Setting Our Hope On Him - 1 Peter 1:13-21

In this episode of The Long Obedience, Pastor Santosh returns from a summer study break to dive into 1 Peter 1:13-21, exploring what it means to set our hope entirely on God's grace rather than fragile earthly pursuits like careers or retirement. He unpacks the profound call to holiness, reminding listeners that we are redeemed from an empty, futile existence by the precious blood of Christ so that we can reflect His character to the world. Ultimately, drawing on his own family's recent painful trials, he encourages believers that our earthly suffering is never meaningless, but is instead being woven into a much larger, beautiful story of redemption written by God. 

Transcript

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Hi friends. We did not have a podcast episode last week. I was at Regent College in Vancouver, taking my annual summer school class. I've started to build in a rhythm of taking a class at Regent College in Vancouver and then taking a study week afterwards to process what I'd learned and integrate it into my life and ministry. Well, since I'm currently not serving in a church now, I just took the class and I skipped the week of study and reflection because my whole life seems to be a season of study and reflection right now. And that's okay. The class I took was on the writer Flannery O'Connor, and it was taught by Karen Swallow Pryor. If you do not know who Karen Swallow Pryor is, you need to know who this woman is. She is a courageous and brilliant woman who is a voice of reason and sanity in the American church during a season where both are sorely lacking. I pray her tribe will increase. Just Google Karen Swallow Pryor and uh read up on her. She's an amazing, amazing woman. It was a real honor to be able to study under her. But let's turn to our passage for today. This is the Long Obedience Podcast, where we study scripture together. And uh we are going through uh the book of First Peter together. And today we come to First Peter chapter one, starting in verse 13. 1 Peter chapter 1, verse 13. Therefore, with your minds ready for action, be sober-minded and set your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conform to the desires of your former ignorance. But as the one who called you is holy, you also are to be holy in all of your conduct. For it is written, Be holy because I am holy. If you appeal to the Father who judges impartially according to each one's work, you are to conduct yourselves in reverence during your time living as strangers. For you know that you were redeemed from your empty way of life, inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb. 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. This is the word of the Lord, as we would say in the Anglican church. Verse 13 contains the central command: set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Let's dig down in this word hope. Hope can be both a verb and a noun. As a verb, I hope it stops raining so I can go outside. As a no noun, her hope is that her company gets the contract. The way Peter is using the word is as a noun. It's a real thing. Hope like this can act as a power and energy in our life, propelling us forward in action. So this season of my own life, I am in transition between churches. I've been a pastor uh for most of my adult life, most of my working life. And right now I am in between churches. And so I place my hope in God that He is sovereign and that He is preparing both me and the next church or the next ministry assign uh placement to align well. And see, this hope has a power in my life. It keeps me positive and it reinforces my faith in God. And then Peter also talks about using the faculties of our minds, right? He says in verse one, therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace. Set your hope fully on the grace, completely on the grace. There's this idea that not a single part of us is not hoping in the grace. In verse 21, he writes, Your faith and hope are in God. And I find this to be very challenging because if we're honest, we do not completely set our hope on the grace of God. Rather, our hope is rests on earthly things. Maybe you're coming towards retirement. So your hope is in your retirement or to have a retirement fund. Maybe your hope is in your health. Maybe your hope is in your career. Maybe your hope is in advancement. And God has really been working on me during this season and indeed through most of my life. Because if you have an idealized view of what your life should be like, if your hopes are placed in things in this world and in this life, then when you don't get those things, you can you can become crushed and you can despair. And I carry that with me. I'm 55 years old, and obviously there are things that I hope for that did not come about in my life and in my ministry. But in this passage, God is guiding my vision beyond those earthly things. See, hope is powerful because we become what we hope in. We become what we hope in. And Peter is saying that this grace is coming to us. It is going to be brought to us when Jesus Christ is revealed. One day, Jesus will return. There's coming for us a day of great reunion and rejoicing. I'm just going to open up to Revelation chapter 21 here. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I also saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband. Then I heard a loud voice from the throne. Look, God's dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and will be their God. You see, Jesus is returning to earth to set up his kingdom. So we, of all people, need to have a future-oriented focus. We need to move past past disappointments and regrets. And to be honest, this is a big personal struggle for me. I find my mind constantly going back to past regrets and past pain. And I need to refocus and reorient my mind toward what Jesus is preparing for me, this grace that is about to come. The passage begins with this interesting phrase: prepare your minds for action. Literally, the Greek says, girt up the loins of your mind. So at that, in that when Peter's writing there, long robes had to be gathered up before running or working. So spiritually speaking, Peter's saying is don't let your thoughts drag around you loosely. Gird up the loins of your mind. Our minds matter. Much spiritual warfare takes place in our thinking. We replay failures. We compare ourselves with others. We imagine alternate histories. We think only if only I had made different decisions. If only I'd stayed, if only I'd known. If only, if only, if only. The trouble with if only is that it always imagines a perfect world that never existed. And you see, Peter redirects our us. He prepares our mind. He says, be sober-minded, think clearly. Don't let your thoughts be intoxicated by fantasies, fears, resentments, or regrets. You see, Christian maturity includes learning how to preach truth to ourselves. The psalmist asks, why are you cast down, O my soul? He's speaking to himself. Perhaps we need to do that more often. Kind of investigate our emotions, interrogate them. Why am I upset? Why am I angry? Why am I sad? And with the Holy Spirit, go a little bit deeper and see what the source of our discomfort is. Hope in God, trust his goodness, remember his promises. You are never abandoned. Your story isn't over. A second thing that Peter talks about here is that is about holiness. This whole idea of holiness. And I'm going to reread this part for us because it's just so important. This is 14 and 15. As obedient children, do not be conform 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. For it is written, be holy because I am holy. Be holy because I am holy. Holiness is a call to a different level of living. And right now, every single human being on this planet is living one of two ways. They are either living in holiness or they are living in unholiness. Right now, whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you are living one of two ways. You are living either in the world of holiness or you are living in the world of unholiness. And as Christians, we are called out into the world of holiness. So let's dig down into this reality of holiness. R.C. Sproul was a reformed theologian who died almost 10 years ago, and he did some great work in this area of holiness and in his landmark book called The Holiness of God, which I read quite a few years ago and made a big impact on me. But he says in that book, this is a quote from Sproull, when God gathered the nation at Sinai and gave to them his law and constituted them as a unique commonwealth among all of the nations of the world, he said to his people, You shall be holy even as I am holy. This was not a new calling. When God made us and fashioned us, he said, Let us make man in our own image. An image is a likeness of something. Being created in the image of God, among other things, means that we, as God's creatures who bear his image, are called to mirror and to reflect his character. We are to mirror and reflect his holiness. We are called to holiness. But what is holiness? So the Hebrew word for holiness is kadusha, which simply means set apart. So if you read the book of Exodus, there are certain items that are called holy: the tent, the ark, the table of showbread, the lampstand. Now, what I want you to see here, these are physical objects. They can't do anything, but they're called holy because they are being set apart to be used by God for his purposes. So this is a sense that I want you to get here is that you are set apart. You are holy because you have been set apart, you have been called out. And so what happens because we've been set apart, because we've been called out, we are to reflect back the character and nature of God. That's what it means to be holy. It means that when people see us, they should be able to see the nature and character of Jesus Christ. This has incredible implications for your life and my life. How do you treat your coworkers? How do you treat people who inconvenience you? Do you treat them like Jesus treats them? Or do you react negatively because they are inconveniencing you? Another pastor and writer I really like is a guy named Paul David Tripp out of Philadelphia. And he he writes this: He says, holiness is the lifelong work of God's grace, progressively transforming us into the likeness of Christ so that we increasingly love what God loves and live for his glory. Holiness is the lifelong work of God's grace, progressively transforming us into the likeness of Christ, so that we increasingly love what God loves and live for his glory. What an amazing. I love writers like this who just in an economy of words can just um convey so much depth. You know what I mean? So holiness is lifelong. It's going to take us all our lives. It's a work of God's grace, and it's transforming us into the likeness of Christ. We should be looking more and more and acting more and more like Jesus every single day of our lives. And as that happens, we will love the things that God loves, and we will hate the things that God hates. And we will do the most important thing that we can do with our lives, which is to live for his glory. If we move on into our passage, Peter reaches now into the very center of the gospel. He says, You are ransomed from the feudal ways inherited from your ancestors, not with silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ. You were ransomed, you were purchased, you