You can turn to 1 Peter 2, verse 11 to 12, as Deb read this evening. Two verses that set up the new section that Peter's gonna get into. And I'll read it once more, and then we'll dive in. 1 Peter 2, verse 11 to 12. Peter has a new exhortation. He writes in verse 11, to the church 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. There's something similar here that we've seen in 1 Peter. Nothing's new. As our brother Deb read earlier on, our Lord, he's told us how we ought to live, but Peter knows, you can read throughout 2 Peter, and he says, I'm writing by way of reminder, and he knows the tendency even of redeemed sinners to forget everything that God has written down in his word and to forget to apply these truths that we never outgrow day by day, and Peter, Here wants us again to understand and in his context for the believers to understand as they live as Sojourners and exiles away from home afflicted persecuted He wants them to know that that your Christian life is Your Christian life only has one standard of living. It doesn't depend on your circumstances. It doesn't depend on whether you're in exile or at home. God, in his words, says he wants his people to live a holy life, whether in exile, as sojourners, away from home, or whether in the comforts of your own home. We also see the reality, not only holiness, but you could use another word that means the same thing, godliness, Christlikeness. God wants us to live a godly life, whether persecuted or whether in a country of great freedom. Our circumstances don't change how we live as Christians. Peter says there's one standard of living that marks your entire life regardless of your circumstances. There's this theme here that Peter is just pressing home again and again and again, and he's building upon what we've seen in verse 9 to verse 10. He's building upon these indicative statements, these statements of fact. This is who you are by grace. And because you've received this grace, here's how you ought to live. That's the message of Christianity. It's not live this way and then receive grace, but having received this grace from God freely, that propels you to live in a way that honors God. So the indicative statements we've seen, verse 9 to verse 10, Peter's already said you are a chosen race. That's your new identity in Jesus Christ. You're a chosen ethnos, a people from every tribe, tongue, and nation that has the love of God set upon them. Not that you earned any love from God, but he set his love freely upon you in an unconditional way. You're a royal priesthood. Peter says you have the privilege of offering up sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ by the Spirit. You're a holy nation, God dwells among you. You're a people for his own possession. For what great aim? Peter said that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, going back to Hosea, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, now you have received mercy. These wonderful truths of the gospel, they propel us to what we'll see this evening Holy living, in light of this, beloved Peter's saying, in light of God calling you out of darkness and into light, in light of the fact that you were at one time not God's people and you were giving yourself to the fleshly passions that enslaved you at one time, but now he's freed you from sin and death and the wrath that come. Now, God calls you to a different standard of living, even in exile, in a foreign land, in a land with great pressures. And we see this in the appeal. If you look in verse 11. of 1 Peter 2, he begins with this phrase, beloved, or beloved. That's an endearing word. He's literally saying you're loved by God. Don't forget that if you haven't picked it up yet. He says you're loved, that God loves you, beloved, that you're part of his family. As Bill Payne says in one of his hymns, you've been chosen by the Father, beloved. You've been purchased by the Son and you've been quickened by the Spirit. And if that's your reality, Then he says, I urge you. He has this appeal. I urge you, beloved, to abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul. And that phrase urge, maybe we get the urgency in English, urge, but another way you could translate that is strongly appeal, where I summon you or I exhort you. And what Peter's saying is that this is, This is a serious command, not just from men, but from God himself through the apostles written down in scripture. He's saying, I summon you as one who's received grace to live in such a way that I'm gonna set before you. And what he's saying is that you don't get a bypass on this because you're a sojourner or in exile, but there is this divine command from God himself upon your life as a redeemed sinner. And now we'll get into that, we'll see how we must walk. If there's this urgent command, what's this walk look like, Peter? He uses two verbs, to abstain. So I urge you, I plead with you, I summon you to abstain from something in your Christian life. And then the second verb's in verse 12. to keep your conduct among the Gentiles, here's the verb, honorable. So you must abstain from something in your Christian life because you've received grace, and you must live in a way that's honorable before the Gentiles because you're a recipient of grace, Peter is saying. And he's showing us that God's concerned about