2nd chapter of Peter, 1st Peter, 2nd chapter,
verse 11.
Dearly Beloved, I beseech you as strangers and
pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against
the soul.
That is rather a complete sentence in itself,
a period could be placed there, and you
have a very strong and full statement.
There is only a semicolon in our King
James Version, and we go on from there,
though we will not have time for it
this morning.
So we will put a period there.
Dearly Beloved, I beseech you as strangers and
pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against
the soul.
Now, Peter was an apostle, and according to
some, first pope.
He therefore had every authority that God ever
gave, I suppose, to any man on earth.
Greater authority than that enjoyed by Moses, in
that it was broader.
And yet he did not command these Christians
scattered abroad, but besought them and called them
by a tender term of affection.
Dearly Beloved, he said, I beseech you.
The reason is that there are certain moral
acts which cannot be secured by commandments.
Certain other ones can.
It is altogether possible to command, Thou shalt
not kill.
Because the act of murder can be restrained,
and if we do not kill another, then
we have fulfilled a commandment, and the human
life has been saved.
But there are certain other acts which must
be voluntary if they are to be real,
because willingness is a part of their moral
content.
So that threats and force cannot work to
secure these acts.
If Peter had said, I command you that
you walk as pilgrims and strangers and avoid
fleshly lusts, he would have been commanding an
impossibility.
Because to know the character of a pilgrim
and a stranger, and to live before God
in meek humility and purity, which overrides the
desires of the flesh, is something that can
only be achieved by a spiritual willingness.
Therefore it cannot be commanded.
I hope that what I am saying is
plain to you.
Not that you couldn't get it, but that
I think I'm confusing it somewhat.
Let me illustrate it like this.
A man can come home from his work,
a brutal, coarse man, and walk up to
his wife, and with an angry face, threaten
her, and say, What's the reason?
Dinner is not on the table.
And command her to get his dinner.
And she's afraid of him, and she knows
he does have some kind of legal hold
on her, so she hurries off and hurries
up to dinner.
He gets his dinner by commandment, but he
cannot walk up to that same woman and
say, I command you, love me.
He cannot get love by commandment, because willingness
and inward participation of a voluntary kind are
necessary to love, but not necessarily to the
obedience to a commandment.
So that the man of God did not
say, I command you, he said, I beseech
you, dearly beloved.
And Paul was saying, though Paul as an
apostle of Christ had every right to command,
he knew there were some things you never
could get by commanding them.
So he said, I beseech you, brethren, by
the mercies of God, that you give your
bodies wholly acceptable unto God.
Because the nature of this consecration was such
that they had to do it willingly and
without fear of reprisal or sanctum, or they
could not have done it at all.
Now he said, O dearly beloved, I beseech
you as strangers and pilgrims.
Last week we saw, and I made a
good deal out of it, that if we
know what we are, then we can trust
God to live in character with what we
are.
And he says, you Christians are strangers on
earth.
And the word stranger, of course, is sojourner.
Usually it refers to someone temporarily living in
a foreign country, not at home there and
not intending to be.
And separated from the natives by language and
dress and customs and conduct, and usually by
culture, varying culture.
And this is a stranger, a person from
a foreign country who isn't at home where
he is and isn't going to settle down
and be at home there, but is temporarily
in that country, separated by language, so he
speaks with an accent, separated by dress and
custom and conduct and diet and culture.
This makes the stranger.
American doesn't know too many strangers, we absorb
them too fast.
We melt them up so fast that we
hardly remember who they are.
As soon as they get over their first
original thick accent, they're American.
But the Bible here recognizes sojourners in a
land for only there for a time, something
as the men that are here with the
United Nations are in New York City or
wherever they are there, living near about New
York City and in New York City.
They're only here temporarily and they don't intend
to stay, and they're not taking out naturalization
papers, they're sojourners, they're here for a time.
Separated by language and customs and conduct and
past and tradition and memories and all the
rest.
Now, just as soon as a man ceases
thus to be separated from those around him,
he's a stranger no more.
But Peter never recognized our becoming naturalized or
getting over our character as strangers, as Christians
were strangers on earth.
Abraham and Lot are outstanding examples of how
men can be strangers and then cease to
be strangers.
Abraham and Lot came from Ur of the
Chaldees and entered into the land of Palestine.
One day their herdsmen quarreled and they got
together like two relatives should, talked it over
and decided they'd better separate.
They were too big to go together anymore
and there was bad blood between their servants.
So Abraham said, you look it over, go
the way you want to go and I'll
take what's left.
Noble old unselfish man that he was.
Lot looked toward the plains of Jordan and
moved down that direction.
Abraham stayed on the plains of Mamre where
there was some grass but not too much.
The other man went where the grass was
green and pitched his tent toward Sodom.
It wasn't long until he sat in the
gate of Sodom, which is equivalent to saying
that if he was not the mayor of
the city, at least he was high up
in official position, because they had their offices
in the gate of the city, as we
have it in the city hall now.
One day Keter Lamer and some other kings
came along and they made an assault upon
the city, and they captured the city, and
humorously enough they captured Lot in his whole
outfit.
Somebody that escaped knew that help had to
come from somewhere, and you know where they
looked?
They said, we'll go tell Abraham the Hebrew,
and the word Hebrew means the stranger.
The only man capable of helping in that
crisis was the man who had never committed
himself or got involved.
He was separated from them and could help
them from the outside.
So they sent for Abraham, not Lot.
