1 Peter 1, verses 13 to 25. Therefore, preparing your minds for action and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. But as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. Since it is written, you shall be holy, for I am holy. And if you call on him as father who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you, who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God. Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart. Since you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God. For all flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass, The grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever. And this word is the good news that was preached to you. Last week we started a new series called Living Hope based on the book of 1 Peter. And the Apostle Peter is writing to a group of suffering Christians who he calls elect exiles, and they're scattered across what's now Turkey. So here's a map of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean world. Peter is in Rome, in Italy, obviously, in that little circle. And he's writing a letter to Christians scattered across Turkey. And you can see the names, maybe, if you can... You've got good eyesight. You'll see Pontus, Bithynia, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia. That's where he's writing to. But Peter, of course, is from the land of Israel in the bottom right-hand corner. He's been a church leader in Jerusalem for some time, and before that he lived in Galilee. So that's the sort of main centers of the map for where Peter is. But the main thing I wanted to show the map for is to show you that everywhere in red is pagan. at this point. The entire map, that's the Roman Empire, and basically everywhere that's in red is part of the Roman Empire. This is, to be fair, this map comes from about 50 years later than this period, but pretty much, pretty accurate, that the Roman Empire covers almost everywhere, the known world for most of these people, and that everywhere there, everyone there worships many gods, they worship pagan gods. So there's no Christendom, nobody has crosses on their flags like nations do today. Nobody celebrates Christmas nor celebrates Easter. No one has Christian names, like many of us in this church, in our own languages have Christian sounding names, but no one does in the ancient world. And this isn't just a matter of no one else believes in the Christian God, although that's true. There's a tiny smattering of Jews and Christians, but everybody else worships multiple gods, and everybody else has a different value system for thinking about the good life. It's not just about your worship, what you do on Sunday, it's about the way you think about the good. And you might see that in a movie like Gladiator, where if you watch something like that, you say, well, this is a world in which slavery is fine, and infanticide is fine, and watching people fight to the death Blood sports in the afternoon, gladiators in the Coliseum is fine. It's like we go and watch football, they go and watch people kill each other. It's a very different world that the early church is born into and even the most educated citizens in that world have a very different value system to you and me. You may remember, if you have seen Galiator, that scene where Joaquin Phoenix is saying, you wrote to me once telling me the four chief virtues, wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance, and I didn't have any of them, and my virtues weren't on that list. And into that kind of world, the early church come and they say, no, the greatest virtues are actually faith, hope, and love. Not these four. And you can imagine Paul writing to Joaquin Phoenix and saying, these are the great virtues. And him saying, yes, but none of my virtues were on your list. Like, that's not the kind of person I am. But in the ancient world, nobody was. That's not what they thought goodness looked like. And into that world the early church come and they say, faith, hope and love. And you and I say, that's not strange at all. Of course love is the highest value. Of course the most important thing in the world is love. Of course loving someone else, all you need is love. It's really obvious to us that believing in things and believing in a better future and hoping for the world to get better and loving people and seeing that as the ultimate value, we would consider those things and say, of course, that's the nature of the good life. But in the ancient world, no one thought that. In fact, you only think that and I only think that because of Christianity. Because Christianity came in and a crucified Savior was placed in the center of the moral world and it reconfigured the way we all thought about what good and evil were. And over time that means people do stop killing each other in Colosseums and they do stop exposing infants and letting them die and they do stop enslaving people and they do change their sexual ethics and their moral life. Everything changes because of Christianity. But at the center of it is this new way of thinking about what goodness is which has faith, hope and love at the middle. And most of us would associate those three probably with someone like Paul, the famous passage that often gets read at weddings, and how these three remain, faith, hope, and love, and the greatest is love. And we'd say, yeah, that's a Paul idea. But Peter talks about them as well, and he structures, in fact, this whole passage around them. I don't know if you noticed as we read it, but Peter says in verses 21 to 22 of the passage we've just heard read, your faith and hope are in God, having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love. Love one another earnestly from a pure heart. And so Peter's got the three, faith, hope, and love, right in the middle of this passage, but he also structures the whole passage around them. In many ways, the first paragraph is all about hope, verses 13 to 16, and then the second paragraph is calling people to faith, believing, in verses 17 to 21, and then the third paragraph is focusing on love, and the need to love one another earnestly, verses 