If you call on him as Father, who without respect of persons judges according to each man's work, pass the time of your living as strangers here in reverent fear:
Peter uses a metaphor to compare the life of man here on the earth to a stranger who travels through a foreign land. Although we move through the midst of an unconverted people, we do so in fear (reverence for God), not terror. The Christian is like that pilgrim. He lives in the land, but his real citizenship is in another land--in the city of God.