Steps to Staying Clean (1 Peter 1:13-16)

What do a mouse in the bathroom and termites in the walls have to do with your spiritual life? More than we like to admit. We talk about the subtle way Christians can “live with” spiritual pests: tolerated thoughts, excused habits, and private compromises that slowly weaken the foundation of faith and credibility. Peter’s words in 1 Peter 1:13-14 push us past more information and toward real application, where belief finally shows up as behavior.

We break down four early steps for staying clean in a corrupt culture without isolating from the world: prepare your mind for action by tightening what you let into your thought life, stay sober minded by gaining emotional self-control under pressure, fix your hope completely on the future grace of Jesus Christ, and start breaking old patterns tied to former desires. Along the way, we unpack what it means to be “obedient children” and why obedience is the one family likeness that should mark every believer, no matter how different we are.

If you feel the cultural undertow pulling you toward “everybody’s doing it,” this conversation offers a clear framework for resisting conformity and choosing integrity that looks like Jesus in everyday work and everyday decisions. Listen through, then share it with a friend who’s been fighting the same battles and leave a review so more people can find the show.

What does it look like to live a holy life? In In Pursuit of Holiness, Stephen shows you how to think clearly, resist sin, and live differently in a culture that pulls you the other way. Move beyond information to real application. Get your copy today and take your next step with Christ. https://bit.ly/4v5aktw

Learn more: https://www.wisdomonline.org/

Transcript

Obedient Children In God’s Family

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Notice again, as obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours. Don't be conformed. Listen, when we come into the family of God by faith in Christ, we are all uniquely different. Our relationships are different, our tastes, our desires, from music to temperament to wiring emotionally, but one characteristic, according to Peter, should mark us all. And that's why he categorically says, you are to be known as obedient children. You have heard over the years of illustrations that have come from that field behind our house. Thirty beautiful acres of pasture land. We've watched cows and uh calves leap around that field. We've watched horses gallop. Well, that field doesn't belong to us, which is great because we haven't had to shovel any manure or mow it, but that field has been sold. And a developer is going to put homes directly behind us. Shouldn't you say aww or something? Thank you. I feel better now. Well, one of the problems we do have with that field is all of those little varmits that make their way through it that want to move in with us in the winter, and so typically in the fall I gotta lay out the traps and get prepared. I was behind this year, and so about a month ago, I was in my study at home. Uh one evening, my wife was in the backmaster uh bathroom, and I heard her shriek, there's a mouse in here. I could tell by the way she screamed it that she didn't want me to look up the word mice in my Greek lexicon or work on a new sermon on how to minister to mice. She wanted no information, she wanted action. So I jumped to it and set out a trap or two, and and uh it wasn't long before that mouse entered the glory of its final resting place and wherever that is. It's interesting. I came across an article this week that that uh I couldn't help but share with you. It's an article that reviewed how people actually are willing to live with rodents and spiders and pests. In fact, this article gave research and statistics about how people are going to dish out their hard-earned money and what it takes to get them to action. And I can't imagine anybody who has their job polling people on how they use exterminators, but this is this is the result. 24% of adults will pay an exterminator to get rid of spiders. 27% of adults will pay to have exterminators come out and kill ants. 56% will pay professional help to get rid of mice. 58% will pay to get rid of roaches, and 90% of adults will pay to get rid of cats. Oh, I wish. No, no, termites. Termites. Now I said that not to get all you cat lovers irritated all over again, although I enjoy doing that. But I did that really to tell you what startles me as I read that is how many people are willing to live with that stuff. Half of them didn't didn't respond. Spiders, ants, roaches, mice. I guess it's okay. They're in the garage. Or maybe they just moved into the living room. It's really not a big deal. Even one out of ten, only nine out of ten, I should say, were willing to move into action to get rid of termites who will turn your foundation into mud. One out of ten are going, you know, it's okay. It's no big deal. I found that to be an illustration of and a warning, not for the unbeliever, but for the believer. How many Christians, how many of us will