22 to 25. And those three, we call them virtues, like the great theological virtues, faith, hope and love. Those three virtues are what make Christians distinctive in a pagan world. And my guess is that all of us, even those of us watching who are not Christians yet, want to be more faithful and hopeful and loving people. So you may not even be a disciple of Jesus today. You may just be here just watching in, observing, and just picking up and seeing what it's like. But actually my guess is that somewhere you say, I think it's a good thing to be a hopeful or a loving or a faithful person. I want to be those things. And so I'm going to suggest that we look at this passage and allow Peter to teach us how we can be more faithful, hopeful, and loving people. Because those three virtues are, they come straight out of Christianity. They weren't a big deal until Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. And now we would see them as central to a good life. And they're central to the Christian life, which Peter is teaching about in this passage. Peter starts this section by talking about hope. The hope that we have, which actually we looked at last week in many ways in this series as well. Hope in an imperishable inheritance. And so Peter actually at the start of this passage is obviously continuing from the passage we read last week. It's the benefit of reading the Bible in sequence. And he says, therefore, preparing your minds for action and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Verse 13. That's a rule of thumb for reading the Bible. Whenever you see a therefore, find out what it's there for. Always, right? Whenever you see a therefore in the text, find out what it's there for. And what Peter's doing is he's saying, because of all the things we saw last week, in the previous bit of the passage, that you have an imperishable inheritance that can't spoil, can't fade, glorious salvation, angels are desperate to look into it, this incredible hope in the future. Because of all of that, because of that salvation and imperishable inheritance, you should therefore do three things. Because of that, you should do this. You should prepare your minds for action. You should be sober minded and you should set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Prepare your minds for action. Peter actually, in the original, uses the language of gird up the loins of your mind, which some of your translations may say that. But we don't generally use language like that in modern English. But what it's an image of what you do is you tie the robe you're wearing around your waist so that you can run as fast as possible. Gird up the loins of your mind. Get ready. You might say, roll up your mental sleeves or something like that. Like roll up your sleeves mentally or something. But you basically get focused and get prepared for action intellectually, mentally. Then he says you want to be sober-minded, right? Or self-controlled. Which is you need to be focused. You need to be free from distraction. It's almost like he sounds like it. Gird up the loins, get ready to run, get focused. He sounds like he's coaching an athlete before a race. It's always like that. You need to get ready with your hope fixed on the future. You need to prepare to run and stay focused. And then you say, stay focused on what? And he says, the third thing, on the grace ready to be revealed at the revelation of Jesus Christ. You set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you. Fix your eyes. You can't live the Christian life, you can't live the life of hope unless you discipline yourself to avoid getting distracted from things that don't bring hope and instead keep your eyes focused on the only thing that does. You've got to put all your eggs in that basket which is the hope that will come, the grace that will come to you at the revelation of Jesus. You've got to keep fixated on that and keep your hope fully set on that future rather than getting distracted on all the other things that might come in. Other options will present themselves. They always do. Put your hope in this. Put your hope on that. And Peter said, no, no, no. Don't fix your eyes on those. Keep your eyes on the prize. The grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus when Jesus returns. One of the great joys of having special needs children, which I do, is you get to go to special needs sports days. And special needs sports days, if you've never been to one, they are just an amazing, they're another kind of sports day. They're just a glorious experience. Because in a school as diverse as the one my kids go to, you've got some kids, including my son, really, who are very focused on winning a race. They would run a race like at any other sports day. And they're intensely focused. And they will run as fast as they can and get to the end. But then you have other kids, including my daughter, Anna, who is not interested at all in running a race. She doesn't really know, doesn't really get the concept at all. And he's not very interested in it. But he's very interested in many of the other things that are going on all around. And so you have a whole bunch of children who will get deeply distracted, they'll start walking or running down a track, and then will totally lose focus and just tear off over there into the bushes. Or run over there because they've seen someone they know, or a biscuit, or a screen, or something. And it's just absolutely hilarious. The parents, and carers, and food, and drink, and noises, and birds, and phones, and anything might distract them from running the race. Because they don't really care about the race. My daughter is just not like that. She wouldn't see why she should try and win a race. And it's just fantastic. Christians run that risk too. Christians run the risk of instead of being focused and ready and completely attentive to the grace that will be revealed, the source of our hope, Christians run the risk of getting distracted by other things and often the same things actually. Family, friends, food, screens, money, sex, home design, whatever it might be. And you get thoroughly distracted