Our Calling: Right Thinking and Right Living
Scripture Reference: 1 Peter 1:13-16
Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter
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Sermon Series: Spiritual Exiles
Message: Our Calling: Right Thinking and Right Living
Airdate: 9/16-9/17/26
Programs: 2358 and 2359
Well, good morning, and good morning to our Cedar Lake campus, our Hobart Portage gang that's gathered, and, here at Crown Point as well. Good morning. I'm gonna begin my, message with a little personal touch. Many of you know that Jennifer and I are pregnant expecting our second child, and we found out what this week, what the gender is. Thought we'd share it with you.
So put up on the screen if you would. Now this is our this is our child. If you look really carefully, look really carefully. So Some of you still don't know what that means. Ask somebody later.
Yes. We're having a little girl, we found out this week. So that's two girls. It's lost lots of estrogen in the house, isn't it? So it'll just be one more reason to pray for your pastor.
Right? We're excited. June, sometime in June is the arrival date, and, we're we're, pretty pretty fired up about that. So let's get into our time in God's word together. And I remember some some years ago, somebody coming up to me and saying, you know, pastor Steve, you spent all that time in your messages on exposition, And then you get to the application.
And, honestly, we really prefer the application. Could you just, like, skip forward to the to the application and do less of the of the exposition? And the answer to that is no. I will not. And the reason for that is that, like a a family that says, you know what? The meat, the vegetables, the fruit, it's also unnecessary. Let's skip forward to the dessert and just do dessert all the time. Would be a very unhealthy family. Similarly, when it comes to studying God's word, it's we always wanna move towards application, but it is the the doctrinal, exegetical, the truth, the words of Scripture that form the grounds for the application. And if you just do application and without any doctrine, your applications aren't gonna last very long.
They won't be very deep for sure. And we see this happening in the in the letters of the New Testament. Most, if not all of them, begin doctrinally. They begin with truth about God. They begin with truth about the gospel.
They begin with truth about, you know, the the nature of salvation, and then they move towards us. So what? This is what it means. This is how we sort of live this out on the street level of life. And Peter is doing that and has done that here in our little study so far.
We saw in verses of chapter one in verses one through 12, a wonderfully, like, amazing, rich, fantastic explanation of the gospel, the nature of salvation, what God has done to save us, how Jesus has been key in that in his resurrection, and it's been it's been filled with hope. It's been filled with joy and gladness. And then you get to verse 13, and there is that word therefore. And that word is code for time for some application. Whenever you see that in the Bible, it's probably the the writer drawing now some conclusions for the way that we ought to live.
And so we're gonna talk about that kind of application today. And, let's get into the text. I'm I'm studying with you today verses, 13 through 16 of First Peter one. Please listen as I read God's word. “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 you who 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.” Now if you look at that section of Scripture, you'll see that there really are two kind of, like, commands here, two big things that he's saying, this is what we ought to do. And he says, first of all, set your hope fully on the grace to come. And secondly, that we are to be holy in all of our conduct.
So hope fully, be holy. And before you think that doesn't sound very practical to me, there's a lot more here than meets the eye. And I want you to see just first of all that these verses are part of a larger section here beginning in chapter in verse 13 and following that is all about what the gospel ought to do in the lives on the practical level as it's lived out by the Christian. Not just what we have here before us, but the fact that God is holy. We're gonna see in verses 17 following that God is our judge, And then finally, that we were redeemed from this way of, this sinful life by the precious blood of Jesus.
And all of those, the holiness of God, the judgment of God, and the blood of Christ are to call the Christian out of a life of sin and living according to the old ways and to call us into the new life. This new life lived to the glory of God, lived free from the bondage of sin. And so there's lots more of this to come. We're just looking at one section here today. Notice, first of all, that he says that we are to focus on future grace.
Look look again at verse 13. “Set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” K? Set your hope your hope fully. Now what is hope?
Hope is, by definition, future oriented. I don't hope, you know, I I I don't hope about something that has already happened. I don't hope the Seahawks win the Super Bowl. Why? Because it's done already, isn't it?
Hope doesn't orient backwards. Hope always orients forwards or towards the future. And we've seen Peter saying this throughout this letter. It's the it's actually the third reference to the return of Christ. He did it in verse five.
He did it in verse eight. Now he does it in verse 13. Are you surprised that a letter about suffering would have a lot about the future in it? I'm not. I mean, this is it makes sense, doesn't it?
