Because He Who Called You is Holy

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.”

1 Peter 1:13-16

In some ways, Peter’s first epistle that we are still just starting is about a call for Christians to be holy. But what does that mean? Before we get an answer to that, we may need to take one step back and make sure we understand what the essence of holiness means to begin with. Various theologians have spoken of this as “the brightness of all His perfections.”1 The Greek word for holy (ἅγιος) is the root for the word used to describe the process of becoming holy, which we call sanctification (ἁγιασμός). If you are wondering why those got to be different sounding words in our English, it is very simple. We derive from the Latin sanctus words such as “sanctity” (holy) and “sanctuary” (a holy place) and “sanctify” (to make holy).

Scripture identifies God’s people as holy in a few senses: first, by virtue of God’s unilateral action to separate them and consider them special2—since “[Christ Jesus] became to us … sanctification” (1 Cor. 1:30), the Apostle can say, “you were sanctified” (1 Cor. 6:11) and even of the children of believers, “they are holy” (1 Cor. 7:14); secondly, by the ongoing process of sanctification, which Peter has already called “the sanctification of the Spirit” (1 Pet. 1:2). This is the believer’s daily, progressive conformity to the image of Christ. And it is chiefly in this second sense that Peter calls the believer into a kind of militant action here.

Doctrine. The Christian is called to mentally war for holiness by weighing its ultimate and subordinate motives. 

(i.) The intellectual discipline of personal holiness

(ii.) The subordinate motives of personal holiness    

(iii.) The ultimate motive of personal holiness

The intellectual discipline of personal holiness

‘Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded’ (v. 13a). This is an interesting expression in the Greek and one which the older translations retained. Let me read it in the King James Version and explain the imagery: “Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind.” The noun ὀσφύς means “loins,” but the reason this expression existed in the ancient world was because males wore what we would consider to be robes, and so in order to run in those everyday clothes, they would have to gather up the loose-fitting parts and tie or tuck them into the belt to run freely. In battle, you would start that way. So the idea is a rapid switch from civilian affairs to battle conditions. The Bible speaks this way. We can easily blame the wrong things when we see the silly gimmicks of the church culture trying to get men interested in church—the surface appeals to sports or action movies can make many think that any talk of war belongs to the same category. Not so! Paul said,

Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him (2 Tim. 2:3-4).

These words of Peter are the words that you would expect of coaches to players, or even commanding officers to soldiers, when some intense conflict is approaching. Either the players or soldiers have slacked off or something that exceeds anything they have experienced so far is on the horizon. For many people in our anti-intellectual culture, the use of the mind itself is that intense thing lurking on the horizon! “How can Peter tell me to prepare for a battle by putting our thinking caps on? For me, too much thinking this early in the morning is the battle!” But this is exactly what Peter is saying and there is no sense in interpreting it any other way. The metaphor is emphatic. To prepare the mind for action means that your mind is for action. To the prepare the mind for warfare means that the fight is fundamentally won up there (in the mind). The “gamer-changer” is going to hinge on a change of thought.

The subordinate motives of personal holiness

A subordinate motive is a lesser motive, but when our loves are properly ordered, they are also means to the ultimate end or motive. In other words, if you achieve these subordinate goals they are what get you further up the road to the ultimate. There are two subordinate motives here, and, at first glance they may seem ultimate themselves. I wouldn’t want to do anything to diminish them. Think of these as behind us and in front of us—in other words, the motive of attaining the glory of salvation, which is Christ Himself, in front of us; and the motive of being rid of the greatest obstacle preventing me from getting there. That is sin.

First, Peter points us forward in this way: ‘set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (v. 13b). The adverb τελείως is from the root for “end” or “aim,” and so this is not just “fully” for added emphasis, but is a hope aimed at the end. Hope to the end! In his commentary, Sproul said of this main word,

The biblical word for hope is different from our normal English use of the term. When we say in English that we hope something will happen, we are expressing our desire for a particular outcome about which we cannot be sure. In the biblical usage, hope is not an uncertainty but a certainty, which is why it is called ‘an anchor of the soul’ (Heb. 6:19).3

Then, Peter points us back to get us to reason that, if we would walk this way, then we must lose those weights and chains: ‘As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance’ (v. 14). The word that the ESV renders “conformed” is a Greek construct (συσχηματίζω / su-schema-tizo) from the word we derive the English “schema,” or, in other words, pattern. So in verb form, “fashioned” or “patterned” would both work, and is probably better to our present English ears. Now, why do I describe those passions as weights and chains? Peter tells us in two other places. First, in this letter, one chapter later, he says, “to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul” (1 Pet. 2:11). Then, in his second epistle, he draws this out a bit more in the context of false teachers who had turned grace into license to sin:

For, speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved (2 Pet. 2:18-19).

