Robert Caldwell, Professor of Church History at Southwestern Seminary, preached from 1 Peter 1, verses 13-21, in SWBTS Chapel on April 17, 2025.
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All right, thank you. Praise band that was wonderful. All the many themes that were in those songs we sung this morning, we’re going to see in our text today, I want to thank Dr Dockery for inviting me to this to preach in chapel, and we’ve been doing this series on the virtues and values that are necessary for shaping a grace filled, Christ centered community. And we have made it to the end of the semester, and we’re going to be looking today at the virtue of holiness, holiness. My sermon is titled The pursuit of holiness, and I’m going to be preaching out of First Peter, chapter one. I’m going to be preaching out of the next section that was read this morning. So we had some great context in that in the reading this morning, so, and I’ll make reference to that as well. There’s some great stuff in there. But our text today, chapter one, verses 13 through 21 I mean, it exhorts us to holiness, holiness in its various facets. We’re going to look at three. There’s three main verbs, three main exhortations that we’ll see in this text here from verses 13 through 21 as we’ll be pondering this text for the next half hour. But first, let’s, let’s go to the Lord in prayer.
Thank you Lord for this time. Thank you Lord for bringing us to the end of this semester, for blessing us, for strengthening us. We pray that we know your word more fully now than we did in January. We pray that we walk more closely with you now than we did earlier this year. Lord now turn our attention to this, this important topic of holiness as we go through this text today. Be with us in Christ’s name. Amen.
Often, when I’m out driving, excuse me, I’ll be on the highway and I’ll see a billboard. Powerball jackpot, $450 million normally, out roll my eyes. I can’t think of a better way to throw away money than investing in the lottery, right? I wouldn’t encourage it. But then, after I get over that, I start dreaming, what would I do with all that money? What? What would I do as I’m standing there with this little piece of paper with numbers on it, numbers worth $450 million 300 million after taxes, right? Well, I don’t know what I would do, but I do know this, everything changes. Everything is different, right? My relationship with work changes. Am I going to go back? I love my work, my relationship with my friends would change. He’s the friend with nine figures in his bank account, my relationship with my family, with my church. In short, once I turn in that slip of paper, a massive windfall will come my way. It will change everything. Well, what does this have to do with holiness? What does this have to do with our text? Well, if we look here in verse 13 of First Peter, chapter one, there’s this little word at the beginning.
Therefore, right? Therefore, what is it? Therefore? Peter is about to in verses 13 and following, he is going to exhort his readers to godly living. Yet he Grounds this exhortation on something that preceded it, on the text that we read this morning, right? Notice, after this, this wonderful intro in in the first two verses, this Trinitarian introduction, Peter explodes with joy, right? And then, you know, blah. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ. And then he moves on. And then he gives this list of these great things that are coming our way. Because of his great mercy, He has given us a new birth into a living hope. Verse four, He’s given us an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled and unfading. It’s kept in heaven for you.
It’s coming for you, right? You are being guarded by God’s power through faith for a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time, it’s like, it’s almost as if Peter is like there’s this wonderful windfall coming, spiritual windfall. It’s going to be poured out, blessing out upon blessing upon you. Therefore, what do you do? What do you do with these staggering realities, these astounding truths, everything has changed. What do you do? Well, Peter, in our text today, the basic answer to this question, what do you do before you turn in that ticket that’s for the spiritual windfall, he says, pursue holiness. Pursue holiness, and that’s what we’ll be looking at here, our big idea in this text, in light of the inheritance, in light of our inheritance that is coming for us. Peter calls Christians to live a life characterized by three things. One, hope in Christ’s coming. Two, pursue holiness. Be holy as the Lord. Your God is holy. Three, cultivate a life of reverent fear before the Lord. Hope, holiness, fear.
This is these are the three points we’ll be looking at here today in in our text here. So let’s look at this first exhortation here. Exhortation number one, verse 13, therefore with your mind ready for action, be sober minded. And here’s the main verb of the verse, set your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Wonderful words. Set your hope completely right. Hope. What is hope? Hope is like faith directed at something toward the future. What is the object of our hope? It is, it is the grace, the grace to be brought to you when at the revelation of the manifestation of Christ, when He comes at his second, at his second return, the grace is this is all. This is our salvation. Everything bound up in it, all that he is, all that He has for us. It’s coming. It will be made manifest when he returns again. This is your hope, Christian, do you set your hope completely on this? When Hope is robust, when it’s living and active in one’s life, it in one’s spirit, it does something to you, doesn’t it? It changes you.
It animates you. Have you ever been hopeless? And then all of a sudden, there was a glimmer of hope. Your countenance, your spirit, is uplifted. Something changes. The apostle John knew this. He knew something about hope. We look to a little bit in First John, chapter three, there are these wonderful verses that kind of reference the same thing that we’re seeing here in this text, First John, three, verses, two through three. Hear these words. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is. Now. I mean, that’s wonderful, but keep reading. Everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure hope. Purity a pursuit of purity. In our text, set your hope fully be holy. It’s our as God is holy. It’s the same pairing, hope and holiness.
