What does 1 Peter 1:22 mean?

In his letter, Peter has described what our lives were like before we trusted in Christ for our salvation by God's grace. We lived in ignorance, driven along our empty, futile way by our selfish passions or evil desires. We served ourselves, to our own destruction, and could do nothing else. All of that changed when God saved us. He declared our lives worthy of the blood of His Son. He rescued us from emptiness and set us apart for one thing: His purposes. Then, Peter wrote, God commanded us to "be holy," to stop living for self and to be fully available to Him.

Now Peter writes that our obedience to the truth has a purifying effect on our souls. It's not that we make ourselves clean from sin by our obedience. God has declared us clean from sin through the blood of Jesus, His death in our place. Rather, it's that when we obey, we are not sinning! We are living the pure, holy lives God intends for His people. When we obey Him, we stop being double-minded, torn between our selfishness and fulfilling His will for us. Setting our desires aside allows us to give ourselves over fully to loving each other—without being half-hearted or false.

So, Peter says, we should go for it with everything we've got. We should abandon our own "evil desires" and work hard at loving each other, instead. The word translated as "earnestly" or "deeply" in this verse—ektenōs in Greek—means "at full stretch" or "in an all-out manner, with an intense strain." Just as an athletics coach might tell a player to "leave it all on the field," Peter tells us to completely exhaust all of our resources in a single-hearted effort to give love to each other.