Last week, I preached for the New Carlisle church of Christ in a gospel meeting. The thoughts here came out of the Friday evening sermon. I hope this challenges you as much as it did me.
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Ask most of us what’s hurting our faith right now, and we’ll point straight out the window.
The Supreme Court. Hollywood. The school board. Cable news. Whatever party we’ve been told to be mad at this month. We’ve spent the last decade convinced the enemy is out there somewhere, holding a microphone or a gavel, and if we could just push hard enough, our faith would finally get to breathe again.
Dear friends, I urge you as strangers and exiles to abstain from sinful desires that wage war against the soul. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that when they slander you as evildoers, they will observe your good works and will glorify God on the day he visits.
– 1 Peter 2:11-12
Then you open Peter’s letter to a slandered, hurting church, and the very first instruction he gives them is not what you’d expect. Look at 1 Peter 2:11. He calls them “strangers and exiles.” Beloved ones living in soil that doesn’t claim them. And right there, in the next breath, comes his first command:
Abstain from sinful desires that wage war against the soul.
Notice what’s missing. Notice how he doesn’t say abstain from the Romans. He doesn’t say abstain from the slander, the gossip, the pressure at work. Peter turns the exile inward before he ever turns it outward. The first battle is in here.
And that’s the one most of us are losing.
The Greek behind “wage war” is strateuomai. It’s the language of an army on campaign. Boots on the ground. Siege works going up. Something is camped outside the city of your soul, and it didn’t come from Washington. It came from somewhere a lot closer.
You know, the Supreme Court has never reached into my life and made me a worse husband. It has never made me a lazier father. It has never weakened my prayer life by a single minute. My phone has done all three. My appetites have done all three. My own laziness has done all three. The Supreme Court? Not once.
Most of us are not losing to the culture out there. We’re losing to Netflix.
For some, the war is being fought over cable news. You wake up angry at people you’ll never meet. Your blood pressure is in the hands of strangers who don’t know your name. They get your first hour of the day. God gets the leftovers, if anything.
For some, it’s the phone. The endless scroll. You can’t sit still for ninety seconds without reaching for it. You used to pray in those gaps. Now you check.
For some, it’s food. Or drink. Or one more episode at midnight when you should’ve been asleep two hours ago.
For some, and this one’s quieter, it’s grievance. You’ve been nursing the same resentment for fifteen years. You feed it. You walk it. You rehearse the wound to anyone who’ll listen. It’s become a pet. And it’s eating you.
For some, it’s respectability. The need to look right, sound right, be admired. You’ve built a tidy little kingdom out of being seen the way you want to be seen, and Jesus barely fits in it anymore.
Whatever yours is (and you have one, we all do), Peter says it is at war with your soul. Something is laying siege to the part of you that matters most. And it isn’t, I promise you, who’s on the Supreme Court.
How does this fit into the bigger picture?
Jesus said it in Matthew 5:13. You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? You can’t season a culture you’re being quietly conformed to. You can’t call a world to Christ while you’re being chewed up by the same things chewing that world up.
This is one of the quieter failures of many Christians right now. We’ve got folks loud about the culture war out there and losing the culture war inside. Christians who can recite every outrage on the news but couldn’t tell you what they read in their Bibles this morning. Households where the adults argue politics over dinner and haven’t prayed together in a year. Men who’ll fight strangers online about biblical manhood while their own wives have felt invisible for a decade.
I’m not scolding anyone. I’ve been some version of every one of those people. So have you.
So Peter says: because you are beloved, because your real citizenship is somewhere else, abstain. The Greek word is apechomai. It doesn’t mean balance. It doesn’t mean moderate. It means hands off. Walk away. Quit feeding the thing that’s trying to kill you.
Paul says it the same way in Romans 12:2. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. You will not bear witness to a world you have not first refused to be conformed to. Period.
Beloved exiles travel light. You can’t carry the weight of those appetites and carry the gospel at the same time. One of them has to fall. Peter is telling you which one.
So here’s the question to sit with this week. Forget the headlines. Forget the news cycle. Forget whoever you’ve been told to be mad at. What’s actually waging war on your soul right now? It’s probably in your pocket. Or on your screen. Or in your grudge. Or in your pride.
Name it. Then put it down.
The world doesn’t need another Christian with a strong opinion. It needs salt that hasn’t lost its saltiness. And that work doesn’t start at the courthouse. It starts in your kitchen. Your phone. Your morning. Your heart.
Today.
