I Peter 1:13-19

3. Purify yourself.

That is one of the 10 things you need to be doing in waiting for Christ's return. So if we hope for and desire to be firstfruits of God at His coming, we must work on becoming pure. Peter puts it a little bit differently. Let us go back to I Peter 1, verses 13 through 19. He writes here,

So they just use basically two different words for saying the same thing. Becoming pure is the same thing as becoming holy. It is making our conduct align with the Holy One Himself, become like Jesus Christ. Now notice here, he says in verse 13 that it requires sobriety, we have to be serious and in control of ourselves. It requires conviction (Martin was talking about that a little bit this morning). It requires obedience, and it requires us putting off the old man in the fear of God.

We want to get rid of all of those negatives, all of those things that we have absorbed either from our own selfish human nature, from the world, or from Satan's influence. We have got to get rid of all of that. That is the only way we are going to become pure, and then we have to, once that is all swept out, as it were, we have to fill it up with good things. We have to fill it up with the obedience and all those virtues of God that we possibly can, so that when Christ appears, we are going to be like Him. That is what is going to enable us to see Him as He is.