In this sermon, Shayne gives five reasons to change your life, based on 1 Peter 1. He then offers suggestions of what that change might look like in real life.

(If you prefer to read the text of this sermon (there will be variations from the spoken message), you can find it below.)

Once, when we were visiting at my parents (it must have been 1993), my dad and I were alone in the kitchen and, out of the blue, he said to me: “I’d like you to do something for me.”

Instead of saying, “Sure,” I said, “What?” With my dad, I didn’t know what was coming next.

He said, “When I die, I’d like you to officiate my funeral.”

I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t that. He was younger than I am now, in good health, and was the toughest guy as I knew.

So, I said, “Okay, but I want you to do something for me.”

This time it was his turn to say, “What?”

I said, “Stop smoking! I’ve done too many funerals for people who have died from lung cancer.”

He replied, “Oh, don’t worry about me.”

So, I said yes to his request, and he said no to mine. About a year later, he was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer. Less than two years after that, I was officiating his funeral.

(By the way, my dad did quit smoking. I called him a week or two after he quit just to ask how he was doing. He answered in his inimitable way: “I never thought it would be this easy. You know, I only want one cigarette. I want it to be 8-feet long, but I only want one.”)

Change is hard, whether the change involves addictive substances or patterns of thinking. And yet change is required of every Christian. Other people may say, “I’m never going to change,” but Jesus’s people say, “I have changed and, by the grace of God, I’ll keep on changing until I am like Jesus.”

If God has been nudging you to change, consider this sermon a push. If he has been speaking to you, consider it a shout.

Today, I want to give you five reasons to change. These five reasons come from 1 Peter 1:10-19. Listen as I read to you verses 10-12. Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.

Reason number 1: You need to change because you are caught up in the most important thing happening in the world today. The matter of supreme importance on the globe right now has nothing to with the rise of AI, international tariffs, or China’s intention to displace the U.S. as the world’s leader. The most important thing in the world is what God is doing—and is going to do next. Peter calls “this salvation,” in verse 10. You should change your lifestyle because God is bringing his salvation plans to fulfillment.

This salvation, this healing of the world, dwarfs everything else that is going on. Thousands of years ago, prophets were making careful searches and inquiries into it, trying to discover the timing and circumstances surrounding it. And now, in St. Paul’s memorable phrase (1 Cor. 10:11), “the fulfillment of the ages has come.” Did you realize that we are living in the time about which the prophets spoke? It is happening now! That is a good reason to change your life.

This thing is so important (verse 12) that angels long to look into it. Beings that existed before humanity appeared on earth, beings of unimaginable power and superhuman intellect, long to look into these things. The word translated “long” is usually translated “lust.” It connotes strong desire. This salvation is so fantastically important that these otherworldly being have an intense longing to know about it. And you and I are a part of it.

A second reason you should change your life is because of who you are. You are (verse 14) obedient children or, literally, “children of obedience.” Before you trusted Christ and came over to his side, you were one of “the children of disobedience.” (That’s Paul’s phrase from Ephesians 2:2.) But things changed for you when, as Peter said back in verse 3, God gave you new birth into his family.

Imagine a nine-year-old who is adopted into a loving family. The people he had been with were crude and lewd and by age 9 he has picked up many of their habits. He uses shocking language, shouts out sexually explicit phrases he doesn’t understand and, when he doesn’t get his way, he hurts himself and others. One day I visit this family and, when I see what’s happening, I take that young boy aside and tell him: “You are now a Smith (or a Jones). It’s time to stop acting like your name is Swine or Brute.”

That is essentially what Peter is doing. He is saying, “You are part of a new family – God’s family. So, stop acting like you are still part of that abusive family you grew up in. In Peter’s words, “Do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance.” You didn’t know any other way then, but now you do.

There is background to this that we need to understand. Humans were designed to conform – God’s entire plan depends on it. He took dust of the earth, added water, and we became a kind of modelling clay, a human Play-Doh. We take the shape of what is around us and we harden into that shape. When we lived in ignorance, we “conformed to the evil desires” we had. Our lives took the shape of lust, or greed, or anger, or pride. But now we have been born into God’s family through faith in Jesus Christ and are being reshaped. We are still being conformed, but this time it is to the image of God’s Son.