live with something that doesn't belong? How many of us will put up with something that invades the home of our hearts and say, you know, it's out there in the garage or it's nearby, I'm not gonna worry about it. You know. We live with spiritual pests, spiritual termites. Let me put the question another way. What are we willing to tolerate and what are we willing to exterminate? What leads us to take action about those things that invade our lives? You know, I'm convinced that what the church needs today is not just more information, not just more word studies, not just more exposition, but more application. Where we arrive at the point where we not only declare the right beliefs, but we demonstrate the right behavior. Now, as you know by now, we've been in this study, in this letter from Peter, and he's writing to believers who are surrounded by a corrupt culture where everything is tolerated, there is no pest too evil to eliminate, where anything goes, where right is wrong and wrong is right. In the first century, you need to think of culture as being synonymous with political and economic and moral corruption, which means that for the believer in the first century, temptation was not being offered to them behind closed doors. It was being bartered, it was being offered, it was being sold on Main Street in broad daylight. How do you handle that kind of culture? How do you handle relentless discouragement or temptation? How do you know what to tolerate and what to exterminate? Let me put it this way. How do you stay clean while living in a corrupt culture? The Apostle Peter arrives at this intersection this morning in our study. If you have your copy of the New Testament, turn once again to the letter from Peter, 1 Peter. It's called, we just finished Peter's introduction, his comments in chapter 1 that have been loaded down, freighted with doctrinal truth. Now we arrive at verse 13, and this is the place where New Testament Bible students they identify this verse as a hinge on which this letter swings. It's a hinge that changes Peter's objective from belief to behavior. And before we dive in, let me just kind of quickly tell you that Peter's premise is pretty simple. If the Christian is going to become clean, become more clean, if the Christian is going to stay clean, if the believer is going to live a holy life in an unholy world, the solution is not isolation or more information. The solution includes application. Peter now moves us to take action. Now, as we go through a few verses here, what I want to do is break this down into what I'm just going to simply call six steps to staying clean. You could broaden it to mean six steps to becoming and staying clean. This is not for the unbeliever. I'm not suggesting you turn over a new leaf. You first must have a new life. This is for the believer who wants to stay clean in a corrupt culture. Six steps. Let me give you step number one. Get a handle on your thought life. Get a handle on your thought life. Look at verse 13. Therefore, stop. We're going to get further than that. Be encouraged. He means, based on all the discussion of what I've just delivered to you on what to believe, now, therefore, on that basis, here's something to behave, as it were. Prepare your mind for action. Prepare your mind to get off your sofa and get into gear. Now, the verb to prepare your mind. I actually like the old King James translation of this particular text that renders it gird up the loins of your mind. It's just a great expression. In fact, it takes the reader back, and I think Peter's thinking about this all the way back, to the book of Exodus, where the Passover is being established among the Israelite people. They've been held in bondage in Egypt for 400 years. Following God's command through their leader Moses, each household has slain a lamb and taken some of the blood of that lamb, and they've put it on the doorposts of their mud slave huts. And according to the command, they've cooked the lamb, and all the Israelites are told in Exodus chapter 12, eat it now with your loins girded, with shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand. Why? Because you're about to be freed from your old life. Everything that you knew is going to change. You, because of your life having been spared by the blood of that innocent lamb, you're about to begin a new life with new laws and a new future home that's flowing with milk and honey. Get ready to take action toward your new life. So girt up your loins. Now, gird up your loins was a reference to someone in these ancient days to reach down and pull up the hem of their robe, the long shirt that men wore that still, they still wear that in the Middle East. Pull it up between your legs and tuck it into your belt. Restrict then the loose flowing gown. It'll make your movement easier. It'll give you the ability to run faster. That's the idea. In fact, the last thing a Roman soldier would do before he ran into battle to have hand-to-hand comment would be tightening his belt. He would eliminate as much as possible that extra fabric from encumbering him as it