Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
1 Peter 1:14–16
“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.’”
Disciplined and sober reflection on the things of God, setting our minds on the return of Christ so that we may be found ready when He comes, constitutes a foundational response to the work of Jesus on our behalf (1 Peter 1:1–13). Yet the Lord never means for us to merely think without acting, for rightly thinking about the glories of the Almighty and the new creation that we will receive at Jesus’ second coming inevitably bears fruit in worship, service, and holiness. In today’s passage, Peter focuses on the holiness that must flow from the mind’s engagement with the truth that our Creator has revealed.
Having come to faith in the Lord Jesus, we must “not be conformed to the passions of [our] former ignorance” (v. 14). This reference to sinful passions and former ignorance is a common New Testament way of describing the ways of the unconverted gentiles who do not trust in the Lord God or know His Word (e.g., see 1 Thess. 4:5). Peter’s original audience had once followed their lusts, not knowing the ways of God, but having come to Christ, they could live in such a way no longer. The same is true for us. Note that there is an application here also for those of us who cannot remember a day when we did not know Jesus in a saving way. We may not have ever lived a life of ignorance of God, but Scripture warns us that Christians can lapse into a love of the world and its sinful ways (1 John 2:15–17).
Instead of being conformed to sin, we are to live as “obedient children” (1 Peter 1:14). The reference, of course, is to our being children of our loving heavenly Father, and Scripture tells us that divine fatherhood means that God supplies all our needs (Matt. 6:25–34; 7:7–11). Consequently, when God calls us to be holy, which is what Peter says it means to live as obedient children, He supplies what we need to fulfill this high calling (1 Peter 1:15). We need His assistance, for the holiness that we aim for is the very holiness of God Himself (v. 16; see Lev. 19:2). Like our Creator, we must separate ourselves from evil and be wholly devoted to what is good. Matthew Henry comments that “we must imitate [God], though we can never equal him. He is perfectly, unchangeably, and eternally holy; and we should aspire after such a state. The consideration of the holiness of God should oblige as to the highest degree of holiness we can attain unto.” The holiness of the Lord is our standard, and our goal must be to grow closer and closer to it every day.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
John Calvin writes, “There is then no part of our life which is not to be redolent with this good odor of holiness.” Peter says that we are to be holy in “all” our conduct, so that we can never be content until we are seeking to serve God in every area of life. May we seek to be holy in all things, and may we seek to be so not in our own power but in humble reliance on God, asking Him to give us the will and the ability to mortify sin and grow in virtue.
For further study
- Leviticus 11:45
- 2 Corinthians 7:1
- Ephesians 1:3–4
- 1 Timothy 1:8–9
The bible in a year
- 1 Samuel 1–2
- Luke 13:1–21