our walk because When we walk as Christians in this world, we walk in this war on our soul. Verse 12 says, abstain, that first verb, here's how you walk, abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. The Christian life is not a cruise ship to glory, but the Christian life is a war, it's an outright war. The devil is an enemy that is constantly bombarding your soul day by day. We also have the world that's an enemy, and you feel the pressures of that in our day, but we forget Peter, he's not even talking about Nero here. You think he could say, well, you know the Roman Empire, and you know that you're an Asia Minor, and you know that man means business, and he's gonna wage war against the church. He says there's a war against your soul. And what he's doing here is he's going to the desires, the sinful desires in our own fallen humanity still, the indwelling sin. He says that's also an enemy in your Christian life. Not only the world, not only the devil, But our own indwelling sin, my sin that dwells within me still is my greatest enemy. And that's your greatest enemy as well. And Peter here, he uses these two verbs to show us where the actual battle is supremely fought. It's fought in our soul. It's fought in our intentions and desires and passions. One man puts it this way, that if you were An earthly traveler, you'd go to a different foreign country and go there for maybe a week's vacation and you wouldn't ultimately conform your whole life and your whole practice and your whole customs to that foreign land that you're just visiting. But if you're a resident, well, your life begins to conform to the place that you're living in. And likewise, this one man says, we as Christians, we're traveling through this world as visitors as it were, this fallen world with sin that is both outward and inward in our own soul. We're traveling like that one through this fallen world who must not conform our lives to the practice of sin. That's what Peter's ultimately getting at. He's saying if your eternal home's in glory with Christ, and if you're seated with him in the heavenly realms, Ephesians 2, he says, well, you're really that traveler who's passing through this world in that sense, and we'll see that it's not an inactive passing through this world. We glorify God, we have good deeds, we're often persecuted for our good deeds and righteousness, but nonetheless, he's saying, Your soul that has this war within, it can't set up camp here. You can't conform your life like a person that wants to set up permanent residency in this world of sin and death. Because if you do, your soul is going to have a losing downward slope in battle there. So we have to abstain. from this passion of the flesh, verse 11, which wages war against our soul. Peter goes to the inner battle, the enemy, the greatest enemy in my heart and in your hearts, and to abstain, it means to keep away. So he's saying because there's a war against your soul, there's something you must keep away from. He's saying there's something that you must have nothing to do with. He's saying have nothing to do with the passions of the flesh. Now you could also understand that as the works of the flesh, but what we often forget is that Peter's exhortation is not simply to say don't have any sinful actions outwardly, though that's a command as well, but he goes in this context to the passions and he goes to the inner being of our own soul and he says that you can actually sin against God with your passions, with your desires, with your intentions, with the musings of your soul, even if you don't have any outward action against someone else or against God, there is this enemy of your soul. And Martin Luther, there's a quote, I find it's convicting but encouraging because he gets to the heart of the matter as well. He says that, I'm more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals." I mean, this Martin Luther, living in that time in history, he could have been put to death by the Pope. So you could say that Luther's greatest worldly enemy, well, how does he not fear him? Luther says, I fear my heart, my own heart, more than the Pope and all his cardinals. Why? Because he says, I have within me the great Pope self. He's saying that I know something of this war in my soul. It's the Pope of self. And that's my greatest enemy and that's your greatest enemy. It's the Pope of self that's waging war against our soul. And we could put it in modern language. Can we genuinely say that we fear the sin that dwells within more than our government? I mean, that is something that we have to ask our Lord. Do I sincerely fear sin that is not put to death in my life more than a tyrannical government that I love to talk about? I mean, is that the burden? I have to say sometimes I fear the government more than the sin in my own heart, and we forget that the worth is within, or maybe it's the sort of unknown future persecutions that we see increasing in our day. Do we say that I fear the sin that pierced my Savior's wounds? I fear that more than the sort of persecution that could put me to death for allegiance to Christ. There's this war Peter's saying that we have to fight, and it's indwelling sin, the passions, the inner desires of the flesh, which wage war against our soul. And if that's not the enemy we kill, We're going to lose