In the first chapter of 1 Peter, verse
13.
1 Peter 1, 13.
Wherefore, 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.
And you who attend here regularly know that
we have been going over Peter almost phrase
by phrase.
And we have just arrived here now at
verse 13 with that word wherefore.
Gird up the loins of your mind and
be sober and hope to the end for
the grace that is to be brought unto
you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Now, there isn't ever a word in the
scriptures that is simply padded.
In human speech, that is, in ordinary workaday
language, there are many words that are just
padded.
They are there because custom has ordained they
be there.
But when you come to the word of
God, you are safe in assuming that this
divinely inspired book has no padding in it.
If it should not be there, it's not
there.
It is there because it has a function
to perform, even in translation itself.
So when we come to the word wherefore
here, we come to the word that means
because of the foregoing.
Wherefore looks back at something that has been
said and forward to something that is to
be done.
Always it's so.
And here again we see the biblical method.
The Bible, like everything else God made, has
method in it.
And you may be sure that you will
not go far astray if you look for
that method.
That is, if you don't pry for it,
but notice it as you go along.
And here is the biblical method.
It is to lay down strong foundations of
truth.
And these foundations of truth are declarations of
God.
Declarations mostly of what God is doing or
has done or both.
And then after this strong foundation of truth
has been laid, then show that this truth
constitutes a moral obligation.
I think I should emphasize this again, though
I suppose this would constitute a certain repetition,
that one of the difficulties in the modern
church is that we are content to lay
down foundations of truth and leave them there
without giving them a moral application.
This was never meant to be so.
The great American evangelist Charles Finney went so
far as bluntly to teach that it was
sinful to teach the Bible without moral application.
That is, simply take a course in the
Bible, find out what he teaches, with no
thought that there's any obligation hanging there, that
you are obliged to do anything as a
result of what you learn.
That we call Bible classes.
And I am convinced that a great many
Bible classes are nothing more than a means
whereby men are deepened and settled in their
religious prejudices.
But when we have moral application, then we're
Bible in our methods.
He says, now this is what God did,
and this is what God did, and this
is what God did, and therefore this is
what you ought to do.
And that's always the Bible way.
And there's never any other way in the
Scripture.
There isn't one single, lonely book of the
Bible that doesn't have expectation that I can
think of.
There isn't one that simply says, now here,
I want you to learn this, I want
you to get this, pack this into your
training, and then let's go.
Never, always the Bible gives you the truth,
and then says, now if this is true,
then you ought to do something about it.
And gives it moral application.
That's what the word wherefore's and therefore's doing
in the Epistles.
Blessed be the God and thought of our
Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his abundant
mercy hath begotten us again unto a living
hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead, unto an inheritance unfading.
And then he says, now because he has
done that, therefore you ought to do this.
Now he says here that we are to
grid up.
And we'll look at this little expression, gird
up our loins.
It's drawn from a figure, of course, it's
an analogy, as there is much of that
in the Bible, figures of speech and analogies
and similes, and here's one.
Gird up the loins of your mind.
Now you and I would have to learn
what that word gird up means, but they
didn't have to learn it then.
They saw it, it was right there, just
as when the Bible says that the Lord
will make our sins whiter than snow, you
and I don't have to be taught, we
look out the window almost any winter day
and we know what whiter than snow would
mean.
But there are places in Africa where the
missionaries can't use the word whiter than snow,
because they have no way to tell, no
way, the heathen have never seen snow and
have no remote conception of what it's like.
So when we come to the word gird
up, you and I will have to have
that explained to us, because we do not
now dress the way they did then.
There were tunics in those old days, great
Mother Hubbard affairs, and they were of course
always in the way, some of these tunics,
they were simply like a blanket with a
hole cut in the middle and then strung
down over it.
And of course you can imagine working around
or walking or doing anything with that, it
was always in the way, any direction you
backed or went sideways or forward or raised
your hand, you always had your tunic in
the way.
Well, the way they handled that was this.
If they were very poor, they simply took
a chunk of leather, a piece of leather,
dry leather, and they cut that out and
tied it around their waist and pulled it
into a loop and they were girded.
Then their tunic was not in their way,
then they could run or walk or travel
or climb or work, and their girdle held
the tunic out up so tight so that
it didn't bother their feet or their hands.
