What are your expectations for your life? Where do they come from and how do you expect to accomplish them? God has a plan and He has provided a means to help you achieve the goals He has placed within you.

1 Peter 1:13 Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ;

I recommend that you read the previous 12 verses but up to this point Peter has been talking about our salvation through Jesus Christ and how the prophets had been fascinated by what God was going to do and tried to figure it all out. It says they prophesied about the grace that would come to us. Peter even says “things the angels desired to look into”. All of God’s creation had been intrigued by how God was going to pull this off! How was he going to bring salvation to a people who can’t get anything right? We’ve screwed up everything God ever started! But he had something up his sleeve, he said “I’m going to do it with grace! I’m going to do it for them so that the only way they can screw it up is if they try to do it themselves!” God probably doesn’t say “screw up” but you understand what I mean.

Now I want to break verse 13 down for you and take a look at some of the word meanings from the original Greek language.

Loins, the waist area, it speaks of what we reproduce of ourselves. The mind has to do with what we think about and how we go about arriving at decisions. So to gird up the loins of your mind means that we have to be very careful and protect our thought processes. We need to have a mindset that is anchored in the truth of the word. Otherwise, we will be producing or reproducing the lies of the enemy. The focus of our thought life determines what type of seed we are planting. Abraham produced Ishmael because he allowed his mind to be taken off the promise of God and attempted to make it happen by listening to his wife’s reasoning. We have to be very intentional about what we allow to occupy out thoughts!

That includes putting our complete trust in the grace that God has extended to us by revealing Jesus Christ to us through the Holy Spirit! Trusting in anything else other than the grace of God produces religion and the letter of the law which produces death!

Be sober! This is not about getting the “warm fuzzies” or “tingly all over”, it is about a serious, intentional thought process that will produce the life of God in us! You can run all over the country to get that next spiritual fix from wherever God is moving or you can have him move in your own life. There is nothing wrong with going where the Holy Spirit is moving but some people chase the experience instead of pursuing His presence.

“Rest your hope fully upon the grace” let’s break this phrase down from the Greek, the word rest is not there, I guess they pull that from what is implied in the word “upon” but it has more to do with placing than resting. Hope means expectation, confidence, trust. Then the word fully means completely, without wavering to the end. Now, the word upon. This is an interesting little word, it literally means to superimpose, to place one thing on top of another so that both are still evident!

If you superimpose a photograph you place one image on top of another so that it appears to be one image. In the days of Jesus it would have been more in the form of an image on a coin. They would take a coin and place a die with an image on top of the coin and when it was struck the image would appear, superimposed, on the coin.

Finally the word grace, in the Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance and Dictionary you will find this definition for the word charis, which is the Greek word for grace- the divine influence on the heart and it’s reflection in the life! I thought it was unmerited favor, absolutely! I thought it was a gift, yes! In fact the word charisma and charismatic come from this word for grace but more than anything it is God moving upon the heart of man to see him line up with the plans and purposes that God has in store for him!

Our expectation of salvation should be superimposed on top of this grace so that our expectations and God’s grace look like the same thing! And we need to maintain that image completely without wavering to the end. How you finish is much more important than how you start. Don’t allow the enemy to get you sidetracked by past mistakes.

If your hope of salvation and the grace of God don’t look like the same thing, then you are trusting in yourself and not God! As much as we Christians claim that we stand on grace, we still, deep in our hearts, think that we have to do something for our salvation. And we induce that in each other because we don’t want anyone to be apathetic, we place guilt on people to get them involved or to do the right thing when all that is needed is a better understanding of the grace that is being delivered to us as Christ is revealed through the Holy Spirit.

I will probably state this every time I talk about the grace of God but grace is an empowering, enabling force that God uses to transform and equip his people. None of us deserve it but it is offered to all. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:10 “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” He understood that it was grace that motivated him and enabled him to do what God had called him to do. He knew that he wasn’t capable of what God asked but he superimposed his trust over the grace of God to the point that it appeared that Paul was doing it when it was God all along!

I caught the end of a live message by John Bevere, he was talking about how the church is turning to the world for ideas to draw people in when we should be turning to the grace of God because it empowers us to be better equipped than anyone else that doesn’t have a relationship with Jesus. They should be copying us, not the other way around. I wanted to jump up and cheer!

John said that English and writing were his WORST subjects in school, his teachers only passed him to move him along to the next person. When God told him to write a book he said, “you have the wrong guy, I can’t write anything.” but he submitted and allowed the grace of God to work through him and once he got started, he said he couldn’t keep up with what God was showing him. Now he has written 14 books that are read and translated all over the world.

We, as Christians, need to come to the understanding that it is the grace of God that enables us to carry out the plans that God has for us and that those plans are probably above our own ability! Only by superimposing our expectations over what God is doing in our hearts and doing it His way all the way through can we accomplish the plans that He has for us. If we mess up there is grace. If we go astray, there is grace but it is not there to coddle us, rather to empower us to rise above our weaknesses.

Blessings,
Jeff