that way. We're not going to lose by the pressures of our government or pressures of persecution. It's going to be the pressures on our soul that will make us disqualified and backslide and fall into sin and depravity and all of that. That's what Peter goes after. What does this doctor of the soul, what does he point us to? The works of the flesh, the passions of the flesh? We look through Galatians, if you flip there for a moment, Paul gives a list of these desires of the flesh, or passions, you could translate it. Peter doesn't go into the full extent, but Paul, another apostle, he's opening up these desires that wage war against our soul day by day, and in Galatians 5 verse 16 to 21, we see the... Passions of the flesh, and maybe it's not every passion here that wages war against your soul, but there's gonna be one, there must be. Verse 16 of Galatians 5, Paul, he says, walk by the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. Here's the battleground, the desires of remaining sin in your own life, they want to take you out. Verse 17, for the desires or passions of the flesh They're against the Spirit. So we know that there's no neutrality. If we're giving ourselves to the desires of the flesh, that's against our Lord. That's what crucified our Lord. Paul says it's against the Spirit. The desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other to keep you from doing the things you want to do. It's a battle, Peter and Paul are saying, that you want to love Christ and run with freeness and a pure mind and a pure heart and pure deeds. And there's this war within, Paul's saying. The flesh wants you to do things that you don't want to do. You love righteousness, you hate sin, yet, as Romans 7 says, there's this inner man within us that wants to wage war against our soul. Verse 18, if you're led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. And then he says, here's the works of the flesh. It begins in the desires, and then if it's not crucified and killed by the Spirit, in the desires, it's gonna lead to sinful actions. But both are sin, whether internally, and no one else sees it, but God, or externally, and others see it. Verse 19, Paul says in Galatians 5, here's the works of the flesh. Sexual immorality, anything outside of marriage. Lust, Jesus says, you've already committed adultery within your own heart. Sexual immorality, whether in thought or in deed. Impurity, sensuality, idolatry. I mean, we all have an idol factory, John Calvin said, within. There's sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy. drunkenness, orgies, and things like these, he says, I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things, and what he's saying is that if you have this unrepentant life that's marked by the desires of the flesh, he's saying, you're showing your fruit, you're not a believer. He says, right here, I've warned you, if you do these things, if you give yourself to these things in unrepentance continually, You're not going to inherit the kingdom of God. Why? The fruit of the Spirit. This isn't perfectly fulfilled in us. We're growing in the fruit of the Spirit, but there's marks of love, and joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, and goodness, and faithfulness, and gentleness, and self-control, the marks of the new birth that Christ is growing in us. So it's a reconstruction, renovation project in us. By God's grace, we have these marks, but it's not the marks that we want to have in the sense of degree. We want more of the fruit of the Spirit in our life. But Paul, as Peter's saying, is that there's genuine desires here that if you don't put to death, if you don't put lustful thoughts to death, it will lead to sexual immorality and action against your wife. Or if you don't put, let's see, if you don't put fits of anger to death in your own heart, Jesus says, if you hated your brother, you've already committed murder against him in your own heart. I mean, Jesus says that our desires on our soul, if they're sinful, You got to put them to death right there, because if you don't, it's going to wreak havoc in your life. The question is, how do we put sin to death? We all have these passions at war in our own soul. Are we without hope? Peter says, abstain. Have nothing to do with them. And Christianity is not just a self-help, self-motivation kind of message where you just got to try harder. You just got to do more. You just got to check off more boxes. No. Paul says, and we'll see with Peter as well, he says, if you walk by the Spirit, Galatians 5 verse 16, if you walk by the Spirit, you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. There's a promise there, that if we're walking by the Spirit, abstaining from the desires of the flesh and walking in dependency upon God the Holy Spirit, given to us through regeneration and as a down payment in our salvation, He says, you won't gratify these passions of the flesh. Now the question that we have after that is, well, how do we walk by the Spirit? And how does the Spirit put to death the passions of the flesh that wage war on our soul? And you don't have to turn there, we know this text, Ephesians 6 verse 7. You look at the whole armor of God that God has given you to stand in this evil day. He says, put it on. I've given you means that my Holy Spirit uses to put sin to death in your life. And one of the weapons that the Spirit uses to put sin, even in your thoughts to death before it comes to action, is the sword. Ephesians 6 verse 17 says, take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. So how do you walk by the Spirit? You take the sword of the Spirit, and you understand this battle of your soul day by day, and you're a soldier marching as to war for your own soul's sake. We love looking at videos and movies of heroic men in the army, and you could look at Navy SEAL training and these men They're up at 4 a.m. and they're training for a future battle or a battle that may happen. And you see these men never, they never wake up 4.01 a.m. any morning. They're waking up at 4 a.m. There's diligence, there's precision in their life. They're not drifting back, but they're pressing on. They're expending their body for a future battle or a battle that may never happen. That's a Navy SEAL. That's someone in the Army. Reality is, is that We're not like that Navy SEAL. We're actually in battle. We're not preparing for a future battle. We're actually in a battle right now. And God tells us in His Word, there are things you must have nothing to do with. How do you put it to death? Take the sword of the Spirit. Walk by the Spirit's dependency on the Word that He's given you. Literally, day by day, to walk by the Spirit is to plead with God. We don't just, I think in some, I heard one pastor say in Reformed circles, we say, Which is true, God says when His Word goes out, it accomplishes His purposes. But we forget that God works through means. And one of the means that He's given us to see the Word's work in our life is dependency on the Holy Spirit to use His Word. And so that means that as Paul and Peter encourage us, We pray in dependency on God, the Holy Spirit. Lord, if you do not quicken my heart, your word's just gonna fall on a dead heart or a dull heart. If we're made alive, it's gonna fall on a dull heart. If your word isn't quickened to my soul, and if you don't open my ears to hear, and if you don't open my eyes to see, it's gonna fall on dullness and coldness. We need that dependency to take the sword of the Spirit and walk by the Spirit day by day. And that's the means that God actually uses to put the passions of the flesh to death. And I'll show you one text that I've tried to memorize in Psalm 119. If you go there, here's a practical example of walking by the Spirit. taking the sword of the Spirit, applying it to your life, and Psalm 119 is a prayer. So the psalmist here, he's taking the word of God, he's praying to God for his spirit to use his word and work in his life, and it's in the area of abstaining, of putting sin to death. Look what Psalm 119 verse nine says. And this can apply for any Christian, not just a young man. Psalm 119 verse nine. How can a young man keep his way pure? That's a question from 1 Peter 2, verse 11 and 12. How can I abstain from the desires and passions of the flesh that assault my mind and my heart day by day? How can I do it, Lord? By, here's the means, by guarding it, literally guarding your way, guarding every move of your life. by your word, by guarding my life, guarding my thoughts, guarding my actions by your word. You say, well, how do I do that? Look, he gives you the answer. Verse 10, with my whole heart I seek you. So I want to guard my life so that I live a life of purity and holiness and abstain from the passions of the flesh. How do I do that? I seek God with my whole heart and I'm praying, verse 10, let me not wander from your commandments. Let me not make a little compromise in my mind or my heart or my tongue or my hands. With my whole heart, I seek you. Let me not wander from your commandments. How do I not wander from your commandments? How can I keep my way pure? He gives us another means. Verse 11. Blessed are you, O Lord! Teach me your statutes. With my lips I declare all the rules. of your mouth in the way of your testimonies. I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on all your ways. I will delight in your statutes. I will not forget your word." Could it be that we don't see the victory of indwelling sin? We're not talking about Christian perfectionism, but we're talking about being conformed to the image of Christ from one degree of glory to another. Could it be That we're not doing this as we ought to do. That we're neglecting the means that God has given us by His Spirit to put the desires of the flesh to death. Could it be that a lack of discipline in our scripture and meditation is what is causing us to not put sin to death in our own heart? God says here, store up my word in your heart. that you may not sin against me." That's a means. That's a promise. So what's that call? We're in a battle for our soul. What does a Navy SEAL do? He knows his game plan. He knows where he's going. He knows how to fight when he's there. He knows what to do if things go wrong. God is saying, I've given you my word. You know the battle on your soul. Be like that Navy SEAL, take my word, store it up. So my encouragement as we abstain from the passions of the flesh and put that at F, is to encourage every one of us to find scripture, find a text, find a book in the Bible and memorize it. But don't just do that, but plead that God as John Bunyan was It was said of John