Fleshly desires are waging war against the soul, so you got a desire battle to fight.

Don't be like those who say desires are neutral, inconsequential, they're not

neutral. They can kill the soul and there's a battle to be fought quite before you even get to the conduct level of your life.

If we always have a battle to fight at the level of our desires, How do we fight it?

That's the relevant question that John Piper

answers from 1st Peter 2, 11 and 12

in this episode of Light and Truth.

This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on May 22nd,

1994.

Verse 11, beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which

wage war against the soul. The issue here is whether the soul is going to be so

fought against that it dies, that it is lost.

There are anti-souled forces in the world.

I mean, the world by and large doesn't even think about its soul.

But this text says there's a war going on and there are desires in the world that are waging war trying to bring my soul to ruin.

And if it succeeds, if the anti-Soule forces win, my soul is lost.

And if my soul is lost, everything is lost, then there is no recovery.

I'm reading a book right now called God in the wasteland. God in the wasteland by David Wells and I want to read you one paragraph

from it so that you can get a flavor for what's moving me and it is him too evidently and when I read it my heart really resonates with David Wells' writings these dates, and here's the paragraph.

It is one of the defining marks of our time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is

ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable.

He has lost his saliency for human life.

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