Aliens
"Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul" 1 Peter 2:11
In 1991 I was on a mission trip to what was still then The Soviet Union. In the Ukraine we were served sausage a few times a day - but not like Jimmy Dean sausage. This sausage was mostly huge chunks of white fat with a little bit of meat around the fat chunks. The native residents loved it. The crowded public buses smelled like it because it wafted out of everyone's b.o. As an alien and stranger, I abstained. No desire for the "sausage".
My beloved brothers, He is calling us and commanding us to live that same way as it relates to the ungodly things the citizen/residents of this fallen and temporary world crave. Sensual expression outside the bonds of marriage, personal prestige and power, materialism etc...: by His grace and Spirit, abstain from them. Cultivate the attitude of the alien and stranger. Those lusts/desires aren't native to your homeland. They don't come natural to your true nature. Your redeemed and true self has no palate for those dishes, so just say "no thank you" and abstain.
9/8/09
Tom: The way I see it is that good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results;bad thoughts and action can never produce good results. Men Having clean thoughts will make clean habits.
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