Living before God Our Father

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind… Christians are called over and over again in sacred Scripture not to park their minds in the parking lot when they enter into church, but to awaken their minds that they may think clearly and think deeply about the things of God. There are those in the church who say that Christianity is a religion of the heart, not the mind. They say if we emphasize the mind too much, we get a cold rational religion instead of a warm faith.

Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul takes us to 1 Peter chapter 1 to show us that we can't really love something we don't understand. I'm sure that by now those of you who have been regularly attending the Sunday evening service are tired of hearing me labor the point of the importance of noting the presence of the word therefore whenever we meet it in the biblical text. It's important because the word therefore signals a conclusion that is about to be reached based upon the previous premises or argument that has been set forth so that tonight when we look at the therefore, we understand where Peter was coming from directing us to this conclusion. And we remember that last week we were looking at the exposition of our salvation that includes a precious inheritance that has been laid up for us in heaven as the adopted children of God.

And in light of this marvelous salvation that has been prepared for us, now we come to the conclusion that is to be drawn that is to be drawn from that. And so Peter says, therefore gird up the loins of your minds, which is somewhat strange because usually when the people of the first century heard a call to gird up their loins, they were not thinking in terms of a mental activity or a mental process. The whole metaphor is based upon the customary garments of first century people who tended to wear long, flowing robes, both men and women. And even soldiers commonly would be adorned with these long, flowing robes, but when it came time to go into battle, they would not be able to move with any agility. If the robes remained long and flowing, they couldn't run very well dressed like that without tripping all over themselves. And so before they went into battle, they girded up their robes, hitched them up, and then put a belt around them after the flowing robe was hitched up above the knee.

And the reason for that obviously is that they could now have their legs free to run, to enter into battle, to be involved in action. So that simple metaphor drawn from the common experience of men who had to hike up their robes in order to enter into action is now directed not for the speed or action of our legs, but in this case, Peter says, gird up the loins of your mind. That is to say, prepare your minds for deep thinking. I pause at this point because we are living in a period of church history which may be the period of the most mindless variety of Christianity ever. I've said before that I believe we're living in the most anti-intellectual period of Christian history.

I don't mean the most anti-scientific or anti-technological or even anti-educational, but rather anti-mind. I had to correct my students in the seminary classroom, and I would ask them a question, and I'd say, Mr. Johnson, what do you think about this proposition? And Mr. Johnson would respond and say, Well, I feel that that statement is incorrect. And I'd have to stop them and say, Mr. Johnson, I didn't ask you how you felt.

I wasn't inquiring into your emotional response. I was asking you what you think about it, because thinking is something that is done by the mind, and Christians are called over and over again in sacred Scripture not to park their minds in the parking lot when they enter into church, but to awaken their minds that they may think clearly and think deeply about the things that the things of God. And I can sense that some people when I say that will say, Well, God doesn't care about the mind. What God cares about is the heart. Christianity is a religion of the heart, not of the mind. Emphasis on the mind leads us into rationalism, and from there into modernism, into postmodernism, and all the other isms that stand in antithesis to biblical Christianity. It is true, dear friends, that what you think in your mind in and of itself will never get you into the kingdom of God until what you think about and what you understand reaches the heart. But we have been so built by God in our constituent nature as human beings that the pathway to the heart is through the mind.

You really can't love with passion that which you know nothing about. And the book that contains the sacred revelation of Almighty God, His Word is addressed in the first instance to your mind, to your understanding, so that the more you understand the truth of God, the more you will be gripped by it in your heart and changed by it. And so the admonition here is very clear, isn't it? Gird up the loins of your mind. Be sober. That is to say, do not be intoxicated with mind-numbing drugs, but rather for the mind to function with clarity.

This must function in a state of sobriety. So we are called to be sober, and Peter says, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Again, I've told you before that the biblical word for hope is different from our normal English usage of the term.

In English when we say that we hope something will happen, we are expressing our desires for a particular outcome of things in this world. But in the biblical usage of it, hope is not an uncertainty, but it is a certainty. That's why it's called the anchor of the soul, that which brings stability to us. It is faith looking to the future with the full assurance with the full assurance that God will do what He promises He will do. And so Peter reminds us of that, and he tells us where we are to put our hope. We are to rest our hope fully, he says, upon the grace of God. Because that's where our hope really finds its anchor. That ship is moored by grace and in grace and to grace.

We can be confident of our future with God because our future, even as our present condition, rests fully not on our righteousness, not on God's justice, but on His grace, which by definition is something that we do not and cannot deserve. And so we need to think about these things soberly, that our mind might come into action and realize that our resting place is on that grace that is being brought to you and will in its final manifestation be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ, which is Peter's way of directing our thought to what the church calls her blessed hope, the final appearance of Jesus in His return at the end of the age when He comes in glory, manifests His majesty for every His majesty for every eye to see. And so Peter says, think about that.