Bunyan that he bled Bibline, he bled Bible, that this man memorized so much Bible that Spurgeon says could prick that man anywhere, and he bled the Bible. That's what Peter's talking about. Put it to death by the Spirit. That's what David's talking about. There's books to help you with that. Donald Whitney's Spiritual Disciplines, or a small book, Andrew Davis, How to Memorize Scripture. What they're doing here is just recovering this old spiritual discipline of taking a text, memorizing it, musing over it, and then praying it back to God for Him to do that which He's promised. And God says that when you do that, there will be not perfect victory, but there will be progress, there will be sanctification. Could it be that our lack of diligence in that spiritual discipline is what is so easily plaguing our soul for this war in the soul? Not only, if you go back to 1 Peter 2, Does Peter give that command of abstaining? But there's a second marker point on our life, and this too is convicting, rebuking. He says in verse 12 of 1 Peter 2, that we must keep, as sojourners in exiles, keep, he says, your conduct, and here's the verb, among the Gentiles, here's where you ought to obey this command, keep your conduct, your way of life among the Gentiles, Honorable, so that when they speak evil against you or speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good works or good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. In exile or at home, you ought to abstain, put sin to death. But now he says as well, whether in exile or at home, whether in freedom or whether in persecution, you have to have an honorable life. Now the English here, it can be misleading. The word honorable is actually translated self-control. That's interesting. Literally, to live an honorable life in the original context is to live a self-controlled life in every area of life. Peter's saying that not only in the church that we've talked about earlier in chapter two, must you live a self-controlled life and a life that's honorable and a life that's pleasing to God. God doesn't just care about how you live in the church, but he also cares about how we live among pagans. We live in the world, but we're not of the world. But God says, It's just as important, if not more important, when you're living among pagans, that they see some kind of quality of life that amazes them, that arouses their thoughts and their discussions, this honorable life against the Gentiles who speak evil against you, that they see your good works, good deeds, and glorify God on the day of visitation. What is Peter doing? getting at, he talked about abstaining from something, but now he talks about a quality of life, self-controlled kind of living. And the context here is when they speak evil against you. That's a hard context, to have self-controlled, as one definition in the lexicon says, to be self-controlled is a discipline given by the Holy Spirit that allows Christians to resist the power of the flesh, Peter's saying that when they speak evil against you, you can resist the works of the flesh by the power of the Spirit of God in you. He's going back to the Spirit's work. He's saying that when they blaspheme your Lord in front of you and when they falsely slander you and speak evil against you and they attack you and wanna devour you and harm you and all of that, Do they see a certain kind of response from you? Do they see it pulled into their own tactics? Do they see it drawn into the works of the flesh? We feel that. It's easy to, humanly speaking, say, well, we walk by the Spirit when we don't have people speaking evil about us. But it's hard, hard work when people speak evil against you to have a self-controlled spirit and to resist the works of the flesh that we've seen in Galatians 5, But it's by the power of the Spirit that we resisted to have a self-controlled life. But Peter's saying that this outcome, this way of life, shouldn't just be when you have easy times, but it should be when you're in exile, suffering, sojourners, away from home, alienated from the people of God. When they're pressing you and you're the only one standing and speaking all kinds of evil against you, They see this phenomenal, this astonishing response of a composed mind, and a composed tongue, and a composed heart, and composed hands. Men and women that stand by the Holy Spirit's power when they are pressed for every degree. Peter's saying what will happen when you have that kind of way of living is that on the day of visitation, on the day of judgment, that will be a tremendous witness to those who blaspheme the name of Christ, that if God sent them as they speak evil against you and persecute the church, And on that day, if they die in their sins and stand before the judgment seat of Christ, they have this witness of a self-controlled Christian that Christ says, I put my disciple right in front of you, that when you told them to deny me, they said, how could I deny my Lord? When I spoke evil against them, they didn't cuss me. They didn't act in reviling anger. They didn't slander. We'll see later in chapter 3 they followed the Lord's pattern. We'll see later that Christ entrusted his own soul to the Father and he went like a lamb to the slaughter. Peter's saying that there is this power of God that is to be exemplified in your life. in the worst of times and in the best of times. One that avoids and has nothing to do with sin and one that lives a self-controlled life. Now, why does he say self-controlled? He's not just speaking, I'd argue, against being self-controlled, but he's using a word here in the Greek that encompasses something that we see throughout Scripture. 