Desire Series

If you have your Bibles and you want to follow along, we are going to be looking at 1 Peter 2:11. If you have been here for a while, you know that we have begun our new summer series called “Do Not Conform. Be Transformed.” It is based on a passage in Romans 12:1-2 where it says basically “Do not conform to the patterns of the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The idea here is that there are many patterns in the world that seek to transform us, negative patterns. The idea here was that we would look at those patterns in the world and begin to think about the consequences of following those particular patterns and then maybe come up with some sort of a bridge to a biblical solution. Last week if you were here, you might recall that I talked about an overarching pattern of the world, which is sin. I mentioned how sin has pretty much infected the entire human race and the world that surrounds it. You might recall that we looked at a passage in Romans where Paul says “There is no one righteous, not even one. That all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The reality is that is the world that we live in and that is the world that we are called to be in.

Today what I want to do is consider how the world, or I would call it culture, uses something within us to tempt us to sin. Basically, the thing that the culture uses is called desire. A little bit of background on this passage before we read it is that Peter is writing to the churches in what is known as Asia Minor. He is addressing people that are feeling fairly persecuted, rejected, under personal attack. Their homes are under attack. Their families are under attack. He is just trying to encourage them to be strong in their faith. Also, he is trying to encourage them to be good citizens of the kingdom. To help point people towards God strictly by the way they live. He writes here in 1 Peter 2:11-12 “Dear friends, I urge you as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” What Peter is trying to get across is that people are watching you. People are looking at you. You need to be different out there. Although the time and the place are obviously different, I think what he is speaking to the people then is very applicable to us today. Think of the fact that we are indeed aliens and strangers in this world. This world is not our home. This is not where we are from and this is not where we are going. Our roots are tied to heaven. Our roots are tied to the kingdom of God. In the meantime, we have to live in this world. We have to live amongst the people. What Peter would refer to even as the pagans. We have to live amongst the nonbelievers. But our strategy should not be one of withdrawal. Our strategy is one of engagement. As I mentioned last week and I even think the week before, when the word Jesus became flesh and he made his dwelling amongst us. Or how Eugene Peterson says it “He moved into the neighborhood.” I like that imagery. Jesus basically came to earth and he moved into the neighborhood. He was among the people. If we are serious about partnering with God in his process of reconciling the world back to him, then we too have to live amongst the people. We have to be with people whether it is the neighborhood, the workplace, our homes or wherever. We cannot avoid people. But again, we are with people, but we are different. We are different because we are called to take on a very specific image. We are called to take on the image of Christ. It makes sense that Peter is going to tell the believers that are struggling, facing rejecting, facing all these trials that they should abstain from sinful desires because it is the acting out of the sinful desires where you end up actually looking more like the world and less like Christ. He goes on to say that these sinful desires are waging a war against us. Waging a war against our very soul.

You may say how does that work? In order to explain that, I need to back up a little bit and revisit this idea of sin. Most of you know that the idea of sin and Christians believe that sin originated back through the sin of Adam. If you remember the sin of Adam, it wasn’t simply just eating of a fruit of a tree. Really what was going on there was a rebellion. It was something that was going on inside of him, inside his very soul that was a rebellious act against God. Again, Adam had a great relationship with God. It says in Genesis that he walked with God in the cool of the day. They were tight. They were a spirit-to-spirit connection. When Adam decided to willfully go against God that spirit-to-spirit connection was basically severed. It was cut off. From that point on, the soul became forever enslaved to the body and its passion. Where it got its nourishment from the spirit, now it was getting its nourishment from the body and its passions. As a side note, there are a lot of views on what the soul is, but I like to think of it as basically the seat of your personality. It includes your mind, your intellect, and your emotions. It is what makes you you bottom line. Before we are regenerated, which is what we call Christians who are born again, the situation is we have a deadened spirit, not a totally dead spirit. We have a spirit but it is deadened. We have this soul that is a bit tainted and we have this body that is not really well equipped to be able to go out into the world and be able to attempt to transform it. It makes it very tough. It makes it especially tough because when we separated from the spirit of God, we have lost that connection. We lost that relationship. Now we are no longer tied to God. We are tied to self. We become self-centered people. As I said last week, sin is where we have taken God off the throne and placed self on the throne. Self is our reality. Where before God was our reality. That is the situation.