flowed freely. Now, what Peter does here is he takes that idea and he brings it in and makes it an analogy to tightening up your mind. Tighten up the loose ends of your thought processes, one New Testament scholar wrote. Gird up the loins of your mind. Notice that? That word refers to your thought processing. In other words, tighten up what you allow into your mind. Tighten up what you allow yourself to think upon. You have that battle of what's going into your mind. Tighten it up. You could paraphrase this text to read, and several commentators did. One put it this way: tighten up the belt around your mind. Another, roll up the shirt sleeves of your mind. Another, pull your thoughts together. My father used to simplify it by simply telling us four boys the words, use your head. Use your head. Think. And by the way, Peter is giving us the first and most important step in doing battle. Because it is a battle that takes place in between your ears, in your mind. That's the battleground, isn't it? To battle then with those thoughts that surround you and attempt to invade and infest your thinking processes because they will ultimately inhabit the home of your heart. They're going to move in, and by the way, they're going to kick you out. Your testimony, that is. So, so tighten it all up. Why? So you can fight the good fight, so that you can run your race without being encumbered. This is exactly what Paul has in mind when he exhorts the believer in Corinth to destroy every speculation and every clever suggestion that attacks the true knowledge of God and to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. I love Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of that text. Fit every loose thought into the structure of a life shaped by Christ. You want to be clean in the midst of an unclean culture? Don't be loose, we would say, in your thinking. Because loose thinking leads to loose living. Just ask Eve. Just ask King David. Just ask his son, King Solomon. I'll tolerate that. You know, I'll manage that sin. I'll make room for it. Just a couple of ants. I mean, come on. They're in the garage. What can they do? Those little thoughts Peter's implying, those little mental invaders must be dealt with without mercy, without compromise, without apology. Take action. Get a handle on your thought life. Step number two, get a grip on your emotions. He writes further in verse 13. Therefore, prepare your mind for action. Keep sober in spirit. You notice the words in spirit are italicized because they aren't part of the original text, but added to provide clarification, most often helpful. Peter isn't talking about being sober in contrast to being drunk or intoxicated. He's talking metaphorically about being emotionally self-controlled. Sober. The word means to be steady, to be calm or controlled. It can even refer to someone who is carefully weighing matters at hand. You could render this statement to remain level-headed. Went off the road. Now I say that, and I don't want to immediately take you to the original context. Think of this. Keep in mind the first readers of this letter in the first century, they had every reason to panic. They had every reason to stay up at night. They had every reason to overreact to every news release from Rome about what the emperor had just done or what the laws of the state has just decreed were now out against them. Peter says, stay sober. Don't start staggering around out of control and lose your balance. I think you could understand them to be writing people who would say, these are mind-reeling times. These are mind-troubling times. These are mind-numbing times. Don't panic. Don't get carried away. Don't come unhinged by trouble. Don't lose your emotional stability in the face of hostile or troubling or unfair or insecure seasons or events. This is spiritually applying the words of the famous line by Kipling that came to my mind. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you are a man, my son. Evidence of spiritual maturity is getting a grip on the excesses of unbridled passions and runaway emotions. Step number one, get a handle on your thought life. Step number two, get a grip on your emotions. Step number three, get focused on the future. Verse 13, the middle part, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Fix your hope there. We would say it this way: pin your hope on that. Pin your hopes there. On the coming of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Now, this command is actually the central verb or thought of this paragraph. In fact, if I read it a little more woodenly, you could understand this verse to read something like this: while you have girded up the loins of your minds, and while you are currently getting a grip on your emotions, now fix your hope on your future with Jesus Christ. Fixing your hope, by the way, is an act of the will. It's not an emotional response. It means to live expectantly, to live with anticipation for the coming glory of your Lord and that inheritance we have studied, that just marvel the angels. It'll never fade away. It's being reserved