Please turn to 1 Peter 4:1-7:
Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin; that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God. For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries: wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same excess of riot, speaking evil of you: who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead. For for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit. But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.
This passage begins by directing our attention to the Lord Jesus Christ, as we read in 1 Peter 4:1:
Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh…
The first thing that we need to mention is that when it says, “for us,” it is really talking about the body of believers, the “elect,” those whom Jesus actually died for. This has nothing to do with every single person in the world. This is not saying that Jesus died for every human being, because He did not. The Bible is very clear that Christ died for His people and only for His people.
In actuality, this will amount to a “great multitude.” It will be numberless millions—tens of millions, hundreds of millions, perhaps. We do not know how many. It is just really a “remnant” out of the whole human race, when we consider that there will have been billions of people who will have lived by the time that the world finally comes to an end.
So here it is saying, “Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh.” The Bible has a lot to say about the suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ. As you are turning to the Bible, if you ever think to just look for passages that speak of Christ’s suffering, they are numerous. Actually, in Acts 3:18, we are told:
But those things, which God before had showed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled.
So all the prophets of God, all the prophets of God, spoke about the suffering of Christ. This is why Jesus said, “In the volume of the book it is written of Me,” and He is referring to the whole Bible.
Again and again, you see this truth, you see this description in the Bible that there would come a time when the Messiah would die for the sins of His elect people. For instance, in Genesis, when Abraham is about to slay Isaac his son on the altar and he is ready to bring the knife down upon the son of the promise, this is a picture where the prophet, Moses, who is moved by God to write this account, is declaring that Christ would suffer. This was telling us that there would come a day when the Son of God would empty Himself of His glory and enter into the human race and die for His people’s sins.
Also, we can turn to Job 16. I do not know if I can say the whole book, but we do know that much of Job is actually a parable that is pointing to the suffering of Jesus while He is under the wrath of God. We know this when we read verses like we find in Job 16:9-11:
He teareth me in his wrath…
And this is Job who is speaking.
…who hateth me: he gnasheth upon me with his teeth; mine enemy sharpeneth his eyes upon me. They have gaped upon me with their mouth; they have smitten me upon the cheek reproachfully; they have gathered themselves together against me. God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked.
Job said, “They have gaped upon me,” and this is what we read when Christ was on the Cross. They were mocking and looking upon Him, and God uses this language of “gaping.”
We also find in Psalm 22, which is a Psalm of David, where David, another one of God’s prophets, is moved to write in Psalm 22:1:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
This is what Jesus said on the Cross. He said these very words, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”
And we read in Psalm 22:13:
They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion.
Look a little further down at Psalm 22:16:
For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.
Again, very clear and very direct prophecies of the coming Messiah. We can see that in some cases, word for word, Jesus fulfilled these verses. Therefore, “all His prophets” were testifying and witnessing to the suffering of Christ.
Or look at Isaiah 53:4-6:
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Again, “all” being “all of the elect people” and not “all” pointing to every human being.
I am just pointing out the very obvious prophecies, but whenever you look at the sacrifices, and they are sprinkled throughout the whole Bible, especially in the Old Testament, every sacrifice was pointing to the One who would come to be the sacrifice for sins. You can see that with this one typology alone how “all” the prophets did speak of the suffering of Christ.
One last verse is Zechariah 13:6:
And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.
Do you see how this is pointing to the “wounds,” to the nails that entered into the Lord Jesus Christ’s hands while He was on the Cross?
When God says in Acts 3:18:
…God before had showed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled.
This is exactly what He meant—exactly what He meant. You can find information all over the place about the suffering of the Son of God, the Messiah.
So here in 1 Peter, we find that God is saying in 1 Peter 4:1:
Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh…
What was Jesus’ suffering? What did He really suffer? He suffered the nails into the hands, the crown of thorns, the whipping. He suffered by hanging on the Cross, physically.
Yes, there was certain suffering involved, but the real suffering that the Bible has in view and that God wants us to know about is not the physical suffering of Christ. The thieves on the left and right of Him also suffered physically. But it is the suffering of paying the penalty for sin. The Bible says, “The wages of sin is death,” and this “death” is the “second death” of eternal damnation. This is what Jesus suffered.
