I don’t know about you but I sometimes sign up to an organisation’s email list because the content seems good at the time. Months later I click “unsubscribe” because I found the emails a bit boring or my interests moved on.

Christianity isn’t something that we simply subscribe to with no commitment. We can’t “get saved”, bank the salvation and then “unsubscribe” from the Holy Spirit’s work of progressive sanctification in our lives.

In 1 Peter 1, the apostle writes to Turkish Christians, with the message that they need to lean in to that process of sanctification.

Here are three themes from the chapter:

1. Be holy because God is holy

Peter is clear that Christians need to work on changing their behaviour versus how they were before conversion.

He writes (verses 13-16, NIV):

…set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”

Dictionary definitions of “holy” can be a bit iffy. For example, the suggestion it means “dedicated or consecrated to God or a religious purpose” is almost there but a bit difficult to apply to God himself. Meanwhile, the claimed definition that it means “related to a religion or a god” is way too vague. Really, it means to be “set apart” as pure.

2. Pursuing holiness is like being a foreigner

Peter’s first chapter emphasises the the glorious gift that God has given before suggesting that Christians should live like foreigners. N.T. Wright explains in Early Christian Letters for Everyone:

All Christians live a strange double life: Peter addresses his audience as “foreigners”, not because they have emigrated to where they now live but because they now have a dual citizenship. They are, simultaneously, inhabitants of this or that actual country or district (Pontus, Galatia, or wherever), and citizens of God’s new world which, as he will shortly say, is waiting to be unveiled.

What this means is that Christians are not going to do all the same things that are encouraged in earthly culture, or at least strive to.

3. Holiness causes love

In 1 Peter 1 verse 22, the apostle goes on to say:

Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart.

We know that love is an essential property of God, so the fact that Peter connects love towards one another with sanctification shouldn’t be surprising.

Paul, elsewhere, bigs up the significance of love as the priority for Christians. “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love”, he says in Galatians 5, before naming love as one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.