Lot was already handcuffed and tied up and
hamstrung like a hog taken to market.
Big Lot who had sat in the gate
was now lying in the back end of
a wagon and was being carried away like
so much hamburger.
And they had to send for the man
Abraham the stranger.
Abraham, who had kept himself free from Sodom
and all of its people, got his little
army together and went out and whipped the
daylights out of Keter Lamer and his crowd
and rescued Lot and his people.
There is an example.
Two Christians start out together, and one of
them gets involved in the things of this
world.
He loses his character as a stranger.
He may rise to a place where he
sits in the gate, but he loses something
that the other man has.
The other man withdraws and keeps himself separated
as far as possible from the ways of
the world and lives a separated life of
a stranger.
And then trouble comes.
Someone down the street gets in a jam.
Which one do they send for?
Lot?
No, he is in as much trouble as
the rest.
They always send for Abraham.
They always send for the man who has
been separated and kept separated.
Lecture 11 Justification and Sanctification 3 Now, he
said, not only are you Christian strangers, but
you Christians are pilgrims as well as strangers.
And a pilgrim is a stranger on his
way from one place to another, one passing
through en route.
Always remember that, that a Christian is en
route.
He isn't where he started and he isn't
where he is going.
He is only where he has gotten to.
Sometimes men will come through this city and
their phone will ring and somebody will say,
This is so-and-so.
Either I'll know him or I won't know
him.
He will introduce himself or else some friend
I know, usually preachers, writers or something, and
I'll say, Oh, are you visiting Chicago?
No, just on my way through from Detroit
or Cleveland or somewhere else.
And on my way to Omaha or Denver
or on west, he is just en route,
he has his ticket in his pocket, and
he stopped to speak to a friend on
his way through.
Now, there is the character of a pilgrim.
That's what it means, somebody en route, somebody
passing through.
And this is the Christian concept of things.
Heaven is our fatherland toward which we are
journeying, and earth is a wilderness.
I know how they ride us Christians for
our concept of the world as being a
veil of tears.
I have read some very caustic criticisms of
that Christian concept, that this is a veil
of tears.
They say, What kind of gloomy old crows
are you sitting around croaking about this veil
of tears?
That's the Christian concept, take it or leave
it.
It's a world in which we live because
of sin, the temporary visitation that sin has
made.
It is a wilderness through which we journey.
We may rest a while, but only for
a night, and then we pitch our tent
a day's march nearer home.
But we're never to settle here, and we're
never to become naturalized.
If you wanted to do it and had
time to bother with it, it would help
you, as it has helped me, to just
run through the hymn books and see how
this idea of Christians being strangers, particularly strangers
on their way, runs through all the Bibles,
the New Testament particularly.
Let me quote here just a brief excerpt
from great hymns.
Joseph of the Stadium wrote in the 800's
of this era, and he starts out one
of his great hymns, O happy band of
pilgrims, if onward ye will tread, there we
have it.
We come on down to the famous Montcell,
and he has one stanza, on our way
rejoicing homeward as we move with Jesus as
our leader, to Jesus as our head.
Everybody remembers the famous Welsh song, guide me
O thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren
land.
Seneca wrote, we are traveling unto God in
the way our fathers trod, they are happy
now, and we soon their happiness shall see.
Dinsendorf, Jesus still lead on till our rest
be won, and although the way be cheerless,
we will follow calm and fearless, guide us
by thy hand to our fatherland.
And Shmoke, straight to my home above I
travel calmly on, and singing life or death,
my Lord thy will be done.
That's just a few, you can find them
by the dozens that conceive their earth to
be a wilderness through which the Christian pilgrim
travels on his way to the fatherland.
But he is not alone in that always
unseen there walks by his side and within
him the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He may have to stop and pitch his
tent overnight, he may have to assume the
character of a soldier and fight his way
through, but always he is on route.
Lastly, while you are doing this, abstain from
fleshly lusts which war against the soul.
These fleshly lusts are those natural appetites that
have their seat in the body and the
mind.
And these natural appetites would be innocent except
for sin, but now are enemies of the
soul.
Nobody needs, and here is one of those
instances where you cannot command anybody, you can
only beseech them as pilgrims and strangers.
But we may be sure of this, that
anyone who is going to make his journey
safely and successfully will have to keep himself
free from those fleshly lusts that war against
the soul.
If we do not, we will be slowed
down or stopped in our practice.
The inner life must overcome them, or they
will overcome and destroy the inner life.
It's a strange thing, it's a deplorable thing,
but it's true when you've got to face
it, that one part of us fights against
another part of us, that the lower nature
fights against the higher nature, that the flesh
fights against the spirit, and that the fleshly
lusts war against our souls.
Thomas Akemba said, Peace will always be found
not in indulging our lower appetite, but in
resisting them.
And a mere philosopher, who was no Christian
at all, probably, but a great thinker, said
this, Every victory we win over the flesh,
however slight, will prove to be a strengthening
act to our soul.
That was Emerson.
So now that's all for this morning, except
to point out this singular truth, that we
are pilgrims journeying home, and that the only
real enemies, the only dangerous enemies, are within
us.
God has changed the land on the outside.
God has said to Satan, This far and
no farther.
God has spoken to the very armies of
the world, and has forbade them to touch
his anointed, to do his prophet any harm.
We have within us temptations which he fielded
to destroy our soul.
So says the Holy Ghost, I beseech you,
the strangers and pilgrims abstain from fleshly lusts,
which war against the soul.