for God to have revealed himself and given us his words for our lives, so rich to spend time in these. So we'll go and read 1 Peter 1, verses 13 through 16, and then Rick will come up and preach. 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. Let's pray. Our fathers, we come before you this morning. We thank you for your word. May we learn today about pursuing holiness in our lives for it's in Christ and we pray, amen. Well, many of you here today, you know, I know well, some of you that I know as well as I'd like, but I do know one thing about everybody who's here today. And that is that not one of you became an instant billionaire last night or this weekend in the lotteries. And maybe you're here today a bit despondent that you didn't hit that big cash prize and thinking that might solve all your problems, but none of us did. But let me remind you instead that if you're a believer here today, you hit what might be the biggest lottery of your life in that you became a Christian, a believer, and now one who inherits all of the promises that God has made to us throughout all of eternity. And there's nothing in this life, in this world that will ever equal that which God has promised us in our future life. And so we struggle in this life as believers, wanting to be more holy, pursuing holiness. And that's what our passage is about today, pursuing holiness. But to do that, we have to begin with what we might call the first step. Now a lot of times we might skip over the first step or two because we think we know what that means. If I'm building something I can see the first couple of steps, skip over that because I can figure it out and get to the next steps. But sometimes you might find that those first steps had something that you didn't know or understand and you got things kind of messed up as you went down the road. The first step to be holy is to first become a believer. Now it seems quite obvious to those of us who are Christians, who are believers, but in this world today it's not quite as obvious as we might think. A lot of people think that you can be spiritual, that you can maintain something of a spiritual life and some sort of a holiness separate from any belief in God. or belief in a false god. And so there are plenty of places. You can go to the bookstores, if they survive anymore, or go to Amazon and find all the different sort of books on holiness, on spirituality, and there's all sorts of metaphysical teaching on what it might be to be spiritual. And so a lot of people who are naturalistic in their thinking, in their life, believing that there is nothing beyond this physical material universe, they might also believe in some sense that they are spiritual, because they engage in some sort of practices that helps join them as one with the universe. But what Peter does in 1 Peter 1, and that's where we're at, Let me just take just a moment to briefly hit verses 3, 4, and 5 again, as we saw last week, to remind us that holiness begins with first being a believer. And Peter writes in chapter 1, verse 3, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable undefiled and unfading kept in heaven for you who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time Peter begins his book, his letter, to these believers by reminding them, first of all, that when they became a believer, they were born again to a living hope. And this living hope is a living hope that changed their life now. And it's only based on this theological, doctrinal exposition of our being born again to a living hope that Peter now begins to build this ethical construct on what it means to be holy. So our holiness only grows out of, first, being a believer. Now, we know a few things about what it means to be a believer. First of all, it doesn't matter what socioeconomic class you come from, whether you're rich or poor, everybody becomes a believer in the same way. We have to be born again. We have to accept Christ. It doesn't matter whether or not you're smart, uneducated whether you have a PhD or a GED or even less than that it doesn't matter all of us begin the same way by accepting and acknowledging that we needed a Savior and this all happens of course we know because God who is holy God who creates the God who exists is separate from us We are not identical with him as many in the Eastern religions teach, but he's separate from us. And when men fall into sin, and we must admit we're all sinners, we are separated from God. And there is in our hearts and lives a true moral guilt. It's not simply a matter of having guilty feelings. It's not feeling guilty because we're inadequate or because we're not equal to others in our same socioeconomic class or our same jobs wherever we're at. It's instead to realize that there is a true moral guilt that separates us from God. there is the work of Christ, which is the basis of our salvation. And so when Christ comes to earth, he provides that sacrifice to us, for us, he then becomes that sacrifice, and it's in his finished work, the work of Christ on the cross, that now we have a means of bridging back to God. And so God reaches down to us through Christ, and we are now able to believe by faith, and that's the instrument of our becoming a believer, is by faith, exercise that faith in what Christ has done in His finished work, and with that then we become God's child, a child of God, or a child of obedience, as we'll see this morning. So this is what it means to be a believer. And it's not a faith, it's simply a hopeful sort of a thing. It's a belief in the promises that God has made. When we believe the promises that God has made to us in the scriptures and accept those promises, we then know that we have a means back to God. And so that's the nature of our faith. And it's all in what