"I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul." (1 Peter 2:11).
Bullets fly. Missiles launch. Strategies develop. Soldiers deploy. All this, because war is on. Blood, death, and danger. An enemy assaults. Subjection is the goal.
This is the image Peter uses to describe the passions of the flesh. Their goal is a bloody massacre of your soul. There is no gentleness, but a war, from your flesh against your inner self.
Your soul is under an onslaught. The passions of the flesh, the sins of the body, with its temptations and tendencies, desire to annihilate you. The flesh wants to reduce you to a wasteland of addiction and apathy. These passions rage within us, and their goal is to bring us to utter fruitlessness.
The passions of the flesh crave our ineffectiveness. If sinful urges can they'll produce laziness, hatred or bitterness -- whatever brings us to our knees. Whatever delivers us to a life without impact, love, kindness, the Spirit. God has a mission for us to engage. The passions of the flesh make it their aim to get us off that mission. Therefore, war.
So Peter says it plainly. Abstain, he says. Those passions of the flesh exist, and they must be starved. They don't deserve even the smallest of rations. If we let them live, we won't.
But many believers have no idea they are in a war. The spiritual dimension positions itself against you. But so does your body of sin, your passions of the flesh, the unredeemed part of you which knows and loves sin. War. Blood. Murder. It is trying to end you.
If we could become more conscious of this war, we might war in response. And with Jesus Christ in our corner, the snare of the enemy has been broken (Psalm 124:7). The trap cannot work. By walking in the Spirit, we will not fulfill the lust of the flesh (Galatians 5:16). Kill or be killed. Jesus was slain so he could help us slay. The flesh does not have to win, for Jesus won. He said it was finished (John 19:30). The body of sin hasn't recognized it, but in Christ we overcome.
Don't float through life disbelieving a war exists between your passions and your soul. Christians who think this way are asleep. They don't know just how victorious the passions of the flesh already are over their souls.
Instead, wake up. “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Ephesians 5:14). The passions of the flesh are warring, but so can you. Get up. Be vigilant. And, where you must, where your sinful appetites are leading you astray, again and again, abstain. Victory will flow.
