Thesis: God’s greatness is our good.
Text: 1 John 2:15-17; Genesis 3:1-7
I love to be comfortable, sometimes at the expense of people I love dearly. When I come home after a long day in the office, my goal is to get a glass of sweet tea, get to the easy chair as quickly as possible, put on some classical music, and dive into a good book. It’s all about me and my comfort. And no matter if my wife is pulling her hair out after a rough day with the kids, or if my son is in the middle of the latest episode of Sponge Bob, or my daughter comes to me with her cup in hand saying, “Tea, tea!” (She loves her sweet tea!) I have the ability to tune it all out and ignore it in the name of my comfort. You didn’t know I could be so mean did you? Well I can. But I’m working to overcome this sin. I’m working to fight the temptation to love my comfort above all else.
The Desires of the Flesh
God created us with the ability to derive physical pleasure. Yesterday we read from Genesis 2. Verses 8 and 9a read: “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.” That last phrase “good for food” teaches us that God created us with the ability to enjoy physical pleasure. Eating is one of many ways in which we can derive physical pleasure.
It is good to enjoy physical pleasure, but only in the context of a due recognition and appreciation for the greatness of God. Why? Because all pleasure is ultimately derived from him. He is the first and ultimate pleasure of which every created pleasure is meant to testify. This was the part of the original temptation which Adam and Eve succumbed to in the Garden. Gen. 3:6 read, “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food . . . she took of its fruit and ate.” And so as we read from the Apostle John, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.” Satan originally tempted our first parents by prompting them to believe that the pleasures derived from a created thing could be adequately appreciated independently of God. When Adam reached out to eat from the tree he said in effect, “I will worship created pleasure over the Creator’s pleasure.” And man has struggled with these particular temptations ever since. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:24-27, “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.” This is our tendency, to see the creation as pleasurable apart from the Creator, to worship it rather than him. And we do this when we forget that God’s greatness is our good.
The Manifestation of the Desires
The desires of the flesh manifest themselves in many different ways in our world.
They manifest themselves when we get wrapped up in the physical pleasure we might derive from the opposite sex. Appreciation for such pleasure is not bad in and of itself. It is good. God created us to appreciate it in the way he has prescribed. But it becomes sin when we lose perspective and try to appreciate it apart from his instruction. It becomes sin when we fail to appreciate God’s gift with deep gratitude, recognizing that it ultimately points to the supremacy of our pleasure in him.
They manifest themselves when we get wrapped up in the physical pleasure we might derive from material things like easy chairs, food, drink, drugs, etc. We live in a consumer culture. We are constantly bombarded with the message that our lives are incomplete and lacking in pleasure, but if we’d only buy the latest ________, then we’d truly be comfortable. We have been trained from infancy to live immoderately. If we find ourselves dwelling on these material things more often than the One who is our ultimate Comforter, then we should step back and examine our lives very closely.
The desires of the flesh are a beast of a temptation to work against. We are bombarded daily with the message to consume. But the Christian faith is not a faith of material consumption. We worship the God who is Spirit. We feed upon Christ through Word and sacrament spiritually.
But there is hope for us. Ultimately there is hope because Christ has passed the test. Just as Adam was tempted according to the desire of the flesh in the garden, so also Christ was tempted. In Luke 4 we read that after his baptism Christ was led into the desert by the Holy Spirit to be tempted by the devil. The first temptation, like Adam’s, was through the desires of the flesh. We read: “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” Christ has passed the test. Therefore all who are united to him by faith are counted as having passed the test as well.
Because of Christ’s finished work, God is at work to subdue us to himself by his Word and Spirit. Notice that Jesus went into the desert guided by the Spirit and he answered the devil with the Word. Word and Spirit are the means of our fight against temptation.
Conclusion
We will be tempted according to the desires of the flesh until the day we die. There is no way around it. The question is this: will we fight actively to overcome the temptation more and more, or will we just give up and stagnate and suffer the consequences of a life walked by fleshly rather than godly desires?
But don’t misunderstand. Overcoming the desires of the flesh does not mean that we cannot appreciate the pleasures God has given us to enjoy. On the contrary it means appreciating those pleasures truly and fully as God originally intended, which begins by recognizing this truth: God’s greatness is our good.
Discussion
This morning I’d like you to explore these questions with your discussion groups: In what ways do I see others in our society tempted by the desires of the flesh? In what ways am I tempted by the desires of the flesh? What steps can I take to begin to recognize and overcome this temptation?
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