Living the Good Life
1 Peter 2.11 – 12
Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
It is plainly evident [if you can pull yourself from the muck and depravity of the world] that Christ followers are aliens. If you stop and search your heart, you should find an aching, sore spot – a hole where the things of this world are not able to satisfy. This is the plain and simple beauty of Christ and what he stirs in our hearts.
On one side you have the sinful desires of the world – the temptations that draw us in and away from the Lord. Often times we correlate these with pleasures of the body – lust, sex, drugs. But just as much as those are our temptations, the lust of the soul, of our emotions is just as strong. Some of us get off on being angry, manipulative, jealous, deprived, or self-infliction. All of these things [and more] battle with our soul, calling to us, winning us over for the temporary high or lows we have trained our bodies to seek.
At the same time, we denounce the very things to which we give our hearts. We proclaim their rancidness and denounce their pleasure battering those around us [believers and non-believers alike] into a bloody pulp. It’s a wonder anyone would take our faith seriously.
Peter, though, calls us to live so demonstratively different from the rest of the world that they would be so surprised they would tell us we were living our lives wrong. Think about that for a minute. By doing right, the rest of the world would tell us we were wrong. By being fully devoted to our spouses [even future spouses, for those who are single] and not wavering a step in our love for them, by loving the loveless, by offering forgiveness for “unforgivable” actions against us, by championing peace, not war, by acknowledging those who aren’t instead of demanding they become those who are…all of these things are so against the grain of our world that we would strike such a strange and different path the rest of the world would recognize in the flash of an instant that Jesus is Lord. It is in that moment that they will be able to acknowledge our good deeds as good and praise Jesus as God, Messiah, and Lord.
