Peter is speaking of, he is referring to the spiritual warfare: that fight, that bitter struggle that goes on in every Christian's life between his sanctified heart and conscience and the sin remaining in his soul, the still rising love of sin and of self. The struggle, that is, to live as a Christian should, to think, say, and do what is pleasing to God, when the desire to sin remains so strong.

There are biblical texts that might seem to suggest that Christ, having won the great victory over sin and the Devil, we have but to gather the spoils. And that is true enough in a certain way. But, though the enemy is beaten -- whether the Devil or Sin itself --, he has not left the field, he is not going quietly into the night, he is still hoping in the fury and bitterness of his defeat to do all the harm he can.

I remember reading in William Manchester's biography of Douglas MacArthur how the great general's lieutenants often bitterly resented his announcing to the press that a battle was over on some island or another with only "mopping up" to do -- that is what they called it, "mopping up"; nothing so hard about that! -- when, in fact, that "mopping up" was sometimes the bitterest fighting of the war, the enemy, though truly beaten, hidden in caves and fighting to the death of the last man. Well so it is with the Christian life -- the victory is won; the outcome certain; but there is a lot of bitter fighting to be done by Christ's lieutenants before the fighting is over.

The Lord is our witness. We want to be holy, pure, and full of nothing but love for God and man. We want to be in every respect a credit to our Savior, a demonstration of his goodness, an adornment of his gospel. And we know what pleases him. We know the good, but far too often, we do it not. "O wretched men and women that we are! The very things we do not want to do, we do; the very things we do want to do, for Christ's sake, we do not do." Some may wonder why Peter uses such violent, extravagant language: "the sinful desires that war against the soul." But no one who had been in this battle wonders about Peter's choice of words. We have found ourselves in a war, nothing short of a war.

And our long experience of this divided mind that so troubles us is that if we put up a real struggle against sinful desire, if, for Christ's sake, we stand and refuse to budge, refuse to give in to a temptation, refuse to permit our minds or bodies to be put to unholy uses, we will have a battle on our hands! The temptation will come after us with a vengeance and will not depart, in many cases, until we are left victorious but bloody and utterly exhausted in the field. And it is also very clear to us that it is just this spiritual fight for our holiness, this refusal to give in to sinful desires which rise in the heart and which are strengthened so by the temptations of the world and the devil, that determines the character of our Christian lives.

Some of us know very well that we have done almost nothing of this fighting for a long time. And we must admit, at least to ourselves, the shame of that and the consequences of that. How weak and how useless we have become to the kingdom of God. Others are in the midst of these battles and, weary as they may be, are glad for that, for they wish to be Christ's faithful soldiers. And others are just beginning to fight. They are young or they are new Christians and they are just now discovering that holiness must be fought for, that Christians have adversaries within and without who will fight to the death to prevent them putting on the Lord Jesus Christ and living to his praise. They are just discovering what an endless battle it will be to give their hearts and bodies to Christ day after day.

Listen to Alexander Whyte, an expert, if ever an expert there was, on the spiritual warfare and on the resistance to those sinful desires that war against your soul. This from his work on Bunyan's Holy War.

"...My brethren, lay this well, and as never before, to heart -- this, namely, that when you thus begin to keep any gate for Christ, your King and Captain... -- Ear-gate, or Eye-gate, or Mouth-gate, or any other gate -- you will have taken up a task that shall have no end with you in this life. Till you begin in dead earnest to watch your heart, and all the doors of your heart...you will have no idea of the arduousness and the endurance, the sleeplessness and the self-denial, of the undertaking. 'We all thought one battle would decide it,' says Richard Baxter, writing about the Civil War. 'But we were all very much mistaken...' Yes; and you will be very much mistaken too if you enter on the war with sin in your soul, in your senses and in your members, with powder and shot for one engagement only. When you enlist here, lay well to heart that it is for life. There is no discharge in this war.... It is a warfare for eternal life, and nothing will end it but the end of your evil days on earth." [BC, iii, 18-19]

I remember very distinctly, as a young man, an adolescent, discovering for myself that, I think to my amazement in a way, that it was not going to be easy to be a Christian, at least a faithful follower and servant of Christ. That I had it in myself to betray him at every turn, that I found temptations to that betrayal very powerful, very attractive. What is more, I began to discover more and more in my heart and life, much more than I had realized to that point, that which was actually sinful, dishonorable, and contrary to the will and the glory of God. I was going to have to put up a real fight for holiness and at many more places than I had realized.