They go together. Peter gives us two pictures here to help us think through completely how we’re to set our hope fully on the grace that is to be. Brought to us. He gives us two pictures here in the first phrase, we look at, we look here at. The first phrase, with your minds ready for action, right? Ready your minds for action. Our minds. This is not just merely our intellect. This is the everything about us, everything in us, our will, our desire, our affections, our mind. We’re to ready our minds for action. The literal Greek here is gird up the loins of your mind. What is that? It’s a strange phrase. Well, I it’s something that I want to do every time we do we process with the regalia during graduation. Got these long robes, right? I’m TR I’m tripping, I’m stumbling. I can’t walk up those stairs out there with this thing on. I just don’t know how to live the in the ancient world, they had long robes togas. You can’t run in those things. It’s very hard.
And so what you do is you you take the bottom and you tuck it in your belt so your knees down below are free and visible, and you can run. You can take action, right? This is what we’re to do with our minds. We’re to take action. We’re to set our hope fully on the grace that is to be brought to us, we’re to be strengthened and hope. We’re to take action. Gird up the loins of your mind. Why do we need to do this? Because there are forces at work that seek to rob us of our hope. Right? We have, the world, the flesh, the devil, all these things are at work against us. Peter says, a little later in the letter, he speaks of the in chapter two, of the passions of the flesh, right? These, these, these desires of the flesh that rise up against us. And they, what do they do? They wage war against your soul. And if we’re a spiritual couch potato, if we’re not readying our minds for action, we’re not going to win that war. So we must be vigilant, ready, active. Second picture here, he says, Here, be sober minded. Be sober minded when we’re intoxicated, right?
The our judgment is completely compromised. We think we’re in control. We’re not we. We think everything’s all right. It’s not. We think we see clearly. We don’t right. This is how sin affects the mind. Affects the spirit. It makes us intoxicated. It makes us see up, down and down, up. Take anger, rage, for instance, right when we’re in the middle of it, we think our cause is just. We think our words are righteous. I’m laying it out outside of us. Everyone else sees a rant. They a torrent of words that’s destroying relationships, that’s hurting people. What’s happened? We’ve let passions, desires rise up and get the upper hand in our minds. We’ve allowed ourselves to become spiritually intoxicated. This is the same thing that happens with pride, greed, sex, these things intoxicate the mind. We don’t have our bearings. Peter is saying, stay sober minded. Know the weaknesses in your spirit, in your mind. Build patterns of life so that you will not come to that place of spiritual intoxication and set your hope completely on Christ’s return.
He’s coming. That’s our first exhortation, number two, verses, 14 through 16. He calls us to be holy as the Lord our God is holy. Here’s our text. Here’s our main topic today, As obedient children, verse 14, do not be conformed to the desires. There’s that word again, passions, desires. Do not be conformed to the desires of your former ignorance. But as the one who called you is holy, you also are to be holy in all your conduct. So wonderful words. Here we see this call to holiness. Peter is exhorting us to is, it’s got, it’s got two sides to it, right? There’s a negative call away from something, and then there’s a positive call to something, right As obedient children do not be conformed to the desires of your former ignorance. In your lives before Christ, in their lives before Christ, they lived in ignorance of God, in ignorance of Christ and His ways. They were probably Gentile, pagan converts. They were completely ignorant of God and His ways, and thus, desires, passions, cravings, lusts. These were the things that characterized their lives, that got the upper hand, that motivated them, that moved their lives forward.
Peter is basically saying, set those aside, move away from those As obedient children. Do not be conformed to them. Then the positive call, verse 15, those the one who called you is holy. You are also are to be holy in your conduct. For it is written, Be holy because I am holy. So here holy. What is this term? Denote it right? It means being set apart. There’s being dedicated to God for His service. There’s ideas of separateness. We’re separate from the world. We’re not conforming to it. There’s ideas of moral purity also as well. We’re not living as they are living. We are holy. And the reason for this, the reason he calls us to holiness is because God himself is holy. This is something right we see throughout the whole Bible. The Holy God expects worshipers who are holy, oh Lord, Who shall dwell on Your holy hill, He who walks blamelessly and does what is right and speaks truth in his heart, who does not slander with His tongue and does no evil to his neighbor, holiness, Ephesians, one God chose us in Christ, before the foundation of the world for what that We should be holy and blameless before him, holiness takes hard work. It takes work. It takes action.
Right. Prepare your minds for action. Be sober minded. God does grant us. He grants us grace. He bestows on us immeasurable resources, His Spirit, His Word, His Church, and yet he expects that we put these resources to work in our lives, to to rid us of the old man, to put to death, sinful patterns in our lives. You’re not getting out of a sermon from me without a quote from Edwards, the way to heaven. He preached, the way to heaven is ascending. We must be content to travel uphill, though it be hard and tiresome, and contrary to the natural tendency and bias of our flesh that tends downward to the earth, right, we have these two tendencies in us. There’s the tendency, the gravity of the flesh, the desires of the flesh, that tend down toward the earth.
