You must live holy and reverent lives and love each other, because Christ has bought you and given you a new life.

1 Peter 1:13-25

13 Therefore, prepare your minds [MET] as people fasten their belts around their waists to prepare to work. What I mean is that you should ◄discipline your minds/control what you think about►, and by doing that conduct your lives fully and confidently expecting to receive the good things that God will kindly do for you when Jesus Christ returns from heaven. 14 And because you should obey your heavenly Father [SIM], as children ought to obey their fathers here on earth, do not do the evil things that you used to desire to do when you did not know God’s truth. 15 Instead, just like God, the one who chose you to belong to him, is ◄holy/separate from evil►, you also must be ◄holy/separate from evil► in everything that you do, 16 because it is {someone/Moses has} written in the Scriptures that God said, “You must be ◄holy/separate from evil► because I am ◄holy/separate from evil►.”

17 God is the one who ◄impartially/without favoritism► judges what each person does. Since you call him ‘Father’, live ◄reverently/with great respect for him► during the time that you are living here on earth. While you are living here, you are like exiles/foreigners [MET] because you are away from heaven, which is your true home. 18 Live reverently because you know that it was not with things that will not last forever, things like gold and silver, that God bought you to free you from your useless life-style that you learned from your ancestors. 19 Instead, it was with the precious blood of Christ that flowed from his body when he died that God bought you. Christ’s death was a perfect sacrifice for us [MET], like the lambs that the Jewish priests sacrificed were perfect, without any blemishes/defects/flaws or spots [DOU]. 20 Christ was chosen by God {God chose Christ} before the world was created {he created the world}. But it was not until now, when the time in which we are living will soon end, that he was revealed for your sake. 21 Because of what Christ has done, you are trusting in God, who caused Christ to become alive again after he died, and greatly honored him. As a result, God is the one in whom you are trusting and confidently expecting that he will do great things for you.

22 Because you have been made pure by obeying the truth, with the result that you sincerely love your fellow believers, continue to love each other earnestly and sincerely/wholeheartedly. 23 I ask you to do this, because you now have a new life [MET]. It was not by means of something that will perish that you received this new life. Instead, it was by means of something that will last forever; that is, by believing the life-giving and enduring message of God. 24 We know that this is true because, as the prophet Isaiah wrote,

All people will die [SIM], like grass dies. And all the greatness/honor that people have will not last forever,

like the flowers [SIM] that grow up in the grass do not last long.

The grass withers and the flowers die,

25 but God’s message endures/lasts forever.

This message that endures/lasts is the message about Christ that was proclaimed to you.