When we consider this fighting life aright, we need not be dissuaded from loving it. We rather have need to be strengthened with patience to go through and to fight on with courage and assurance of victory; still fighting in a higher strength than our own, against sin within and troubles without. This is the great scope of this epistle.  Against sin the apostle instructs us at the beginning of this chapter. And here again, against suffering… He urges us to be armed with the same mind that was in Christ… The words to the end of the chapter contain grounds of encouragement and consolation for the children of God in sufferings, especially in suffering for God.
—Robert Leighton “A practical commentary on 1 Peter”