And I know full well that in the years since, sometimes I have fought the good fight and left my enemies and Christ's enemies within me lying dead in the field. Other times I have fought but timidly and half-heartedly and, to my still greater shame, sometimes I have proved a completely coward and run from the field with my tail between my legs, throwing my hands in the air, surrendering to evil desires when they had hardly begun to war against my soul.

There are people in the Christian church, even real Christians I daresay, who hardly ever fight the good fight of faith. They have no scars to show that they have fought their master's battles. They never slept in their clothes with their swords at their sides. They are strangers to the struggle that other Christians know so well. Ask them how to fight your battles with sinful desires that war against your soul and they will give you a blank stare in return. They don't know what you are talking about. They do not know what it is to be weary of watching for the Lord, of lifting their eyes to the hills from whence comes their help. The Devil has seldom troubled them because they aren't worth the effort.

And how much they have missed and how much they have never become and how much the Church has missed in them and from them because they never learned, were never willing to learn to be warriors and to set themselves with might and main against the sinful desires that war against their soul.

Martin Luther said that he did not learn all at once how to be a minister of Christ. It was his temptations and his corruptions and his sinful desires that taught him how to preach Christ. The Devil, he said, had been his best teacher of practical Christianity. He won his stripes in the field. Before he entered battle he was a child, but battle made a man out of him. I've read that one of the great worries of the American commanders on D-Day was that they were sending so many untested men into battle. In the very first waves were thousands of men who had never been in combat before. They worried that the men might melt under the pressure, turn and run, forget all about fighting and care only about surviving. But, it was discovered in the case of these green troopers, as it has so often been discovered in warfare, that three minutes of real combat is worth three years of training. They learned the craft of a soldier in moments because nothing can teach that craft like battle itself.

And there have been a great many Christians, trained very quickly in the heat of spiritual combat, who then through the course of their lives fought bravely and nobly, who defended Christ's honor when set upon by those sinful desires, and who were still standing in the field when the battle was done. "Fight neither with small or great, but only with the Prince of Israel." That is the Devil's strategy and his orders to his soldiers. Fight to the death with that young Christian, that dangerous Christian, he will tell his underlings; bring me his head or hers on a platter, or we will regret the day he or she ever entered the field. I want you, I want you all, as I want myself to be numbered in that worthy company!

Now, Peter here doesn't say anything more than that we should fight, that we should manfully resist the attacks made upon our faith, our purity, our holiness, our faithfulness to God. Very often this is the Bible's way. It simply tells us to fight. It does not explain this command. It does not provide specific instructions or tactics to employ. It simply orders us into the field. And we are taught by that that ordinarily what must be done is obvious, at least to a lively Christian conscience. We must simply say "No" to this and "Yes" to that -- we are simply to do what is pleasing to God. And we are also taught in this very simple instruction Peter gives us that what is really involved here, the real issue here, is not strategy or tactics in the first place, but a determination of the will, a resolve to do right and to be obedient and loyal to Christ our Savior.

That is not to say that the Bible does not furnish us with strategies and tactics by which to resist the sinful desires that war against our souls, to put down the risings of sinful desire in our hearts -- lust, greed, selfishness, pride, laziness, indifference to God and others, and so on. But, even then, the strategies and tactics are almost always put in a general form so that, still, the issue resolves itself into a test of the will. Will I or will I not do what I fully know is the will of God or will I do what sinful desires incline me to do?

1. We have the instruction in Eph. 6, for example, about putting on the whole armor of God and by so doing to equip ourselves to resist the Devil and ward off his fiery darts. But that is a figurative manner of speaking. It is an inspiring and helpful image, but it is not an explicit guide to resisting temptation. Taken together it still means that, in one way or another, we must answer sinful desires with our Christian faith -- with what we know to be right, with the promises God has made to us, with the warnings God has given us -- and must have the will to do so when it counts.