and you can try and find the hope in those things instead of in the one place that really guarantees your hope. The one place where the anchor is pulling you forward to the future. The grace that will be revealed at the revelation of Jesus Christ. And Peter's exhortation to the church and to you is keep your eyes fixed on that hope. Set your hope fully on that grace. All of it. Don't get waylaid by lesser hopes. So for me, during the pandemic, a lot of the temptation has been and was, particularly like a year ago, that I would look for hope in the news. So I got very distracted by the news, and I didn't do well sometimes. I'd often be online going, maybe there's a fragment of hope that we might be able to get out of this lockdown pandemic. And I'm not saying looking at the news is bad. I'm just saying I found myself fixing too much hope on a source that ultimately can't deliver it, because pandemics go up and down like anything else, as we know. And what I needed to do was to keep drawing my hope off the news, or off whatever, and fixating on the fact, no, Jesus is coming. And when he comes, there will be a grace brought to me that nothing in this world can match. Focus your hope on that. Another way of saying that, as Peter concludes this section is, as obedient children, don't be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. But as he who calls you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. Be holy. Be hopey. Be happy. Pursue the things of God. So we hope in an imperishable inheritance. We also need to know not just that our hope is rooted in an imperishable inheritance, but our faith is rooted in an imperishable ransom. The freedom from slavery that we have, what Peter says, is secured not with money but with blood and we have been ransomed with an imperishable source that means that we are able to fix our faith fully and trust God fully in everything that he says he's going to do. And Peter, as you've probably picked up already if you were here last week as well, Peter loves the contrast, doesn't he, between perishable and imperishable things. We saw that last week. The inheritance is imperishable. You see it again here. Verse 18, you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things, silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. Now, that word ransom, that you were ransomed, ransom is what happens when you're brought out of slavery, either because you're paid for in a slave market with money, or very exceptionally, because somebody else substitutes for you, which is what happens in the Bible in the story of Judah and Benjamin, for instance. Like, I'll substitute, so you set him free and I'll be a slave in his place. But ransom is what happens when you get set free from slavery, either with money or by perhaps a substitute. And Peter is saying, but you haven't been ransomed with silver and gold, with money. It's like what the prophet Isaiah says, you are sold for nothing and you'll be redeemed without money. You're not redeemed by being paid for with money, you've been redeemed with blood. And not just any blood, the precious blood of Christ, like that of a blemish-free spotless lamb. That's what Peter is saying. So you have been ransomed out of slavery to futility and all the things your ancestors used to do and believe. Peter says to this in this very pagan world, you Christians have been ransomed, but you haven't been ransomed with money that perishes and spoils. You have been ransomed with the blood of God's own son. And that's a totally different kind of ransom and it can't be taken away. And if God has paid the price of the precious blood of His Son for you, no one can offset the ransom, no one can get you back into slavery. If God has paid a price that high to free you, the blood of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who could possibly re-enslave you? If God has bought us, who can re-enslave us? You see, your faith is grounded in an imperishable redemption. It's not with the perishable stuff of the world, the money, the silver, the gold. Your redemption, your ransom, your rescue from slavery, your freedom from captivity is grounded in blood, not in money. And that's why it can't be taken away. So just as your hope can't be taken away because it's secure in heaven, your redemption, your ransom can't be taken away either because it's grounded in imperishable realities and been paid for with the precious blood of Christ. And it is that ransom Not with perishable money, but with precious blood that grounds our faith in God. That's where faith ultimately comes from, Peter says. He, verse 20 to 21, he was made manifest in the last time for the sake of you who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory so that your faith and your hope are in God. So yes, your hope is in God because of this imperishable inheritance. But now your faith is in God because of this imperishable ransom as well. The blood of Christ is the reason you can trust God. See, faith on its own is not virtuous, just saying, I believe, I believe things. You can believe something good, you can believe something bad. Faith is virtuous when it's faith in God, it's trust or belief in God that holds God to His promises. And the way you can do that, the way you know that God will keep His promises is that you can look at the precious blood of His Son and you can say, if God is prepared to do that for me, I can trust anything He says. That's the connection between faith and the imperishable ransom. If God is prepared to go that far for me, I know I can believe every word that comes from his mouth. So the blood of Christ is the reason you can trust God and believe when he tells you something. And it's the reason you can put your faith in him to carry you through whatever trials you're facing. Because you may say, there's a lot of threats here, a lot of opposition. I don't know how I'm going to keep going. But the one thing I do know is that a God who's prepared to do that for me and shed his precious blood for me must be able to be trusted with any other issues I have. So again, I often quote the opening question of the Heidelberg Catechism, 500 