for you. That final act of salvation, the consummation of the glory of God, when you and I will be removed from even the very presence of sin. Fix your hope on that. So, in a very real sense, the Christian lives in the future tense, as if it's present. In contrast, by the way, the world of unbelievers, where do they live? They only live in the present tense. I mean, I got to get it now. Here and now, I'm gonna grab all I can. This is all that matters today. I'm living for today, man. I gotta get everything I can today. Not gonna learn anything from yesterday, and I'm not gonna think about tomorrow. Just give it to me today. Constantly looking for someone or something to give them hope today. But for the believer, what excites us most isn't really what happened yesterday. It isn't really what's happening today, although this has been a great day thus far. A nap this afternoon will top it off. We get excited about that future today. One author wrote that we live in the future tense in such a way that our present actions and decisions are governed in light of the future. Let me illustrate it this way. If you're married, you may well remember the day you guys proposed to your wife to be, hopefully with fasting and prayer, that she would say yes. How many guys proposed, and your your your girlfriend immediately said yes? Not many. From where I'm standing, I can understand why. How many of you like my girlfriend said something a little less exciting? Mine said, I don't know. She did say I don't I don't know because I'd broken up with her so many times and she's afraid I wasn't serious, but I was. And listen, I had a ring in my pocket. If she said no, I was 1400 bucks in the hole, okay, with nothing to show for it. Teasing. Everything, however, when she said yes, began to be interpreted in light of a coming day. Remember? I mean, you treated everything differently. I know I treated money differently. I I was a senior in college, and up to this point I never saved money. If there was loose money laying around, it went immediately into food and more food, right? All of a sudden I gotta save some. After I got engaged, things changed. In fact, we were both in the same senior class in college. I can remember one day I worked all day long on a man's property, and uh when it came time to pay me cash, I asked him, Look, I noticed in your shed is this table and four chairs. And if you don't mind, would you would you pay me instead of cash, would you give me that old table and those four chairs? He was dumbfounded but thrilled. And he gave me that. Why in the world would I work all day for an old table and four chairs that I couldn't fit in my dorm room for six months? Why? Because after graduation, I was gonna need a kitchen table and four chairs where I could sit and my bride could feed me. Those experiments, they were delicious. I'm thinking of my future here. They were delicious. They really were, actually. You want to stay clean in a corrupt culture? Be careful, don't get bogged down in the past. Learn from it. Don't stay there. Don't become over-enamored in the present. Peter says, pin your hope. Pin your expectation. Pin your thoughts on your future. You see, my wife, when we got engaged, you know what she began to do? She began to carefully purchase things, and there wasn't a lot of money to go around for either one of us. Purchase things, and she began to store them in that beautiful cedar hope chest. Hope chest. Not hoping it happened, but in light of the fact that this was her expectation, she began to plan. We do the same. We're hoping. That is we are expectant. Our anticipation is of Revelation 19, verse 9, that coming day when we, the bride, will experience the marriage supper of the Lamb, our bridegroom. Now that should affect what we do with our money and how we plan and how we spend and how we entertain ourselves and how we discipline ourselves and what we do for that day. How we live clean lives preparing for our bridegroom. I think the Apostle John, Apostle Peter had some time around the campfire to talk about this because they seem to be reading each other's mail. The Spirit of God inspired them to say basically the same thing. John said it this way we know that when he appears, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And everyone who has this hope purifies himself. See the connection. Staying clean today has a lot to say about what we're planning to do and where we're planning to be tomorrow. So get a handle on your thought life. Get a grip on your emotions, get focused on the future. Step number four, get rid of old habits. Verse 14. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance. Now, ignorance here doesn't refer to intellectual stupidity or misinformation or ignorance, as in you didn't know it was wrong, so you did it. No, Peter is referring to a kind of moral ignorance, as the New Testament does, in the willful, defiant suppression of the truth so that you can somehow convince yourself it isn't wrong. And if you can get enough people around you shaking their heads, it's okay, you know, you're gonna feel even better about what you're doing. And if the entire culture says that isn't wrong, that's right. That isn't right, that's wrong, you're gonna feel better. That's the kind of ignorance he's referring to. Romans 1 describes it further. He says, but you, as obedient children, do not be conformed to these former lusts. Now, did you see the connection? It's a foundational relationship to getting rid of old habits. You're getting rid of former lusts because you're pursuing a new family likeness as obedient children. But as many as received him Christ, to them he gave the right to become children of God. John chapter 1, verse 12. Let me ask you a question. How many of you grew up with brothers and or sisters? Wow, look at all the happy childhoods out here. How many of you parents right now have more than one child of any age? Raise your hand. Okay. I think you'll understand what I'm talking about. No matter how many brothers and sisters you grew up with, no matter how many children you now have, you've discovered that you are entirely different than your siblings. There may be some overlap. And your children are entirely different. I grew up with three brothers. We had the same mother, the same father, we lived in the same house, we ate the same food, we went to the same church, went to the same schools, played in the same neighborhood, even wore the same clothes as they were passed down. But were we ever different? My brothers and I, we had different tastes, different personalities. Some of them were disobedient. One of us was spiritually minded. I remember my mother giving us a traditional uh birthday wish. Our missionary family didn't have a lot of money, although we didn't know it. You're probably the same way, you just didn't know it. But we love this tradition where uh where our mother would allow us to choose on our birthday our favorite dessert. And many times that was our gift. I can remember that. In fact, I remember my older brother's choice, and I remember it because I didn't like it. Um, but he always chose German chocolate cake with extra coconut, which I've never preferred. You know, my choice was always angel food cake, which fit my personality. No, I'm serious, it really was angel food cake. Love, love that, love that stuff. My my I remember even in music, very different. My youngest brother learned to play the trumpet. Um my brother next to me learned to play the guitar. I took piano lessons, which I wouldn't admit to my friends. My older brother, to the chagrin of my jealous heart, got to take accordion lessons. What a future he had. I mean, I was so jealous about that. We all have different character and personality traits. Children are all unique and all different. But you know what? If I take that illustration now to this text, did you notice that we all, though all of us are different and all of us are unique, there is one characteristic that should mark us all, and it is this trait of obedience. No matter how different your children are, you expect obedience. No matter how different your siblings were, your parents demanded equally. Obedience. Listen, when we come into the family of God by faith in Christ, we are all uniquely different. Our relationships are different, our tastes, our desires, uh, from music to temperament to wiring emotionally, but one characteristic, according to Peter, should mark us all. And that's why he categorically says, you are to be known as obedient children. Well, what does obedience look like? Well, Peter tells us first what it doesn't look like, then it'll tell us what it does. Look at what it doesn't look like. Notice again, as obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours. Don't be conformed. Another rare verb appears only one other time. That's Romans 12, verse 2. You probably recognize that. Don't be conformed to this world. You could paraphrase it. Don't be squeezed into the mold of this world. Don't be fashioned by worldly fashion. Don't pattern your life after the pattern of the world. Listen, the oldest argument you used as a kid growing up, and your kids have used it on you, about doing whatever behavior they wanted to do and typically disobeying and doing it was Mom, Dad, everybody's doing it. God doesn't care that everybody else is doing it. And neither do you as a parent. God knows what everybody else is doing. And he, through Peter, is commanding us, he's warning us, he's encouraging us to fight against the undertow of the majority that will sweep us out to see. What does that undertow look like? Well, Peter describes it in a word, and the word is lust. He calls it your former lusts, which by the way is incredibly encouraging. He calls them your former lust, which informs us they can be broken, these patterns. Well, what are they? Well, the word, the Iransack, the New Testament for lust, is sort of a categorical word that just simply describes a life of sinful desires. It could be good things pursued selfishly, wealth, position, influence. It could be forbidden longings, uncontrolled appetites, sensual impulses, unrighteous motivations, self-centered