He could only do this because He is God, but He somehow was able to bear the sins of all those hundreds of millions of people, whatever total number it is. God saw all of those sins, all of that guilt, all of that shame, all of those transgressions of His Law, and He then meted out, He measured into a “cup,” the degree of suffering that all of those people would have had to pay if they had spent an eternity in Hell. God poured it into that “cup” and then He gave it to Christ to drink of, and Jesus did drink the “cup” dry. He drank the fullness of the “cup” of God’s wrath, and He paid the penalty, completely. He satisfied the Law’s demands, perfectly.
This can only mean that He somehow, and I do not know how He could do it, but He somehow, being God, was able to go through the depths of Hell, or the equivalent of Hell. He never really descended into a place called “Hell,” but the equivalent, meaning “equal to.” It was nothing less than this; it was exactly equal to whatever actually going through Hell would be for those who one day will experience it.
God gave that “cup” to Jesus to drink, and Jesus paid that penalty. Then He “rose from the dead,” because the Law’s demands were satisfactorily met. Therefore, no longer could the Law point the finger at any one of God’s elect whom Jesus died for. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus,” because they have already been condemned; they have already suffered and died. In the Person of Christ, we were “baptized with the baptism” that Jesus was “baptized with,” which was the washing away of our sin by going through Hell itself, or the equivalent of Hell.
This is what the Bible has in view with all of this language of suffering, the suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is not simply the physical beating that He took, the physical blood that He shed, but that the life that He gave was an eternal giving up of His life, in a very real way.
So here in 1 Peter 4:1, it says:
…Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh…
Now, let us turn to Hebrews 5. This is speaking of Jesus who is a Priest “after the order of Melchizedek.” We read in Hebrews 5:7-8:
Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared; though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered;
This is an amazing statement, that Jesus “learned obedience by the things which He suffered.” We know that Jesus is God and that God knows everything. Right? God knows everything. He knows “the end from the beginning.” He is the “Alpha and Omega.” He is the Eternal God, the “One that inhabiteth eternity.” He dwells in the whole spectrum of existence, from everlasting past into everlasting future. There are no secrets from God. The Almighty knows everything, so how can Jesus “learn” something?
This means that He is gaining knowledge. He is learning something that He did not know before. Is that not what learning is? When we read a statement in the Bible and then begin to understand what it is really saying and we come to truth, we have learned what God had in mind with that particular verse. Yet, this says that Jesus, “though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.”
Actually, this kind of statement helps us to understand Mark 13:32. Mark 13 is a chapter dealing with the Great Tribulation, the end of the world. It says in Mark 13:32:
But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.
The Son does not know something. He does not know something. We just read in Hebrews that Jesus “learned” something, which means that He did not know it. Previously, there was an area of some kind that He “learned” about.
Both verses will help us to understand each of the verses. As we read, “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man,” we do not have any problem understanding that mankind does not know “that day and that hour,” because we know that man is a very finite and limited creature who has a tiny mind. We do not even know what is going to happen next week, so how are we going to know “that day and that hour”?
Also, “no, not the angels which are in heaven.” This is actually referring to the fallen angels. They, likewise, do not know “that day and that hour.”
But the incredible thing is that this verse sates, “neither the Son,” and Jesus is God. “Neither the Son,” so Jesus does not know when He is coming? He does not know when the last of His elect will be saved? He does not know the timing of the end of the world?
It can not be that. It can not be that. It says in Job 24:1:
Why, seeing times are not hidden from the Almighty, do they that know him not see his days?
You see, times are not hidden from God. They are not hidden from Jesus who is the Almighty. He knows perfectly the year, the month, the day, the hour, the minute, the second, and however much further time can be broken down. He knows completely and absolutely when He will return, because He is the Almighty and “times are not hidden from the Almighty.”
But here in Mark 13, God is not talking about the timing of the end and lacking knowledge of the year or month, or anything like that. He is talking about the actual experiencing of judgment.
At the time that Jesus is declaring these things in Mark 13:32, mankind has not yet been judged. The fallen angels have not yet been judged. Jesus has not yet begun to suffer the equivalent of an eternal damnation. It is coming soon, but as He is saying this, He has not yet entered into the Garden of Gethsemane nor begun to be in great agony to where “his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” None of this has happened at this point. Therefore, you can say, “neither the Son.” He does not “know.”
But why does the Father know? The Father knows because the Father is the One who is filling the “cup.” He is the One who is going to administer the penalty. He is the One who is going to pour out His wrath, and He knows exactly to what degree the wrath will be measured and to what degree individuals—mankind or the fallen angels or even the Lord Jesus—will have to drink of that “cup.”
