[YOU Should Read This One] 1 Peter 1:13: Setting Our Hope

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."

Question: What is your hope set on?

Seriously. Think about that question for a moment. Don't let it pass you by:

What is your hope set on?

So often, we immediately say that our hope is set on Jesus. "Fully and forever," our hearts cry, "Jesus is our hope!" But...really? What if I ask the question in a different way:

What angers you?

Or, maybe one of these:

What keeps you from reading your Bible ever morning?

What makes you anxious?

What is the thing that you fear the most?

What steals your focus?

What causes you to stumble?

In a way, all of those above questions are the same as the first, because all of the above questions help us to determine what our hope is truly set on. If something makes you angry or anxious, steals your focus, or causes you to stumble, there is good reason to think that your true hope is not placed in God and in God alone.

So, what do we do with that? We all know that there are things in life that agitate us that ought not to. We all know that there are things in this life that steal our focus when we ought to focus on God. But how do we fix that? How do we truly live out the words of that great old hymn: "My hope is build on nothing less, that Jesus' blood and righteousness"? [Which, for those of you who care to know, is the inspiration behind the name of this blog, as "The Solid Rock" is my favorite hymn. Those of you who know me well surely know this already.]

1 Peter 1:13 gives us that answer. It encourages us not only to "set our hope on Jesus" as we would say, but to "set our hope on the grace that will be brought to us on the revelation of Jesus Christ." Woah...woah...big words, right? What does that mean? It means that we ought to set our hope not only on Jesus, but on the fact that Jesus is coming again to give us an even greater grace--a grace that will take us from this world full of sin. I'm not sure about you, but I don't think there's any better hope than having Jesus come back for us someday.

But how do we do that? It's easy to say we're going to do something; it's another thing to do it. 1 Peter 1:13 also gives us the answer to this: by "preparing our minds for action, and being sober-minded." I know...more big words. But think about it this way: in order to do something, you have to have both the power to do it and the will to do it. It would deffinitely be cool to make a law that says everyone on my college campus has to pay me $5 every Monday, but I don't have the power to do that. And if I really wanted to, I could punch my suitemate in the throat, but ultimately, I don't have the will to do that. Both are needed: power and will.

In order to truly set our hope on Christ's coming, we need the power to "prepare our minds for action" and the will of being "sober-minded." We will never have the power to set our hope on God unless we "gird the loins of our mind" (in other words, "take action") and work towards it. Furthermore, we will never have the will (or "desire") to set our hope on Christ's coming unless we have limited all of our distractions so that we can be "sober-minded." We will not desire to set our hope on Christ unless we are "sober-minded," and we will never have the power to unless we have previously "prepared our minds for aciton."

So, have you fully set your hope on Christ's coming? You may have said you have, but have you truly? If not (and I enourage you to think that you haven't, at least not "fully"--we all have room for improvement), you ought to "prepare your minds for action" and "be sober-minded." Gird up the loins of your mind, take action, and fight for the hope that you don't have (this doesn't come from sitting on the couch watching Netflix, by the way). Limit your distractions, become sober-minded that you might love the things God's loves. This takes work. This takes prayer. But it also is the best thing that you could ever do.

"On Christ, the Solid Rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand."