Please turn with me in your Bibles now to 1 Peter 2. 1 Peter 2, we're going to read verses 11 and 12. That's on page 1015 in the Bibles provided for you. 1 Peter 2, 11 and 12 on page 1015. And then as we've been doing, but I forgot to do again last week, we're going to read our theme verse for this series after that. That's chapter 1, verse 13. That's provided on the sermon handout in your bulletins if you'd like to look there for that. That's chapter 1, verse 13 that we're going to read in unison after I read this passage. We've been talking here in 1 Peter about our new identity in Christ. So we once were not a people, but now we are God's people. And then here, Peter gives us instructions for what our lives should look like as sojourners and exiles, meaning we belong somewhere else. Right? We belong to a people whose home is elsewhere. So what should our life look like? And as you'll see here, as is so often true in scripture, there's an instruction what not to do, what to put off, and instruction for what to do. How does God want us to live our lives? How does it change our lives to be sojourners and exiles? 1 Peter 2, 11 and 12, this is the word of God. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. And then chapter 1, verse 13, if you'd read with me in unison. Therefore, preparing your minds for action and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. May the Lord bless the reading of this holy word. When I was growing up, we had a lot of graduate students attending our church over the years. And they would come for a few years, right? Three, four, five years, some even longer. And the whole time they were there, they would be living in these tiny little apartments with sparse furniture, not really making any effort to make a home. And they were just sort of surviving. And during that time, they also usually would not become members of our church. They would attend for years, even five or six years sometimes, and not become members because they didn't know where they were going to end up after they finished school. And so they'd often keep their membership at home until they figured out what they were doing after school. If they were working a job, and had started a career there in Boston, and they were acting like that, that would be strange. That would be strange. You'd say, why haven't you put any pictures up on your wall? Why haven't you made any effort to make this seem like a home, or work towards buying a home, or at least making your rental seem like a home? Why are you not making a home here? And why have you attended this church for years without joining? Why would you do that? But if you ask that person that question, they said, well, I'm a student. You'd say, oh, OK, I get it. That makes sense to us. We understand this sort of transient time of life for that kind of a person. Here in this passage, Peter reminds us that we are sojourners and exiles in this world, or better, sojourners and foreigners in this world. We are supposed to be living our lives in a way that shows that this life and the priorities of this life on this earth and the priorities of this world are not all that we have, and that we belong somewhere else. And not just somewhere else, we belong in a different time that's coming. We're people who live life by hope. A hope in certain events that are going to happen in a coming world that is not here yet. In a time when Jesus returns. We've talked about all through this series and we'll see again and again, Peter wants us to be people who live lives of hope. Who know that something is going to happen in a certain time is coming. And in particular in these verses, Peter is talking about our moral behavior. He says that as sojourning citizens of heaven who belong somewhere else, who belong in a different time, who have become part of God's people, that we should be living a lifestyle of goodness, a lifestyle of righteousness that breaks the pattern of ordinary human morality. There's an ordinary pattern, an ordinary pattern of sinful human behavior that we are to break. We have been saved by our gracious King, our gracious Lord Jesus Christ. He's brought us out of darkness into his marvelous light, as we saw last week, and so now you have an opportunity to live your life for his honor in a way that brings him glory and honor, in a way that shows the world that you have something better, that you know there is something better, And something better that they can enjoy themselves if they will turn to Christ and repent of their sins and believe in Him. So brothers and sisters, the call from this passage is to honor your King by living as sojourners. Honor your King by living as sojourners. As I mentioned a moment ago, there's a negative side to this and a positive side to this in the sense of don't do this and do this. That's really how we're going to look at this passage. That's the two verses we looked at. The first one tells you what not to do. Second one tells you what you're supposed to do. And so we see, first of all, that Peter calls us here to abstain from sinful passions. First of all, abstain from sinful passions. He urges his readers here, as sojourners and foreigners or exiles, to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. When you hear that, and you think of maybe the plain reading of those words, the way we normally think about the words flesh and soul here, You might think that the plain reading of this is to say that you should abstain from everything that your body desires because it's waging war on your spiritual side. It almost sounds like Peter's saying you should abstain from everything that's physically pleasurable because that's bad for your immaterial self. And there are Christians in history who have read this that way, Christians who have tried to live their lives that way. Every hermit, every Christian hermit or monk or nun who has purposely worn uncomfortable clothes, who has eaten the plainest food possible and the least food possible, who has stayed single not just to devote themselves to the service of the Lord, but because they believe that sexual pleasure, even in marriage, is somehow a passion of the flesh that they should be abstaining from. or who have avoided really every creature comfort, every pleasant experience, because they believed that it was bad for their souls. That's how they viewed a passage like this. They thought that if you had just abstained from what they thought of as the passions of the flesh, meaning anything your body enjoys, then you would be spiritually healthier. But the Apostle Paul actually argues against this kind of thinking in 1 Timothy chapter 4. In 1 Timothy 4, he's warning about false teachers that were going to be coming, and he says that these are people who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. He actually uses the same word for abstain there when he says they require abstinence from certain foods. And he's saying that we're not supposed to be saying, well, certain pleasurable things are things you must abstain from for the sake of your soul. That's not what Peter is really saying here. So what does Peter mean here by passions of the flesh? If that's not what he means, what does he mean by passions of the flesh here? Well, we need to look at the wider biblical teaching on the concept of the flesh. And I want to look at some other passages here. A couple of weeks ago, I gave a whole lesson on this in the afternoon. And if you weren't there for that, it's just a lesson on the flesh. I'd really encourage you to listen to that. It's on Sermon Audio. We got into it in much more detail. And it's such a critical issue in how people think about human nature today. Again, if you haven't heard it, I would encourage you to go listen to that. But I want to read some of these passages here. Some of them are a little longer than I would normally read. But it's important for us to get a broader picture of this topic. Later on in this same letter, in chapter 4, 1 Peter 4, starting in verse 3, it's a parallel passage. Peter's talking about not living for human passions anymore, and he says in verse 3, For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this, they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery and they malign you, but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. Notice that's a parallel passage, right? He says, don't live just like everyone else because you know there's a judgment day coming and they will give account to that person, right? That's the same concept. But when he talks about that different way of living, Yes, there are some of those bodily pleasures that we think of, where he talks about sexual sin, he talks about drunkenness, but he also lists idolatry there. Idolatry, which you might call a spiritual sin or a sin of the heart, right? He's not just talking about bodily pleasures here when he talks about these passions. Then in Galatians 5, probably the most well-known passage about the desires of the flesh, or the works of the flesh, as opposed to the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit that we're familiar with actually comes in contrast to a list before that of the works of the flesh. Listen to the way that he talks about this. He says, Galatians 5 and verse 16, but I say walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. And then when he lists those works of the flesh, he lists sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. At the end of that, he says, those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. So again, you get some of those bodily pleasures like you would think of, sexual sin, drunkenness, sensuality, those kinds of things. but also divisions, rivalry, enmity, right? Those kinds of things that are not associated with a pleasure that your body experiences, but these are passions of the heart or of the mind that are sinful before God. And I think maybe the most helpful verse in this is Ephesians 2 verse 3. Ephesians 2 verse 3 is talking about who we were before Christ made us alive. before we're saved, and he says, among whom, he's talking about the rest of the world, he says, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. Passions of the flesh, desires of the body, and the mind. So the flesh does not just refer to your body. It does not just refer to what your body enjoys. The passions of the flesh refer to desires of your body and of your mind that are contrary to the Word of God. They're contrary to what God has told us is good and right. The flesh, in this sense, is a shorthand for who we are naturally in our sin. Who we are naturally as human beings passed on in the flesh from one generation to the next, because of original sin, corrupted in body and in mind in a way that leads us into sin, that tempts us to rebel against God and to do what is not honoring to him. Your whole human nature corrupted by sin, body and mind. And Peter's warning you that you will passionately desire things that are destructive to you and dishonoring to God. He's saying that's gonna be part of the reality of living in this world with this human nature. You will passionately desire things that are destructive to you and dishonoring to God. He's not telling you that your body is an enemy, right? When we talk about the three great enemies of the Christian being the world, the flesh, and the devil, we're not saying that your body is an enemy or that your physical nature is the problem. We're saying that what comes naturally to you can't be trusted outright. Again, you will passionately desire things, both physically and spiritually, physically and emotionally and mentally, from your heart. You're gonna desire things that are at war with you, that are trying to destroy you, that aren't actually going to do you any good. And so every desire and every passion that you have must be tested by what our King has told us is good and right. The same word for passion is used in Christ's life. He was passionate about things. So it's not that passion itself is a bad thing. It's that we have to test those passions by what our King has told us is good and right. So in this broader context of being sojourners and exiles, Peter's saying you're gonna have to live a life that looks different from the ordinary course of human nature and the ordinary course of human society. You're gonna have to live your life in a way that's different from your neighbors, the people around you, no matter what society you're living in. If you're living around people who do not believe in Jesus Christ, and even your brothers and sisters fall into sin as well, you're gonna be living around people who are living life in a way that is with passions and desires that constantly pull them in the wrong direction, and you're gonna have to differentiate from that. You're gonna have to be different from that. You're gonna have to live your life in a way that is honoring to him by abstaining from these sinful desires, these sinful passions. You don't expect an Olympic athlete to live like a normal human being. You know that ordinary human eating habits and ordinary human exercise habits are going to make you an ordinary human being. They're going to keep you an ordinary human being. But if you want to compete at a whole different level, if you're expecting to be at a whole different level and you're looking forward to something at a whole different level, like an Olympic athlete, you expect them to live a different life. They're not going to live the ordinary human life. And so if you follow your desires in exactly the same way that the people around you do, the ordinary sinful humanity around you, if you are carried along by the passions of a sinful nature, why would you expect to be any different from the world around you? If you want to honor Jesus, if you want to be different to honor him for saving you, you're gonna have to break with tradition. You have to break with what people normally do. You're gonna have to break with how humans usually function in gluttony, in bitterness, in sinful anger, in sexual sin, in pride, in idolatry, all of these things that are so common and so natural to us in human society. But if you want to be a Christ-honoring sojourner, you have to abstain, you have to put them away from you. What passions of the flesh are winning battles in your life right now? Maybe it is those physical desires for you right now. Maybe it is sexual sin. Looking lustfully at someone that is not your spouse or engaging sexually with someone who is not your spouse. This world tells you it's normal. This world tells you that, well, maybe don't go overboard and break the law or something, or don't go out hurting people with it. But be reasonable and safe. But everyone does it. And to suppress your sexual urges is harmful to you. And you need to follow them wherever they take you, and with whomever they take you, as long as it's consensual. That is preached to you nonstop in your world today. Brothers and sisters, scripture tells you to abstain. True abstinence from sexual sin, any sexual desires or interaction outside of its beautiful purpose in marriage. Brothers and sisters, this is the call of the word of God. There are some things that we don't do in moderation. We don't do them at all. We say, I will not have that be part of my life. Sex belongs in marriage as a beautiful and good thing, and I will not participate outside of that. Or maybe it's drunkenness for you. There's a reason drunkenness appears in so many of these lists we were looking at. Or drug use, or modern form of drunkenness. Shutting down your brain. You're dealing with the pain by shutting down your capacity to think. Incapacitating yourself. Scripture does not say, only get drunk when you won't be driving. Scripture does not say, smoke your pot responsibly at home when you're not going to be operating machinery. It says, do not get drunk with wine. Brothers and sisters, abstain from these sinful passions of the flesh, a passion for drunkenness. When we think of physical desires, though, I think what are even tougher, or more subtle, more difficult, or more subtle are the desires that are good in moderation, but can become controlling, right? Gluttony. Idolatry of material goods, materialism. Here we are between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And the world is just pulling at you to say, you need this stuff, and this stuff is the most important thing. This stuff is going to make you happy. Right? It can be other good things in your life. It can be music. It can be dance. It can be movies and books. It can be sports. All of these experiences and good things that God's created to be enjoyed. But are you controlled by them? Are they too much of a priority? Are you engaging them in excess? Look at your life for things that you feel like you have to do, things that you can't live without. Has it become a sinful desire by becoming too great of a desire and taking too much of your life, too big of a place in your life? But as I've been saying here, it's not just physical desires or pleasures that are a danger. Look for those sinful passions in your mind, spiritual or mental desires that we need to root out, that jealousy, bitterness, strife, sinful anger. If you want to honor Jesus as your king, you're gonna look different in your relationships. You need to look different in your relationships. Loving your enemies the way that Jesus loved you, in a way that's totally counter-cultural. Showing kindness to people who aren't being kind to you and being patient with people who aren't being patient with you. The world tells you just cut off those relationships, be done, burn those bridges. But Jesus did not do that with us. Friends, you will have passionate desires to not be loving and kind and patient. You will have passionate desires to be vindictive and to be selfish. You will have a world of internet advice and peer advice that eggs you on to practice selfishness and these sinful passions of the heart. and that desire for vengeance boils up in you, that anger that wants to destroy that other person burns in that way that almost feels irresistible, but that is not who you are in Christ. Abstain from these sinful passions. Cast your cares on the Lord. Take that anger and that difficulty to the Lord, to whom vengeance belongs, and trust him to be just, and then love your enemies as hard as that will be. Now, as we often see in scripture, it's not just about what we shouldn't do. It's about what we should do, right? Put off this way of living and put on the other. So secondly, Peter tells us here to engage in timeless good. Secondly, engage in timeless good. In verse 11, Peter's warning us about the harm to ourselves and our sinful desires, right? The war with our souls. But then in verse 12, he reminds us that our behavior has an effect on the people around us as well. The way that we live impacts the people all around us. He wants us to conduct ourselves honorably, and we're supposed to live this way among the Gentiles. Now Gentiles in the Bible usually refers to non-Jews, right? You're either Jewish or you're a Gentile. But as we've been seeing, he's applying in this book the language of God's chosen people to all believers in Jesus Christ. Once you were not a people, you were scattered all different kinds of people. Now you are God's people. And so that means that this term Gentiles refers to unbelievers. So in this sense, everyone who believes in Jesus is part of God's people, and everybody else who doesn't believe in Jesus, regardless of whether they're Jewish or Gentile, is a Gentile in the sense of this passage. So he's talking about our behavior before unbelievers. We're supposed to think about how our behavior is seen by the people around us. Now, you may be behaving honorably before the people around you, but how they perceive what you're doing is complicated. Peter recognizes that here in this passage. Just because you're behaving honorably doesn't mean that others are going to see it that way. He talks about the Gentiles speaking about you as evildoers. Jesus warned us that those who hated him will also hate us, and we're going to be slandered. We're going to be treated unfairly. We're going to be spoken evil of when we don't deserve it. And uprightly living Christians have been slandered by unbelievers all through church history. We have a good example of this in the life of Justin Martyr. Justin was an early church Christian. He was born before 100 AD, so just right after the time of Christ. He was born in Judea, but he was a Gentile, came to faith, and then was a very well-educated and philosophically-minded person, was able to express himself well. And so he's best known for writing two defenses of Christianity, defending them against some of this slander. They're called his apologies, in the sense of apologetics, of defending, right? He wrote to the emperor himself and said, here's why you should not persecute Christians. And what he was doing was defending against slander that was happening against Christians at the time. Christians were being called atheists. because we didn't believe in the Roman gods. So we were atheists, and we were being accused of cannibalism because they heard that we ate the body of Christ. And we were being accused of sexual sin. They heard that communion was referred to as a love feast, and they assumed there must be something sexual going on there. And they heard that they accused us of incest because they heard that brothers and sisters in Christ were marrying each other. And so Justin has to defend himself against these, defend Christians against this slander. There's no truth in these things. And he has to defend himself. So he goes through it, and he goes through all those issues, and he says, we are good citizens, right? We're promoting the peace of society. We're not engaged in any of these things that you think are wrong. We don't worship your gods, but we worship a true and living God, right? And we don't engage in these sexual sins that you're talking about. And then he comes back at the Romans, and he says, and listen, you're doing some of the things that you're telling us not to do. He calls them out for exposing their children when they didn't want a baby. They just leave the child out to the elements. And many of those children were picked up by traffickers and ended up in the world of prostitution in Rome that people were freely engaging in. He said, listen, you're doing the thing that we, that you're accusing us of doing. You may be doing the thing you're accusing us of doing without even realizing it. And he calls them out for their sin and points out that they understand what's right and what's wrong in some sense. Romans 2 tells us that the law of God is written on everyone's heart in some sense. That they have a God-given conscience, it's not perfect, it's not always right, that will tell them that some things are right and some things are wrong. And so even if we don't, if people don't always live according to that law written on their hearts or act from the right motives in doing those things, we can appeal to someone's sense of right and wrong. We can appeal to people's sense of that true, timeless, righteousness that will be recognizable as good in many human societies and to many people. Now, does that mean it's always going to go well when we point out that we're not engaging in these really heinous kinds of sin? Well, no, it doesn't always go well. And in fact, in Justin's case, he's called Justin Martyr because he was martyred. Because not long after that, he was denounced for not worshiping the Roman gods, and he was beheaded. Because he was still spoken of evil, people were still speaking evil against him. The slander or attacks from unbelievers may still come if you live honorably. But what's our hope here in this verse? It says that they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. That phrase, day of visitation, comes from Isaiah 10 that we read earlier. It's predicting that moment of judgment when people who think they're really powerful and in good shape suddenly face the true and living God. There's that day, that moment of reckoning, right? That visitation in the sense of when the judge visits or when the king visits. And Peter is saying, you should live a life that will be commendable at the day of judgment. Live a life that's going to stand up on that day, regardless of how people view it today. Right? You may be slandered as an evildoer today. You might even lose your life, like Justin did. But you can know that if you were doing what Christ has commanded you to do, that will be recognized by everyone on that day of judgment, on that day of visitation. It will be recognized by everyone as something that is glorifying to God. And glory will be given to God on that day for what you have done, even if no one glorified God for it here in this world today. But it's not just that you'll be vindicated on that day. There's a hint here that your behavior today might lead some of these enemies who are slandering you to faith in Jesus Christ themselves. Justin Martyr himself did not grow up as a believer. He was a Gentile. He didn't grow up in the Jewish faith. He didn't grow up as a Christian. And he had explored a bunch of different philosophies and tried all kinds of different things. And then he saw some Christians face death. And he saw them face death without fear. And he said, there's something going on here. There's something different here. There's something I want here. And that was what started him on that path to saving faith in Jesus Christ. So that someday, at that day of judgment, Justin Martyr and those Christians that he saw give up their lives without fear will stand side by side, glorifying God for the fearless faith of those believers that he saw give up their lives. Friends, that's our hope, is that as we stand and live honorably, We show people what is good and right, and people may slander you for it for now, even in this life, there might be that moment where they realize. They know there's something good there, and they're hungry for it, and they realize their need for forgiveness, and they come and repent and believe in Jesus Christ, and then you can stand side by side giving glory to God for that thing someday. That's part of the hope. of this passage. Jesus said in Matthew 5, 16, Friends, that's our hope. They will do it one day at the Day of Judgment. Our hope is that they will do it joyfully, having come to faith in Jesus Christ themselves. So what does this mean for your everyday decisions? Well, if you want to honor Christ, who is going to come back to judge the living and the dead, choose what will be honorable to him on that day. You're faced with a choice of what to do, whether other people around you are gonna slander you for it or not, whether other people are gonna think that it's admirable or not. Will this bring honor to Jesus Christ? Is this action I'm about to do going to give honor? Will it be God glorifying on that day of judgment? Often, that's going to mean choosing the kind of good that people only appreciate later. The kind of good that people only appreciate in the morning, for example. If your friends are inviting you to a party, and they can't understand why you won't go get drunk with them, and they ridicule you for it, and you feel isolated, and you feel embarrassed, in a sense, because of it, and then who's the one who's still sober enough to clean them up and put them into bed? And the next morning, they realize and they may see, they may know, they may see the goodness, the timeless goodness of your compassion and your kindness to them and your lack of drunkenness as you've walked honorably in that relationship. Or maybe you're being mocked for not being sexually active, but after that friend is feeling the sting and the loneliness of serial sexual relationships and they realize you're the only friend who doesn't view them as a sexual object, They may come to you and see that there's goodness here by the grace of God and come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. For as that doesn't mean that you'll get invited to parties, it means you may be mocked often, but that is truly honorable and it will bring glory to Christ. Or maybe it's people's opinions of you that loom too large in your life. Maybe you are deathly afraid of being embarrassed. And so you're working all the time to keep people happy with you. And you're doing everything you can to make sure everyone has a good opinion of you. Or maybe there's an embarrassing thing that you've said or done in the past that constantly comes back to mind and it gives you that awful sinking feeling every time you think about it. And you find yourself doing things, making choices in your life, not because it's what you want to do because it's good to do, but because you're worried about what people will think of you if you don't. Friends, the good news of Jesus cuts through all of that. If you have sinned, if you've sinned in a shameful way in the past, Jesus died for that sin. He has nailed, if you believe in him, he's nailed that debt to the cross and it's as far away as east is from west. That's done. And going forward, you know whose opinion matters most. And you're looking forward to that day when true good, true timeless good, will be honored as true good. So yes, keep in mind that you're living your lives in front of people. You're living lives in front of the Gentiles, the unbelievers. They are watching you, and you should be concerned about your reputation for the honor of Christ. But at the end of the day, you are freed to do what is right, regardless of how other people will take it, knowing that you will bring glory to God, either in this life or at the day of visitation. Brothers and sisters, do you look like one of Jesus' sojourners? We don't wear a different kind of clothes. We don't have a different accent. We don't eat different food. We're still Americans, we're still Kansans, but we don't live our lives by sinful passions. We aren't controlled by our desires. We have a gracious and merciful King in heaven who has told us what is good and true and honorable. And out of love for him and for what he has, gratitude for what he's done for us, we live for his honor. Brothers and sisters, as long as you sojourn in this world, abstain from sinful passions and engage in timeless good for the honor of your King. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we come to you so much aware of those sinful passions in our hearts, whether they be physical desires or spiritual desires, or we feel that war raging inside of us. Lord, please help us, by your strength, by the work of your Spirit, to put away these things, to see what is true and good, to see through the lies that to these deceitful desires, that these deceitful desires are telling us, and to know what is honoring to you and what is not waging war against our souls, but is choices that are bringing life. Father, please help us. We thank you for the forgiveness you've given us in Christ. Please help us to walk by your grace every day and to keep in step with your spirit. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.