If they were rich, they had woven girdles
of various kinds, just narrow belts, we use
the word belt now, exactly the same thing,
a man has a belt around his waist,
some people don't feel they're dressed unless they
have a belt holding them.
And that's quite scriptural and quite in order,
and they had those belts in those days.
John the Baptist, you remember, came wearing camel's
hair, that was the great big old tunic.
But he had to get around so much
that he had to gird it with a
leather girdle.
He was a poor man, he couldn't afford
silk-woven girdles or linen, so he had
an ordinary piece of leather cut out now
and put around his waist and tied in
a hard knot.
That was to get him foot freedom, so
he could walk.
Now that's the explanation of it.
So when it says gird up the loins
of your mind, the loins being your waist,
gird up the loins of your mind, we
now know what it means, though we'd never
guess it in a thousand years if we
didn't have scholars to explain it to us,
because people nowadays in this country don't dress
like that.
But he says gird up the loins of
your mind.
Now as applied to the inner life, that
is the mind, let's put it like this,
that as natural men, as ordinary men born
into the world and grow up in it,
educated or uneducated, black and white, handsome or
homely, rich or poor, just common plain people,
sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, we
are by nature careless and disorganized in our
inner life, and indifferent.
And we tend to accept the popular way
of life, whatever it may be.
The popular way of life is accepted by
the average man, not because he thinks so
-called, but because he doesn't think.
Even a sinner, if he thinks, rebels against
the tyranny of the popular way.
Men like Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, and
Bruno, and many such men, they rebelled against
the day in which they lived.
Occasionally you'll find a stern old New Englander
yet who stands up on his own strong
hard feet and refuses to bend.
They have to bend to him, I admire
that, because it's individuality, it's independence of spirit,
but you don't find it much.
It takes a thinker to stand up and
refuse to bow or bend.
But the average man doesn't think.
He only thinks, I wonder if there's enough
time on that meter by while I run
into the store.
Or he wonders, I wonder if Dresden will
manage the Dodgers this year, will Pee Wee
Reese manage them.
Or he thinks in something where it doesn't
mean touch character, doesn't touch life at all,
doesn't touch any inside, it's only a surface
thing.
He never wades deep, he only plays on
the shallow surface of his life.
That's the sinner.
He's all careless and disorganized and indifferent.
And if there's some field where he has
to tighten up his belt, say the mathematician
or the scientist or the industrialist or the
businessman, that has to do some careful thinking.
It's never moral thinking, it's never thinking that
touches his inner life or his conduct.
It's only thinking that touches his business, his
profession, his occupation.
That is all.
The mathematician or the physicist working over the
atom bomb, that's some magnifying thinking, but it
doesn't necessarily mean it has anything to do
with his moral life.
His moral life is all ungirded and loose
and ragged, and loose-ended, even while he
is carefully thinking in his own little prescribed
field.
And so with the author, the writer, the
playwright, the scenarist, I've forgotten how to pronounce
that word that they used to call, used
to give to a man who wrote movie
plays.
But anyway, they think, but they don't think
anything that touches their moral lives.
Now, the Bible says here that we are
to gird up the loins of our mind.
When we are converted, well, that's one of
the first things we begin to do.
We become sensitive to eternal values.
And we want activities that will endure, and
readiness for flight.
Because that's why they girded themselves in the
Old Testament.
Ordinarily, just slopped around in their old tunic.
But when they wanted to work or travel,
they girded themselves.
And Paul, or Peter here, uses the phrase,
Paul used it too, but Peter uses it
meaning, you Christians ought to get ready to
do two things, labor and travel, one or
both.
So, he says, gird up the loins of
your mind.
Activity, that is labor, and readiness for sudden
departure, that is travel.
Those are the two things that people do,
travel or work.
And they had to be girded for.
And then we begin to grieve for the
way we're living.
The lax, thoughtless mess of our lives.
Sinfulness.
Not sinfulness in its overt way, maybe, as
Christians, but aimlessness and futility.
One of the hardest things that I've had
to get over, or hardest things to understand,
is to find so many Christians that are
living aimless lives.
They're not shooting at anything, so if they
hit it, they won't know it anyhow.