2 Timothy 1 verse 7 uses this word. You don't have to turn there, but Paul says to Timothy, And Paul's about to have his head cut off. He's in prison, and he's writing his last letter dipped in blood. And listen to what Paul says. He says in 2 Timothy 1 verse 7, God gave us a spirit, not of fear. He's saying, Timothy, I'm going to charge you with a certain way of living. And this is how I've lived, not with fear. But God gave us a spirit. And God, the Holy Spirit, dwells in you to help you live this way. It's a spirit of power and love. and self-control. Now we know when we're pressured with the Gentiles and they speak evil against us, the sinful passions of the flesh want to fear rather than to live in power and love and self-control and dependency on the Holy Spirit. But Paul, he's saying that this is a marker on your life, one of power, one of love, one of self-control. And what Paul's doing and what Peter's doing is they're simply talking about the fruit of the Spirit. We won't turn back there, but Galatians 5 verse 22 to 24 has self-controlled way of living as a fruit of the Spirit. And we saw way back when in Galatians, it's not fruits, plural of the Spirit, but it's fruit of the Spirit. So this is the life of Christ exemplified in bearing fruit in your life. And one of the aspects of that singular fruit of the Spirit's work in your life is self-controlled living. But you could take all the other fruits, or fruit of the Spirit, and that is what it means to be honorable. It is to be a believer who exemplifies the fruit of the Spirit when they speak evil against us, when they send us into exile, when they banish us from what we call our homeland. The whole point of this section then is that God wants you and I, if we haven't gotten this yet, He wants us to have a Spirit-filled life, a Spirit-dependent life, a Christ-exalting life, whether in persecution, whether in freedom. And we say, well, how do we do that? We know the source is to walk by the spirit and not gratify the flesh. We know the means, it's to know that we're in a warfare of our own soul. And so we ought to be like soldiers and take the word as a weapon to renew our mind day by day and to refresh our soul day by day and to build us up day by day. But what does it look like to be an exile living in a pagan land? And we won't dwell on this for a long length, but let me just conclude with the book of Daniel for a moment. Daniel, in chapter 1, is a man who lived in exile. In the Old Testament, he lived as a sojourner. He was away from his homeland. And here, you really see what Peter is getting at. You can see a man who lives a self-controlled, fruit of the Spirit, Christ-exalting, God-dependent life, when he's away from his homeland, when he's persecuted, when he's under this tyrannical regime. You see what Peter's getting at. He's abstaining from the gratification of the flesh, and he's living a self-controlled, a godly life when he's pressed and tempted and squeezed. And let me just set before you a little sketch from chapter one of Daniel. If you look in verse three to four first, we see in chapter one, really the lesson here is that the world, the world, the flesh, the devil are enemies. One enemy, the world here in Daniel's day, the Babylonian Empire, they're pressuring him to try and assimilate him, to try and, you could say, bring him into the customs of the world and conform Daniel, not to the works of the spirit, but to conform him back to the works of the flesh. And you can see in verse 3-4, their tactics, they take the best Israelites. Verse 3-4, the king commanded Ashpenaz, the chief eunuch, Chapter 1, verse 3, and look what they do. Bring us the best of men. If we can make the best men crumble, that's going to cause the sheep to scatter. Jesus says, strike the shepherd and the sheep scatter. He says, if you're to bring some men, bring both of the royal family, verse 3, and of the nobility. Verse 4, youth with a blemish of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom and endowed with knowledge and understanding and learning and competent to stand in the king's palace. He says, bring us the best of men and we're going to re-educate them. We're going to try and conform them back to the pleasures of Babylon, the gratification of the flesh. Look what it says in verse 4, we're going to give them and teach them literature and language of the Chaldeans. We're going to paganize them again. We're going to try and corrupt them and instruct them. As one man says, if you send someone to Caesar to be educated, they're going to come back as Romans. Well, their idea is that if we take the best Israelites and re-educate them and assimilate them to Babylonian pagan practices, it's going to cause the rest of the people of Israel to conform to that way of living as well. And then the second way that they try and tempt, verse 5, It's not necessarily that food is bad here, but it's the pleasures, this abundant. God is their bellies, as Paul says in Philippians 3. Verse 