The third reason you should change goes beyond who you are to whose you are: change because of who your Father is. Lots of pastors tell their kids they can’t do this thing or that thing – or yell at them after they’ve done it – because of what church people might think. That is a mistake. If our kids wanted to do something with their friends that seemed questionable or was likely to land them on morally shaky ground, we would tell them no. When they asked why, as teenagers do, I would say. “Because you are a Looper. But, more importantly, because you bear the name of Christ.” I wanted them to remember whose family they belonged to.

Because God is your Father (verse 17) and because he is holy (verse 16), you should “be holy in all you do” (verse 15). We assume that means, “Be religious in all you do.” It does not. Being holy has nothing to do with spouting catchphrases like, “Praise the Lord,” “God is good,” or “I’ll be praying for you.” Being holy does not mean you don’t laugh or enjoy sports or like nice things or take vacations. But it does mean that you are different.

That difference is not cosmetic. It is comprehensive. People have sometimes talked as if holiness is about how you dress or what kind of music you listen to. It is not. You can be holy whether you speak Farsi or English or Wolof, but you cannot be holy if you use your words to condemn or to gossip. You can be holy whether you wear a blouse or a Nike T-shirt or go topless (if you’re Wolof), but you are not being holy if you dress to intimidate or to titillate, to compel submission or evoke lust.

The heart of holiness is being different and that difference results from the fact that God’s Son has brought us into his family. We are different because we are his—his sons and daughters. A Christian who wants to please our Father and look like our savior is going to be different.

One difference between us and many other people is that we acknowledge God’s authority to say what is right and wrong. He gets to tell us what to do. That is radically different from how most of our neighbors live.

People do what is right in their own eyes. We choose to do what is right in God’s eyes. Our interests don’t come first; his do—and then our neighbor’s. We can live like this because we trust our Father to take care of us.

To live like this is to be different. To live like that is to be holy. And why live like this? Because God is our Father, and we are part of his family.

Here is a fourth reason to change: there is going to be a judgment and God is the judge. That is the teaching of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and that is what Peter has in mind in verse 17: “Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.” There are some things to notice. First, note the word “each”: each person’s workis going to be judged. No one gets a pass.

Second, take note of the word “work.” The judgment Peter has in mind is not about your admission into God’s eternal kingdom. If you have the eternal kind of life that comes through faith in Jesus, that has already been taken care of. Peter is talking about a judgment of your work He doesn’t mean your job or career. He’s talking about what your life has produced during your time on earth.

Next, note the one judging your work is your Father. Do you realize what that means? Your judge is not some stranger, or enemy, or rival. He is not some infamously nitpicking critic. He is your Father who loves you. Whatever he may say about your work, what he says about you is this: “This is my child” – if you are indeed his child through faith in Jesus Christ. If you are not, believe on Jesus Christ today!

He is your Father, but he is also a perfectly just judge. He will not ignore the faults in your work because you are his child, like some parents do. But neither will he, like other parents, be harder on you than he is on everyone else because you are his child. Your life work is going to be judged and it will be judged accurately. As 1 Corinthians 3:13 put it, “Their work will be shown for what it is.”  

If your work survives that examination, you will have a reward, which will, I think, include the enjoyment in the next age of what your life produced in this age. That will be a sweeter fruit and more enjoyable than you can now imagine. But if your work does not survive the examination, neither will your reward.

Peter wants us to keep this in mind. He tells us, “…live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.” Understand what is at stake. Our work – not the employment that makes us money but the product of our life – is going to be judged. That means that what you and I do now has lasting consequences.

Peter calls our time on earth (literal translation), “the time of your alien residency here.” Before we moved to Elkhart, there was an influx of immigrants into the small town where we lived. Whenever we went to Walmart, we would see lots of people who were born in another country: Africans, Middle Easterners, people from the Caribbean. Most had a different mother tongue. Many wore different clothing. It was easy to recognize them as foreigners.