And their lives are all apart.
They're not girded up.
They have great many talents.
I know a number of men.
I'm thinking right now of a great man.
I say he's a great man because he
has great nobility of character, and one of
the most tremendous thinking machines that I have
ever seen in my life, or ever come
in contact with.
He makes me feel like a little boy
when I'm around him, because of the utter
size and range of his intellect.
And I have never known him to do
or even utter anything that is not noble,
and yet he has been a minister, and
he's been a total failure from the time
I've known him.
A total failure.
Goes from one church to another, has a
run-in there, and then goes to the
next one, and starts something, and it peters
out, and then goes somewhere else, tries that,
and it peters out.
And it's because he's not girded.
He has tremendous mind, but it's not girded
up.
It's like a man with a beautiful Stradivarius
violin that isn't tuned.
He's not taking time to sit down and
tune his violin, so he doesn't get any
melody.
People won't stay to listen.
And yet he's a tremendous preacher with a
great mind and a noble character, but he's
no good because he's not girded.
And that's one extravagant, extreme example.
But I find many of God's people, I
go back after twenty years, now twenty years,
just nothing to me anymore, just tossed around
like that.
Used to be, you know, and I thought
twenty years would be a lifetime, but twenty
years, you know, you just toss it around.
I go back after twenty years, and there
he is, same old fella, a little bit
thicker, a little bit balder, a little bit
heavier.
But nowhere, he didn't get anywhere because his
mind was never girded.
Peter says that we are to gird up
the loins of our mind, and that carelessness
and aimlessness should all go out of the
Christian.
The average Christian won't think when it touches
his moral life.
He won't think when it touches his spiritual
life.
Meditates a little enough to solve his conscience,
and then lives his aimless life.
He's a puppet of circumstances, being tossed around
like a crook on the wave, but not
plowing through like a ship on her way
to harbor.
Gird up the loins of your mind, he
says, and stop this wastefulness, this lax thoughtlessness.
I said not sinfulness, maybe, but only aimlessness,
laxness, and futility.
But I wonder how far you can go
and how long in living an aimless life
and not border on sin pretty soon.
I think it becomes sinful after a while.
When we get so prodigal with our talents
and so careless with our time and so
aimless with our activities that we get nothing
done, it becomes sinful after a while.
The book of Proverbs tells us about the
man that lies on his bed and turns
on his bed like a door on its
hinges, but the weeds grow up in his
garden, choke and kill his crops.
And when the fall comes, he has nothing,
and then he has to beg.
Now, that's not overtly sinful, but I wonder
if it isn't sinful after all.
I wonder if it isn't sinful to be
lazy.
I think it is.
It's sinful to be intellectually lazy.
I believe it's sinful to be intellectually lazy.
A man that won't lose his head doesn't
deserve to keep it.
And a great many people don't use their
heads.
And if a preacher gives them anything else
except a few stories about a little girl
that went to church and then came home
and she said, Mama, if you get any
deeper than that, they say he's too deep.
He goes over the heads of the people.
What are their heads there for?
Any preaching I do that they charge I
go over their heads, I deny it.
I may go through their heads if there's
nothing there to stop it, but I don't
go over their heads.
God Almighty gave you a head there, brother,
and you ought to use it.
You ought to take it out, oil it
up, and rub the rust off of it,
and begin to use that head of yours.
I believe we ought to be theologians.
I was reading this morning, just this morning,
about old Nicholas Herman, that godly Brother Lawrence,
who recommended, he said, Nourish your heart on
high, noble thoughts of God.
Nourish your heart on high, noble thoughts of
God.
You've got to use your head a little
bit to nourish your heart on noble thoughts
of God.
You can't live on yellow tracks and stories.
You've got to think some.
Well, gird up your mind, he says.
Gird up your mind, and we begin to
pull our lives together then.
And we eliminate carelessness.
We eliminate carelessness in word and thought and
deed and activity and interest.
I suppose that if I could know every
one of you, could know every one of
you, and I speak now of our own
people, not in chance visitor who might be
with us, but if I could know every
one of you as God knows you, I
would experience two tremendous shocks.
One would be this.
I find so many of you so much
better than I thought you were.
I believe that.