Think clearly about that. Let your mind's activity rest upon the confidence of that future promise. As obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts as in your ignorance. Now already in just the first few passages of the first letter of Peter, I have indicated passages that have great similarity to themes that are expounded by Paul in his epistles and even in the epistle that we just spent so many months studying, namely the epistle of Romans. Here Peter talks about not being conformed. We remember that we remember that when Paul finished his exposition of the doctrines of grace and of those things that attend the gospel, his conclusion in Romans 12 was, therefore, my beloved brethren, present yourselves as a living sacrifice which is holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And then he added to that the admonition, be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed. And how did he indicate that transformation would be accomplished?

By the renewing of your feelings, by the renewing of your mind. And so the Apostle saw our sanctification as taking place once we achieved a new mind, a mind whose mindset was different from the mindset of this world. It was a mindset of non-conformity. And Peter is really saying the same thing that Paul said in Romans 12 here in the first chapter of Peter. Let me just direct you to another passage in the teaching of the Apostle Paul where this same idea is in view in chapter 2 of Paul's letter to the Ephesians. In the first verse he reads this, And you he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the Spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

Here when the Apostle speaks of our resurrection from spiritual death, whereby we are born again by the power of the Holy Ghost, the Apostle says that that resurrection from spiritual death happened while we were dead in trespasses and sins, listen again, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the Spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once conducted ourselves, fulfilling the desires of the flesh, because we were at that time by nature, children of wrath, just like everybody else. Now do you see the theme that's common here in Romans 12, Ephesians 2, and in 1 Peter? It is a theme of non-conformity to the patterns and the customs of fallen humanity. We are to be non-conformists. Now that non-conformity can be sought and achieved in a very superficial way. The non-conformity that we are called to practice is an ethical non-conformity, that we are to practice an ethic that is the ethic of God rather than the ethic of this world. I used to teach ethics in the seminary, and one of the lectures that I would give in every course of that was the problem that we face now in what I call statistical morality, where the distinction between ethics and morals has been obscured and blurred in our day so that people use the term morals and ethics interchangeably as if they were synonyms.

Historically, those two words were not understood to be synonyms but had a vastly different meaning. The term morals comes from the concept of mores, which is a descriptive term where sociologists and historians may examine the behavioral patterns of a given culture and describe how people actually act. That is the mores of a given society. The study of ethics, however, is the study of normative principles of behavior, which tells us how people should behave. But you know, and I know, and certainly the Bible knows that there's a great chasm between how we ought to behave and how we in fact do behave.

But here's what happens. The psychologists observe human behavior, and they see what people are doing, and they say that ninety percent of young people are involved in premarital sexual action, and since such a high percentage of them do this, we see that it's therefore normal human behavior. And if it's normal, it is a short step from that to saying it's normative because it's good to be normal, and to deviate from the normal is to fall into the ditch of abnormality, and God forbid that we should be considered abnormal.

On the one hand, you have the sociologists and the psychologists telling you that it is perfectly normal and common for people in their teenage years under the pressures of erotic propaganda for them to fall into these patterns of behavior, and that's fine because it's normal. On the other hand, you hear the Bible say, don't let fornication even once be named among you as befitting saints. The oldest argument in the world for defending behavior is the argument, everybody else is doing it. God doesn't care what everybody else is doing. God knows what everybody else is doing.

He's concerned about what we're doing. And so He tells us not to be conformed to those patterns, to resist conformity to those patterns, that before God has raised us from the dead spiritually, just like everybody else, we walked according to the course of this world. We walked according to the prince of the power of the air, the Spirit who even now works in the sons of disobedience.

But here Peter is making a sharp contrast between the sons of disobedience and the children of God. Now beloved, if it is that you are in Christ, the only way you can be in Christ is if God the Holy Spirit has regenerated you. Again, I've said many, many times that the term, born-again Christian, is a redundancy. You can't be a Christian without being reborn, and if you are reborn by God the Holy Spirit, you can't be anything else but a Christian so that it's a redundancy. And if you are a Christian, that means that you have been born anew by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And what does that mean? That means that your constituent nature as a human being has been changed by God. And having been changed by God, He expects our behavior to manifest that change, that we ought no longer be conformed to this world but rather we are called from the day of our rebirth to the end of our pilgrimage in this world to go through this process of constant sanctification where we are gaining the mind of Christ and showing our love for Him by keeping His commandments. Preparing our minds for action, we are called to reject any conformity to this world.

It's not any conformity to this world. It's not a straightforward message, but it can't be a challenge to live it out faithfully. That's why studying God's Word is so important, and that's been our emphasis all week here on Renewing Your Mind. Each day we've been sharing sermons from Dr. R.C. Sproul today from a series that he preached from 1 and 2 Peter, and we encourage you to keep studying. We'd like for you to have the hardbound edition of Dr. Sproul's commentary on Peter's letters. Just provide a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries and we will send it to you.

You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343, but you can also give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. By the way, you won't be able to request this book for a donation of any amount after today, so I hope you'll contact us soon. The Bible informs us as Christians that we have been crucified with Christ and baptized into Christ. But what does that mean? What does it look like? We'll find out next week as we feature Dr. Sinclair Ferguson's teaching series, Union with Christ. That's beginning Monday here on Renewing Your Mind.