Christ has done. It's not a religion based on what we do. We don't contribute anything to our salvation. It's not something we add to or we cooperate in. It's entirely the work of what Christ has done and what God has done through Christ for us. And so that's the simple truth of the gospel and that's the first step in being holy is to first have our sins forgiven and that darkness in our heart being removed and us being given a new life in Christ. That's the meaning of the gospel. That's what it's about. And in this modern world where there's this spirituality or this belief that there's many ways to God, what did Jesus say in John 14? There's only one way to the Father and that's through me. There's only one way. So it's not as though you can find multiple ways to get back to God. There's only one way through Christ. And so it's in Christ. And so that's what the gospel is about. Now this doctrine we might call justification. It's the idea that God has now declared us righteous based on the righteousness of Christ. And so in becoming a Christian, we've been declared righteous by God. We are now a believer. That's justification. But now that we're a believer, we have to do something more than that. It's one thing to be born. And whether you're a king or a pauper, whether you're rich or poor, whether you're smarter or not so smart, all of us physically come into this world the same way. We have to be born physically. And so we're all born physically the same way. The same thing is true spiritually. But being born is just the beginning. The same is true physically as spiritually. Think about it. Being born physically is a wonderful moment in your life But it's only the beginning. And if a child never grows, if there's no change, if there's no growth after being born, immediately parents and others and the doctors will say there's something wrong here. We have a grandchild that's just over a year old now. and an app that we check every day on our devices called Tiny Beans. And so my son and daughter-in-law who live in Indiana take a picture every day of our grandson and post it on this app called Tiny Beans. And every day we see modest, maybe incremental changes in him. Today he did something new, something different. And it's exciting. As time passes, you see how quickly they grow from being what they were. And you can flip back a few months and see pictures and videos of a few months ago and see that now he's grown a lot. He's no longer the infant that he was. He's now walking and talking and moving and doing these sort of things. That's natural and that's good. But if you flip through tiny beans month after month and saw no growth, He's still an infant, no physical growth, no mental growth. You might begin very quickly to wonder, there's something very seriously wrong here. The same is true spiritually. When we became a believer, that was the first step of our spiritual growth, the first step in our spiritual life. But it's only the first step. And we then have to grow spiritually. And if you become a believer, that's an exciting moment in your life. There's nothing more exciting to those who've been believers for a lot of years. than to see somebody who's only been a believer in recent months. Because there's an excitement in a person's life and knowing now the old life that they had has now been forgiven. They've now separated themselves from that old way of living. They're no longer conformed to that, but now conformed to the image of what Christ wants us to be. That's exciting for all believers. There's something on the face of somebody who's young and a young believer like that. Even today, My youngest son is in Kenya today preaching this morning to Kenyan churches. And when you see the faces of young Kenyans who are believers, the excitement that they have in hearing the gospel, it's invigorating to your own soul to know that there's some life here. There's something that's changing their lives. It changes your life as well. But as he's preaching today, he's preaching to those who are new believers. And what you want to see in their life is growth, spiritual growth. The same is true of us. The thing is, spiritually, you don't just grow old, gray, and die spiritually. You grow stronger and stronger every day spiritually. Even in your old age, you grow spiritually stronger in every way. That's what spiritual growth is all about. Now let's take a look at what Paul says, what Peter says in 1 Peter 1, verse 13. And as Peter talks here, he talks about a few things we want to just touch on to give ourselves an idea of what spiritual growth is about. In verse 13 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. Look at the words, preparing your minds for action. Now, the modern translations we have takes the metaphor of the Greek that's used here and makes it understandable to us. But the King James Version, if you have that, conveys clear what the Greek says, and that's to gird up the loins of your mind. Now when we say gird the loins of your mind, modern people today don't really know what that means and so that's why we have the translation preparing your minds for action which conveys the idea. But girding up the loins of your mind takes an imagery from the first century that is understandable to them and it's this. If you've seen these Jesus movies, these movies set in the first century, you know that in the first century they wore robes, right? They wore these robes and they would have a sash around them. But when you had to work, when you had to run, when you had to do something, you would take the robe and strap it up between your legs and stuff it into your girdle your belt around your waist girding up your loins you would tie it up and tie it tight and that way you could then work and you could run you