Yet God calls us upward. He calls us to ascend. He calls us to to to work out our salvation with fear and with trembling. Right? You’re doing the work, and yet that work that you’re doing, keep reading in that Philippians verse, For it is God who works in you to will and to work, to act according to His good pleasure, right? Who’s doing the work you’re putting in, the hard effort you’re fighting sin, prayerfully, bringing it before the Lord. And yet the Lord is working in you, in that in that effort, and he gets all the glory. Once we’ve succeeded, once we started building. Once we obey. And then the obedience become we start obeying more and more and more, and then pretty soon we we get a habit of obedience in our lives. That sin that that followed us for so long now seems to be in the rear view mirror of our lives, and we can say God did this. It was hard work, but God did it all. That’s the mystery of of gospel sanctification. He’s working through our working, right? So be holy as the Lord your God is holy.
So another so we so here’s our two facets so far, facets of the pursuit of holiness, right we got setting our hope completely on the grace to be given us. We have an exhortation to seek holiness. Now we have an exhortation to conduct ourselves in reverent fear here in verses 17 through 21 I’ll read from the CSB here if you appeal to the Father who judges impartially according to each one’s work. Now here’s the main verb. You are to conduct yourselves in reverence during your time living as strangers. The CSB is the only translation that I’ve seen that uses word reverence. Here. Every other translation uses the word fear, right? It’s it’s a, it’s a, it’s a sharper word. It seems to the way we’re using our language today, and it’s usually more negative, but this, but Peter’s, Peter’s using it in a positive light. He’s using fatherly imagery and the imagery of fear in the same verse. Right? These go together.
They go together in our Christian spirituality, the word connotes awe, profound respect or deep reverence for a deity, or in this case, of course, God, this fear is not irrational. It’s not paralyzing. It’s a fear that demonstrates deep and profound respect for God and Peter goes on and gives two reasons why we’re to conduct our lives with in with fear, with reverent fear. First, right in the opening of verse 17, we call upon a father who judges impartially. If you appeal verse 17 to the Father who judges impartially according to each one’s work, right? And you do appeal, right? Our Father judges impartially. He doesn’t play favorites. His judgment of each one’s work, that’s the last day.
The judgment here he’s talking about is the last day this judgment will be fair, just and impartial. God’s judging us by our work. This is not inconsistent with salvation by grace, by justification by faith alone. That’s a whole other topic to talk about. You get that in your section in sanctification and systematic theology, no grace moves us to do good works which he’s prepared for us in advance. So conduct your lives here in reverent fear, in reverence because the Holy God, your heavenly Father, who loves you, who’s provided his son for you, your Holy Father judges each one’s work impartially. Second reason we’re to conduct our lives with fear is because reverent fear is because we’re redeemed by the precious blood of Christ. This is what we see in verses 18 through 21 for you know, for you know, right, he’s given the explanation right, why you are to conduct yourselves in reverence. You know that. Yet you were redeemed from your empty way of life, inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb.
Redemption, being redeemed, right it? There’s lots of things associated with that in the scriptures, but two things we see here, redemption liberates Israel’s liberation from Egypt is her redemption. We see this wonderful freeing, freedom from the slavery of Egypt in the past, redemption is also costly. Silver and Gold were often used in redeeming slaves. In the Greco Roman world, people would have images of this all the time. They’ve seen this. It’s costly. You, however, as Christians, you weren’t redeemed with silver or gold. You lived lives of emptiness. Think Ecclesiastes, one emptiness, vapor, you’ve been redeemed from that not with silver and gold, which shall perish, which yields no spiritual benefit whatsoever.
Rather, you were redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, something more costly, something most costly, the precious blood of Christ, Christ giving his life for you. Notice. And then he goes on, Peter goes on to kind of look at how precious is this life that was given for you how precious it is. He’s like the unblemished and spotless lamb, faultless consecrated to God, the perfect Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Furthermore, in verse 20, he was foreknown before the foundation of the world, right from eternity, God had set his sights on this one, His beloved Son, to be the center of salvation history. Now this one has been revealed to you He’s come. He’s actually come and lived his life in the region near where you are. There about he’s come for you.
He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for you through him, you believe in God who raised him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God. Look at all these things we receive from Christ, from this pre this, this precious life that has been given on our behalf, since you’ve received so much from this spotless lamb, why would you not live your life here in reverent fear, right, holy fear, walking in holiness, fear, hope, all these things wrapped up together. So here we are again, right at Hope, so that your the last phrase of our text, so that your faith and hope are in God, we’ve come full circle to hope again. Have this hope in a massive spiritual inheritance. You have a ticket, right? It’s not cashed in yet. What are we to do? How will you live your days in light of the grace to be given to you at the revealing of Christ Peter gives us the only safe way conduct your lives in reverent fear, set your hope fully on the grace to be brought to you the revelation of Christ. Pursue holiness, holiness in life, in thought and deed.
So let’s pray Heavenly Father, thank You for this time. We’re grateful for this word. We pray that you would use it to strengthen us in grace, to fill us with your hope. Lord, purify us, strengthen us as we pursue holiness, faith. For the Glory of Your Son, for the for Your glory Heavenly Father, in the power of the Spirit, we ask these things, amen. Amen.