Once in a while, somebody will tell me,
you should have heard so-and-so pray,
or you should know what so-and-so
is doing.
And I never knew they were like that.
I just, we walked around here, and I
shake your hand, greet you.
But I, you're better than I think you
are.
Some of you are.
But I think on the other hand, over
against that, to offset it, I would find
some far worse than I dream they are.
Careless, loose, lax in their thoughts and words
and activities and interests, anything but spiritual.
Between Sunday and Sunday there isn't a thought
of God.
Between Sunday and Sunday there isn't an hour
spent in prayer.
Between Sunday and Sunday there aren't three verses
of the scriptures read.
We can get away with that before pastors
and boards, but we can't get away with
that before God.
That's loose living.
That's laxness.
Now scripture says in Luke 12, 35, and
36, Let your loins be girded, and your
life burning, and ye yourselves like unto men
that wait for their Lord, to come back
from the wedding, so that when he cometh,
they may get up immediately and open to
him.
And now in Isaiah 11 and Ephesians 6,
we learn what we gird our loins with.
It says, Righteousness shall be the girdle of
his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his
reins.
And Paul says, Good, let yourselves be girded
round with truth.
So we have righteousness, faithfulness, and truth as
the beautiful strands of silk and linen and
perhaps gold that we gird ourselves with.
God doesn't mean us to be girded in
our minds only with cheap leather.
He wants us to be girded with the
fine linen of righteousness and faithfulness and truth.
Pull that tight around you so your mind
isn't loose.
Righteousness, that's right living.
Faithfulness, that's loyalty to something.
When we invented the conception that the church
was a mistake, as we did at the
turn of the century in around 1910 up
to 1920 in this country, when we invented
the idea that the church is a mistake
and that it's only tabernacles and preaching centers
and come when you're pleased and leave when
you must and belong to nothing and look
to nobody and submit to no one and
no thing, we played straight into the hands
of that master of all disorganization, the devil.
Right into his hand we played.
And in the name of freedom and liberty
and the deeper life, we went a long
way to destroy the Church of Christ in
America.
Remember, my brethren, it's better to be faithful
to something and have loyalty for something than
for the good it does you.
Sometimes denominations carry that too far.
I never could have been loyal to anything
that didn't command my loyalty.
Some denominational churches impose loyalty by decree.
They'll never catch me in that net.
Nobody's ever going to demand that I be
loyal to something, but if they'll get good
enough to command my loyalty and I don't
give it to them, then I am the
sinner, not they.
But when they try to impose loyalty on
me, they're all wrong.
I will not honor a man that does
not deserve honor, and I will not withhold
honor to them from the man that does.
I will not be loyal to a denomination
that has cast the blood of Jesus out
and denied the deep truths and the scriptures.
But if any church anywhere is spiritually worthy,
then I want to be loyal to that
church.
Now, faithfulness and truth.
Then it says, be sober.
Now, what does it mean by sober?
We know a little more about that.
Sobriety is when the calm reason is in
control, the mind is balanced and cool, and
the feelings are subject to reason.
And for that reason, I do not believe
much in any kind of spiritual experiences that
deform reason.
Men sometimes act unreasonable and then excuse it
on the ground if removed by the Spirit.
I doubt it.
I doubt that the Holy Ghost ever deforms
reason in any man's mind.
I know in my own personal life, the
highest, loftiest, and most God-beholding moments of
my spiritual experience have been so calm that
I could write about it, calm that I
could tell about and analyze it.
The human reason must always be in control,
blessed and warmed and refreshed and shining with
the love of God, but always in control.
Now, drunkenness is the opposite.
When reason has been dethroned, you know what?
You go down to the corner here and
you'll find a fellow come staggering out.
Reason has been dethroned and the judgment has
been impaired.
Who was it?
Shakespeare or Robert Burns?
It's said that Robert Burns called liquor, liquid
damnation, and I think it was either Shakespeare
or someone else who talked about a man
opening his mouth and drinking down something that
made his brain go out.
He probably said it more gracefully than that,
but that's the meaning of it.
Now, when the emotions get out of control,
and that's what happens to a drunk man,
his emotions get out of control.
He's either so happy that he's a bore,
or else he's so sad that he cries
in his beer, or he's so affectionate he
wants to hug you and move over you,
or he gets so generous he gives everything
away he has, or he gets so mean
he can't live with it.