could do things and so when peter says to gird up the loins of your mind he's saying pick up the skirt that's going to make you stumble the road that's going to cause you to fall, gird it up, tie it up tightly and prepare for action. And so what Peter is saying here is that we have to mentally prepare for action in this spiritual life. It's not simply a matter of being lazy. A lot of times people will tell you that Christianity is a faith for those who are not very bright. If you take those who are intellectuals, those at the universities, they will say that the Christian faith is for those who are middle America, not very bright, that don't have a lot of thinking and so they just believe in something because they don't know how to work their way out of their own problems. But instead we see that Christianity is fundamentally and critically the only way of believing the only way of thinking that requires your mind constantly as a believer we have to think with our minds and that's what Peter's first moment here is about is to use our minds his point is to think to think clearly with our minds now we know we've talked about this that God has created us as humans with a rationality with a mind so we have an ability to think Being human means we also have emotions. We feel things. And so our mind affects our emotions. We also have a will, the ability to decide to do one thing or another that are often motivated by our desires, what we desire. And with our mind, heart desires, we're able to form intentions. And so you sitting here today can form intentions in your mind as to how you're going to live and what you're going to do, what you're going to be. What Peter is saying is gird up the loins of your mind, prepare your mind for action, using your mind rationally to think about what it means to be a believer that's pursuing holiness. How you can direct your emotions and your will and your desires and your intentions in every way so that you're growing stronger in holiness and not simply maintaining a stagnant sort of life. And so Peter's emphasis here is to use your brain. And so fundamentally, it requires our mind. Now there's more to it as Peter's gonna get as we move on through this passage in chapter one later in coming weeks, but the mind is the place to start. And so reading the scriptures, memorizing the scriptures, hearing sermons and learning from one another, all of these are methods of adding to your mind, your thinking, your understanding something more. that helps us live spiritually and wholly in this life. And so that's the point he makes, preparing your minds for action and being sober-minded, which is the idea of being level-headed. It's not simply not being mentally drunk and confused and stumbling mentally, but it's living a life where you're always mentally level-headed, thinking about what really matters. And so Peter's emphasis here is on the mind. He says, continuing, set your hope fully on the grace that we brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. The hope. Now the first two phrases we have here, preparing your mind and being sober-minded, are participles which really build on, emphasize this command, which is to set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you. Your hope is your confident expectation that God will fulfill what he's promised to you. It's not a wish. The word hope in the New Testament and the scriptures is a confident expectation that God will do what he said he will do. And so spiritually we can set our hope on the grace. that word grace conveys all of those ideas of salvation all of those ideas of a growing holiness in our hearts that is the grace of God as he works it in our life and so we can trust in God's grace putting our minds on that hope that's built on that grace and that's how we live and that's how we grow and it's a grace that comes to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ Now some take this to be the coming of Christ in the first century but I think most rightly take it to be that time when Christ will come at the end of the age and so either you or I will live to the time when Christ returns, and so we will grow spiritually until Christ returns, or we will die before he returns, but we should be growing spiritually until the moment we die. Either way, our command, Peter's command to us to grow in holiness depends on us using our minds, setting our minds on the hope that is in Christ and growing spiritually until that time. Verse 14. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. As obedient children. Now the words here, as obedient children, we can think of this in one of two ways. Either we're children of obedience, which refers to our character, or obedient children, which talks about our conduct. And so the words here, as obedient children, you might think talks more about your conduct, which is external. And that's certainly required. That's certainly true. And so if you think about as obedient children, you have children, and when they're obedient, you're emphasizing their conduct. But if you take it the inverse as the Greek has it and say instead, as children of obedience, that sounds more like it's referring to your character. You're not a child of darkness, which is your character before you were a believer, but you're now a child of obedience, a child of God, a child of Christ. And so that's now part of your character. And your character is more fundamental in how you live and what you do than the simple external. And so if we emphasize that we are children of obedience, children of God, those who are following Christ, that will emphasize the character of who we are. And the most important thing we need to know when growing spiritually is to first know who you are. A lot of believers don't know who they are