1 Peter 3:3 “Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble.”

First the attitudes. Before we can talk about actions, we need to get the attitudes right. If you have ever had to deal with ornery kids, students, employees, or anyone else you were trying to lead or guide, you know that nothing changes until you get the attitude right. Trying to change the behavior first is an exercise in futility. You might as well be talking to the wall.

So Peter starts with “live in harmony with each other,” which is literally “be like-minded.” “Get on the same page with each other with your thinking.” Thinking like Christians goes a long way towards talking like them, and living like them.

That kind of harmonious, united thinking looks like this: sympathetic, loving, compassionate, and humble. The first three all talk about how we regard others. The world in which we live may talk a good game about sympathy, love, and compassion. The truth is, they live in more or less a constant state of irritation with the other residents with whom they must share the planet. Left hates right and right hates left. Just see how they behave at each other’s rallies. Does the person driving the car with the “coexist” bumper sticker realize the irony of his behavior as he flips off the elderly person who drifted into his lane? Does the Christian with the little fish symbol on his trunk realize the irony when he does exactly the same thing?

Sympathy–genuinely trying to understand and feel what the other person feels; brotherly love–caring about people who aren’t family as though they were (and not the messed up, dysfunctional kind); compassion–letting yourself be moved and changed by the pain someone else is experiencing; this is how we have to think about other people, including the ones we don’t like, especially the ones we don’t like, if we are going to treat them like God’s people and bless others.

Then there is one-word Peter mentions for how we regard ourselves: humility. We are generally inclined to think of ourselves as smarter, better, cleverer, more moral, than just about everyone else. Somewhere C.S. Lewis describes the man headed for hell this way: “unshakably confident to the very end that he alone has found the answer to the riddle of life, that God and man are fools whom he has got the better of, that his way of life is utterly successful, satisfactory, unassailable.”

Don’t misunderstand. Humility will always be confident about what God says and does. “May I never boast except in the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul says. The cross that saved me, that cross that provides forgiveness for my pride and false confidence in self, will always be a big deal, worthy of our unceasing praise.

But humility means we are not so sure about ourselves. It certainly doesn’t assume our own superiority. Humble hearts not only put ourselves in the right place. They prepare us to offer everyone else the dignity and respect appropriate for people God himself loved and redeemed.

A coach of mine used to say, “Where the head goes, the body has to follow.” Peter recognizes something similar here: “Where the heart goes, the body will follow.” Get the attitudes right first. How we think and how we feel will soon be followed by what we do.