To cast our eyes towards what is yet to come in the midst of our trials, in the midst of our sufferings, to think about the future. And here, he says the grace that is yet to be revealed. Now what is that talking about? Because I think we could look at salvation and say, wait a second, I already got the grace of God. Right?
When I when I put my faith in in Jesus, I received from God grace. I was saved by grace. I go to a church that sings amazing grace. How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I've already got the grace of God.
How can I put my hope on some future grace? What might this be talking about? One of my favorite commentators, Wayne Grudem, says the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ means the further store of undeserved blessings, which God will pour out on them when Christ returns. Whenever we talk about grace or the grace of God, it is always highlighting that God is giving us something that we don't deserve. That's why it's grace.
Salvation is by grace through faith. To think about the future and to realize that there is a storehouse of grace, there are blessings that are yet to come to us that we have not realized, that we have not yet fully received. The future is even better than it is right now. Might that be encouraging if you're in a trial of some kind? That maybe the best is yet to come, and that what I have, while wonderful, is not yet the fullness of what God has in store for those who love him, for those who are called according to his purpose.
You say, well, that sounds nice. Preach as well. But, like, what are you talking about? Well, here's just a short list I just kind of compiled of future grace yet to come. The ongoing conscious life upon our physical death, the physical presence with God, our resurrected and glorified bodies, seeing and worshiping and savoring the presence of Jesus Christ himself, eternal rewards that God will give to us based on the quality of our service to him while here on earth.
How about eternal life, enjoyment, and pleasure that we will have forever in real time on a new earth that has no curse upon it? We're gonna live on that new earth, and it's gonna be a much better version than this one. Eternal fellowship with fellow Christians and loved ones. If you've if you've had a loved one that's died in the faith, I guarantee there's a future grace coming to you. You're gonna meet him or her again and fellowship with them forever.
Eternal status and relationship as children of God, which right now we don't totally get and realize what a big deal that is. But to step into eternity and the God of heaven, the God of eternity, we are part of his family. We're not just servants in the house. We are sons and daughters of God. Many other things.
Someday you're gonna come to me and say that list was terrible. It was so small. We you could have added so many more things. Indeed. None of them we deserve.
All of these things are God's gift to us. We deserve hell. We deserve punishment, and yet God is giving us what we don't deserve. And much of what we're going to receive, we haven't even tasted yet. And so Peter writing to exiles, suffering trials says, put your hope not here and not in the trial or maybe the trial going away.
Set your hope fully on grace yet to be received from God. The inverse of this is true. Don't put your hope on anything less than this. Don't put your hope, Scripture says, in your riches. Don't put your hope in your life and in your physical vitality.
Don't put your hope in any fellow man or pastor or anybody else. Don't put your hope in who you are and your achievements and your big stuff or whatever it might be. Don't put your hope in things in this world. All of it is passing away. The Bible calls God's people with the same faith that trusts in Jesus in the past dying on our on the cross for our sins, to look to the future with the same kind of expectant hope and to believe the best is yet to come.
That helps you endure in them trials, doesn't it? Now that sounds wonderful, but how do we do that? Peter, get practical for us. K? We're tired of these long expositions, Peter.
Could we just skip to the dessert? Can we get to the application? And Peter provides two specific means by which our hope is set fully on the future. You might have missed them as I read it. But notice, first of all, he says that we are to prepare our minds for action.
Somehow, there's a connection between setting my hope fully and the grace to come and a mind that is prepared for action. What does this mean? Well, it's an intriguing illustration. In fact, if you have a King James Bible possibly with you, you might look at that and say, my Bible says it a little bit different. Indeed, here's how the King James translates it.
And if you grew up in the church in the seventies with a good Scofield Bible like I did, this is more what you're familiar with. Right? It says this, gird up the loins of your mind. Ain't that a blessing? Gird up the loins of your mind.
And, technically, that is what the text is saying here. The problem is that for most of us, a loin is something to put barbecue on. Right? And so we don't feel like we can apply that very well. What do you mean loins?
Well, this is a historical cultural thing. Let's talk about this a little bit. A loin was a robe or the bottom section of a robe. And if you've watched, you know, the Jesus film or some things like this, you've seen the kind of robes and garments that the men would wear as just that was the fashion of the day. And so what would happen is is that these men would wear these long longer kind of flowing gowns, but they had to do what men today have to do.