years back, teaching people how to understand the basic truths of Christianity. What is your only comfort in life and in death? Of all the things that you might find comfort in, what's the only one that holds you through in life and in death? Answer, that I am not my own. but belong body and soul to my faithful saviour Jesus Christ because he has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood and he set me free from the tyranny of the devil. So your hope is grounded in an imperishable inheritance and your faith is grounded in an imperishable ransom. So if you want to become a more hopeful and faithful and loving person, Peter has got news for you. You can put your hope in that inheritance that can't be destroyed. And you can put your faith in that ransom which can't be undone. And finally, you can love. based on his imperishable word. This is verse 22 to 23, and it's easy to misunderstand. Okay, verse 22. Love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since or because you have been born again, not of perishable seed, there's that word again, perishable, but of imperishable seed through the living and abiding word of God. And that sounds very theological. Yes, okay. I've been born again of imperishable seed, the living and abiding word of God. What does that mean? It's actually quite a graphic image. He's saying you can love one another because you have been brought to new life through imperishable seed. And the reason why you can love one another genuinely, a lot of love in this world is not in a sense, real love. A lot of songs we sing about it aren't really love because they might be selfish, they might be trivial, like chart music love, but actually the kind of deep, pure, lasting love that unites people and commits people to one another for decades and holds fast and goes through thick and thin and doesn't, you know, envy or boast or, you know, all that kind of biblical love, that gets sustained and is made possible by the new birth that has come about through the seed of the Word of God. That's what Peter's saying. So you can love one another earnestly because you've been born again through an imperishable seed. And it's quite a graphic image. Imperishable seed means indestructible semen. Now, you didn't expect to hear that word, probably at this time on a Sunday, but that's what he means. The semen, in a sense, that is the Word of God. The life-giving thing that came into you, that brought you to life, was the indestructible semen of the Word of God. Now, we don't tend to talk like that very often, and I don't either. I don't say those words loudly in Tesco or whatever. But they are actually the grounding of your faith and the reason why you can become a loving person. Because what Peter means is human birth, like the way we all were born ourselves in physical birth, happens through perishable seed, semen, right? One in a million of those seed hits the target and creates life. The other 999,000 just disappear and they produce nothing. And even the one in a million that does produce life only produces life for seven or eight decades. And then eventually that person's life runs out. and all the others perish and do nothing. So we are humanly, we are born of perishable seeds. But the new birth that comes to you in Christ, the new birth that makes you the kind of person who can love somebody earnestly, the new birth comes through imperishable seed, a completely different sort of seed. It's the living and abiding Word of God. The Word of God, the Gospel of God, the truth of what God has done for the world in Christ is like an indestructible kind of semen that breaks the whole world open and creates everlasting life. Not that fades after seven or eight decades, but that goes on forever and ever and ever. Because this seed, unlike human seed, has life in itself, on its own. The Word of God is happening right now as I'm speaking. You're hearing the words of God and the Word of God is bringing life into your heart because the Word has power to do that all of itself. and the grass withers and the flower falls, Peter says, but the word of the Lord remains forever. It is an imperishable, indestructible seed that is never going anywhere. And this word, he says, is the good news that was preached to you. So God's word has the power in and of itself to bring life because it's like indestructible, imperishable semen. That's such a weird image and don't worry, we're not going to come back to this over and over again. But it is an important idea that God's Word creates life on its own terms. And that is how you and I become loving people. So notice what Peter's not saying. He is not saying, if you want to be loving, then you need to do what the Bible says. By the way, that is true. It is true. It's great advice. But that isn't actually what he means here. What he's saying is far more radical in many ways than that. He's saying, if you want to be a loving person, if you want to love passionately and purely and permanently, and you want to put God and your neighbor ahead of yourself, then your only chance is to be born again to new life by the indestructible, imperishable seed of the Word of God. That incorruptible seed of the Gospel, the living and abiding Word of God, is the only way by which you can be made into a new kind of person, a new kind of life, that is going to be able to be a loving and a hope-filled and a faithful person because of what God has done for you in Christ. And that, Peter says, is the good news that was preached to you. Let's pray. Father we thank you so much for these remarkable promises, as hard as they are to grasp sometimes Lord, we are amazed by the hope that is ours, the living hope, the faith that is grounded in your imperishable ransom of us by your own blood. and this wonderful new life that comes to us by the word of God that brings us to new life such that we can love one another. Lord, we are so grateful for these unbreakable promises that secure us and this imperishable inheritance we have and this redemption that can never be taken away. We are grateful and we celebrate you. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Amen.