2. Or, there is the wisdom repeated often enough in the Bible that those who would be holy should, whenever possible, avoid the occasions of sin and temptation. That is, the best way to resist temptation is to avoid it whenever possible. "Do not go near the door of her house" the father in Proverbs tells his son concerning the sexual temptress. "Flee youthful lusts," we read in James. And we see Joseph doing just that in Potiphar's house. Instead of standing and discussing the adultery that Potiphar's wife was proposing, he ran from the house leaving his cloak behind him. As Spurgeon once memorably put it: the answer to many temptations is a good pair of legs and the king's highway.

But, everyone who knows the spiritual warfare, who is familiar with the sinful desires that war against the flesh knows that that advice, true as it is, in a sense, only carries the issue back a step. For, as McCheyne admitted concerning himself, our problem is that we want to be tempted, we want to get as near to the sin as we can, telling ourselves all the while that we will not finally succumb. Whether it is gossip, lust, greed, or the fear of man, we take steps toward the sin which are already sin! To avoid the occasion of sin requires that already, at that first point, we resist the desires that war against the soul.

3. Or, there is the Bible's emphasis on the active pursuit of one's spiritual duty as a great protection against sin. Like Nehemiah, we should be able to say to sinful desires when they surface in our hearts and seek to draw us away from the will of God, "I am doing a great work and cannot come!" We see David fall at exactly that moment when he lays down his responsibilities. "In the Spring, when the Kings go out to battle, David stayed in Jerusalem." And because he did he saw Bathsheba bathing and a chain of events was set in motion that would have been impossible if he had only been where he belonged, doing what he was to be doing as the King of Israel. Paul says the same thing in Gal. 5. "Keep in step with the Spirit" and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. Live the Christian life in all its parts with a vengeance; it is the best way to ride roughshod over your sins. And, in any particular case, if you struggle with stinginess, practice generosity with a vengeance; if you find your eye wandering, throw yourself heart and soul into loving your wife; if you find it within yourself to take advantage of others, make it the great interest of your life to be scrupulously careful to give others more than anyone could say was due from you, and so on.

But, will you take such steps and keep taking them? We are back to the fundamental issue. Will you say "No" or "Yes" when God calls you to say it and mean it? There is where the spiritual warfare is joined and that issue cannot be avoided by tactics or strategies of any kind.

4. And that is true even of that wonderful wisdom on preparing a Christian heart for battle, such as you get in the great classics of the spiritual warfare -- John Owen's great works (On the Mortification of Sin; On Temptation; On the Nature and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded); Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying; or William Gurnall's The Christian in Complete Armor, and other such works that so many Christians, myself included, have found so much help in and encouragement from.

Still, at the end, to prepare yourself for battle in that way, to furnish your mind and heart with the weapons of this war, is itself an act of the Christian soldier and is itself opposed at every turn by sinful desires that war against the soul. We can certainly find other things to do very easily besides reading such godly works and taking them carefully to heart and watching and praying that we enter not into temptation! And our sinful desires are quick to suggest those other things and make them seem altogether more attractive and important and pressing at the moment.

No, finally, the issue is the determination of your will as a soldier of Jesus Christ. Will you follow his orders in the field? Are you determined to do so? All of us who are Christians, certainly should be so determined. And it is well to pause to consider why.

Rutherford, in one of his letters, reminds his friend John Gordon of thirteen reasons for fighting the Lord's battles with relish and with an absolute determination to give no quarter to the enemy. Among those thirteen are reasons such as these -- do you have faith this morning to find them powerful motives for yourself and your own resistance to the sinful desires that war against your soul?