So the greatest of all my subordinate motives to pursue holiness are so that I can escape the chains of sin, so that I can persevere to glory. But even those are not ultimate.

The ultimate motive of personal holiness

In keeping with that call to preparing your mind for action: Look and think hard about the logic of Peter’s statement.

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” (vv. 15-16).

Here Leviticus 11:44-45 is quoted. There it uses a repetition to Israel, so that the point can be hammered home: Your reason for holiness is my reality of holiness. If you trace that out in the books of Moses, the dominant theme for this rationale was a very practical necessity. To be near to the holy was actually a problem. It was a great danger. John tells us that, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 Jn. 1:5). If you are darkness, you can’t just walk into the light. So it is with sin approaching holiness.

But that is the negative necessity. Holiness and sinners don’t mix. But there’s a positive rationale. Assuming that you have been cleansed of your sin and adopted by God to be His sons and daughters, then you can see this. The original rationale of Israel’s holiness followed from the same rationale of God making man and woman in His image from the start: We are what we are because of what it says about God. We do what we do because of what is says about God. God commands what He commands because of what it says about God. All things ordained by God are designed for His glory—“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory” (Rom. 11:36). What does that mean? All things. Each thing.

my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory (Isa. 43:6-7).

Every Christian designed to speak about God. In this case, the focus is specifically God’s holiness reflected in the Christian. That is a specific glory to God. We get the privilege of living lives that make those around us think about the holiness of God.

This gets back to that Greek word that Peter used containing the word “schema.” We Christians are, after a fashion, “little Christs”—that was what the word Christian originally meant, used as a pejorative by those in Antioch (cf. Acts 11:26). So here to become “fashioned” after the One who is holy is to be fashioned after the pattern of Christ who is holy as perfect Man, so that copying holiness is intelligible.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor. 3:18).

Simple principle behind this: We cannot take on the character of another without at least observing him: or, in Paul’s word, beholding. There is more to it than beholding, but there is not less. Imitation follows admiration, and admiration follows beholding, but if you don’t start by beholding, no admiration can ever arise, and then you can forget all about imitation.

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Instruction. Consider again the Big Idea—The Christian is called to mentally war for holiness by weighing its ultimate and subordinate motives. How does weighing those motives make us mentally able to war for our personal holiness? There are two main reasons.

First, it is generally true that bad things are viewed as bad, and eliminated, only in light of the greater good that they would prevent. This is as true of spiritual goods as it is true of diet and exercise, or money management, or time management. So it is here, that Peter opposes obedience to passions of our former ignorance. In other words, one has to become “un-ignorant,” that holiness begets true happiness and sin begets misery.

Second, moving beyond that simple opposition of motives to sin conquered by motives to holiness, one can then graduate to properly ordered loves—seeing even the salvation of one’s soul as the means to the end of God’s glory. How? Here, the specific glory to God is our holiness after the fashion of Christ’s holiness. In gaining that in this life—even by a faint reflection—I am gaining that which is the substance of the eternal state.

Use 2. Exhortation. We are exhorted here to pursue holiness right now and with a special eye toward the end. This hope toward the end and this holiness to the end go together—holiness and hope. Many do not pursue holiness because of alternative hopes. They do not make time for it because they are torn between ultimate things and “the next thing,” and the next thing wins every time. But this passage reminds us that we will give an account for how we set our hope in pursuing holiness now. “Oh, I will get to that when things are better.” No! In that case, your hope is fixed on that “soon” and not on the end; and those false “betters” will just keep coming. Take time to be holy, the hymn says.

How? Holiness is not just purity, but separateness. Be separate unto God. Your time specially to the Lord. Your money specially to the Lord. Your children specially to the Lord. Your near future plans specially to the Lord. Your nearest day—this day—before you contemplate other things and forget these things, specially, separate, purely to the Lord.

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1. Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, Volume 1: God, Man, and Christ (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 1992), 121.

2. Francis Roberts wrote: “In all which places we are not to understand by holiness, a qualitative holiness of person: but a relative holiness of kind, which some call federal holiness, because by virtue of God’s Covenant it is derived and propagated from parents to posterity, from Abraham to all his seed.” God’s Covenants with Man, Volume 2 (Kansas, OK: Berith Press, 2023), 75.

3. Sproul, 1-2 Peter, 27.