Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1909
“Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober and hope to the end for the Grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” 1 Peter 1:13.
To read the whole chapter is most helpful to the understanding of our text. If we have studied it carefully, we must have said to ourselves, “How full of their Lord were the minds of these holy writers!” Peter can scarcely write a verse without an allusion to the Lord Jesus Christ. He was not only, “Peter, an Apostle of Jesus Christ,” but you can see that his heart was steeped and saturated in memories of his Master—he could hardly get through a sentence without some allusion to the death, the Resurrection, or the Second Coming of his beloved Lord. Oh that my ministry might always be of the same sort, dripping with the holy unction of the Savior’s name! Brethren, may your conversations and your lives be full of the Lord Jesus Christ, that men may take knowledge of you—that you have been with Jesus and have learned of
Him.
A second thought will have occurred to you—How ardently these men expected the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ! Peter was continually speaking of it and so was his beloved Brother, Paul. They hoped that Christ might come while they were yet alive—they evidently looked upon His Advent as very near. They were not mistaken in this last belief. It is very near. A long time has passed, you say? I answer, By no manner of means! Two thousand years is not a long time in the count of God, nor in reference to so grand a business! If a thousand years is with God as one day, if the Lord does not come for the next 20,000 years, we shall not be truthfully able to say that He delays His coming, for with a history of which the chief fact is the death of Christ, there may well be due pause and ample time for working out its infinite problems. We are dealing with eternal things and what are ages? Let us patiently wait. “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise as some men count slackness.” Let us persevere in the same belief which filled the minds of the early Believers— that Jesus will come, that He may come at any time—and that He will surely come quickly! Brothers and Sisters, before the word which now proceeds from my lips shall have reached your ear the Lord may come in His Glory! Be you as men that look for His coming at any moment.
It is equally noticeable that while Apostolic men looked for the coming of Christ, they looked for it with no idea of dread, but, on the contrary, with the utmost joy! In this chapter Peter sets forth the glorious Advent of our Lord as an event to be hoped for with eagerness. He speaks of “the Grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” It was to him, therefore, not a day of terror and of thunder and overwhelming confusion, but a day of the consummation of the work of Grace, a period in which Glory should crown the Grace received through the first manifestation of the Lord! It was all joy to the early Believers to think of the Lord’s appearing. The falling stars, the darkened sun, the blood-red moon, the quivering earth, the skies rolled up like an outworn vesture—all these things had no horror for them since Jesus was, thus, coming. Though all creation should be on a blaze and the elements should melt with fervent heat, yet Jesus was coming and that was enough for them—the Bridegroom of their souls was on His way and this was rapture to their expectant spirits!
Observe also, once more, how constantly they were urging this as a motive! Peter never holds it out as a mere matter of speculation, nor exclusively as a ground of comfort, but he is constantly using the Lord’s glorious appearing as the grand motive for action, for holiness, for watchfulness! Our text is a case in point—“Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober and hope to the end for the Grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” My Brothers and Sisters, let us not set aside a Truth of God which is evidently meant for our stimulus, our strength and our
sanctification—but let us receive it into our hearts and pray that God may bless it to our practical profiting in all time to come.
I intend to handle the text with special view to the present time. It seems to me that there never was a text more appropriate for any day than this one for the time now passing. It begins, as you notice, with girding up the loins of your mind. These are days of great looseness—I see great laxity of doctrinal belief—and gross carelessness in religious practice everywhere! Christian people are doing, today, what their forefathers would have loathed! Multitudes of professors are but very little different from worldlings. Men’s religion seems to hang loosely about them, as if it did not fit them— the wonder is that it does not drop off them! Men are so little braced up as to conscientious conviction and vigorous resolve that they easily go to pieces if assailed by error or temptation. The teaching necessary for today is this—“Gird up the loins of your mind,” brace yourselves up! Pull yourselves together—be firm, compact, consistent, determined! Do not be like quicksilver which keeps on dissolving and running into fractions—do not fritter away life upon trifles, but live to purpose, with undivided heart and decided resolution.