Consider these reasons:

1. Weeping and gnashing of teeth...or heaven's joy;
2. There is sand in your glass yet; and your sun is not gone down;
3. Joy and peace in Christ's service;
4. To have mercy on your seed and a blessing on your house;
5. The pain of a guilty conscience;
6. Sin's joys are but night dreams;
7. What dignity it is to be a son of God.
8. To have true honour and a name on earth that casteth a sweet smell;
9. (And in Rutherford's own inimitable voice): "How ye will rejoice when Christ layeth down your head under his chin, and [upon his chest], and drieth your face, and welcometh you to glory and happiness."
[paperback ed. pp. 63-64; Bonar ed. Letter CXXIII, 247-248]

What stories will eternity tell of the faithful men and women who struggled alone in battle so fierce and so bitter that had Christ not lifted them up and strengthened them they could not have withstood. Young Christians and old; Men and Women, Ministers and People alike. You would not know, you could not know what battles they are fighting, how severe the wounds they have suffered, how exhausted the fight has made them. They live among you and seem like all others. For they have washed their face and changed their clothes to come into your presence. They could not tell you how fierce the battle has been for them at this point in the line or that, for it is a matter of intense shame to them that they must struggle so to resist things so manifestly wicked and unworthy of Christ.

You know it; or you should know it, only because the Bible teaches us that every Christian life is a battle field and because you have such battles yourselves. You may think that no one else has been bloodied as you have been because you can't imagine that other Christians would have to fight so hard to resist such sinful desires as are always warring against your soul. That is the way we think. But our God is a warrior; the Lord Christ is often presented to us in martial terms in the Bible -- our great Captain who sits astride a great steed of war with a sword in his hand -- and all who follow him must be soldiers too. Indeed, the people of God in the OT were often referred to as "the hosts of the Lord." Every Christian has a battle to fight for his Captain leads him or her into battle.

And what a great history will be written of this warfare when all is finally said and done. What millions upon millions of moments like this one recorded for us concerning Thomas Shepard, the New England Puritan, author of great works on the Christian life, and first president of Harvard. He was found one night, late in his life, fainted and lying on his face in his study with a copy of the New England Gazette in his clenched fist. Shepard had a friend who was a preacher and it was no secret that his friend's sermons were much preferred by almost everyone to those of Shepard. Shepard was the man whose sermons might well have been thought to be printed in the newspaper, for his position and his station. But people did not want to read his sermons nearly so much as to read those of his friend. And in that particular issue of the newspaper there was a particularly fine and beautiful sermon by his friend. And Shepard found terribly strong evil desires rising in his heart to war against his soul, and the battle he fought there alone in his study took everything from him, finally even his consciousness. That New England study had become Shepard's own Gethsemane. [Whyte, Thomas Shepard, 192-193] No wonder, at another time, we should read Shepard, in his diary, report: "Kept a private fast for the destruction of my pride."

If you don't understand that and if you cannot sympathize with Thomas Shepard in that, then at least do not admit that you do not and cannot. Perhaps the day will come when you will no longer be a stranger to this warfare; I very much hope so and pray so. Because that is the Christian life; that and nothing less. It is a battle to the death with sinful desires that war against the soul and it is a battle Christian men and women want to fight and intend to fight to the very end of their lives. It is the chief way that they enter into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings for them and the chief way they prove their loyalty to their great Captain and King -- by fighting his battles in his name and taking their scars for his sake.

How many perfect heroes there are in heaven whose names remain unknown on earth. We hallow the memory of our great warriors who proved courageous and gained great victories in the wars of human history, but such victories matter very little in the whole scheme of things. But the battles fought in a soul for Christ's name and honor determine the woe or weal of human beings for ever and ever. And the victors in these battles win not the cherish memory of the human race but the crown of righteousness which the Lord Christ will give to all who have fought the good fight.

The Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, after surviving the terrible WWI battles of Gallipoli and the Salonika front, was killed instantly on the Western Front when a shell exploded near him. He is buried in a cemetery with 506 other soldiers whose bodies could not be identified. He had written this verse while at the front:

A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart,
Is greater than a poet's art.
And greater than a poet's fame
A little grave that has no name.

Christian warriors, though unrecognized in this world and perhaps soon forgotten are remembered above. And their battles and their exploits, so secret, so mysterious, and so seemingly unimportant to the world make the great wars of world history, in comparison, tales full of sound and fury signifying almost nothing. "Fight the good fight" says Peter. It is what Christians must do.

Then outspake brave Horatius,

The Captain of the Gate;
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his God[s]?

And the last word on this great subject this morning to John Calvin.

"And, thus, like one of the heralds, I have endeavored, to the utmost extent that my ability allowed, to do honor to Christ, riding magnificently in his royal chariot, drawn by four horses."