urges. Hey, all that stuff drives the world. I just described the pattern of the world. This is their pattern. This is the mold into which they want to squeeze you. Which, by the way, is why when somebody in the world, whether they're a believer or not, and sometimes you'll see an article about it, whenever they act so differently than everybody else, like selflessly, everybody goes, Wow, did you see that? Well, it ought to be marked in and through our lives, shows up periodically in something that someone will do. One particular news article that ran in Chicago's Daily Herald talking about two newlyweds. I read it where these newlyweds lost all their money. This couple had left a black case the size of an iPad on the roof of their car as they sped away from the wedding reception to head on their honeymoon. The case held all of the cash gifts they'd been collecting for weeks, and the last gifts came in on the wedding day. They were loaded down. When they reached their destination, they realized what they'd done, it was gone. Newspapers picked up on it and ran the story, and a couple of days later they did a follow-up story because evidently an Asian young man by the name of David Yi had found that case with a business card inside. And even though that case held in cash$12,000, and he was out of work and his bills were mounting, he tracked this couple down and gave it back to them. When that news follow-up hit the newsstands, David Yi was offered inundated all kinds of jobs from all kinds of companies. Why not? Why not? Employee theft is costing corporations billions of dollars every year. You got an honest man who can get away with something and he's gonna do the right thing? I'm gonna hire that guy, right? You should be marked by that. I have shared with you in the past, but it came to my mind, and I want to give glory to our Lord as our model here. For carpenters in Nazareth, one of their chief tasks would have been to carve plows. For several years, Jesus no doubt worked as an apprentice with his adoptive father, sweating alongside of Joseph with planks of wood they sanded and shaped and cut and fastened. It always intrigues me, especially as Jesus came into an awareness of as a young adult before beginning his ministry, especially in his twenties. He could have waited for his father to just sort of slip out of sight, taken a quick look around. And then that plow that he was sweating over to carve just so there it is. But you read that briefest of biographical statement in Philippians chapter two, where he in his humility accepted the limitations of mankind and he showed us what it meant to put in an honest day's work. I'm always struck by the fact that Justin Martyr wrote in the second century he was a church leader in Galilee. And he wrote the interesting statement that farming families were still using the plows that Jesus had carved after 75 years of use. Perhaps the first step in becoming clean and staying clean distinctively so will be for you to put in an honest day's work. Not like the world that'll say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna I'm gonna get you in that contract, and I'm not gonna tell you all the details, and I'm gonna I'm gonna do the least that I can do and still get paid. I'm gonna I'm gonna do the best I can for my Lord. Step number one, get a handle on your thought life. Step number two, get a grip on your emotions. Step number three, get focused on the future. Step number four, get rid of old habits. Steps number five and six are for next Lord's Day, and everyone said, but don't go anywhere yet. Pack your things. Let me say a few things more. I received a letter at our Wisdom for the Hearts Studios some time ago. It was from a young lady that really marked me, a faithful listener. She doesn't live in this area. She wrote that every time the program comes on, she gets out her Bible and her notes, notepad, and begins to take notes as fast as she can. She went on in her handwritten letter to ask me a few questions related to the will of God and doing the will of God. So transparent and eager. I could tell she was deeply committed to living for Christ. She writes, and I quote, I want to do anything God tells me to do. And I often tell the Lord, Lord, you show me and I'll do it. I am totally open to you. What challenge me most about this letter is that it was written by a girl who was still in middle school. Middle school. Someone obviously focused on pleasing the Lord, not wanting to be hindered by habits, runaway emotions. Someone unwilling to tolerate for any moment those spiritual pests, those termites that don't belong, that will eat away at the foundation of your faith and your testimony and your clean, distinctive walk. So this week, let's tighten up the belts around our thinking. Let's roll up the sleeves, as it were, of our thought life. Let's get a grip on runaway emotion and passion. Let's get focused on that future marriage celebration that should govern our thinking. Let's continue even this week to break off old habits that can so quickly turn into concrete. It's lost down the way.