Let me use an example or an analogy. The Bible talks about punishment in the days of the Bible, and this type of punishment continued even much later than that. When someone committed a crime, not always, but they could be turned over to the authorities and the authorities could declare that they be punished, that they be whipped for their crime. The Jews had a law where a person could not be whipped more than “forty stripes save one,” which is thirty-nine. They were not supposed to sting them with the lash more than that thirty-nine times.
What Mark 13:32 is saying is that the Father is the One who is holding the whip and who is going to administer the stripes, and He knows the definite number of lashes that He is going to give—and so does Jesus, by the way. Jesus has that knowledge, because He is God. He knows that He is going to lash Himself so many times. He also knows to the degree that He is going to inflict the lash, the whip, into the back, and He knows how strongly and so forth that the lash must be given to equal the penalty and the punishment.
The one who is administering the punishment has this information. They possess this knowledge. Even the one who is going to be whipped can also know, “Hey, I have to receive thirty-nine stripes. I have seen this before and I know how hard they sting you with that lash.” They can have that knowledge, but then once that person gets up to the post (however they do it) and they tie their hands around the post and the person with the whip begins to lash them, at that point they are learning something. At that point, they are experiencing something that they could not have known by just knowing how many lashes or to what degree the whip was going to be struck upon them. At that point, they are learning what it is to go through and endure thirty-nine lashes or more.
You see, at this point, the Son did not know. The Son did not know. The Father knew what He was going to do, the “cup” that He was going to measure. Jesus also knew this, but the Son had no knowledge of just how terrible and awful and what a heavy load it would be to bear the sins of so many and then to have God pour out His wrath for all of those sins. This is why Jesus is in an agony and severely tried as He is bearing the weight of these sins and experiencing the punishment for them—and we can read about this in other places of the Bible.
This is why Hebrews 5:8 says, “Yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.” He learned. Actually, we are all in this situation. We are all in this kind of situation to a lesser degree. God is going to get into this in 1 Peter 4. We are not really obedient until we have begun to suffer.
You can be a Christian. You can know God’s Law. You can do certain things, but the real test of obedience is when you suffer as a Christian, when you suffer for the sake of His commandments, for Christ’s sake, and when you do so obediently. There is a difference because everyone suffers, but I am kind of jumping ahead.
Let us return to 1 Peter 4, where God brings up this idea about our Christian life. We read in 1 Peter 4:1:
Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind…
“Arm yourselves likewise with the same mind.” You know, there is the popular gospel that is out there today. It is given with a smile, and the bait is, “Come, be a Christian! Join us in our church. We are all so happy! We are all so blessed! We are all having a wonderful time because not only can we continue to live in the world, but now we have Jesus. Join up. Be a Christian. God has a wonderful plan for your life. You are going to just be full of happiness from here on out.”
Have any of you ever heard, not in so many words, but this kind of a “gospel” presentation? “Let us be a Christian. The joy of the Lord is ours!” It is all the positive things. It is all the good things, and there are many, many good things and many positives in the Bible. There are great blessings for being a Christian, wonderful blessings for the child of God. But, you see, we can not just stress the positive and overlook what God also says about the Christian life, which is that you are to “arm yourself” with the same “mind of Christ.” “Arm yourself with the same mind.”
It is almost like you are unarmed if you do not know that to live the Christian life is a life of tribulation, affliction, and suffering persecution; it is one of trouble; it is a narrow way—it is not a broad way. It is easy to walk down a big wide street; it is not easy to go the narrow way of affliction. So God is really warning us and commanding us to look to our example, the Lord Jesus, and “arm yourself with the same mind.”
Let us turn to Philippians 1:29. This is a very important verse in the Bible. Everything is important, but this verse really gives us very necessary information. Philippians 1:29 says:
For unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him…
Faith is a gift of God. It is “given.” It is part of the gift. “Not only,” though, “to believe,” “for by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God,” but there are other things that have to do with God’s whole salvation package. They are all wrapped up in one package. All of these other things will follow; they will come along. It is not only the wonderful and beautiful things and saving faith and belief in God. Yes, that is an unspeakable gift. “But also,” it says here:
…to suffer for his sake;
“Suffer?” “Suffer for His sake?” This is “given” to us? That is part of the “gift” of God? That is God’s plan for us?
Yes, there are no exceptions. It is given to the Christian to believe, to live a Christian life, and as you do so, to suffer as a result. It is amazing. It is amazing that this is what God is saying, but it is true.