5, the king assigned to them a daily portion of the food that the king ate. So he's not just affording them food, but he's given Daniel and these men the pleasures of the king. He's literally saying that the world is yours. Eat, drink, and be merry. He gives them the pleasures of the king and of the wine that he drank. They were to be educated for three years. And at the end of that time, they were to stand before the king. And then look in verse seven, the last thing that they try and do to conform them is they say, let me give you a new name. How about you forget about your name, Daniel? And how about you forget about God's dealings with you and your identity in the covenant Lord? And let me give you a pagan name so that you forget your new identity. And you start to think that you're a pagan again. And if you forget your identity, you're gonna start living with those that carry the similar name. Verse seven, the chief of the eunuchs gave them names. Daniel, he called Belshazzar. Hananiah, he called Shadrach. Mishael, he called Meshach. And Azariah, he called Abednego. If we simply take the best men of the Israelites and give them all the pleasures of the world and give them a new name to forget who they're loyal to, The king thinks they're going to cripple. They're not going to abstain from the passions of the flesh. They're not going to live a self-controlled life, but they're going to give their life to gluttony and all these things. And look what Daniel does. Here's where we'll wrap this up. Verse 8 and 9, there's a children's text. Song, dare to be a Daniel, and that's not a moralistic lesson, but it's showing us the power of God in a man that's living in exile with great pressure, standing before the king, and this is what God can do with one Christian, one believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. Look what Daniel did by God's grace, verse eight, but Daniel, Did he forget his identity? Did he partake of the king's meal? Did he fall into re-education and all of that? Daniel resolved, verse 8, that he would not defile himself with the king's food or with the wine that he drank. And therefore he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. Look what God did. God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs. Here's what Peter is really getting at in a different point in redemptive history. You can stand in this battle, but you can't stand on your own. You can stand if you stand in the power of God and dependency on God with the means that God's given you by his grace. If you're dependent on him, He will make you stand on that day, whatever hills he brings your way. But the question is, as Daniel is given all these pleasures before him, and as Peter says that there are the desires of the flesh, as I conclude, I ask myself this and I ask each of us, where does the world draw us? Where does it draw us? And we ask the Lord to search our heart. Lord, where is my heart so often pulled? That's a pleasure of Babylon trying to pull us. That's a pleasure of Babylon trying to suck our soul and cripple us. So where, Lord? Where does the world grab my fleshly desires? You could also ask a question, Lord, what drowns my thirst for God? David cried out, God has a deer pants for flowing streams. So my soul thirsts for you. If we're in seasons where we say, I don't thirst for God as much, we have to say, Lord, what is drowning my thirst? Most often it's actually, The Pope himself is drowning in the thirst of God that I have in my heart. So what drowns my thirst for you, God? What draws my heart to the world? And then finally, what do I need to cut off? What do I need to abstain? Where do I need to live an honorable life before Gentiles so that I can honor you and they glorify God? And as Jesus said, so let your light shine before men. that they may see your good works." And what? Glorify you? Glorify me? No. Glorify our God in heaven. What do I need to do? What do I need to abstain? And then once we figure that out, we ought to be like Daniel. and be resolved. There's a battle. We're Navy SEALs in the spiritual kingdom. And it's actually a greater battle than what men have laid down their lives for in this world as well. This battle is an eternal battle with heaven and hell that are set before everyone's eyes here this evening. So let's conclude the prayer and ask our Lord to help us. We're a needy and a dependent people. Let's pray. Father, we ask that you would help us as we've looked just briefly, Lord, at your grace in our life. We thank you that we who were not your people are now your people, that we who didn't deserve your mercy, you gave us mercy, Lord, and we want to live in this world in a way that glorifies you, Lord, in a way that our good deeds, whether in thought, or in action, Lord, would glorify You that the world that's watching the church in this hour would see a people that are zealous, that are in love, that have a growing and contagious love for our Lord Jesus Christ. We pray that You'd help us by Your Spirit to put the deeds of the flesh to death and increase our appetite, increase our thirst, increase our hunger, and as that man William Williams sung, feed us, Lord, till we say we can't handle any more, that we're filled to the brim, and feed us again and again, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. Amen.