Bible Verse of the Day Tuesday August 17th 2021

 1 Peter 2:11-12 Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage 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.

 As followers and believers in Christ Jesus, “to abstain from sinful desires,” and the best way to do that is to live the way he calls on us to live in that same verse, “as foreigners and exiles.” As saved believers, we understand that this world is not our home, and we do have a home and citizenship in heaven. These fleshly battles will always war against our souls. Consequently, being a Christian means that we will always have to fight against the lust of the flesh for as long as we are in our fleshly bodies here on this earth.

The fleshly lust can not only destroy our spiritual beings but our physical bodies as well. If you would like to see first-hand an example of this, ask an alcoholic that is slowly and painfully dying of liver disease. Ask the sexually immoral person that is dying of AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease. Ask the lifelong smoker that is suffering and dying from lung cancer or other tobacco-related illness. Sometimes people may be able to escape these physical diseases; however, the illness and death of the inner-person is a penalty that none that have surrendered to the flesh will be able to escape.

Peter is telling us that even though the “pagans” might accuse Christians of evil-doing, we should live our lives so that the lost of the world can see the reflection of the light of Christ Jesus. In the initial days of Christianity, Christians were falsely accused of many things. For example, they were charged with cannibalistic actions because Christians were falsely accused of consuming human flesh and drinking human blood at communion. Also, in the early days of Christianity, the non-Christian world believed that Christians were atheists because they were not involved in worshipping idols.

Today the lies told of Christians by the “pagans” might be of a different variety, but there are still lies told of Christianity. As followers and disciples of Christ Jesus, it is our responsibility to live a life that would show the love of Christ Jesus to the world. “The day that he visits” is most likely a reference to the ultimate meeting of God that all people will have to face. That could be when people go to meet God or when He comes to meet people. The idea here is that through the example of the lives of the Children of God, lost people might want to come to Christ Jesus, accept Him as their Lord and Savior and surrender their lives to Him. Thus, when they meet God, they would be able to “glorify God” instead of cowering before His judgment.