They had to work. They had to go to war. They had different things. And so if you were going to do that, you had to gird up your loins. You had to take those flowing gowns, and you had to get them out of the way if you were to do serious business.
Now I happened upon an illustration on a website that I kind of like called the art of manliness. I go there just to see if they're manly enough, in my opinion. But I came across this illustration of how they actually girded up their loins. Now this is gonna be a blessing to each of you. Notice that the the the the gown that the guy has, he would pull it up, bring it cinch it together, pull it through between his legs, and then stick it into his belt.
And when he'd done that, now he's ready to go to war. The art of manliness. Okay? I actually thought about demonstrating this myself, but maybe this will suffice for that. Okay?
Now here's the point. You girded up the loins of your mind or your your your actual loins, it meant that you're about to get serious about something. You are about to take care of business. And that could be working in the field, or it could be defending your home or defending your honor. I mean, if you saw a guy if if you're, you know, if you're at the local pub and a guy starts girding up his loins, you're like, hey. What's going on around here? Right? Why? Fight's about to break out. This guy's getting serious right here.
Calm down, man. Stop the girding. Peter says, with our minds, we are to gird up our loins. What is he referring to there? What Peter is saying is the same thing that Paul says in Ephesians six when he writes, “stand therefore having fastened on the belt of truth.”
I believe it's the same word, gird on the belt of truth. So for Paul, he's saying, get that belt of truth solidly in your mind. Peter is saying, get serious about truth with your mind and with your thinking. Why are our minds so important? Here's why.
Right thinking leads to right living. When I am thinking rightly, my life is going to be consistent with that right thinking. When I am thinking poorly, when I am not thinking, when I am thinking with distraction, when I am thinking about lesser things, my life is going to reflect that also. Proverbs says, “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” If you wanna know who you really are, look at your thought life.
Think about the things that you think about. Examine the way that you use your mind, and it will determine largely the shape of our lives, how important our thinking is. He doubles down on this. Peter does. And he says, secondly, be sober minded.
Be sober minded. This word here is most commonly used in reference to alcohol and intoxication. He uses it Peter or Paul uses it in First Timothy three describing the qualifications of an elder. He is to be sober, and a godly woman is described as being sober. And it certainly includes not allowing alcohol or any other kind of substance like that to be a controlling influence in your life.
But it's used here more broadly, not just alcohol, but a kind of soberness in thinking, not dour, not sad, not like I'm sober. We're Christians. We're very sober. Not like that. We can be we can be joyous, and we can be glad hearted, and we ought to be.
But in our thinking, we are serious and sober. We are directing the thoughts of our minds, and it's shaping our whole approach to life. Another commentator. For Peter, the cares of this life and the pressure of persecution can intoxicate the Christian and distract his or her focus just as easily as wine might. The need of the hour is clear judgment and a mind and will prepared to resist anything that would distract them from a hope set on Jesus' appearing.
Sober thinking is thinking with focus. It is clarity. It is the refusal to allow anything to distract. Again, it's not sober in personality. It is sober in thinking.
It is a mind that says, I am. I refuse to think about life and my trials and my troubles in any other manner than this right here. I will look at life through the gospel. I will look at life through the grid of God's word, which is God's wisdom. I wanna look at my marriage.
I wanna look at my parenting. I wanna look at my singleness. I wanna look at my schooling and my job and my hobbies and the dreams and hopes and my money and everything else. I wanna look at it through the wisdom of God's word, and I refuse to allow my mind to think anything else else than that. That is sober thinking.
It is the Christian mind whose best and highest thoughts are reserved for kingdom and spiritual matters. So let me ask you. Think about what you think about when you don't have anything that you have to think about. What do you spend your time thinking about? How often in the course of the day do your thoughts turn towards spiritual realities?
This is where I think some of the disciplines, Christian disciplines of prayer and Bible study and Scripture memory. These are all things that aid in this. It helps us to tune our hearts to sing his praise as the hymn writer says. It's in the day where my I am vertically oriented, and I'm looking at my life from the perspective that heaven vertically allows for me. How often do you think about God in the day or ministry or the needs spiritual needs of the people around you or Scripture or eternity?
Do you intentionally direct your mind to think about what you want it to think about? And you say, I can't do that. My mind has a mind of its own. And now this is psychologically confusing, isn't it? But what I wanna say is we can direct our thoughts.
