“Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). Kim and I attended a worship service yesterday and we heard the pastor preach on this verse. This is an incredibly forceful verse with a lot of strong ideas. Peter calls us God’s beloved, he urges us, he says that we are aliens to this world, and he declares that our sinful desires are “passions.”

But the idea that caught my attention was that the passions of our flesh wage war against our soul. They wage war. A war has been waged against your soul, and there is nothing more important than the state of your soul. Jesus said, “What will it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul. For what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26). If the soul is lost, the whole person is lost. And there is no way to negotiate to get it back. When the war against the soul is over, it’s over. When all is said and done, it doesn’t really matter if we lose the war against terrorism, or the war against drugs, or the war against poverty or teenage pregnancy or AIDS. Diseases can be treated, the hungry can be fed, the homeless can be housed, but you can’t get a new soul. This war against your soul is crucial. It has grave implications.

The bottom line is this. You’ve got a bulls-eye on your back—better yet, on your soul. Aliens cannot be neutral. You can’t live in a country that has declared war on your homeland and not expect to be considered an enemy of that country. You may think that you can just ignore temptation and the passions of the flesh, as Peter calls them. But I’ll assure you, they are not going to ignore you. Those sinful desires that are still resident within you are waging war against you. They are out to get you. They are on the offensive. They are aggressive. They are relentless.

This is why on some days—sometimes it seems for no reason at all—the temptation to lust or over-eat or be lazy is just overwhelming. This is why sometimes you take the opportunity to gossip about somebody else, or feel proud over your success and someone else’s misfortune, or think of yourself as a victim and wonder why others seem to get opportunities and you don’t. This is why sometimes you wake up in the morning and just feel out of sorts with the world—the least little thing sets you off: you snap at the kids, you kick the dog, you pound your fist on the steering wheel at the driver who is driving slow in the fast lane. The world calls that “waking up on the wrong side of the bed,” but we know better. Peter reminds us that it is the war that is being waged against our soul.

So what is the solution? What are we to do? Peter tells us that we are to abstain from these passions of the flesh. We must fight our sinful desires like they were a contagious, deadly disease. You can’t indulge them, you can’t flirt with them, you can’t minimize their destructiveness. And how do we abstain from these passions of the flesh, these sinful desires and tendencies? We do so by more and more admitting that we are aliens and that these passions of the flesh just do not satisfy like they used to. An alien knows that there are deeper comforts and more satisfying pleasures to be found at home. And home for a Christian is worshipping God and serving others, finding our hope in Christ alone and giving our lives away to the world.

Those passions within you for approval or acclaim, for sympathy or pity, for comfort or convenience or pleasure at the cost of serving others, must be recognized for what they are. They are enemies of your soul whose goal it is to take you down.