Dearly beloved! I beseech you: abstain from fleshly lusts.

You are strangers scattered throughout the Babylon of this world. You are surrounded by the false church, the ally of the ungodly world, and together they speak against you as evildoers. In the world you must go through a season of heaviness through manifold temptations.

You are elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. Beloved of God, though hated by the world. You live in the sphere of grace. You have been begotten again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Christ! You are a chosen generation. You are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and a peculiar people. You are the Israel of God.

You are strangers and pilgrims here by the work of God’s grace.

A stranger is one who is a foreigner in another country that is not his home. Your home is not this world. Your home is in heaven. Your life is hid with Christ there. You seek the things above and not things here below. God has prepared for you a city that has foundations, and your citizenship is in that city. You have an inheritance, incorruptible and undefiled and that fades not away, reserved in heaven for you.

A pilgrim is a temporary resident. Oh, how fleeting is your life here. Seventy years? Some last that long, but the majority of men perish long before that. Eighty years? Only if strength is great. Our years are cut off, and we fly away. All flesh is as grass and the goodliness of it as the flower of the field. The grass withers, and the flower fades. The wind passes over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. For his dearly beloved the Lord returns as he promises to take them to their eternal home.

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as pilgrims and strangers, abstain from fleshly lusts. How fleshly is the Christian yet. He has eternal life in a body of death. He has the Spirit among the flesh. He must live in his body and serve God with his body, but his body is full of sin, and at the root of that sin stand fleshly lusts. The body is a body of lust. Fleshly lusts are all those carnal desires that root man to the earth and that turn his eyes away from heaven to this world. They are all that glitters and gleams, tastes good, and pleases the flesh. They are all the affections of our sinful nature. The very thoughts of the flesh are enmity against God!

Abstain from them! Keep yourself separate from them.

Do you not know that they war against the soul? The soul is the habitation of the Spirit. Soul is regeneration in man whereby man is able to see, understand, and perceive heavenly and eternal things. It is, as it were, the sanctuary of our spiritual life with God. And fleshly lusts war on the soul to seek to destroy it and overthrow it.

Abstain from them! How foolish would a man be thought who would run to a den of murderers who would destroy him. How foolish must a pilgrim and stranger be thought to run to those lusts that seek to destroy him. How contrary is it to our lives as pilgrims and strangers to run to satisfy the lusts of the flesh. Dearly beloved who are pilgrims and strangers, who already have heaven in your hearts and over whom the flesh can have no victory, abstain from fleshly lusts.