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.
The apostle Paul sums it up pretty good. He is speaking of the prior days before the people became Christian. He goes on to say “All of us also lived among them” (speaking of the pagans) “at one time. Gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.” That is not a very pretty picture of humanity. If you thought about it, it could be a really bad picture of humanity. Again, we have a spirit that is pretty much useless; that has been deadened. We have bodies that are corrupted. That are bent towards following its passions. We have a soul that is darkened and blackened. We basically have skewed desires so we go out there and try to feed this soul and this body and this spirit that really has no connection to God. Consequently, I forget the passage, but it says there is no way that we can please God. Because of that situation, we are objects of wrath. What else are we good for? We have no value to God so we become objects of wrath. As the story goes and the good news goes, as you are all aware, salvation dealt with our problem. Salvation, the coming of Jesus Christ, the willingness of Christ to take his place upon that cross for our sins and the sins of the world, what it did is it freed us up of the penalty of our sin. That is the good news. The bad news is he didn’t take away our sinful nature. This is what you have to remember. He took away our sin. He took away the penalty of our sin, but he left the old man, the old woman inside of us that some would call the flesh. Some would call the sinful nature. We are stuck with that. What it means is that you have Christians and you have non-Christians and as far as sin goes or the ability to sin, Christians have the ability to sin just as much as a non-Christian. We see that, unfortunately. We see Christians sinning more than non-Christians because they both share that common thing which is a sinful nature.
But there is more good news. The good news is that God has given us an incredible weapon for fighting against this old sinful nature and basically what he has given us is a regenerated spirit. It is a fancy name that we use to mean to be born again. Through accepting Jesus Christ as savior, Christians believe that we received the spirit of God within us, which enlivens our spirit. I think it is in the gospel of John where it says of course we are born by an earthly mother but the second birth we are born of God. I think it is John 1:13. It says “People who believe in the name of Jesus Christ will be called children of God, children not born of human descent or husband’s will but born of God.” Meaning born from above. That is the birth we have gotten. We have this regenerated spirit. We are filled with the spirit of God in us. So we are fully equipped to be able to deal with the onslaughts against our very soul and, not only that, to be ready to be transformed by the spirits working within us. Transformed into the image of God.
Now some of you are saying that’s cool. What does that have to do with culture? My answer is it has everything to do with culture. You may not be aware of this, but culture at large doesn’t give a hoot that you want to be conformed to a 2000-year-old dead guy named Jesus. They don’t care. They don’t even know the name Jesus. They don’t care that you want to look like Jesus. All they care about is that you conform to the image of culture, whatever that image might be. Whatever image that they are projecting on any given moment. As I said before, when it comes to shaping your soul or even when it comes to discipleship, you are either being discipled by the world, the culture, or you are being discipled by God. There is no in between. You choose that. You say you are not going to do discipleship, but you are being discipled. You are being discipled by the world. You just don’t know it. You are being transformed and the transformation is looking more like the world. Again, people, there is a war going on out there. Actually, it is interesting; the war is not so much out there. The war is really going on inside. The war that is going on is the war between spirit, that new regenerated spirit, and the old sinful nature. The sinful nature. He calls it the flesh. He calls it the old man. You know what? You know whose side culture is on? The old man. The old woman. Culture will do everything it can to feed that negative image. Feed that sinful part of ourselves. What is funny is you think about the world and you think about religion in the world, people aren’t really into religion. Culture is not really into religion. But you know what? Most people know that everyone has something inside of them that is not right. Something that is vulnerable to sin. Something that is vulnerable to temptation. So what does the world and culture do? They feed message, after message, after message, after message. They don’t even know they are doing it. They are pounding down your spirit and building up your flesh so they can take over the soul. I don’t know a nicer way to say it. That is the war that is going on inside you that is being supported by culture that is really ultimately being supported by Satan. Culture is just a tool for Satan. He is not afraid to use it. He is very good at that. So that is the situation. Ultimately, what culture is trying to do is mess with our desires. It is trying to exploit our desires. The desires that in some way are natural and in some ways are not.
