Welcome back my friends. It's time for you and for me to do the work necessary to get ready for this day and one of the primary things we need to do every single day is to get our minds ready.

Do you realize that the way that you think is what is going to generate your actions?

It's the way you show up in the world. We just read yesterday in 1st

Peter chapter 2 verse 11 that we are to abstain from the passions of the flesh.

And we cannot do that if we don't have our minds ready for that battle.

Peter goes on to describe it as a war being waged against our souls when those passions of the flesh arise.

Well if your mind is not viewing it that way if you and your thinking are not ready

to take it on with the seriousness of a battle. You're going to fail, you're going to be defeated.

He goes on in verse 12 to describe another way that we need to look at this war that we're in, he says keep your conduct among

the Gentiles honorable. Now let's stop for a moment and understand culturally what he's

talking about. You see Peter himself was a Jew, the Jewish people

go all the way back to the time of Abraham in the Old Testament. They have a rich faith history in following the one true God, his name is

Yahweh and his son is Jesus Christ. So Peter speaking from his Jewish

ethnicity and more than that his Jewish faith that has now

become Christian faith as he believes in Jesus, the Messiah.

And he's saying, all of you should keep your contact among the Gentiles.

Now Gentiles technically were people who were non-Jewish, people outside the Jewish faith.

But Peter's talking about it in a broader sense than that.

It's not just non- Jews, it's non-believers in Jesus Christ.

You see he's speaking of Christianity and those who believe in Christ as an entirely different

set of people, not Jew, not Gentile.

And he's saying keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable.

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