We can, as Paul writes, take captive every or take captive every thought and and subject it to the lordship of Jesus Christ. It is a discipline. It is a way of using and thinking about life intentionally, but it takes habit. I've been thinking about this lately because I feel like in my life right now, I'm struggling in this regard. And I think why is it?
Like, I I feel like I I I used to be able to think better than I do right now. And I think one of the reasons this is just one of them. One's just the aging process. But secondly, probably, I I think is that I find myself today often the the the gaps where I used to have time to think are now being filled with checking my email, social media, or passively watching something on a screen. Now maybe it's just me, but I don't think so.
I think we are currently and unknowingly awash in a kind of mind muddling cultural habit of perpetual distraction. And I will never be able to say that sentence again. So I hope somebody wrote that down. Don't you think? I mean, now it's just common.
We don't we think nothing of it to go to a restaurant and to look in the booth next to us and to see a family of five. They're not talking to each other. They're engrossed in their smartphone. Right? I have come to church and and walked through here before the service starts, and I've seen an entire family all sitting here minutes before the service is about to start.
All of them are engrossed in their phone. And I don't think they're preparing for worship by reading the Westminster Catechism. What are they looking at? What are they reading? What are they filling their minds with?
What are they directing their thoughts towards? And I say this to myself because I feel like my mind is I'm getting mushy. I don't like that. Distracted. You know, Satan doesn't have to convince us of a heresy.
He just has to distract us from thinking about the truth. The one, if I got up and say Jesus isn't God, I hope you'd all rush the stage and beat me to a pulp in love. K? That's the obvious danger. How about the more subtle one where we just don't think about it at all and we're constantly distracted from the higher and holy things of life and eternity.
We're awash, I think, in trivial things. Can I just sit on this a little longer? If you want I say, hey. Think about what you think about. If you if you view social media as any indication of the thoughts that people are having, I mean, if they're having the thoughts sufficiently that they think I need to post this, I need to communicate this with everybody that knows me, then this must be, one of their best thoughts.
Right? And if you look at a at a news feed on Facebook or some other social media site and to see the kinds of thoughts that people in society and maybe even people in the church, what they're thinking about, what they are viewing, what they are finding humorous. Not all of it. There's lots of cute pictures of babies and gender announcements. And that's totally acceptable.
But a lot of it is superficial, silly, banal. And it seems normal to us now. Right? Because it's just all the time going on. It troubles me to see on Facebook people, even in our church, posting, tweeting about, you know, the dresses at the Grammys or Katy Perry's Super Bowl performance.
Really? Like, this is this what we're filling our thoughts and minds with? And then here comes the trial and life is devastating. I wonder why. I haven't set my hope fully on the grace to come in years.
I've been filling my mind with all of these lesser things. I'm thinking poorly. Now this is not a rant against media or movies or Twitter. Not at all. I think Peter would have had a Twitter account, honestly.
But I don't think he would talk about silly things. In fact, can we not look at First Peter as a kind of long Twitter account? What was Peter thinking about? He writes about what he was thinking about. And here we have before us the kinds of thoughts that the apostle Peter had about life.
This is the kind of thing that he was dwelling on and thinking about. Does that not tell us something about what it means to be a spiritually mature Christian man or woman and the kinds of thoughts that we think about? And this is a struggle because our culture is so immoral and so materialistic and all the rest. But he was living in the Greco Roman culture, which would give ours a run for its money. And yet, he was thinking this way.
I would encourage you to follow the example of the apostle Peter. Now one more thing, and I gotta move on here, because I wanna get particularly practical. How do we engage our mind in sober thinking? How do we make it intentionally oriented towards spiritual truth? Well, I thought I'd just have some fun with this.
What's the gender of our baby? Girl. So how about maybe on the week that I announce this, here's my little acronym. K? Four ways to help think more seriously about higher things.
Girl, g, get rid of distractions. If your whole life is beeping, humming, buzzing, smartphone, constantly calling your attention to something that somebody has said about this or that, you have no time to think high and holy thoughts. There's no time for prayer. You're distracted all the time. Now I sound like an old fuddy duddy with that, and the young people are going, he is so uncool.
But let's see what happens to this generation in thirty years. Time will tell whether wisdom lies in the beeping and the humming and the buzzing or in the older folks who are saying, it didn't used to be like that. We used to talk. I thought maybe some of those old people would amen that point. But get rid of distractions.
