off the Couch
So, what does it look like to put this into practice? In many ways, this is an easy passage to apply because it is application. This is how Peter applies everything we learned in the previous few weeks.
But still, let’s think a bit more carefully: what does this kind of active, careful thought, for the sake of active hope, look like in real life?
Let’s look at this two ways—first, negatively, and then, positively.
By negatively, I mean being alert to the various influences on our thinking that surround us, and being careful about anything that will dull our thinking so that we stop hoping fully in the return of Christ.
Just think about all of the sources of information and noise in our world, and how easy it is for us to become dull and intoxicated in our thinking. If Peter and his readers needed to be sober-minded in the 1st century, before social media or Hollywood, how much more us? Our minds need to be nowhere more engaged than when we are being bombarded with all of these messages from the world.
It’s quite concerning when we think of the way that many Christians interact with entertainment media, apparently doing so in a way that doesn’t involve much thought at all, watching, listening and reading things without much attention at all to the bigger issues.
Do we realize that every movie, TV show, YouTube video, and advertisement has a message? That is comes from a certain view of the world? That it’s telling us things about what’s good and true and beautiful and important?
This is one of the reasons why our culture has changed its mind so rapidly on so many key issues. In 2008, Americans elected Barack Obama who stated his belief that marriage was between one man and one woman. And just look at how much ground our culture has covered in the fifteen years since.
And how much of that has been because of the media and the types of heroes that our culture has held up for us to be entertained by? For years, our culture has celebrated the stories of those who throw off the mold of who they are supposed to be and instead choose for themselves who they want to be and how they want to express their own authentic self.
We’re horrified to hear about 14-year olds undergoing life-altering surgeries, permanently changing their bodies to “follow their hearts” when they’re not even mature enough to vote or hold a driver’s licence. And yet how many of those seeds were sown in movies like The Little Mermaid, which seems to be an innocent Disney movie that is kid-friendly— yet it celebrates a teenaged girl going against her father’s wishes and permanently changing her body because she developed romantic feelings for someone she just met?
Some of the most innocent-looking stories in our world are laden with ideas that, if you really think about them, are super dangerous. And we can’t say that they’re just silly stories, and people know the difference between those stories and real life, because they don’t. All kinds of people in our world are living out those stories in real time all around us.
And so as Christians, we can’t turn off our brains. We can’t just swallow what we’re fed. Any time we’re behind a screen or reading words or listening to music or podcasts, we need to have our minds turned on—prepared for action, soberly considering what we’re being told. Sometimes that might mean that we go ahead and watch or listen or read, but we’re thinking as a Christian the whole time about the messages that we’re receiving, and how those messages compare to God’s word. This even applies to Christian material that we consume.
Sometimes, it’s easy to recline and relax to a good Christian movie when that’s actually the time that we need to be awake and alert—because more often than not, these Christian movies today tend to be shallow or go beyond what Scripture teaches for the sake of “imagination.” And I would argue that this can be more dangerous than non-Christian movies because getting gospel truth wrong is more dangerous than not getting any gospel truth at all.
As a teenager, I remember watching hit Christian movies like Facing The Giants (partially because it was about football and that was one of my idols back then). This movie brought me to tears until I realized that the ending of the movie when the coach gets his dream job, a new truck, and a baby touches on his faith being the engine towards earthly rewards as opposed to eternal—which is along the same lines of Joel Osteen’s “name it and claim it” prosperity gospel sermons.
On the other hand, sometimes this might mean that we just need to turn off the screen or the headphones because however discerning we’re trying to be, whatever it is we’re taking in is not going to help us set our hope fully on the grace to be given at the revelation of Jesus Christ. The point here is that we don’t ever get to take a break from being sober-minded.
And this isn’t just about being discerning for the sake of being discerning. This is about being discerning for the sake of setting our hopes on the grace that will be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Which means we need to be active and alert on guard for anything which could dull our senses to the hope of Christ’s return.
Maybe that’s in the flyers from the hardware store, trying to sell you on ways to spend more money to make your home nicer, subtly or not so subtly encouraging you to transfer your hope from the return of Christ to a comfortable future here on earth.
Maybe it has nothing to do with media at all. Maybe it’s being on guard against the intoxicating affects of grumbling or complaining about our health or politics or even the weather—little ways we can begin to hope more and more in the things of earth instead of the return of Christ.
We need to be on guard against anything that dulls our hope in Christ’s appearance. If we find anything in our lives that is having that effect, we either need to start thinking about it differently, or we need to avoid it entirely. We must stay sober-minded and alert to any influence that would dim our hope resting fully on Christ.
Now we’ve been talking negatively here. But we can flip this around and speak positively. Having our minds ready for action means actively use our minds to positively think about the things that will stir up and sharpen our hope in Christ’s return.
We’re doing that now, as we carefully think about God’s word and its implications. I hope your mind is not lounging back, just letting these words come at you. I hope your mind is ready for action even now, actively engaged, thinking about what’s being said, thinking about what Peter said, and carefully considering the truth in order to stir up your hope.
Just think about this: if you were to truly set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ, what would you need to do with your mind in order to sustain that? How would you need to think? What sort of habits and practices would you need to engage in in order to keep that hope alive?
Now, hear what Peter is calling us to: to actually do that. To actually use our minds in whatever way necessary to keep our hope fixed on the grace of Christ’s return. And it goes without saying that one of the very best ways that we can use our minds to stir up hope is to read and think about God’s word regularly, both on our own and then in all of the ways that we do that together as a church.
Isn’t this why we sit under expositional preaching here on Sunday mornings? Or do our Bible study nights here, whether it’s Wednesday nights with the Young Adults or the monthly Sunday nights with the men and women of our church? So that we can grow in carefully reading and critically thinking about God’s Word on our own so that our hope (both individually and together) might be set fully on the coming grace in Christ?
So on your own, consider last week’s sermon application (https://ebcnipawin.ca/sermons/1-peter/his-story/) on reading the Bible slowly while using Bible study tools like study Bibles or commentaries or reading articles on the passage that you’re in to help you understand the parts that are harder to understand. Maybe look into some classes that our local Bible college offers for the general public once a year.
And what I’m not saying is that you need to be a bookworm or an “academic” or a Bible scholar—but what I am saying (and what Peter is saying) is that we need to think more and deeper about this bottomless Bible so that our hope would be set fully on the coming grace in Christ rather than what’s happening tomorrow or the fun thing that’s scheduled for next week/month or the next week or the movie that’s coming out next year.
Shouldn’t we want this? The return of Jesus in grace for us will be literally the best thing ever. Why would we want to be distracted with anything less? Why would we want to be satisfied with cheaper pleasures? Shouldn’t we want to hope in this wonderful truth as fully as we can?
And that means getting our minds off of the couch. It means getting our brains in the game, thinking carefully for the sake of hoping fully. We’ve just scratched the surface of some of the things this could mean today. Our minds are always active and thinking to hope is something we’ll always be growing in.
As we end, I want to remind us of the good news of the gospel logic in this passage. Setting our hope completely on the return of Jesus is not a requirement for grace. Verse 13 isn’t a test we need to pass in order to receive that grace. The grace is coming because Jesus is coming.
Nevertheless, because He is coming, we’ve been called to action. So please, don’t let this go in one ear and out the other today. Determine to take a step towards active, sober thinking this very day. That might mean even just memorizing this verse—writing it out on a sticky note and committing it to memory.
The possible steps we could take are many. Let’s just make sure we actually take even one, that we might be joyfully obedient to the apostle Peter’s instruction that we, preparing our minds for action, and being sober-minded, would set our hope fully on the grace that will be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ.