Dearly beloved, I urge you, as strangers and exiles in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.

It’s interesting to me that the Lord can suddenly open up a verse that a moment before, meant almost nothing to me. So this is what happened to me this morning, as the Lord brought this verse, 1 Peter 2:11, to my attention. As I meditated upon it, it suddenly opened up. I am sharing only some of my thoughts here this morning.

So let me pick on the word “exiles. ” When you think about somebody who is in exile, you think of someone who for whatever reason, had to leave their home. The word itself evokes emotions of longing for what was, longing for the good old days, and I have a memory that came to mind.

Shortly after my breakdown in 1995, I was sitting in the botanical gardens in Wollongong, Australia. Possibly within the altered state of consciousness that my breakdown had brought, I experienced what felt like a memory. There was such peace in the garden, the sky was blue, the greens were lush. There was a Japanese garden with a little red bridge over a stream. In the sky cockatoos were screeching out their distinctive cry, and I had this sense of déjà vu, I had this sense that I had been there before. But I felt that what I was remembering was far better and far deeper, and what is felt like was that I was remembering Paradise before the fall. And it evoked a deep longing in me for it.

The closest earthly experience I have had in terms of exile, is when I longed to return to England from here in Canada. The biggest draw for me was that my beautiful little daughter was there, and I was here. That separation was very, very difficult. Such longings can immobilize us, they can cause us to live either in the past, or in the future and as a consequence hardly living at all, but rather simply existing. You know, proving the truth of the saying “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.”

Paradoxically, a true appreciation of our spiritual exile will cause us to enter into the promised fullness of life in the here and now (John 10:10b). As part of what we need to do in order to enter into this, we need to heed the exhortation that comes at the end of this verse. In particular, we cannot enter into fullness of life when we allow our sinful desires to lead us astray. As Peter is telling us here, to do this is to declare war on our soul.

Father, most of us and I certainly include myself, had to learn the hard way that yielding to our sinful desires brings destruction. I have come to realize Lord, that this is just the way life works. In fact after the fall, it’s how You redesigned it to be. You told Adam “for your sake I curse the earth.” What You are telling us Lord is that the consequences of our poor choices are designed to bring us back to You. You did it for our sake. It certainly worked with me Father! Thank You Lord that You rescued me, showed me the eternity that was already there in my heart, and brought me back to You, the shepherd and guardian of my soul. I love You Lord. In Jesus Name Amen