As we look at the Bible, we see abundant evidence to support this. Just look at Hebrews 11, where it talks about the faith of the saints. Toward the end of the chapter, “they were sawn asunder.” They were persecuted greatly. There is all kinds of information in the Bible that tells us that the world, or the church that is unfaithful, will persecute the believers. John the Baptist was beheaded.
Again and again, there is a great deal of Scripture where God is pointing to this truth that we are “given” the gift of suffering “for His sake” or for the Word’s sake, for the Bible’s sake—there is no difference. If we are suffering for Christ’s sake, then we are suffering for the Word’s sake, because they are One and the same.
God is really warning us to be on guard and to expect this. As Jesus said, “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” “We must through much tribulation enter into the Kingdom of God.” This is the language of the Bible.
I hope that no one is out there shaking their head and wondering what I am talking about. I am sure and I know that the true child of God, the true believer, has personal experience with this kind of thing—if they are living a faithful witness to the Gospel in this world. They go hand-in-hand.
God speaks of opening up “a great door and effectual” in 1 Corinthians 16, and the second part of that verse says, “and there are many adversaries.” You see, when we are bringing the Gospel, we can expect that there will be persecution, and it is all part of God’s gift.
One thing that we have to keep in mind, as God is instructing us to “arm yourselves likewise with the same mind,” is that He knew. He knew. You can find, again and again, that “the Son of man must suffer many things.” So He lived His life with the knowledge that He was going to suffer and pay the price for the sins of His people. Well, we also should be aware that we are going to suffer as a Christian.
What is our suffering? What is our suffering? It is not really very much. If we look at this honestly, who has suffered anywhere near what Jesus suffered? He is our example, but the truth is that He suffered something that we will never know. By God’s grace, we will never know what it is to pay eternal damnation. We will never know what it is to pour out our lives to that degree.
All of the suffering that we endure is like stubbing our toe. No matter what it is, even if we are burned at the stake, even if we give up our life for the sake of Christ, it is nothing in comparison to the suffering of Jesus. We have to keep this in mind. God tells us this in 2 Corinthians 4:16-17:
For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;
There must be a mistake with this, “our light affliction,” being “but for a moment”? There have been believers who have been held in prison for years for their testimony of the Gospel, because they would not give in. They would not “bow the knee,” and they were thrown into prison. That was much more than “but for a moment.”
No, not according to God—not according to God. No matter what you or I have experienced in suffering for the Word’s sake, for the Gospel’s sake—and this runs the whole scale from someone ripping up a tract in our face to someone literally doing physical harm to the believer and maybe even taking their life, and everything in between. No matter what it is, even if it is everything like the Apostle Paul lists, as he speaks of his suffering for the ministry of the Gospel, it is “but for a moment.” When you lump it all together and you say, “I am 60 or 70 years old, and I have spent years and years and years suffering,” it is “but for a moment.” It is “but for a moment” in comparison to the “eternal weight of glory” that it speaks of in 2 Corinthians 4:17, because there is an eternity to come. It is “but for a moment” in comparison to the suffering that Jesus experienced.
If we turn to Matthew 11, we will see how Christ is really comparing temporal suffering and eternal suffering. He says in Matthew 11:28:
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
This is referring to anyone who is bearing their sins. You are “heavy laden.” You really have a load on your back. If you are still unsaved, if your sins are still upon you, then you are going to have to pay the penalty for them and you are going to have to pay the price. If Jesus did not do this, then you are going to have to endure eternal damnation. Of course, you will never be able to pay this price. You will forever be in Hell and suffering for your sins.
So Christ is saying, “Come unto Me,” all ye that have this burden of sin. We are all sinners. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” We all are, therefore, subject to the penalty of sin. We all have the wrath of God hanging over our heads. Within a moment, our eternal fate can be sealed. We will rise on the Day of Judgment only to be judged, found guilty, and thrown into Hell. Each man’s, each woman’s, each child’s real problem in this world is this—what about your sin? But He says in Matthew 11:28-29:
…I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
This is referring to someone who does become a Christian, who does become a child of God. Come; take the Christian “yoke.” Take the “yoke” of the Lord Jesus Christ. Be a servant to Christ in this world and live as a Christian.
Then Jesus goes on to say in Matthew 11:30:
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
When we live in this world, there are all kinds of people who do not like the Christians. They do not like what the Bible teaches. They do not want to be reminded of sin and of judgment and of Hell. They do not want this information, but as a Christian, we are called to go forth, to bring the message of the Gospel to the world.