K? And I don't mean to focus on that one. There's a thousand distractions out there. Secondly, increase truth input. Get rid of the banal and the inane and the silly and the superficial and fill your mind. This is the garbage in garbage out principle. Fill your mind increasingly with truth. Philippians four eight. You know, “what sort of things are pure and lovely, of good report, excellent, and worthy of praise, think on these things.”
Spend your time on the beautiful and the truthful and the glorious and the eternally significant. Third, r, recall the grace of God for all the times you don't do that and to seek his forgiveness and ask God to give you daily grace. And finally, love God with your mind. That's a whole another point we could make, but how critical it is that we're we are thinking Christians. And even from the beginning, we're called to love him with our body.
I mean, we preach against, you know, sexual sin or, you know, abusing your body with drugs or something like that. But so we we're we're all about loving God with our bodies. But what about loving God with our minds? And to intentionally seek to think deeper and higher thoughts about God and to learn and to grow and to become a mature thinking Christian. Let's do that.
K? Let's do that. Now I gotta move on. We got communion coming. Second thing that he is focusing on.
First one is setting your, your hope fully on the grace that is to come. The second category is that we are to be holy or what I'm calling, we're to be like our daddy. Again, the text, verse 14. “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.”
So we see Peter here moving from right thinking to right living. What does holy thoughts in my brain look like in a holy expression in my life? And I want you to see, first of all, that this has a relational tone to this. He he began doesn't just say, be holy. He says, hey. As obedient children. And what is that referring to? It is referring to the relationship that we have with God. Right? The Bible says that when we become Christians, that God actually adopts us into his family.
We are members of the family of God. We're brothers and sisters in this family. We're sons and daughters of the most high God. And because God is my Father, that relationship matters. It means something in regards to the way that I look at myself, the way that I want to live my life.
God's my Heavenly Father. How should I live now? Well, he says here that we should live morally disciplined lives. And to proof text this, Peter reaches into the Old Testament, goes back to Leviticus, and he quotes from there's five passages in Leviticus that use the same statement. “You shall be holy for I am holy.”
K? You shall be holy, not me. I'm I'm saying it like I'm I'm God. Okay? “You shall be holy for I am holy.”
K? And so we see in that statement the ethical measure and the eth and the ethical motivation as well. God's character is the measure, and God's character is the motive. Because I am holy, you shall you shall be holy. God's holiness is the absolute moral unity of his entire being.
He is completely good. He is morally without fail. He is not the author of evil. He has no inclination towards anything that is less than absolutely morally pure and upright. John writes this in First John one.
“In him, God is light, and in him, there is no darkness at all.” There's no shadow. There's no little something hidden. He is absolutely, morally, purely bright and light. Everything he does always is holy.
And so Peter says, this is our God. This is our Heavenly Father. This is the way that we are to strive to live our life in a morally disciplined manner where the ethics of life matter to us. We want to please our Heavenly Father. We wanna live consistent with what he is like.
Notice in all your conduct. Okay? So it's not just, you know, be holy as I am holy. When you're at church on Sunday, when you are out with the pastor, when somebody is watching that maybe could look down on you, It is not in any sort of category. It is in all categories.
Holiness of life impacts, shapes, directs every aspect of my life. Why? Because it shapes and directs every aspect of the very life and character of God himself. Now lest there be any confusion here, I wanna emphasize that we are not naturally holy. We are naturally sinners.
And this is why Jesus came, and this is why Jesus died. He didn't die for holy people so that they could go, not go to hell. He died for I said that wrong. He let me just say it this way. He died for sinners.
K? He died for sinners, and that's us. K? So without his righteousness, we have no standing with God. We have no adoption with God.
But sometimes people confuse our position before God as righteous because of what Jesus has done and the calling that God has upon the practice of our life. You overemphasize the position and say, hey, I'm righteous before God, so who gives a rip? Right? I'm going to heaven anyway. That is an abuse of the grace of God.
If I focus on the practice solely, then now I am all the time wondering if I'm good enough, wondering if I'm gonna earn my way to heaven. And that is a misuse of the gospel. The gospel is is that we are declared righteous by God. We are positionally righteous before God. We enter into a relationship with God through the gospel by faith that now shapes my desires where now I want to live like I'm a child of God.
