1 Peter 1:14

1 Peter 1:14. As children of obedience: a second counsel is thus introduced, dealing with a holiness which is to be not less complete than the hope. The one rises naturally out of the other. Hope is a sanctifying principle, promoting holiness, while it is itself also brightened and strengthened by it. It is in the character of ‘children of obedience' that they are charged to aim at a perfect holiness. It is as becomes those with whom obedience (here again in the largest and most inclusive sense) has become a new nature. The familiar Hebrew figure for permanence of quality represents them as drawing the inspiration of their life from obedience, as related to it like children to a mother.

not fashioning yourselves in conformity with your former lusts in your ignorance: in the character of the obedient, and in order to holiness, they must renounce a certain fashion of life. The verb occurs only once elsewhere in the New Testament (Romans 12:2). In the heart of it is the term which is applied to the world in its aspect of transience, ‘the fashion of this world passeth away' (1 Corinthians 7:31), and which is used of Christ in the great Christological statement in Philippians 2:7 ‘found in fashion as a man.' The term refers to the externals of an object, all that wherein an object appears, rather than to what is intrinsic. It carries with it, therefore, the idea of the changeable and illusory. This unstable, deceptive form of life which they are not to assume is the old life of heathen lust, the life in which they ignorantly followed ‘the capricious guidance of the passions.' (See Lightfoot on Philippians, p. 128.) Ignorance (in the ethical sense of heathen ignorance of God and the things of God, as also in Ephesians 4:18; Acts 17:30) is represented as the stage of their career (‘ the time of your ignorance') when passion was their life (so the Revised Version, Calvin, etc.), or rather as the element in which the passion was bred which gave the stamp to their life. Probably Peter has in view those grosser immoralities which are invariably associated with idolatry, and which Paul (Romans 1:18, etc.) traces back to ignorance of God. The word used for ‘lusts,' however, covers not only sensual passions, but all those unregulated desires which are summarily comprehended under ‘the lust of the eye,' as well as ‘the lust of the flesh' (1 John 2:16).