As a side note, let me give you a quick definition of desire. Desire the noun is a longing or craving as for something that brings satisfaction or enjoyment. That is a pretty basic definition. As a side note, all desires are not bad. We need food and water to survive. We need a mate to have company and to ensure the population of the species. We also need shelter to make sure that we are protected from the elements out there. Those would be considered base level, lower level needs. Is anyone familiar with Maslow and his hierarchy of needs? Does anybody remember that from high school psychology or whatever? On the lower level are the base level needs of food, shelter, and that sort of thing. As you move up the pyramid, you start hitting new levels of needs. You start hitting things like the need to succeed. You start hitting things like the need for achievement. The need for respect. The need for belonging. The need for love. Ultimately, the need for self-actualization. I don’t know what that means. Apparently, nobody ever gets there, but it sure sounds like a fun place when you make it. You are very self-actualized. I just never got to that place. That is the pyramid. The hierarchy of needs. Those needs are not bad. Those are just basic human needs. Because of the fall of man, because of the sin of man, what happens is those desires begin to manifest themselves in tainted ways. Because again you have a tainted soul. A tainted soul results in tainted desires and tainted desires result in tainted actions, inappropriate actions. Actions not becoming of a Christian but really in many ways not becoming of a human being. You have that ability to do that. If you are a Christian, it becomes a possibility that you will be a bad witness for the world. It is tough in the world today. The world is like a magnet. It knows again that we have these base desires that it will seek to exploit and suck us into it. When you have a world where there are no moral guide rails and you decide all of a sudden you want to take a trip off the road to seek your desires, your base desires, your advanced desires, your higher level desires, who is waiting there? Culture saying: “Hey, I will accommodate you. I will help you out. What do you need? I will take care of every desire that you want.”
Starting with food. Food is something that is so obvious. The world knows that we have this base desire to eat. Everybody has to eat so of course they create food ads. They create food ads like this. They know we need to eat, but if you eat too many of those, you are going to die. Eat one of those every day for about a year and see how you feel and see how you look. They take a base level desire and they exploit it and then if we engage it, it turns into excess and then feeling worse even though the desire felt good at the time and then what happened is you have the law of diminishing returns. It gets less and less enjoyable.
Take the need for sexual intimacy. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that, in the marketing world, what is the term? Sex sells. You say that is awful. Why would they say something like that? Well, because sex sells. That is just the reality of it. It sells everything from beer to cosmetics to a Cadillac. I was saying last week I often go online and look for illustrations to use for my opening slide or somewhere in my presentation. I made the mistake last week of typing in depravity and clicking on images. Not good, Charlie. I looked at like ten of them before I realized this doesn’t look good. What is going on here? I took a chance this week and I decided to type in beer ads. There are some bad beer ads out there. I wanted to use one for an illustration, and I hope this doesn’t offend any of you because this is one of the more milder ads I came across. It is these three beautiful ladies that are hovering around Miller Lite. My point is what is that image trying to sell? Miller Lite or what? Sex. The idea here is if you go down to Bellevue Beer on 65, and I know some of you have been there, you buy that case of Miller Lite and you go home, those three babes are going to show up at your door and say come on honey, let’s party. Not! At least not in Bellevue. Three ladies may show up, but they aren’t going to look like that. All kidding aside. Think about it. There is someone trying to sell beer so they have to attach it to something that you relate to. You don’t have an inner desire for beer, but you have an inner desire for sexual intimacy.
What happens if you have the need for some sense of identity? Let’s say you have a need for one of those higher level desires on Maslow’s hierarchy of need. The need for success, accomplishment, the need to have some sense of an identity. What happens if you are a woman and you don’t happen to smoke and the tobacco industry is trying to capture you as a market? What is it going to do? It is going to attach it to an identity. We don’t have an inherent need to smoke. I tried cigarettes in about seventh grade when I stole the case of non-filtered Camels out of a garage, smoked it, and almost puked my guts out, but then I kept smoking as stupid as I was. But you don’t have that need. Woman normally find that pretty gross, don’t they? So what do you do? You have to attach it to something you need. Woman need to feel progressive. They need to feel independent. They need to feel good about themselves. They need to get out of the male-dominated society so what happens is you create an ad. Virginia Slims. You know this slogan. “You’ve come a long way, baby.” What is it saying? If you smoke Virginia Slims, you are progressive. You have broken out of that male-dominated world. You are moving along. That is what they are doing. They are not selling us cigarettes. They are selling identity.
One more. Let’s say you are kind of a nerdy kind of guy like me or something. You want to be part of the in-crowd. You want to be part of the cool crowd and it just doesn’t work. You are a high school student. You are a college student or something. You just really desire to be cool. You want to really fit in, so if you were going to do that, what product are you going to buy? Are you going to buy the Mac book that the cool guy uses or are you going to buy the PC that guys like me use? If you want to be cool, then you want to buy the Mac because what Apple is selling is not an Apple computer. They are selling cool. Whether you want to admit it or not, at the gut level inside your soul, some of you young people desire to be cool because you don’t see yourself as cool in the eyes of God. That is a problem so you are seeking a sense of identity through a piece of hardware. That is the problem.
This is not rocket science. I could go on and on and on giving you illustrations. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have seen so many of these types of ads that we become numb to it. I remember in college I was taking a marketing class and they call this subliminal seduction I think is the term for it. Subliminal, below the surface, seducing you. That is what is going on. Don’t they do a good job? This is old school stuff. They are hitting you every which way. Not just with ads. With videos. I went to see a movie the other day. We went to see “The Man of Steel”. Did anybody see that movie yet? How many products were in that? Did you see any products? Name some. Gillette. I didn’t see Gillette. Nikon. 7-11. Product placement. They are just bombarding you. Boom. Boom. Boom. Hitting you and hitting you and hitting you because they know that you have these base desires and they are going to exploit it. The culture is trying to shape you and so many of you people are letting it do it.
The answer is found in Paul’s letter to the Galatians where he writes “So I say live by the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” That is like a promise. That seems so simple doesn’t it. Live by the spirit. If you are a believer, if you are someone who has accepted Christ as Lord, you know that you have the spirit of God living in you. You might not know it, but you do. I am talking about a sincere conversion where you have opened yourself up to the Lord Jesus Christ and you have invited Christ in to your heart. You have the spirit of Christ living in you. That was a promise. Remember Christ went up before the Pentecost and what did he do? He spent his spirit down and filled up the church and now he has filled up every believer. I kind of get the imagery of one of those blow-up characters you plug into the wall and all of a sudden it comes to life. That is what happens to you when you are born again. You get the spirit of God living in you. The spirit of God is multipurpose. The spirit of God is going to come alongside of you in the tough times and comfort you in your trials. The spirit of God is going to come alongside of you and encourage you when you are struggling with your faith. The spirit of God is going to come alongside you and smack you upside the side of the head when you need it occasionally. He is going to rebuke you. What the spirit of God is trying to do is transform you into the very image of Jesus Christ. Transform your soul, your inner being into the spirit of Christ and into the character of Jesus Christ. When you are in a world that has gone nuts and you cannot not look at the world and realize that it is crazy out there. It doesn’t know up from down, right from left. We are in the midst of this thing and we are just joining in all the craziness getting pulled every way. When you live in a crazy world, the answer is live by the spirit. Live right next to the spirit. Live with the spirit coming alongside of you because then again you have the guarantee that says you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. Really all it requires, which again is the most difficult thing to do, is submission, surrender. That is just the reality. So many people don’t want to get off that throne. You like it there. It feels good. I struggle with it just like any of you. It is easy to get your head puffed up because again you have those things from your past that you haven’t dealt with. You go and find ways in the world to fill you up. The things you didn’t get from your mommy or your daddy or your teachers. You are feeling insecure so the world says I will take care of that. What happens is you do that, you follow through, and you feel terrible, and you come forward on Sunday and say I confess this, I just don’t know what to do. All the spirit is saying is stop it. Just stop it. Stop it. You have the power of the God who raised Christ from the dead inside of you and you can’t deal with a marketing executive? That is sad. It is absolutely sad.
Again, you have to get to the place where you are willing to surrender. That is why I love that song “Lay Me Down”. Debbie picked it. She didn’t even know what I was preaching on. She doesn’t know what I am preaching on until Sunday morning sometimes because I am all over the place. The “Lay Me Down” song. That is what it is. It is lay me down. Even looking back at Romans 12:1. It was the whole idea of being this life sacrifice. Let it be your spiritual act of worship by giving of your life. Laying down your life first and foremost. What it means is laying down those personal desires; those two-bit desires that titillate your base desires and that stimulate you to do stupid things. If you can’t control your base desires, how are you going to control the higher level desires? He is saying cut it out. You have the spirit of God in you. Lay it down. Let your desire be of God. Let your first and foremost desire. There is a writer Oswald Chambers that some of you recognize. He sums it up very nicely when he says “One of our greatest hindrances to coming to Jesus is our own natural desires. When we surrender our natural and fallen desires to God, he can begin to do the work in us to form his desires in us.” That is what he wants. I have described sin as simply misguided worship. That is all it is. You have chosen to worship self over God. The answer again is laying down your desires, laying down your life and let your greatest desire be God. There is a passage I didn’t put on the screen but it comes out of Psalm 37:4. This is from David. He writes “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” That is the irony of it. You lay down all those two-bit desires that you think are going to fill you up and give you satisfaction. He says you want desires? I am going to give you desires you never even imagined. I am going to show you things that you will not believe but first you have to lay down those desires. Get rid of them. Get them off your plate. They are useless. They are nothing.
Again, people, we are in a war out there. A war that starts right here. A war again that is nurtured by culture and ultimately supported by Satan. Unfortunately, we look out into the world and we see that culture is winning. We see culture has got an upper hand on not only the world but Christians. We buy into the stuff out there so much. I can’t believe how guilty we are in buying into that stuff. If you have been born from above, if you have been born from the spirit of God, you have the spirit of God within you. You have every bit of strength and energy that you need to get past anything that the world would throw against you. But again, you have to be willing to lay it down. You have to be willing to submit those desires to God and let God be the soul desire in your heart. As you desire God, he will give you desires of your heart. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Let us pray.