K? It is relational. It is not legalism. It's not antinomianism. No law.
It is relationship. Grudem says to be holy as God is holy includes a full and pervading holiness that reaches to every aspect of our personalities. It involves not only avoiding outward sin, but also maintaining an instinctive delight in God and his holiness as an undercurrent of heart and mind throughout the day. God is our Father. He's always our Father.
Everywhere we go, he's our Father. We're his children. And this is where I think the metaphor is helpful because children, not always, but naturally want to to please their or to be like their dad. I'm enjoying this almost every day. I have a 20 year old daughter.
Okay? So here's here's what happens in my day. I find myself you know, I'll I'll be sitting at the couch or something and I'll stretch like this and I look over and there she is. She's looking for my affirmation. Right?
I'm I'm I'm doing what you're doing, daddy. Right? I kinda like that. That's kinda fun. I'll say to her, I love you.
And she'll say, I love you. Is that manipulation? I don't know. But I love it. I love it.
Or the other day I was eating and I wasn't watching my manners very well. And so I'm kind of chomping away on something sort of loudly and all a sudden I look over and she's going, daddy needs to slow down and close his mouth while he chews apparently. Why does she raise her arms and mimic me? Why does she repeat the words that I say? Why does she mimic even some of my less wonderful qualities?
Because at this point, at least in her life, she wants to be like me. That's a goal for her even though she couldn't articulate it. And here's where I think verse 13 and verse 15 come together. The goal of what God is doing in each of us is holiness and Christ likeness. That's the big picture.
He is forming us into the likeness of Christ. As I muster my spiritual and my mental thoughts and energies towards loving God with my mind, my Heavenly Father, my will increasingly is shaped by that priority And the true thoughts that my now girded up mind, the loins of my mind, are thinking about and focusing on shape the desires that I have in my heart, which right thinking leads to right living. So I fill my thought, my heart, my mind with God's truth. And the more I think about the grace of God to me, both now and in the future, and the love of God to me both now and in the future, the more my life then is shaped around his will and his purposes. So that right thinking about God shapes my desires and produces a more righteous living, a more holiness in my life.
And all of it is anticipating a future grace and goodness of God that he will shower upon me and is yet to be experienced. And the anticipation, the more I realize what God has already done for me, it elevates my anticipation of what God has yet to do for me. K? And anticipation is a very powerful motive in our life. I remember when, football season was about to start.
I would run, and I would train. I would get ready for it. And when basketball season was gonna start, I would run and train and play and shoot. I would get I would get ready for it. I remember when we had, the Bethel five k here a couple years ago.
I'm the pastor of the church. I don't wanna embarrass myself. I ran, and I got ready for it. And I remember, perhaps the best example for me is after forty-four years, I got married. And before my wedding, I'm here to tell you, after forty-four years I was thinking about my wedding, and I was thinking about my honeymoon.
I wanted to get ready for it. So I swam, and I ran, and I got a tan, and I was thinking about anticipating being with my girl. And it shaped the way that I lived my life. And when we, as Christians, set our minds on things that matter, things that are spiritually true, the promises of God, gospel, the word of God, when my thoughts are high and holy as God would have them to be, I anticipate increasingly, this is good. The best is yet to come.
And that anticipation of what is to come means I'm getting ready for it now. And it changes and it shapes the way that I think and the way that I live and the directions of my life, which increases my likeness to Christ and gets me ready for that day when Jesus returns and when his full grace will be revealed. So friends, set your mind on the grace to come. Be holy as God is holy. Is your mind disciplined?
Is your life morally diligent? And is your hope oriented towards the amazing grace of God yet to come? To help us with that today, we are going to be partaking in the Lord's supper. And I'd like to pray, and you could begin to prepare your hearts as I do. Heavenly Father God, I do pray and ask that this very practical message would, lead to very practical results in our lives.
Lord, help us to be a church that is disciplined in our thinking, that strives to know and understand the gospel, the God of the gospel, the Jesus of the gospel, that we would be serious about this. And that this might, Lord, grant to us an elevated sense of anticipation of what is yet to come. And as we take this communion now, I pray that the partaking in it, the reminder of the death of Jesus would serve to also prepare us with, holiness and anticipation of no more symbols but actual presence to see him and to be with him forever. All praise be to Jesus, we pray in his name. Amen.
* This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.