in Christ. They still think they're struggling and stumbling because they're fighting in the flesh against the old way of life on their own. But as a believer, you have a new character, a new life within you, a living hope, as Peter says, and it's that living hope, that living hope which includes the spirit in your life, that's now helping, guiding, and instructing you in your spiritual growth. And so this living hope is what guides us and directs us. So we are children of obedience. And then Peter says, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. Now, all of us are conformed to something. We were before we became a believer, conformed to the passions of our former ignorance, our former way of life. There was a passion we had, a lust we had after the former way of life, and we conformed ourselves to that. But when we become a believer, we're now conformed to Christ. It's a different conforming. It's conforming ourselves to the way of Christ, to who Christ is, and what he has done for us. The Greek word used here is schema, and it's a scheme. It's sort of a way of thinking, a way of living, a way of doing things in life. And so we conform ourselves to a new pattern of thinking, a new pattern, a new way of looking at life, of evaluating the events in our life. Our spiritual life depends on us thinking properly, understanding clearly what God would have us to do and how he would have us to live. And so it's a new way of conforming. Conforming ourselves instead, not to the former ignorance, but as he says in verse 15, as he who was called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. As God who called us is holy, so we too should be holy. That seems quite simple and obvious. Be holy. Be holy in how we live and what we do. And then he gives a basis for it in verse 16. Since it is written, you shall be holy for I am holy. Several times in Leviticus, maybe four times in Leviticus, Moses used this phrase, be holy because I am holy. And so there's this constant emphasis beginning there to conform our own way of life to a way of holiness because of what God has done for us, because of who he is. Our holiness in our life is to be a reflection of what God is. And so this is a motivation for our holiness. And so we ask ourselves, how can we then grow in holiness? If you go back in history, and you can go back a couple of hundred years, there was a time when Nearly everybody was a Christian in some form. And we might put quotes around that. But in European society, in the world back in the 1600s, 1700s or so, there was generally the belief that everybody was a Christian. Generally speaking so. Now we know that in reality they may not have been. But that was the idea. In fact, one of the first skeptics was David Hume. He was one of the first skeptics who argued that there's no rational basis for believing even in cause and effect in life. He's very skeptical. And one thing he's skeptical about is the existence of God and whether there's a God. So he might be called the first atheist. And because of his skeptical way of thinking, David Hume couldn't even get a teaching job at a university. You couldn't even teach at a university unless you were nominally a Christian, unless you said you were so. But then we have the Enlightenment come. And through the Enlightenment, there's a lot of people who believe that there's a different way of thinking. And so what we might call this naturalism, this materialistic sort of way of thinking, that the only thing that exists is this physical world, that there is no other world, there is no God, there is nothing beyond that. They began thinking this way. And so there's a fork in the road that's now taken that people now have to choose. Am I going to believe that there's a God that created, that created separate from himself, and that we're a part of God's creation separate from God? and there's a way of a future life beyond this physical world, or am I gonna believe simply that this physical world is all there is and there's nothing more than this? And so this movement began, and as you come now into the 1900s in our own country, you come to a point where people now are faced with this. So you might think back to the 1950s. Remember Ozzie and Harriet? You remember these sort of shows, Leave it to Beaver? A lot of times we have a conception in our mind that the 1950s were something like that, where everybody lived in these nice homes and these nice lives and everything was simple. But then the 1960s come along. And when the 60s come along, we see the hippies and the rebellion, Haight-Ashbury, these other events going on. And so through all of this now, there's a grand rebellion that takes place. And people are looking for something more. They're rejecting authority, they're rejecting the church, rejecting God, rejecting parents, rejecting all sorts of things, pursuing their own way of life. And when they do that, they're rejecting everything that's past and wanting to go their own individualistic sort of way. And so you come to the 1970s, you still have the Brady Bunch, but you also have those other shows that show life probably more as it really was. So when the church, when Christians now are faced with this, what'd we do in the 1970s? Well, we want it to be separate. and there became this emphasis on personal holiness that required us now to be separate from the world, separate from this other way of thinking and doing things. And so what the church did was to begin to teach that we have to be separate. And some were more radical in this than others. And so you might have first degree separation, which says that I will separate from unbelievers, I will separate from believers who live in sin, and I won't allow them to contaminate my life. Others said, well, first degree separation