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1 Peter 1:13—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.  Even though it may not look like it, there is only one imperative in this verse.

It’s the first command in Peter’s epistle, the command to “set your hope”. But if you look carefully at the text, there are two other phrases that kind of look like commands: “preparing your minds for action” and “being sober-minded”. These phrases are called participles. Without getting too technical, they’re like adverbs. They modify the main verb. In other words, these aren’t standalone commands, they’re telling us how to align our hope.

So how do you align your hope? By “preparing your minds for action” and “being sober-minded”. Let’s take these one at a time.

A.   Prepare for Action

What does it mean to prepare your mind for action? The King James Version translates it this way: “gird up the loins of your mind”. What in the world does that mean? Surprisingly, that is a faithful translation of the original language. The Old Testament often talked about “girding up your loins.” In those days everybody wore long robes, which would be cumbersome if you had to do any strenuous activity. The men would hike up the bottom of their robes and tuck them into their belts so they could move more freely. One preacher said it was like turning your robes into running shorts.[i] Today we might say “roll up your sleeves.”

But what does it mean? It means that the work of aligning your hope is going to require your mind. If you want to learn to align your hope you need to “roll up the sleeves of your mind” and prepare for action.

Virtually everything we do in our public worship services is designed to force you to roll up the sleeves of your mind. Think about what we do when we gather. We sing, sometimes songs with a lot of words or with some words you might not be familiar with. These songs aren’t meant to be amusement—which by the way means “no mind”—they’re meant to engage your heart and mind with truth that sticks with you.

Just think about some of the songs we used to sing in the 90’s. Here’s some lyrics from one of the songs I remember:

“ Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes yes Lord.

Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes yes Lord.

Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes yes Lord, Amen.

We say, yes Lord, yes Lord, yes yes Lord.

We say yes Lord, yes Lord, yes yes Lord.

We say yes Lord, yes Lord, yes yes Lord, Amen.”

Contrast that with what we sang this past Sunday:

Come behold the wondrous mystery, he the perfect Son of Man

In his living, in his suffering, never trace nor stain of sin

See the true and better Adam, come to save the hell-bound man

Christ the great and sure fulfillment of the law, in him we stand.

 

Now before you send me an email about how much you like that first song, here’s my point. I’m not saying that it’s never okay to sing a simple, fun song that doesn’t have a lot of depth to it. But we sing less songs in a year than some of you listen to in a week! So we work hard to be intentional about singing songs that have depth. Songs that force you to roll up the sleeves of your mind.

But it’s not just what we sing. We pray all these different prayers. Prayers of praise, prayers of confession, a pastoral prayer with thanksgiving and supplication. Each of them requires you to engage your mind. We repeat a catechism question together that pushes you to think. I stand on a stage and yell at you for 45 minutes, hopefully in a way that is engaging your mind.

Our Sunday School ministry—which is officially (re)launching this Sunday by the way—is designed to engage your mind by teaching you truths from God’s Word in a less formal way that is harder to achieve in a service like this. Our bookstall ministry recommends books that instruct your mind with truth.

I believe many people reject Christianity because they think it’s stupid and simple-minded and trivial. Nothing could be further from the truth. Biblical Christianity requires an engaged mind.  The Apostle Paul puts it this way in Romans 12:1-2—I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (2) Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Have you cultivated a Christian mind? Do you think like a Christian? This doesn’t mean that you only think “Christian thoughts.” If you ask somebody, “What do you think about the Big Ten cancelling their season?” or “are you going to watch Mulan on Disney Plus?” and they respond “I don’t think about those things. I think about JESUS.” Is that what it means to have a Christian mind?!? NO!!! A Christian mind is not a mind that only thinks “Christian thoughts,” but a mind that thinks about all sorts of things from a Christian worldview.

But before we move on, it’s appropriate to remind you that even though Christianity engages the mind, it does more than that. Let’s not be tadpole Christians who are all head and little else. God’s Word should engage our heads, our hearts, and our hands. But if you want to align your hope to future grace, you’re going to have to roll up the sleeves of your mind.

B.   Stay Sober

The second participle at the beginning of verse 13 is “being sober-minded”. We align our hope to future grace by having sober minds. What does that mean? Think about what it means to be sober. You avoid intoxicants, whether that’s illicit drugs or alcohol. It’s the same for the mind. To stay sober-minded you avoid what intoxicates the mind. The saying goes: sow a thought and you reap an act. Sow an act and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny. Your mind matters!

But what is it that intoxicates our mind and threatens our hope? For many of us our first thought is sex and violence. If we avoid movies that are sexually explicit or gory than our minds will stay sober. I don’t think it’s that simple, but let’s camp out here for a minute.

 Let me speak as your shepherd who loves you. I do think Christians should avoid sexually explicit entertainment. Specifically, entertainment that includes nudity. And I do think there’s a difference between violence at the movies and sex at the movies. The violence is fake. That’s not real blood. The gore is just pretend. But that body you’re looking at for entertainment is real. That’s somebody’s husband or wife, somebody’s son or daughter.

But simply avoiding these things is not enough. Christian, our minds are intoxicated by far more than explicit sex and gratuitous violence. Our minds are intoxicated by trivialities. That dress she wore to the awards ceremony. What he did during the national anthem. The pictures of her lunch she posted on Instagram or Snapchat. The silly meme he just tweeted. How many times your favorite player struck out last night. The latest trailer for that upcoming movie. What President Trump said or didn’t say, what former Vice President Biden said or didn’t say. None of these things are necessarily wrong to think about or talk about, but do you see how trivial they are? Especially if they dominate our thinking. Before long we’ll be intoxicated by them, thinking that these things really are the most important realities in the universe. Not even close.

This is the reason I challenged you to fast from content intake during our study of 1 Peter. Whether it’s a fast from social media, your favorite news channel or show, a video game, a TV show, or something else I hope you’ll take my challenge seriously. Christians, we need to set aside some time to detox our minds from the things that so easily intoxicate us. As our minds begin to sober up, we’ll begin to think more clearly. It will be easier for us to set our hope fully on the grace that will be ours if we’re not being intoxicated by a thousand cheap substitutes.

Exiles must continually align their hopes on God by engaging our minds and by watching what we allow into our minds. By preparing for action and by staying sober.  

 

[i] John Piper, Girding the Mind to Guard Your Hope, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/girding-the-mind-to-guard-your-hope. Accessed August 20, 2020.