As a result, there will be persecution, and many have suffered for the cause of the Gospel. Yet Jesus is saying that it is a “light” thing. It is a very light thing, because over here, you have the penalty for sin, which is eternal damnation. It just weighs heavy on the scale, does it not? If you were to somehow weigh out your suffering in Hell for the rest of eternity and into eternity, that is going to be an enormous weight on a scale.
On the other hand, by God’s grace and only by the gift of God and by God’s predestination and election, you are a child of God. As a child of God, you really come down on the social scale in the world. No matter who you are or what you do or where you are in the world, you are going to come down, because it is an abomination to the people of the world when someone is living as a Christian. You are going to begin to suffer shame for His Name. The world is going to revile you and speak evil of you. The more you love them, the less you are going to be loved. The more you pray for them, it will seemingly be, the less they will care about you. This could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers.
We tend to think that this is an enormous pressure that the world begins to put on the child of God, and it is all there to make us give up the cause, to make us go back to the world, to make us go back to the way that we were headed before and to stop traveling this narrow way, because it is so hard and so difficult. But Jesus says, “My yoke is easy, and My burden is light,” because if you measure the reviling and the cursing and you measure the displeasure of man—because man is not happy with you now since you are living for Jesus and you are not living the way that they live—if you measure it all out, it does not even budge the scale. It does not even budge the scale. You can be whipped. You can be thrown into prison. They can threaten, “You conform. You conform to our way of doing things, or you die,” and it does not even move that scale—not in the least bit.
This is because, in comparison to eternal suffering that all those in the world will experience, it is nothing at all to live as a Christian. They do not have that burden of suffering, seemingly, at this point, but they will one day suffer for their sins. It is nothing at all to live as a Christian.
Going back to 1 Peter 4:1:
…arm yourselves likewise with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin;
I was going to go into this a little bit more, but we are running short on time. Basically, this is telling us that if we are going to live as a Christian, we have to live obediently. We have to live obediently, because there are two kinds of suffering. There is suffering for wrongdoing and there is suffering for well-doing. There is suffering for God and then there is suffering because of our own sins, where we are the offense and the offense is not the Gospel.
When God is saying, “He that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin,” He is saying that when we begin to do it God’s way, when we begin to, by His grace, walk obediently in accord with the will of God, with the Word of God, then we will begin to “learn” what it is to suffer—just as Jesus “learned obedience by the things which He suffered.” We do not know obedience, we do not know what it is to obey God, if we are not suffering for the Word of God. I think God is teaching us this in these verses.
We read in the next verse, in 1 Peter 4:2:
That he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God.
The word here for “rest”, “no longer should live the rest of his time,” is a word that means “remaining.” “We all had our conversation in times past” with the world. We have all been involved with the sin of the world. We know that the Bible tells us this. We have all, to some degree—some more, some less—been out there in the world and living life just as the world lives, doing what we thought we wanted to do, involved in whatever we wanted to be involved in. God is saying in this verse that no matter what your past is, no matter how much time you have wasted, and that is all it is—that is all it is because you were just having fun involving yourself in this pleasure and that pleasure—it was all a waste—it was all vanity—it did not profit anyone anything. God is saying no matter what you have wasted of your life up until right now, up until this point—no matter how old you are, it does not matter if you wasted 30, 40, 50, 60 years, or if you are a youngster and you just wasted the last 10. Whatever you have wasted, God is now saying, “forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before,” as it says in 1 Peter 4:2:
That he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God.
This is a very encouraging verse, on one hand, because there is still time. There is still time. We have not come up to the Last Day, as yet. We are still alive. We have not died and our life is not yet over. Death can happen at any moment, yet there is time remaining.
Now, what are we going to do with the time? What are we going to do with the time? Here, it is saying that we are not to live “the way of the Gentiles.” Do not live the way of the world any longer, but live God’s way. Begin to suffer, actually. Begin to suffer. Allow yourself to suffer. Allow yourself pain.
We all shy away from anything like this, to think that we would have to endure any kind of hardship or pain. But actually, we are to have that mind. “Arm yourselves likewise with the same mind.” There will be suffering for Christ. So I am going to, by God’s grace, go as far as I can go in obeying God and in praying to God that He might have mercy on me and give me strength and give me courage to do His will, to keep His commandments and to move on.
Let us close with one last passage. We read in Romans 13:11-14:
And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.
This is what God is saying in 1 Peter 4. We ought to begin doing it His way. By God’s mercy, may we each do it His way, according to His will.