is necessary, but maybe even second degree separation. So I should separate from those who themselves don't separate from the world, even if they're good themselves, if they still have influences from unbelievers or from bad believers, then I will separate from them. And then even third degree separation, where you're now creating barriers between everything separate from you. And so there's this idea that holiness is clearly the idea of only separation. Now, you go to the Old Testament, the Hebrew word kadosh is the word used there that speaks of holiness. We have a Greek word also, hagios, which is this holiness. It has the idea of separation, but it's not only a separation from. It's more the idea of a separation unto. It's being separate unto God, not entirely from everything else. So what we did in the 70s, and I remember all of this, and many of you will as well, you lived at a time where we began to think about the way we had to separate. And so you can go through the New Testament and see what we call vice-less. And we'll see one in a moment. But Paul would talk about a vice-less, avoid slanderous talk, behavior, all these sort of things. Avoid that stuff. And that's certainly to be avoided. What we did then is to begin to add to it what we thought was necessary so we could be holy in our own life, in our own culture. And so we might add to it things like this, well, the hippies listen to bad music so we shouldn't listen to their music and so I remember this maybe you do as well times when churches would have record-breaking meetings you'd bring all of your un-christian records non-christian records and you'd break them apart and burn them in a trash dump does anybody remember that? I heard Derek Thomas, who's a great theologian today, who works for Ligonier Ministries, who works with the R.C. Sproul, the late R.C. Sproul and others, talking about this very moment. And he said he became a believer in the 70s, and when he did, somebody came into his life, became something of a mentor, told him to bust all of his records apart, and this mentor left. And then Derek Thomas was sort of lamenting all the good records he broke back in the 1970s. wishing he had them back. Now, my records were Barry Manilow and Anne Murray and some of these others, so they weren't so bad perhaps, but I didn't break them. I still have them. But we began saying that the hippies had long hair. And so we didn't care how long your hair was until the hippies had long hair. And so now we had to have short hair. And so we began saying you had to be spiritual and holy. You had to cut your hair because the hippies liked wire rimmed glasses. We couldn't wear wire rimmed glasses. We had to have the plastic black frames. And so there was all of these ways we were looking to separate ourselves from the world. And this became something of the emphasis in the 1970s. We created our own schools, our own publishing houses, our own way of doing everything. We separated from all of this. And then the 1980s come along and we say there's something more to being spiritual than only separating from others. Maybe you can be spiritual. and have a different kind of music. Maybe you can be spiritual with long hair. And so some of the bands, and I can give you the names but that's not important now, the second chapter of Acts is one and others, they began to look like a lot of Christians as radical believers. They claimed to be believers but they looked a little strange. Well, now we come to the current years. We know that our spirituality is not tied to the length of our hair. I remember one time when I was in Anchorage, Alaska, we had to solve a church dispute because one of the ushers had a tattoo on his arm. People were concerned whether or not we should have an usher with a tattoo. Now, the tattoo was from World War II. It was a Navy Marine tattoo he had on his forearm. But there was a concern, so the idea was, well, let's have him wear a long sleeve. Now, could you imagine living in a legalistic world where we thought your spirituality was tied to whether or not you had a tattoo? So this is a way of spirituality that began to kind of guide the way people thought in the 70s. And then we began to think, perhaps that's not the way to go. There's a better way of spirituality than that, that there's something more meaningful than these external things. And so we got rid of these external lists Now, Francis Schaeffer talks about this in his book, True Spirituality. Jerry Bridges in his book, The Pursuit of Holiness, deals in different ways with some of these sorts of ideas. But the idea is this, to get back to what the Bible really says. So what does the Bible really say about our own holiness? And there's two things. First of all, let's think about the 10 commandments. The 10 commandments. Now, we went through the book of Exodus a few months ago, this past year. And as we did, we hit the Ten Commandments. And you know the commandments to love God, keep Him first, no idols, not breaking the Sabbath, not lying, stealing, cheating, not committing adultery, all of these commandments. And so there's this emphasis on the external. Don't do these things. And clearly the external is important, but we don't judge. one another's spirituality only on how they appear externally. So there's often this fear, this thought that as long as I am perceived to live a holy life because I don't lie, because I don't commit adultery, because I don't do external things, that maybe I'll be perceived and understood by others as being a good Christian, a holy spiritual believer. there is truth you don't want to emphasize or neglect the external but there's something more because when you come to the 10th commandment the 10th commandment is a commandment not to covet. Now the 10th