True faith is a stubborn thing. Cultivating this habit is no easy task. It requires ongoing effort. It’s why we daily seek to bring the truths of Scripture before our minds. It’s why we labor to pray consistently and constantly, thankfully and humbly calling on God as our Father for help. It’s why we gather with other believers to encourage each other in the faith and stir one another up to love and good deeds. These habits of grace are ways that we roll up the sleeves of our mind and soberly set our hope on future grace.
Christian Hedonism emphasizes the importance of feelings. The Bible commands us to delight in the Lord, to love mercy, to fear God, to rejoice in hope. Emotions are essential to the obedient Christian life.
At the same time, Christian Hedonism recognizes that not all emotions are godly emotions. Not all feelings are faithful feelings. Not all affections are holy affections. Emotions aren’t always our friends. Far from serving worship of God, they can hinder and undermine it.
It’s my growing conviction that we need to develop (or recover) a more robust vocabulary for describing various categories of feelings and emotions. In particular, it seems good to distinguish between immediate and impulsive feelings that are rooted in the soul but closely tied to our bodies, on the one hand, and deeper, more stable emotions that are exercises of our will, on the other. The former we can call passions; the latter we can call affections. With a little help from the apostle Peter and C.S. Lewis, we can see the value of making this type of distinction between immediate (and superficial) passions and deeper (or higher) affections.
Set Your Hope on Grace
First, consider Peter’s exhortation in 1 Peter 1:13–16.
Preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”
Notice the three phrases in verse 13: (1) “preparing your minds for action,” (2) “being sober-minded,” and (3) “set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you.”
The first phrase literally means “girding up the loins of your mind.” To use a modern image, we might say, “rolling up the sleeves of your mind.” Peter calls them to get ready to do some serious mental work, the kind that takes effort. This isn’t roll-out-of-bed-in-your-pajamas work. This is get-your-work-clothes-on, make-sure-your-shoes-are-tied, get-your-game-face-on work.
The second phrase refers to the opposite of drunkenness. Be sober-minded. Now, drunkenness impairs our perception, our judgment, our reaction times. So the opposite of drunkenness is an alertness, a clarity of mind, a steadiness. So roll up the sleeves of your mind, get clear and steady, and then what?
The final phrase calls for a particular affectionate response. Hope is a future-oriented affection. It is a glad-hearted expectation of something good that is coming. We don’t yet possess it; we don’t hope for what we already have. And Peter knows it is far too easy to be distracted by the cares and anxieties of this world, to look to the future with fear rather than faith. And so he exhorts us: Roll up the sleeves of our mind, get clear and steady, and then set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you. You’ve been born again to a living hope, an imperishable inheritance (1 Peter 1:3–5). Now set your hope fully on the tidal wave of coming grace.
What Are Passions?
Now, why is setting our hope in this way so necessary? The next verse expresses the danger. “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance” (1 Peter 1:14).
Passions are the immediate and intuitive and impulsive exercises of the soul that are closely tied to the body. Passions can be good. Paul desires to depart and be with Christ (Philippians 1:23), using the same word translated as passions in 1 Peter 1.