And Jesus’s people should be recognizable for the same reason. “Our citizenship,” St. Paul says, “is in heaven and we eagerly await a savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20). Would to God that people at Walmart recognized us as foreigners, as people who are different – who are holy – because our citizenship is in heaven and our customs come from there.

A fifth reason to change is because of the inconceivably high price God paid to make a new way of life possible for you. Peter contrasts that new way to “the empty way of life from which we were redeemed” (v. 18). When we hear the word “redeemed,” our brains immediately categorize it as religious. Peter’s first readers would not have done that. For them, this was a word that came right out of the community’s social life. They knew people who were redeemed. They themselves may have been redeemed. They didn’t think of it solely (or even especially) as a religious thing.

When Peter was writing, slavery was a major economic driver, comparable, say, to retail trade in our day. At one point, half the people living in Rome were slaves. The economy of the ancient world would have utterly collapsed if the institution of slavery had ended abruptly. But an individual’s slavery could end abruptly if he were (Peter’s word) “redeemed.”

The way that usually happened was this: a slave would save all the money he could, get friends and family to contribute and, when he had enough to make an offer, he would take it to the priest of Artemis or the priest of Apollo, who, after taking a cut, would make a deal with the slaveowner to redeem the slave. The slaveowner would then sign a paper acknowledging the slave had been released to Apollo or Artemis. Such a person was called a “freedman.”

Peter thinks of our life before Christ as a kind of slavery. It was “empty” as the NIV puts it. It led nowhere. We couldn’t help living that way because we were born as slaves. And we didn’t think much about it because everyone we knew was living the same way. We weren’t trying to get out of slavery, just make our slavery a little more comfortable.

But it was not some priest of Artemis or Apollo who bought us out of that old way of life. It was the high priest Jesus who released us into the service of the Lord of heaven and earth. And he didn’t use our own resources to redeem us out of slavery. He paid for us with his own blood. How can we go on living like everyone else, slaves to the empty desires that once controlled us, after we have been bought at such a price?

I’ve repeatedly said that we should change and related five reasons from 1 Peter 1 for doing so, but what does that look like? How should we change?

First, change the object of your hope (this is verse 13). In the empty, slave-way of life, people’s hope is about having a little more: a little more money, a little more time, a little nicer house. They hope for a more comfortable slavery. Stop hoping like a slave and start hoping like a son or daughter. Set your hope fully on the grace to be give you when Jesus Christ is revealed. He is going to make you more than comfortable. He is going to make you glorious.

Next, change your routine. Do you know what it means if you do what everyone else does and desire the same things they desire? It means you have been assimilated. Look at your life: if you are pursuing the same goals, valuing the same stuff, and spending time the same way as everyone else, you’re not living here as a foreigner. You’ve settled down. It’s time to settle up. If God has been speaking to you about changing something in your life, that is the place to start.

(This is just an aside. One easy way to be different is to go to church every week. That will differentiate you from 80 percent of all Americans.)

Finally, change what you tolerate in your life. I’m not talking about what you tolerate from others but what you tolerate in yourself. Ruthlessly eliminate (this is 2:1): “all malice” (that’s the desire for other people to get their comeuppance and to fail) “and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander” (whether online or in-person). Malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander—that’s life in this world. It is not life in Christ.

You will need help to change, and God will give you that help. Ask him. Trust him. But understand that change requires (verse 13) “minds that are alert and fully sober.” In other words, you’ll need to think about this.

By “fully sober,” many scholars think Peter means only “clear-headed,” but since he mentions drinking later in the letter, we can’t rule out a literal reading. It’s impossible to do the kind of thinking needed to change your life when you’re drinking a lot – or even more than a little.

But alcohol is hardly the only thing that leaves us muddled. We can get buzzed on social media, non-stop news, hobbies, and shopping. I suppose such things have stopped more people from advancing spiritually than alcohol ever has. Whatever keeps your mind distracted, prevents you from going to God, and leaves you incapable of trusting him, needs to go.

It’s time for a change. That I should change pricks my conscience. That I can change gives me hope. That that change is into the likeness of Jesus causes me to pray, “Lord, I want to be like you!”