commandment not to covet is not external it's internal and this is what Francis Schaeffer says when you break the 10th commandment not to covet it's an internal thing and you cannot break any of the other nine commandments without breaking the 10th commandment first So you don't break the commandment not to steal until you first break the internal commandment not to covet. You only steal after the internal commandment not to covet is broken. You covet first and then you steal. So in stealing you've broken two commandments. In committing adultery, you've now coveted against another person, someone else's husband, wife, or someone else. When you do that, you're now breaking two commandments, coveting first and then committing the external act. And so we think not only of external. Spirituality is not only an external thing. It is fundamentally, it begins with the internal. Now you think about what Jesus said. about the commandments. When he was asked, he was asked in Matthew, and we see this in Matthew chapter 22, he's just gone through this conversation with the Sadducees and some others, the Pharisees are there and they're challenging him on who's gonna be in heaven, husbands and wives and all of this. And then the Pharisees ask him a question, what's the greatest commandment? Tell us, Jesus, what's the greatest commandment? And in Matthew chapter 22, verse 37, Jesus says this, and he said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is likened to it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. So when Jesus was asked how to boil down the 10 commandments, how to show us what the greatest commandment is, he says there's two, to love God with all your heart, soul and mind and love one another as yourself. And so what Jesus said is you can take all of the other commands, and the Jews would have in their head 600 and some commands that they could break down from the Old Testament. Jesus said there's two, love God and love one another. Everything else falls out of that, you see. By loving God, it means now to be content and satisfied in what God has given to us, what he's promised for us. In loving one another, We don't covet against what somebody else has, but we instead do for them as we would have them doing to us. And so these are the sort of commands that we're looking at. So we think about true spirituality, true spiritual growth. What holiness is, it is external. It's not doing certain things. And we can make the list, but you want to make a biblical list. But if you make a biblical list, you have to include the 10th commandment not to covet, and the two commands from Jesus to love, to love God and to love one another. Those are the motivating internal factors in our life. And we see these things each as being in the negative, a lot of don'ts. And so we think we don't do these things, don't do this. Spirituality is gonna be more than simply a list of don't dos. And a lot of times we know that others criticize the church because all we do is take the fun out of things. you can't do this, you can't do that, we take the fun, you can't do these things. But there's something much more about spiritual holy living than not doing the don'ts. There's also a positive side to it that we have to see as well. So let me just show you real briefly how Paul kind of deals with this. Paul himself talks about the commandment not to covet and how it changed his life. You see, what Paul says is that he obeyed the commandments, but when he saw the commandment not to covet, he says, then he realized he was a sinner. So let me read Romans 7, verse 7. And Paul writes, what then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means, yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin, for I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, you shall not covet. but sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died." Now, what Paul is saying here is this, and the way he phrases it is kind of complex, and if you break it down slowly, you can see how the argument flows, but it's basically this. Paul is saying that in his life, when he compared himself against the external commands to honor God, to not make idols, to keep the Sabbath, to not commit adultery. Paul would say, I did all of those things. And I thought myself to be pretty good. I thought I was living a good, pure, holy life because I was not breaking these external commands. But then he says, when it came to coveting, then he says, sin woke up in me. And what he means is, is that he didn't realize clearly that he was a sinner. By looking at the external, he could say that I measure up better than the rest of them. I'm better than all of you. But when it came to coveting, he could look in his own heart and know there was something else wrong because he knows in his own heart he did covet. Now we can covet a lot of things. This is a desire. When God doesn't give us all that we want, we're coveting against God. We're wishing God would give us something more. We're not satisfied with what he's given us. When we're coveting against somebody else, whatever they have, whether it's their money, whether it's their gifts, when we wish God had given us those abilities, those gifts, that life, we're coveting against them, then it's sin. Paul is saying that in that moment in my life, I realized I was a sinner. Now, he doesn't go on specifically to say that perhaps somewhere before this Damascus Road experience we saw in Acts chapter 9, maybe there he was thinking about this idea of coveting, but when Christ comes to him, Paul now knows he is a sinner and it's only through Christ he has a way of redemption. So Paul looks at his life in this coveting. Now, what happens spiritually, as Paul says in Romans 7, is that there's like two trajectories, if you can imagine this way. When you first become a believer, you know all of the sin in your life. You now feel comfortable in rejecting all of that, repenting of it, turning away from all of that, going a different direction. And you feel now early on that your spiritual life is right on track, that you're really doing quite well. But as you become a believer and grow in spiritual knowledge, The more we know about what it means to be godly, what it means to be holy, what the scriptures say about our life, the more we see there's a diverging line between our growth in holiness, which is slowly going upward, but our understanding about what holiness is, which is sky high. And so the longer you're a believer, hopefully the more you realize you've really got a long way to go. That you are not as holy as you thought you were. And so if you're a new believer looking at a bunch of older people here who look like they've really got it together, like they pray well and they do well, they must be holy. You should know that those who are truly older in the faith know more than you do that they're not holy. That in our own hearts, in our own lives, we know that there's sin in our life. There's something more we're not doing right. And so the Christian life is understanding this different trajectory. It's growing slowly each day, but it's knowing that there's something more for us to do. So we never reach that point in this life. We never reach a point where we say, I've got it together. There were those, the early Wesley, Charles Wesley talked about perfectionism, later he began to give this up. Benjamin Warfield taught clearly against this idea of sinless perfectionism, but there is in some churches the idea that you can become perfect in this life, and that never happens. This life is one of going upward, of spiritual growth, but we never reach perfection until after we pass this life into the next, where then we are fully sanctified. So sanctification is a slow growth, but our ultimate future glorification happens in the next life when we go beyond this. So holiness requires us to submit to God, it requires us to obey God in all that he says, but it's always an acknowledgement, a recognition that we're not there yet. So we always have to keep striving. It's not a yielding up and giving up to the Spirit. It's a work now. Your salvation is what we call monergistic, which means it's only God's work. You contributed nothing to your own salvation, but your sanctification is what we call synergistic. It's working together with. You work together with the Spirit in your spiritual growth, in your spiritual life. And so holiness, growing in holiness, being holy, as Peter says, be holy because God is holy, is an effort we make because we have the Spirit in our life. And so it is negative. There is the don't do list. We have the don'ts, don't do this. It is negative, but it's not external only, it's internal. But it's not only negative and external as well as internal, but it's also positive. There is the positive side to spiritual growth. There is the affirmative that we do. It is loving God. Loving God means accepting where God has put you in this life. It's not wishing God had given you something different, something else. And so we know a couple of things. First of all, we know that in this life, we are engaged in a battle. We are engaged in a battle while unbelievers, the secular world will say that the physical material world is all there is. We as believers know that there is a spiritual world, there is another world, there is the unseen. And there's a battle going on in your hearts and your lives between not only the seen but also in the world of the unseen. And so there's a battle going on. And being submissive to God, not coveting against God, is not wishing that God would give us something else, but it's understanding that we have to be submissive to God. And that means submitting to where God has you in this life, even if it includes suffering, as Peter talks about earlier in chapter one. whatever it includes, we are in a battle, a spiritual battle, and God has placed each of us someplace in that battle. And if we're submissive to God, we should be happy with wherever he has placed us in that spiritual battle, whatever our role might be. And so we find ourselves in this life, submitting to God who's placed us in this world as his soldier in this spiritual battle that's ongoing. Spiritual life, holiness, growth, all of these ideas can be summed up with not coveting in your heart, with loving God and loving man, loving one another. From all of that, everything else we do will flow. We can critique our own hearts and lives by asking ourselves, in what I'm doing, In what I am doing, am I loving God? Am I demonstrating love to God? Am I demonstrating love to one another? These are the ideas that Peter is working out that Paul develops further in other places. And so in all of this, we know that we have to use our mind. It's about thinking first. It's about beginning with the mind, thinking about what matters, knowing God, pursuing his word, his way. And with that then, working it out in our life in a practical way. Let's stand as we pray. Our Father, as we consider your word this morning, may we be people who understand that our spiritual life begins, first of all, with this new birth, but it continues on every moment of our life, each day as we grow spiritually, as we grow in our understanding of your word, as we grow in our love for you and our love for one another, may we demonstrate that in every aspect of our life, may we look critically to our own hearts, to the internal in our own lives, so that we know whether we're living a holy life. And may we work with your spirit in growing spiritually in holiness each day. First in Christ, amen.