1 Peter 4:2 Commentary and Bible Study

The purpose of arming ourselves with Christ’s mindset is to cease from sin. We know that the believer will cease from sin entirely at death when the body of this death which sins so constantly is taken away from him, but this is not the time that Peter is thinking of, because the reason he gives for taking this mindset is that it will aid us in fighting sin while we are still living in the flesh. This attitude allows us to regard living to the lusts of men as something that belongs to the past, for like Christ we are committed to facing suffering rather abandoning righteousness. Why would we face suffering for Christ’s sake unless we had settled it in our hearts to leave behind our sins in order to follow him? The thought is similar to Paul’s words in Romans 6:6-11, except that in Romans Christ’s work is viewed as already completed, while here Peter considers the mental outlook that enabled him to go through with it. Both passages speak of the mind of Christ and tell us to adopt the same mind. In both cases the adopting of Christ’s mindset allows us to view ourselves as dead to sin, and the old life of sin as belonging to the past and now over. You either live for your appetites in this life – what you can possess, what you can enjoy, what you can have of material things, of prosperity, of fame and fortune, of entertainment and sensual pleasure – or you live for the will of God, to obey him. We are not to be forever mourning over our past sins, for God has removed our guilt, but we should regard the old life that we lived as a matter of shame. The thought of returning to what we were before should fill us with horror. We have a stronger motivation for obedience than regret of past guilt. Gratitude for what Christ has done for us makes us cheerfully desire to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity of new life, and not to repeat the mistakes that belonged to our days of foolishness and blindness. There is a strong sense in Peter’s words of redeeming the time, of a new start, of lessons learned from an understanding of past foolishness. The will of God is the new rule of our lives, so that the Bible is the book which governs us.‘That he no longer should live the rest of his life.’ Some translations use a more active word: ‘spend’. It is actually much better, because when you spend money, most of the time it's something you do carefully. There’s an even better word that one translation uses: ‘that he should no longer conduct the rest of his time.’ That really brings out the original.