God gave you your desires, hunger, thirst, sex, sleep, rest. These are not evil. But when sin takes them and corrupts them and distorts them,

they become anti-God, they become Judas.

What role do our desires play in the battle within our mortal bodies?

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper turns to Romans 6, 11 to 14, to reveal how

sin seeks to gain control of our desires in its war against us.

The sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on November 5, 2000.

One of the greatest privileges of my life is to be able to spend so much time

dealing in the greatest realities in the universe that I find in the Bible.

I am privileged to be commissioned to study and to pray and to

figure things out and to commune with God over his word

and then to try to think through how to say things that I find there.

That's an awesome privilege. I do live in the real world. I live in the same world you do. I have to brush my teeth and I have to brush my teeth and I have to put storm

windows down and put towels under freezers when they leak and figure out why the

cars not working. I live in that

God has in his wonderful kind Providence granted me to have a calling where the greatest things in the world are my bread and butter.

And you don't have to be a pastor to enjoy that.

You don't have to be a pastor in order to set your mind

on things that are above and not on things that are on the earth to be caught up into

great things and glorious things and magnificent realities. You can do just what I did yesterday.

So yesterday, Noel is coming home after being away for three weeks taking care of her sister's

children in Illinois so that her sister could do a mission trip. So my wife is

coming home after three weeks with our little girl and I'm on my way

...