Steps to Staying Clean

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.

Hello, and welcome to Wisdom for the Heart. Today, Stephen Davey takes you to the epistle of 1 Peter. This is the first message in a series called, In Pursuit of Holiness. The Bible calls us to holy living. God's commands are impossible to perform in our own strength.

He doesn't say, work harder, or drive slower, or speak more honestly. God says, be holy as I am holy. How do we do that? Well, we're going to find out what God desires from us and learn some practical ways we can pursue holiness every day.

Let's get started. Turn once again to the letter from 1 Peter. 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 can 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 gonna 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 gird 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 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. It's the battleground, isn't it? To battle them 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 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. It's 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.

Now, 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, what Arthur wrote. Now, I say that, and I 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. We're 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 going to grab all I can. This is all that matters today. I'm living for today, man. I got to get everything I can today. Not going to learn anything from yesterday and I'm not going to 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 day, don't we? 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 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 know, because I'd broken up with her so many times and she said, times and she was 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.

Everything, however, when she said yes, began to be interpreted in light of a coming day. You remember? I mean, you treated everything differently. I know I treated money differently. 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 got to save some. After I got engaged, things changed. In fact, we were both in the same senior class and in college. I can remember one day I worked all day long on a man's property and 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 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 going to 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 in 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. I'm 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 going to 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 going to 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. 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. Well, what does obedience look like? Well, Peter tells us first what it doesn't look like, then he'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, 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 lusts, which informs us they can be broken, these patterns.

Well, what are they? Well, the word, the Iran sack, 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? I received a letter at our Wisdom for the Heart 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 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 challenged me most about this letter is that it was written by a girl who is still in middle school, middle school. Sounds a lot like someone the Apostle Peter would be proud of. Someone obviously focused on pleasing the Lord about 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 belt 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 and slow us down.

Well, there's certainly a lot of practical wisdom and advice for us to think about today, isn't there? You've tuned in to Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. Stephen will be exploring more of this section from 1 Peter in the days ahead. The series is called In Pursuit of Holiness, and I hope you'll be with us for all of it.

Stephen is the pastor of the Shepherd's Church in Cary, North Carolina. Learn more about us by visiting wisdomonline.org. You can also call us today at 866-48-Bible or 866-482-4253. Be sure and ask about our monthly magazine, Heart to Heart. We'd like to show it to you, so ask about that when you call. Thanks for being with us today. Join us again next time for more Wisdom for the Heart.