That's the way it works.
I think it usually works that way in
everybody.
They start out by getting happy.
The French used to say that conversation was
impossible without wine, that if you didn't have
wine to stimulate you, you couldn't talk.
I've been around a while, I've been talking,
and I never had taste of wine as
much as one gram or seven meter or
whatever it is in my life, and I've
managed to talk, and I think you have,
but that's what they say.
They say you have to have wine in
order to have sense of effort to talk.
But I have noticed that when a man
gets too much alcohol in him, he gets
too talkative and gets too happy.
He's ready to tell stories and laugh and
carry on, and then after that begins to
wear off, he gets affectionate.
You see a drunken fellow throw his arms
around you and cry on your shoulder and
tell you how he loves you, and twenty
-five minutes before he didn't even know your
name.
And then they get sad also.
Emotions go out of control, and every bartender
knows, though I am not exactly a friend,
too close a friend to too many bartenders,
but I read a little, and every bartender
knows the fellow who comes in, gets enough
to make him sad, and then sits and
tells how his wife doesn't understand him.
And then generosity.
People get too generous, too happy, too sad,
too affectionate, too mean, all because their emotions
have gone out of control.
That's what liquor does.
A man is drunk when he's like that.
Now the same thing is true in the
Christian life, my brethren.
I do not believe we ever ought to
allow our emotions to get out of control.
The spirit of the prophet is subject to
the prophet, and when the spirit of God
moves into a man's heart, it'll make him
generous, but it'll never make a fool out
of him.
It'll make him happy, but it'll never make
him silly.
It may make him sad with the woe
and weight of the world's grief, but it'll
never turn him into a cynic and a
sadhead.
It'll make him affectionate, but it'll never make
him do things that he's ashamed of afterwards.
So, brethren, I want you to gird up
the loins of your mind and be sober.
And if ever there was an hour when
we need sobriety, this is the hour.
This is the hour, brethren.
We need to be sober men, but spiritual
men.
Now, tombstones are the soberest of all things.
Their gravity is perfect.
And they sit through the years, they're neither
affected by cold, nor rain, nor snow, nor
heat, or changes of administration, or coronations of
kings, or losses or winnings of battles, they
just sit there and look straight ahead, faithfully
reminding the passing onlooker that Mr. John M.
Jones, 1861-1932, lies there.
And that's a tombstone.
So some churches, in order to keep sober,
they just stay there.
And of course, you don't want anything to
do with a church like that, and neither
do I.
I believe in spirituality of the loftiest kind.
I believe we ought to be filled with
the Holy Spirit, and that we ought to
walk in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
But I don't believe that the central, we
call reason, ever ought to be disrobed, nor
that our emotions ever ought to get out
of control.
Now it says here, shout as it were,
to the end for the grace, but the
margin says perfectly in the King James Version,
and all other versions I'm acquainted with say
something that's perfect.
I don't know how to the end got
in there.
But the translators can't decide whether Peter said,
hope perfectly to the end, or be perfectly
sober and hope to the end.
Well, hope perfectly is not an idiom we're
familiar with.
Contrary to the genius of the English tongue,
nobody ever heard anybody say, he hopes perfectly.
But you heard him say he's perfectly sober.
So I think what he meant here was
to be perfectly sober and hope to the
end.
Now the sober Christian is one whose reason
is sanctified, and he can't be swept off
his feet by the latest vote, nor by
scintillating personalities.
If Bob Hope fires Arthur Godfrey, he doesn't
run and read about it, he doesn't care.
And if Julian Osabrosa is not humble enough,
he doesn't care.
He's got his mind set on higher things,
and he's not going to be swept off
his feet by the temporary glory of some
national clown.
You say you're an old meanie?
I've been called worse things than that by
better people.
So I don't care.
And yet I wonder where I'd go to
find better people.
But, uh, I'd say amen to that, not
sober.
But anyway, scintillating personality, personalities, will never sweep
a man away, nor fear, nor feeling, nor
love of anything earthly.
He's got, he's sailing for the star.
Some people remind me of the young sailor
that I heard about, who was put up
on, uh, wherever they are, to steer the
ship, and they said, keep that star a
little off your port bow.