were redeemed. You were not redeemed just from guilt or just hell. You were redeemed from futility. You were redeemed from uselessness. Peter calls it the futile ways of living. You have been rescued from the empty way of life handed down to you. You see, you and I are born into futile ways of living. Every culture, every educational system, every business, every company, every family, every human being that is not centered on the person of Jesus Christ is ultimately futile. It is a futile way of living. It is empty. Peter is saying, we've been rescued from that. I love that word, rescued. It was so bad you had to be rescued. And how are we rescued? And here we descend into the heart of the gospel, into the heart of reality. Peter says that Jesus Christ came to rescue us from all that futility and emptiness and hopelessness. And the price wasn't silver or gold, it was himself. I'm reading a book right now. It's a book written 60 years ago, actually. It's called Our Guilty Silence. It's by John Stott. It's not a very well-known book of his, but he just writes so beautifully on the gospel and on why Jesus had to die. And as I get older, you know, I've been in this business for 30 years now, preaching and pastoring all across North America. And as I as I get older, I just keep coming back to the cross. Like that's all that this is all about. We need to meditate on the cross. We need to have just the cross on our mind and our hearts all the time because it reveals reality to us. It reveals our need and it reveals our value. We are loved beyond measure. Because if God would give his son for us, then failure can't define us. Regret cannot imprison us. Disappointment in life can't have the last word. I think it was Frederick Bieckner who wrote that beautiful quote. He said, The resurrection means that the worst thing is not the last thing, because the worst thing was Good Friday when Jesus died. But it wasn't the last thing. He rose again. You see, the cross preaches to us, it says that we are more sinful than we imagine. And as you get older, you will notice there are deep reservoirs of sin. There's sin in me that I haven't even encountered yet that I'm going to need to repent of. You are more sinful than you ever imagined, but you are more loved than you ever dreamed. We will never exhaust meditating and rejoicing and celebrating in the love of God, even when we get to heaven. In 10 quintillion trillion years, we're still going to be blown away by his love for us. We will never be exhausted from it. You know, Peter says here that this was before the foundation of the world. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world. Jesus Christ was foreknown before the foundation of the world, before Rome existed, before Peter wrote the words down, before you were born, before your parents met, before all your successes and failure, before your regrets, before all the things that have happened in your life, all the painful things. God knew it, God planned it, and God loved you. Nothing catches God by surprise. He isn't up there in heaven going, oh wow, look, I can't believe that happened to him or her. Life isn't easy. And every event is not good. But our stories are held inside a much larger stories. You see, there is a narrative arc to your life. There is a story being written by your life. And we one of the challenges of life is we don't get to see the reasons for all the things that happened to us. I look back on this past year getting unfairly fired from a job from a church. My wife getting cancer two months later and having to walk through that incredible journey of recovery and suffering with her. And continuing to deal with the the fallout of that of being treated unjustly by a church. Who would? But here's the thing. I don't get to see the reasons for all of those things that happened. But I choose to believe that somehow, somehow, what has happened to me, the events of my life are being written into a bigger story that I don't get to see, but that God is writing. Okay? And that gives me so much hope. That gives me hope for the future. That means my life is not meaningless. That means my suffering is not meaningless. It's meaningful in God's story. I want to close by thinking about what Peter might say to you today if you're suffering, if you're in pain. I think he would say something like, prepare your mind, think clearly, set your hope fully on grace. Remember who your father is and what he is like. Pursue holiness, live reverently, remember the price that Christ paid for you. Remember that your life is part of a story much bigger than you can see. And remember that your faith and your hope lie not ultimately in anything in this world. Your hope lies not in your decisions, not in your accomplishments, not in your ability to control outcomes. Your faith and hope are in God. And because they are in God, your hope never runs out. Grace never gets depleted. Because the God who raised Jesus from the dead is still writing beautiful stories of redemption. And one day, Jesus will return. And grace will arrive in its fullness. Everything broken will be made whole. Everything sad will come untrue. And we will be home. We will be hopeful, we will be holy, and we will be loved, and we will be held by the God whose promises never fail. Amen. Well, I hope you enjoyed our little foray into First Peter today. And as always, if you can subscribe and if you can leave a review wherever you're listening to this podcast, it helps a lot. I'm loving doing this. I hope you are enjoying them as much as I'm enjoying putting them out. And so I pray God's richest blessings on you today, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. Walk in His grace. God bless you.