And later on they came back and found
him miles off course, and they said, why
didn't you do what you're told?
He said, I passed that star a mile
back.
He lost his star, and a lot of
the Lord's people are steering by a star,
but they lose the star.
I look back and think, I can just
look back now, over the past years, and
remember all that came.
There was a converted five-year-old swimmer,
and he took the public eye for a
while.
And then here was a converted prize fighter,
whose wife didn't know the difference between radium
and radio, and in a message she gave.
And then here was the converted actress, and
then the converted star from opera.
And then there was the gospel in the
stars, and then there was the gospel in
the pyramids.
And the poor people with their loins unguarded
and their minds all out of shape, they
ran wild after these things.
Cynical old Tozer sat back and looked the
whole thing over and said, it's no good!
And every one of those fellows had gone
with the wind.
There was one of them because they passed
their star, he said.
By the grace of God, some stepped the
star ahead of us, and still there, and
still steering by.
You don't get as much popularity, you're as
big a crowd, you're as much money, but
it'll be in the long run something very
precious to know, that when men's minds were
all going to pieces, you kept yours girded
by the Lord Jesus' help.
And when others were getting drunk with money
or depressions or boons or wars or something
else, you were keeping sober, hoping to the
end.
Now, I'll get that one word, hope, in
five minutes, and we're finished.
And that word, hope, it's a word we
abuse terribly in our day, terribly.
We use that word, hope.
Man says, well, I'm hoping.
There's been a Democratic landslide, and it's obvious
that the Republicans are out, and the word
comes from headquarters.
We're running behind, but we're hoping.
Everybody else knows they're licked, but them.
We're turned around the other way, and Eisenhower
gets a landslide, and the Democratic headquarters says
we're hoping.
Somebody's obviously dying, and we say, I'm still
hoping.
He said, I hope.
That word, hope, is used loosely to mean,
I have a sort of a wish that
it might be so.
But in the Bible, hope never means wish.
Tom, did you ever know that the word
wish isn't used in the Bible ever in
a good sense at all, if it's ever
there?
Nobody wishes in the Bible.
You either don't want it, or else you
pray and get it, but you don't wish
for it.
Wishing is sloppy thinking.
You say, oh, I wish.
No, no, brother, don't wish.
Hope.
Hope is not wish.
Hope is a confident expectation based upon sufficient
reasons.
For instance, it says that a man hopes
for the morning, they that watch for the
morning, Psalm 130, and the watchman hopes for
the morning.
I used to work in a factory in
Akron, Ohio, when I was a young fellow
in my teens, worked 12 hours, all night,
with a half hour out for lunch, standing
on my feet.
That's the reason I never got any bigger
than that.
I wore myself out in my teens, working
in factories.
So I'd stand there on my feet and
watch the light come in the east in
the morning, and know that after the light
came in, it'd only be a couple of
hours or three hours until I could get
out of that rat's nest and back on
the street and up to my home.
And oh, how I hoped for the morning.
I was hopeful for the morning, but it
wasn't a wish.
It wasn't an uncertain possibility.
Mourning has broken every 24 hours since the
Lord said, let there be light.
Mourning has broken.
And so, when I hoped for the morning,
I wasn't simply wishfully thinking.
I had a confident ground of expectation.
I knew the sun would come up.
Never had failed.
So a Christian has even a stronger ground
for hope.
He tells us that Christ is coming, that
there's to be a revelation of him to
the world, that he's coming for his bride.
He's coming to raise the sleeping dead and
change the living saints.
That's not a dreamy wish, that's a confident
expectation.
We're looking forward to it because he said
it and he can't lie.
So a Christian isn't a dreamer wishing for
something.
He's a realist who knows what he has
and what's coming.
And so he's looking forward with expectation.
I read this verse and that's all for
this morning.
Listen to what the Holy Ghost says here
in 1 Thessalonians.
Therefore, let us not sleep as do others,
but let us watch and be sober.
For they that sleep, sleep in the night,
and they that be drunken are drunken in
the night.
But let us, who are of the day,
be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith
and love, and for a helmet, the hope
of salvation.
For God has not appointed us to wrath,
but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus
Christ.
Amen.